Paulette Jiles: Stormy Weather

“Who’s that?” he said. “There is somebody there.”

“Yes,” she said. She kept her eyes on his cane.

“Well, who is it? It’s a child. Who are you?”

“Jeanine,” she said.

“What are you doing here?”

“I’m looking for my dad.”

“Is it dark?” he asked.

Jeanine put her hand to her mouth in confusion. “Is what dark?”

The man was heavy and fat, his shoes were not at all worn but his coat and pants were threadbare. The inhuman noise came from beyond a wooden wall, on the other side of the open space.

“I’m blind,” he said. “I’m just sitting up here all night until people come in to work. In the morning. They forgot me.”

Jeanine said, “They forgot me too.” She saw that his eyes moved and jittered, they were never still. “Do you know what happened to my dad? Jack Stoddard?”

The blind man said, “He’s asleep, honey. He’s passed out. Over there.” His eyes roved and trembled in their sockets and their movement seemed to have nothing to do with where he turned his head or the gesture he made toward the coal storage shed beyond the wall. His eyes seemed to have some secret life of their own.

She slipped past the blind man and took the latch of the shed door in both hands and pulled it open. Her father slept on his back atop several bags of coal. His handsome face was slack, his dark hair sprayed across his forehead, and his shirt stained with coal dust. He sounded like something being slaughtered in a lonesome dirty pit.

She shook his arm and said Daddy several times but he did not wake up. He jerked his arm away from her and thrashed one way and then another on the coal and then started snoring again. She started to cry but crying only made her feel worse. She went back to the blind man.

She said, “Sir, can you help me get him home?”

“I don’t know what I could do to help you.” He cleared his throat. “You should wait until morning and some people will come. George Dillard, he owns this place, he’s the blacksmith. He’ll be here about seven.”

“I have to get him home,” said Jeanine. “My mother will be worried. We don’t have any food or anything. I have to go to school.”

“How old are you?”

“I’m nine. Is there anybody close by that could help me?”

“Well, if you want to go get the town constable.”

“No, I better not.”

She cried noiselessly. Her mother and father were supposed to love each other but they yelled at each other so much, and these things kept happening. Now it was the middle of the night and she was abandoned here in a blacksmith shop with the old Tin Lizzie and the meat going bad in the heat.

“Well,” he said. “Can you drive?”

Jeanine wiped her face on her dress. “Yes,” she said. “Yes, I could drive. Daddy has let me drive. I think I know where we live.”

The blind man leaned on his cane. “Do you know how to work the pedals?”

“Yes. But I don’t know how to start it.”

“Well, I’ll tell you how.” His fingers wandered up and down the cane like white caterpillars in the dark. “Do everything I say.”

Jeanine went over to the old Ford and stood waiting for the blind man to tell her what to do.

“All right, turn on that lever on the tank. That opens the gas line to the engine.”

She turned the tank lever, and when he told her to, she reached into the driver’s side window and pushed up on a left-hand lever. She found the hand brake and skinned her knuckles setting it.

“Your dad ought to be jailed,” he said, “for getting drunk and leaving you in the car. There ought to be a law.”

“Oh no,” said Jeanine. “Don’t tell anybody. I can take him home.”

“Can you see over the dashboard?”

“I can!” she said. “It’s easy, I can see over it good.”

“Turn that coil box key,” he said. “That’s your electrical system.” The fingers of his right hand waved in the air as if they were independent of him or he did not realize he was doing it. “I could take one of them Tin Lizzies apart blind. They won’t let me. I could do it easy.”

Jeanine turned the coil box key, and then he told her shove up on the lever on the steering wheel that retarded the spark. She turned the key and pressed down with her heel on the starter. The motor purred smoothly, the lights came on and the blind man sat in the beams with a smile on his face. He was illuminated like an actor on a stage.

Jeanine said, “I got to get him in the backseat.”

The blind man followed her voice in a slow shuffle, his feet like small boats sprayed aside bow waves of straw and dirt and coal ash. She tried to wake her father and after a while he wobbled upright.

“Ahhh bullshit,” he said. “Iss juss bullshit.”

The blind man took Jack Stoddard by the ribs and lifted him.

“Guide me,” he said. “Hey, girlie, point me at that car.”

Jeanine took hold of his sleeve and then opened the back passenger-side door and the blind man felt along the rim of the door while he lifted Jack Stoddard through it with surprising strength. She saw her father grope around and claw his way onto the torn upholstery of the rear seat and slump down again saying, “Well what the hell is this? If this isn’t a way to do a fellow.”

Jeanine said, “Thank you, mister. I sure appreciate it.”

The blind man walked back toward his chair with sure steps, in an upright posture with his head drawn back, as if he were afraid something might strike him on the chin and as he came to his chair he put out his open, white hand in an elegant gesture, letting it fall until it touched the chair back.

“Children driving around at night,” he said. “There ain’t words to describe it. He should be arrested.”

Jeanine climbed in the passenger door. She reached down and took up a heavy twenty-five-pound flour sack and somehow got it onto the driver’s seat and sat down on it so she could see over the dash. The world was now full of obstacles and pieces of metal on the ground that would reach up to pierce one of the narrow tires. She stepped on the pedal and fed gas to the engine and released the brake and drove out of the blacksmith’s yard into the midnight town.

The streets were paved with brick and the tires made a flubbering noise passing over them. It was a town in the middle of the night, something she had never seen before. The daytime had receded like a tide and left all the buildings comatose, all the signs that said groceries and mexia drugs and barbershop had nobody to speak to. Jeanine passed by one street after another, looking for the sign that said brick yard road, afraid of waking up somebody who would come and arrest her father. If she could just get home she would be all right. The headlights glared back at her from storefront windows and behind those reflections were town constables and sheriffs looking for a nine-year-old girl driving without a license with a drunk daddy in the backseat.

She came toward the railroad station. A man in a broad western hat stood beside a team of four horses. He was waiting for the train to come and he would load them up and take them away to his ranch. It was Maisie and Jeff and Big Man and Little Man. Her father had sold them that very night. Their pale straw-colored manes and tails were like lifting flax in the midnight glare of the streetlights, they nodded to one another and shifted their enormous feet.

Jeanine felt that her heart was broken but she dared not try to stop and say good-bye to the team. She felt that they were on their way to some good place and were leaving her behind, it was as if she had been deserted by some roadside. She had not yet passed Brick Yard Road. They lived down that red dirt road somewhere in a two-room rent house alongside other rent houses thrown up at the height of the oil boom and now dwindling back into mere lumber.