Richard Ford: A Piece of My Heart

“You make me feel kinder towards the world,” she had said, and he couldn’t figure out why, and lay with his chin in the pillow, listening.

“Don’t you feel that way all the time?”

“No.” Her lips were to his ear. “I get contrary, get people in trouble.”

“Don’t he make you feel good?”

“Larry does. Sometimes.”

“How come you want to foul up with me?”

She turned on her side and crossed her arms beneath her chin. “I don’t trust him,” she said, as if it were something she always knew, but had just realized.

“You’re up there every day,” he said. “What ain’t there to trust?”

“If I wasn’t up there, he’d be humpin some bar bitch like he is right now.”

“But you are up there,” he said.

“And there’s a lot of tonk bars between Rag-land and Variadero, too — see?” she said.

He graveled his chin in the pillow and tried to figure that out. “Looks like you got him jumpin the creek.”

“You’re sweet,” she said, and gave him a kiss on the shoulder. “I love him. But I can’t trust him not to wipe me out.”

“So what does that mean?” he said.

“I got to cheat on him so he don’t have a chance to leave me like I was in Salt Lake.”

“That don’t make sense,” he said.

She smiled. “If I cheat on him a little , and he knows I’m liable to anytime, then it balances me — see? He can’t feel like he’s put nothin on me, cause he knows I’m probably putting something on him already. It gets dangerous when you feel like you can fool the other one anytime you get ready and not pay for it. Everything starts splitting. You got to stay balanced.”

She ran her fingers through the hair on his belly. “I want you,” she said in a queer high voice.

“Wait now,” he said, picturing Larry laying bricks in Variadero and wondering where his wife was while the sun was going and whether or not she was liable to show up, or whether she was stopping over in some tonk bar and not making it in until tomorrow. “Does he know that’s how you’re playing it?”

“Let’s don’t us talk,” she said, grabbing him up in her tight little fist and rolling her eyes back. “I need it right now, understand?”

“But wait a minute,” he said.

“No waits,” she said. “No waits.”

When she had gone to sleep he lay and stared at the ceiling, spattered with the gold tinsel of water seepage. He understood that when it rained, it rained until the boards soaked and the water shot the walls and set the house floating like an ark. He dozed and felt himself drawn to a powerful commotion as though the sky were driving through the cages, drowning animals, filling the truck bed, and buoying him inside until it was necessary to hold the bed staves to be saved from drowning. There were lights in the yard, flashing through the panes across the wall in his room, revolving rectangles of light across the wall, and he had sat up startled and faced them and heard the groan of someone’s pickup and two doors slamming and the soft lilt of voices in the yard. He walked out on the low plank porch and stood where his mother was watching the two men angrily while they talked one at a time in quick low tones, trying to avoid her eyes and get the story told and get gone. They stood silhouetted in the truck lights that fanned the grassy spiderwebs, and for a while his mother stared at them while they talked, watching them intently, snapping her eyes over one and to the other, holding them unmovable until they finally talked so fast the words ran together into gibberish. And after a while she just stared past them into the headlights, and they finished and left. The way the woman told it, his father had gone up into the hills early in the evening to attend a service, and took the woman with him in his car. And three-quarters of the way up the long grade, full of roots and chuck holes, winding up the Bostons toward the top of Mount Skylight, where the tent was supposedly staked on a high knob, the old car had failed where they forded a creek, a ribbon of spring water squirreling down the mountain toward the Illinois River. The woman said she got out and went into the bushes while his father stayed and monkeyed with the dashboard wires, trying to get the car going before it got night. And when the woman came back from the bushes, it had begun to rain, “an unimaginable rain,” she said, that smacked the sides of the car like a lanyard, and the water rose over the bottoms of the doors and swirled and shot past the car so that a strong man couldn’t have walked through it without falling. And she said she could see him inside humped over the dashboard studying the wires and fuses, unaware, she guessed, that the creek was up or that it might not do to be out in it. She herself, a plump, slope-eyed woman from Tonitown, said she never imagined what the outcome would be, and went up and squatted underneath a plum bush to wait for the rain to stop and the creek to subside so they could go on to the church, which turned out to be accessible by some other road. And as she sat, the water got dark and creamy, and rose, and pieces of split-off pine timber came down the chute, and she got wringing wet watching the limbs batter the car and the water rise to the door locks. She said she believed Mr. Hewes did sense something was not right, because he opened the window and said something to her that she couldn’t hear and tried to open the door, but the water was against it and the other side was busted from before she knew him. And she said that he closed the window and looked out, laughing and grinning and making funny little signals with his hands, signals she said she couldn’t make out any better than what he’d said. She said for a long time, maybe ten minutes, the two of them sat and looked at each other, she on the bank under the plum bush, wet, and he shut inside the car with the ugly water raging around, smiling and making signals, perfectly dry. Until, she said, the water seemed to wash over the car all at once, without a wave or a tree limb to hit it, or any inkling that it was losing purchase, and just suddenly, rolling, it rolled over and the water over it and it out of sight into the darkness.

Robard felt himself to suffer the long breathless suspension, suspended between the moment of purchase and the moment when whatever it was had knocked him unconscious and made it feasible for him to drown in the floor of his own car, so that he felt that at any moment at all he could expect the impact and the long slow daze that ended by dying.

Behind the house the clouds had piled against the sky. The sun had gone and left the sky indistinct and pinkish. In the east it had been dark a long time. He lay still in the smoky light. There was a chill in the room, and he could hear the girl outside teasing the raccoons onto the rungs of the cage. He rose quietly, dressed in the corner, and carried his shoes out the door. On the floor outside the girl had laid a blanket, and he brought it inside and spread it over the woman, covering her until her fingers clutched the basting and she drew it around herself and slept on. He slipped down the stairs into the store, where the cold box glowed and the compressor hummed in the gloom. He took a candy bar out of a plastic jar and a soda from the cooler and stepped into the lot, where the air was slow with the fragrance of sage.

The little girl looked up when she heard the screen slap, and went back to tempting the raccoons when she saw it was him.

“You got a Butterfinger?” she said, keeping her eyes averted.

“And a Grapette,” he said, squeezing candy out of his teeth and taking a look down the cages.

“Seventeen cents,” she said.

Her hair was full of fine gold threads mingled with what was almost white. “I set you a blanket out,” she said without looking up. “It’ll get cold. I knocked but didn’t nobody answer.”