Something Rich and Strange: Selected Stories Page 5

  “Barry’s supposed to take me home.”

  “I can take you home after we eat.”

  “I don’t like to be around a bunch of strangers,” Ginny said. “I get tired of the stares.”

  “We’ll go where there aren’t many people,” Andrew answered. “That ought to be easy today. Everyone’s hunkered down with their white bread and milk.” When she hesitated, Andrew placed his hand on her forearm.

  “Please,” Andrew said, “just breakfast.”

  “Let me tell Barry I’m going with you,” Ginny said.

  Soon they were driving through the center of town in Andrew’s jeep. Few tire tracks marked the snow the jeep passed over.

  “This should fit the bill nicely,” Andrew said, and turned into the Blue Ridge Diner’s parking lot.

  The snow had stopped but gray clouds smothered the dawn. The parking lot lights were still on, casting a buttery sheen over the snow. Inside, the waitress and cook stood across the counter from a middle-aged couple who sat in plastic swivel chairs. They were talking about the weather, their voices soft as if also muffled by the snow.

  “Let’s sit in a booth,” Ginny said. The waitress turned from the others at the counter.

  “You all want coffee?”

  Andrew looked at Ginny and she shook her head.

  “Just me,” he said.

  Andrew nodded toward the counter where the waitress continued to talk to the cook and the couple as she poured the coffee.

  “A scene worthy of your moniker.”

  “No, not really,” Ginny said. “Too much interaction.”

  Andrew turned his gaze back to her.

  “In the painting the man and woman are a couple.”

  “I don’t see that,” Ginny said. “They aren’t even looking at each other.”

  The waitress brought Andrew’s coffee but no menus.

  When she saw Ginny’s face up close, her lips pursed to an O before she quickly turned to Andrew.

  “There’s not much choice as far as food,” the waitress said. “Our deliveryman is running late, so it’s pretty much waffles or toast.”

  “Waffles sound good,” Andrew said.

  Ginny nodded.

  “Same for me.”

  Andrew stirred cream into his coffee. He held the cup but did not lift it to his lips. He leaned to blow across the coffee’s surface, then raised his eyes.

  “You’re wrong about that couple in the painting.”

  “What do you mean?” Ginny asked.

  “They are connected, the man and woman. Their faces may not show it but their arms and hands do.”

  “I don’t remember that,” Ginny said.

  “Well, I’ll show you then,” Andrew said.

  Coatless, he walked outside. Ginny watched through the window as he stepped into the lot, rummaged in the back of the jeep. The waitress brought their waffles as Andrew returned with a gray hardback the width and thickness of a family bible. He pushed his plate and cup to the side and laid the book open on the table.

  “There,” he said when he found the painting. “Look at her left arm and hand.”

  Ginny leaned over her plate and studied the picture.

  “I’m not convinced. Because of the perspective it could go either way, like whether the Mona Lisa is smiling or not.”

  “Maybe you just don’t want to admit you’re wrong,” Andrew said, and paused. “Maybe you’re wrong about several things, like not being able to teach again, like you and me.”

  Andrew reached out and laid his palm against the scar on Ginny’s face. She jerked her head sideways as if slapped.

  “OK,” he said, slowly lowering his hand. “I made a mistake tonight. It won’t happen again.”

  They finished their waffles in silence, and did not speak until Andrew slowed in front of her apartment.

  “Don’t pull into the drive,” Ginny said. “You might get stuck if you do.”

  Andrew pulled up to the curb but did not cut the engine. Ginny got out and trudged across the yard, her black walking shoes disappearing in the white each time she took another step. She did not look back as she opened the front door. Inside, she took off her shoes and socks and brushed the snow off her pants. She looked out the window. Only one set of tracks crossed the yard. The jeep was gone.

  Ginny slept as the sky cleared to a high, bright blue. By noon the temperature was in the forties. When her alarm clock went off at three, she lay in bed a few minutes listening to cars slosh through melting snow. She would not need a ride into work. She would drive herself across town, looking through safety glass as she passed the school where she had taught, then the hospital where her face had been stitched back together, the restaurant where she and Andrew had eaten breakfast.

  At the radio station she would unlock the door, and soon enough Buddy Harper would end his broadcast and leave. She would say, This is the Night Hawk, and play “After Midnight.”

  Ginny would speak to people in bedrooms, to clerks drenched in the fluorescent light of convenience stores, to millworkers driving back roads home after graveyard shifts. She would speak to the drunk and sober, the godly and the godless. All the while high above where she sat, the station’s red beacon would pulse like a heart, as if giving bearings to all those in the dark adrift and alone.

  The TRUSTY

  They had been moving up the road a week without seeing another farmhouse, and the nearest well, at least the nearest the owner would let Sinkler use, was half a mile back. What had been a trusty sluff job was now as onerous as swinging a Kaiser blade or shoveling out ditches. As soon as he’d hauled the buckets back to the cage truck it was time to go again. He asked Vickery if someone could spell him and the bull guard smiled and said that Sinkler could always strap on a pair of leg irons and grab a handle. “Bolick just killed a rattlesnake in them weeds yonder,” the bull guard said. “I bet he’d square a trade with you.” When Sinkler asked if come morning he could walk ahead to search for another well, Vickery’s lips tightened, but he nodded.

