Richard Ford: A Piece of My Heart

She caught a corner of her lip between her teeth and drummed her fingers. “They got a air temp?” she said.

“Fan,” he said.

Her pale face seemed to pale more while he looked at her, like coarse cloth held to the sun.

“Might as well,” she said, looking out in the desert toward the hazy cactus figures pinpointing the horizon, and sighing. “We can’t dance in this heat.”

The girl led them inside the house, where it was murky and cool, and stood behind a store counter before an old ledger book. The room was lit by whatever light could angle through the flocked window, and by a mint-colored bulb in the cold case at the back of the store. He had to get near the page to see to sign, and when she pointed the place, he looked at the book for a moment and signed “Mr. & Mrs. S. Tim Winder,” using the ballpoint chained to the ledger. The only other registry on the page was at the top, written in square penciled letters that said “RAMONA ANELIDA WHEAT, THE QUEEN.”

The girl led them between two steepled rows of Vienna sausages and Wheat Chex, through a green portiere and up two flights of stairs to where it was quiet and hotter, and where it smelled to him like an icebox that had been locked up and left in the heat. Sunlight illumined a square of green linoleum, and the room drew together inside like a kiln. There was a brown metal bed, a serpentine bureau with a doily, a chair, and a string-pull ceiling fan with one blade removed.

“You better open a window,” the girl said, blinking in the heat and holding her ponytail up to let off the hot air. “It’ll cool off when the sun moves. You’ll be hollerin for a blanket.”

“Ain’t there no toilet?” Jimmye said, looking desperate in the heat.

“That fan works.” The girl reached on her toes and yanked the string. The motor hummed as if it were straining against resistance, and the blades stayed still. “Pot’s downstairs,” she said. “We got two.”

He went to the window, pried it up, and stood back to allow in the breeze, but there was no moving air. The truck looked abandoned in the lot, sunshine gleaming off the hood. He tried to think about what had gotten him up this far, up into this room when he should have been on the highway halfway to somewhere, and he couldn’t figure it at all.

“Ain’t there no sinks?” the woman said.

“In the pot,” the girl said. “I’ll put a glass in there. Lonnie’ll be back tonight. You’ll hear him cause it’ll be a noise when he does. He gets drunk as cooter brown.”

“I can’t wait,” the woman said, flouncing on the bed. “What else does he do?”

“Nothin,” the girl said, and let her jaw fall open and shift back and forth while she stared at the woman. “Check-out’s eight-thirty. You get charged another day.” She threw the key at the dresser and slammed the door before the woman could speak.

“A.M. or P.M.?” she yelled, but the words got slammed in the door. “Little split-ass. A kid pimp — ain’t that the shits,” she said.

He stood staring down at the truck.

“I know you,” she said, laughing and bouncing lightly on the bed. “You got the eye for that little twat.”

He walked across and stood in front of the bureau and looked at her and sighed, his hands in his pockets, wondering whether it would do just to leave her sitting, go off for a Grapette, and never show back.

“What’re you lookin at?” she said, and slumped on the side of the bed, watching him meanly.

He shook his head.

“What’re you shaking your ugly head at?”

“Not anything,” he said, trying to quit thinking.

“You think you’re some hot young stuff, don’t you?” she said.

“I hadn’t thought about it,” he said.

“Oh, yes, you did ,” she said. “You thought you were too good to screw me, but I got some bad news for you — you weren’t.” Her eyes had gotten round again and she looked frightened. “You’re right to my level. It may of took you a while to get here, but you’re here, by God.” She retired to her elbows.

“Where’d you get that colored mark on your neck?” he said.

“He give it to me,” she said proudly. “It ain’t a mark . Don’t you know what a hickey is, Robert? Did you think somebody’d been beatin up on me?”

“I didn’t think about it,” he said.

“I guess not.” She poked around after the mark, as if she thought she could feel it.

The fan had begun circling. He picked up the chair and brought it to the side of the bed. He sat with his elbows on his knees and his face collapsed in his hands. She smiled at him and he knew she knew everything.

“You gonna stay mad at me?” he asked quietly.

“I ain’t mad,” she said. “You ain’t nobody.”

“That’s right.” He listened to his breath escaping between his fingers.

“You ain’t hidin nothing —are you, Robert?”

“No,” he said.

Her smile sweetened and flesh collected in a little pouch under her chin.

“How come you’re up here with me? I’m a married woman,” she said. “Ain’t you married?”

“I guess,” he said.

“Ain’t you got no sense of right?”

“I guess not,” he said.

“This here’s adultery, boy,” she said, smiling keenly. “Who’s it paying the bill?”

“Whoever wakes up second, I reckon,” he said.

She pressed in his direction, letting her legs scissor a fraction. “You going to strand me, are you, Robert?” She let her calves rub his knees, her pants pushing above her ankles.

“What’s-his-name’ll be to get you,” he said.

“Sure will,” she said. “You better hope he don’t find you here, or there’ll be shit to fly.”

She kept smiling, and he had the impulse to get out the door and not stop until he had reached the line to Texas.

“He won’t find nobody but you,” he said.

She pushed off her elbows and straddled him, her pants squeezed up on her knees, her eyes wide. He set his hands along her calves and wedged them inside the material, and felt the cords in her thighs. She lay on the spread, breathing evenly and letting her head wag side to side.

“He won’t find me,” he said. His throat was dried up.

She hummed in her throat and turned her face so that she stared at the metal uprights above the foot of the bed.

He unbuttoned her pants and slid them around her thighs. Her skin was bluish. She hissed through her teeth as though it were a pain commencing. He laid her pants over the chair back and pushed his hands up her legs. She bridged her neck and sank her elbows in the ticking.

“Robert?” she said, her arms laid out, her hands made into fists.

“What?”

“Do you think I look thirty — I mean, with you looking at me?”

The linoleum buckled. He tried to get himself onto the bed and pay attention to what she was saying all at the same time.

“No, sweet,” he said softly.

She drew her legs up and eased his hand, faced down the bedspread and smiled.

“You don’t look twenty where I’m at,” he said.

“I ain’t mad at you no more,” she said, her voice lost inside her throat.

“That’s sweet,” he said. “Now that’s real sweet.”

At seven o’clock it had turned gray down in the east. The coons were against the wires, staring at the sun sagging by degrees. Leo lay quietly, eying the rabbit, who had dozed as the day cooled and was not awake, the breeze pushing back lightly against the hatch of his fur, laying bare a smooth white undercoat.

He lay beside the woman in the brown light feeling the breeze draw through the room, pulling the curtains and plucking the flesh on his arms. The screen slammed and he could hear the girl move out in the yard, cooing at the raccoons. The woman shuddered and he looked at her expecting her eyes to open, but she lay still, breathing as if she were barely alive. He could smell the sage on the breeze, a faint burning aroma in his nostrils, and he could hear the raccoon claws clamber down the wires to the child.