Lorrie Moore - 100 Years of the Best American Short Stories

Nobody was inside but the one man — a silent, relegated place like a barn. I let him bring some rum cokes out to the only table, the card table out on the back where the two cane chairs were. The sun was going down on the island side, and making Vicksburg alight on the other. East and West were in our eyes.

“Don’t make me drink it. I don’t want to drink it,” Maideen said.

“Go on and drink it.”

“You drink if you like it. Don’t make me drink it.”

“You drink it too.”

I looked at her take some of it, and sit shading her eyes. There were wasps dipping from the ledge over the old screen door and skimming her hair. There was a smell of fish and of the floating roots fringing the island. The card table smelled warmly of its oilcloth top and of endless deals. A load of Negroes came over on the water-taxi and stepped out with tin buckets. They were sulphur yellow all over, thickly coated with cottonseed meal, and disappeared in the colored barge at the other end, in single file, as if they were sentenced to it.

“Sure enough, I don’t want to drink it.”

“You drink it. It doesn’t taste bad.”

Inside, in the dim saloon, two men with black spurred cocks under their arms had appeared. Without noise they each set a muddy boot on the rail and drank, the cocks hypnotically still. They got off the barge on the island side, where they disappeared in the hot blur of willow branches. They might never be seen again.

The heat trembled on the water and on the other side wavered the edges of the old white buildings and concrete slabbed bluffs. From the barge, Vicksburg looked like an image of itself in a tarnished mirror — like its portrait at a sad time of life.

A short cowboy in boots and his girl came in, walking alike. They dropped a nickel in the nickelodeon, and came together.

The canal had no visible waves, yet trembled slightly beneath us; I was aware of it like the sound of a winter fire in the room.

“You don’t ever dance, do you?” Maideen said.

It was a long time before we left. All kinds of people had come out to the barge, and the white side and the nigger side filled up. When we left it was good-dark.

The lights twinkled sparsely on the shore — old sheds and warehouses, long dark walls. High up on the ramparts of town some old iron bells were ringing.

“Are you a Catholic?” I asked her suddenly, and I bent my head to hear her answer.

“No.”

I looked at her — I made it plain she had disappointed some hope of mine — for she had; I could not tell you now what hope.

“We’re all Baptists. Why, are you a Catholic?” Oh, nobody was a Catholic in Sabina.

“No.”

Without touching her except momently with my knee I walked her ahead of me up the steep uneven way, to where my car was parked listing sharply downhill. Inside, she could not shut her door. I stood outside and looked, it hung heavily and she had drunk three or four drinks, all I had made her take. Now she could not shut her door. “I’ll fall out, I’ll fall in your arms. I’ll fall, catch me.”

“No you won’t. Shut it hard. Shut it. All your might.”

At last. I leaned against her shut door, spent for a moment.

I grated up the steep cobbles, turned and followed the river road high along the bluff, turned again off into a deep rutted dirt way under shaggy banks, dark and circling and down-rushing.

“Don’t lean against my arm,” I said. “Sit up and get some air.”

“I don’t want to,” she said in her soft voice that I could hardly understand any more.

“You want to lie down?”

“No. I don’t want to lie down.”

“Get some air.”

“Don’t make me lie down. I don’t want to do anything, anything at all.”

“You’re drunk.”

“I don’t want to do a thing from now and on till evermore.”

We circled down. The sounds of the river tossing and dizzying and teasing its great trash could be heard through the dark now. It made the noise of a moving wall, and up it fishes and reptiles and uprooted trees and man’s throwaways played and climbed all alike in a splashing like innocence. A great wave of smell beat at my face. The track had come down deep as a tunnel. We were on the floor of the world. The trees met and matted overhead, the cedars came together, and through them the stars of Vicksburg looked sifted and fine as seed, so high and so far. There was the sound of a shot, somewhere, somewhere.

“Yonder’s the river,” she said. “I see it — the Mississippi River.”

“You don’t see it. We’re not that close.”

“I see it, I see it.”

“Haven’t you ever seen it before? You baby.”

“Before? No, I never have seen the Mississippi River before. I thought we were on it on the boat.”

“Look, the road has ended.”

“Why does it come this far and stop?”

“How should I know? What do they come down here for?”

“Why do they?”

“There are all kinds of people in the world.” Far away somebody was burning something.

“Do you mean bad people and niggers and all? Ones that hide? Moonshiners?”

“Oh, fishermen. River men. Cock fighters. You’re waked up.”

“I think we’re lost,” she said.

Mother said, if I thought you’d ever go back to that Jinny Stark, I couldn’t hold up my head. — No, mother, I’ll never go back. — The whole world knows what she did to you .

“You dreamed we’re lost. We’ll go somewhere where you can lie down a little.”

“You can’t get lost in Sabina.”

“After you lie down a little you’ll be all right again, you can get up. We’ll go somewhere where you can lie down.”

“I don’t want to lie down.”

“Did you know a car would back up a hill as steep as this?”

“You’ll be killed.”

“I bet nobody ever saw such a crazy thing. Do you think anybody ever saw such a crazy thing?”

We were almost straight up and down, hanging on the bluff and the tail end bumping and lifting us and swaying from side to side. At last we were up. If I had not drunk that last drink maybe I would not have made such startling maneuvers and would not have bragged so loud. The car had leaned straight over that glimpse of the river, over the brink as sweetly as you ever saw a hummingbird over a flower.

We drove a long way. All among the statues in the dark park, the repeating stances, the stone rifles again and again on lost hills, the spiral-staired and condemned towers.

I looked for the moon, which would be in the last quarter. There she was. The air was not darkness but faint light, and floating sound — the breath of all the people in the world who were breathing out into the night looking at the moon, knowing her quarter.

We rode in wilderness under the lifting moon, Maideen keeping very still, sighing faintly as if she longed for something herself, for sleep — for going the other way. A coon, white as a ghost, crossed the road, passed a gypsy camp — all sleeping.

Off the road, under the hanging moss, a light burned in a whitewashed tree. It showed a circle of whitewashed cabins, dark, and all around and keeping the trees back, a fence of white palings. Sunset Oaks. A little nigger boy leaned on the gate this late at night, wearing an engineer’s cap.

Yet it did not seem far. I pulled in, and paid.

“One step up,” I told her at the door.

I sat on the bed, the old iron bed with rods. I think I said, “Get your dress off.”

She had her head turned away. The naked light hung far down in the room — a long cord that looked as if something had stretched it. She turned, then, with tender shoulders bent toward the chair, as if in confidence toward that, the old wreck of a thing that tonight held her little white dress.