Роберт Батлер - The Ironworkers' Hayride

“Milton?” she says.

“Are you subject to chills?” I say. Inexplicably. I do have a good, thick, gum-rubber eraser in my head always at the ready to wipe away my mistakes of judgment before they issue forth from my mouth. I am a man who arrives at the appropriate sum total before giving an answer. But on this occasion I have simply blurted forth the next, uncalculated thought in my head.

“I don’t have an illness,” she says.

My remark had nothing to do with her leg and I have to squeeze my lips shut hard to keep that assertion from coming out of my mouth now and just making things worse.

“Of course,” I say. “Of course,” I repeat instantly. And it only takes the briefest moment of silence following for me to add, “Of course.”

“I’m Minnie,” she says.

“Of course,” I say, and the hand with the flowers shoots out as if my arm was artificial and the spring lever in the elbow has just let go.

But the flowers save the moment, I think.

“Poppies,” Minnie says, her eyes widening at their sight, which is wide indeed because her eyes are already quite large as it is, large and dark as the skin of a Ford Model T, one of which is roaring off into the night, a Ford Model T, that is, Zack’s, leaving me alone with this girl. “They’re my favorites. How did you know?” she says. “ Did you know?”

“The flowers?” I say. “Oh. .” I pause. I could suggest a deep intuitive bond here. I’m capable of that. I can’t possibly expect strict, detailed honesty to be the best policy on a date with a girl with a wooden leg anyway, but in this circumstance I opt for it. “I asked Zack,” I say.

Minnie laughs, lifting her face and not holding it back at all, not covering her mouth with her hand, like girls usually do. She says, “He had it drummed into his head by my sister around my last birthday.”

A few moments pass, and I’m not aware of it exactly but I’m just sort of gawking at her. She looks at me and tilts her head just a little. “Are you trying to picture Zack’s head being drummed on by his wife?”

I gawk some more.

Minnie lowers her voice. “She’s a suffragette, you see.”

I realize that if I don’t take myself in hand I’ll spend the rest of the evening two steps behind this girl without speaking a word. I manage to say, “I didn’t know.”

“Oh yes. I want to vote, too. Does that surprise you?”

“No.”

“Or put you off?”

“No,” I say, and I manage to sound emphatic.

“I won’t harangue you in the hay,” she says. “Don’t worry.”

“Okay.”

I’m finally catching up, I think, certainly enough to realize that I’m still holding the flowers straight out. I lift them up at her and she’s been sort of in another place, too, it seems. “Oh. Sorry,” she says, though it looks like she’s talking to the flowers. She takes them and then fixes on me again. “You were swell to do this,” she says.

So we get to the business of finding a place for the ride. Most of the other couples have already made their choices and are settling down in the hay. We drift down the row of wagons, Minnie moving along real natural next to me. We arrive at the last one, and I look inside and say to her low, so the others can’t hear, “Do you know any of these people?”

“Not a one. And you?”

“Seen a couple of them around, don’t know any of them.”

“Any of Zack’s pals?” she says.

“Not that I know of.”

“Then this one’s for us,” she says, and she’s already trying to climb up into the wagon.

I step up behind her and my hands come out and sort of hang in the air on either side. She’s not looking at me but she knows what I’m doing, even down to my hesitation. “You can just grab and shove if you like,” she says.

So I put my hands, which I have to say are trembling more than a little, on each side of her waist and she is heavily corseted inside there and just thinking about her corset makes me go too weak to lift her. But I try. I help a little and somehow she’s up on the wagon and I’m scrambling in after her.

She moves forward on her hands and knees pretty fast, heading for the far end of the wagon, and I try to keep up, crawling past the other couples settling in. One guy that I’ve nodded to a few times at the Ironman I nod to again and he gives me a big wink, finally understanding I’m a regular fellow, I presume, and I have the problem of what to do with my face in return. A similar wink, as from a fellow fellow? Another nod, which, I instantly realize, might give an impression like some European king or somebody passing in a carriage? Nothing, just stay blank-faced or turn away? But would that be interpreted as a gesture of rejection or overreaching uppitiness? All this goes through me like turning the crank on the arcade mutoscope real slow, but my arms and legs are still moving in normal time and the decision is made by my indecision. I pass on with my mug fixed in what I’m sure is a mask of buffoonery. Then I look ahead and Minnie is just turning around in the spot she’s found for us, and the whole batch of poppies is clenched in her teeth. She’s got the stems in her mouth and the cluster of flower heads are bunched up at her cheek and she sees me seeing this and she flutters her eyebrows at me, and once again it’s me and my face trying to figure out how to act in this world we’re not quite suited for.

She has put the blanket on the straw to her right side and pats the straw to her left. I’m grateful for the instruction. I just set my face to the place where I’ve been told to go and I creep on. Meanwhile, Minnie takes the flowers from her mouth and lays them on the blanket. Happily, my mind catches up — she’d put the bouquet in her mouth to protect them as she crawled. This makes perfectly good sense. I have arrived safely, turning and falling into the hay beside Minnie, and we are side by side.

I lean on my elbows thrown back behind me and I cross my feet at the ankles. My mouth opens to say something and then snaps shut with no actual words coming to mind. Her wooden leg lies between us. The evening in hay lies before us. I figure I’m in trouble.

Not that I shouldn’t be prepared simply to keep quiet. Especially considering I’ve been enlisted in this date by the girl’s relative who happens to mostly know me from a bar and he knows how out of place I generally am and I’ve agreed to it only after I’ve said no a few times and even written to my sister in San Francisco that I was saying no in spite of she’s the one who’s always worried about me never looking up from the column of numbers in front of me to find a life with somebody, but here’s a girl who’s got a cork leg, not to say there isn’t plenty of girl left in spite of that, but it’s just the idea of this whole arrangement, which is: Let’s choose Milton to take out this girl who other young men maybe would get uncomfortable around because Milton’s hard up and he’s also a safe choice because there’s not really a red-blooded young man inside of him, he’s just got ink in his blood and ledgers in his brain and numbers on his lips. So under these circumstances why should I care if I don’t say another word all night? I can just lie here in the hay and get through the whole thing and then everybody will get off my back and let me go back to my numbers. See? That’s the fate even I imagine for myself at the end of a hayride with a girl. Go back to my numbers. But in fact I do expect more from myself now. I want more. It was Minnie herself who brought this out in me. Minnie radiant in the Model T’s headlights. Minnie who says just grab me and shove. Minnie who wants to vote. Why shouldn’t she?

“Why shouldn’t you vote?” I say, unexpectedly.