  The next day, Sinkler took the metal buckets and walked until he found a farmhouse. It was no closer than the other, even a bit farther, but worth padding the hoof a few extra steps. The well he’d been using belonged to a hunchbacked widow. The woman who appeared in this doorway wore her hair in a similar tight bun and draped herself in the same sort of flour-cloth dress, but she looked to be in her midtwenties, like Sinkler. Two weeks would pass before they got beyond this farmhouse, perhaps another two weeks before the next well. Plenty of time to quench a different kind of thirst. As he entered the yard, the woman looked past the barn to a field where a man and his draft horse were plowing. The woman gave a brisk whistle and the farmer paused and looked their way. Sinkler stopped beside the well but did not set the buckets down.

  “What you want,” the woman said, not so much a question as a demand.

  “Water,” Sinkler answered. “We’ve got a chain gang working on the road.”

  “I’d have reckoned you to bring water with you.”

  “Not enough for ten men all day.”

  The woman looked out at the field again. Her husband watched but did not unloop the rein from around his neck. The woman stepped onto the six nailed-together planks that looked more like a raft than a porch. Firewood was stacked on one side, and closer to the door an axe leaned between a shovel and a hoe. She let her eyes settle on the axe long enough to make sure he noticed it. Sinkler saw now that she was younger than he’d thought, maybe eighteen, at most twenty, more girl than woman.

  “How come you not to have chains on you?”

  “I’m a trusty,” Sinkler said smiling. “A prisoner, but one that can be trusted.”

  “And all you want is water?”

  Sinkler thought of several possible answers.

  “That’s what they sent me for.”

  “I don’t reckon there to be any money in it for us?” the girl asked.

  “No, just gratitude from a bunch of thirsty men, and especi
ally me for not having to haul it so far.”

  “I’ll have to ask my man,” she said. “Stay here in the yard.”

  For a moment he thought she might take the axe with her. As she walked into the field, Sinkler studied the house, which was no bigger than a fishing shack. The dwelling appeared to have been built in the previous century. The door opened with a latch, not a knob, and no glass filled the window frames. Sinkler stepped closer to the entrance and saw two ladder-back chairs and a small table set on a puncheon floor. Sinkler wondered if these apple-knockers had heard they were supposed to be getting a new deal.

  “You can use the well,” the girl said when she returned, “but he said you need to forget one of them pails here next time you come asking for water.”

  Worth it, he figured, even if Vickery took the money out of Sinkler’s own pocket, especially with no sign up ahead of another farmhouse. It would be a half-dollar at most, easily made up with one slick deal in a poker game. He nodded and went to the well, sent the rusty bucket down into the dark. The girl went up on the porch but didn’t go inside.

  “What you in prison for?”

  “Thinking a bank manager wouldn’t notice his teller slipping a few bills in his pocket.”

  “Whereabouts?”

  “Raleigh.”

  “I ain’t never been past Asheville,” the girl said. “How long you in for?”

  “Five years. I’ve done sixteen months.”

  Sinkler raised the bucket, water leaking from the bottom as he transferred its contents. The girl stayed on the porch, making sure that all he took was water.

  “You lived here long?”

  “Me and Chet been here a year,” the girl said. “I grew up across the ridge yonder.”

  “You two live alone, do you?”

  “We do,” the girl said, “but there’s a rifle just inside the door and I know how to bead it.”

  “I’m sure you do,” Sinkler said. “You mind telling me your name, just so I’ll know what to call you?”

  “Lucy Sorrels.”

  He waited to see if she’d ask his.

  “Mine’s Sinkler,” he said when she didn’t.

  He filled the second bucket but made no move to leave, instead looking around at the trees and mountains as if just noticing them. Then he smiled and gave a slight nod.

  “Must get lonely being out so far from everything,” Sinkler said. “At least, I would think so.”

  “And I’d think them men to be getting thirsty,” Lucy Sorrels said.

  “Probably,” he agreed, surprised at her smarts in turning his words back on him. “But I’ll return soon to brighten your day.”

  “When you planning to leave one of them pails?” she asked.

  “Last trip before quitting time”

  She nodded and went into the shack.

  “The rope broke,” he told Vickery as the prisoners piled into the truck at quitting time.

  The guard looked not so much skeptical as aggrieved that Sinkler thought him fool enough to believe it. Vickery answered that if Sinkler thought he’d lightened his load he was mistaken. It’d be easy enough to find another bucket, maybe one that could hold an extra gallon. Sinkler shrugged and lifted himself into the cage truck, found a place on the metal bench among the sweating convicts. He’d won over the other guards with cigarettes and small loans, that and his mush talk, but not Vickery, who’d argued that making Sinkler a trusty would only give him a head start when he tried to escape.

  The bull guard was right about that. Sinkler had more than fifty dollars in poker winnings now, plenty enough cash to get him across the Mississippi and finally shed himself of the whole damn region. He’d grown up in Montgomery, but when the law got too interested in his comings and goings he’d gone north to Knoxville and then west to Memphis before recrossing Tennessee on his way to Raleigh. Sinkler’s talents had led him to establishments where his sleight of hand needed no deck of cards. With a decent suit, clean fingernails, and buffed shoes, he’d walk into a business and be greeted as a solid citizen. Tell a story about being in town because of an ailing mother and you were the cat’s pajamas. They’d take the Help Wanted sign out of the window and pretty much replace it with Help Yourself. Sinkler remembered the afternoon in Memphis when he had stood by the river after grifting a clothing store of forty dollars in two months. Keep heading west or turn back east—that was the choice. He’d flipped a silver dollar to decide, a rare moment when he’d trusted his life purely to luck.

  This time he’d cross the river, start in Kansas City or St. Louis. He’d work the stores and cafés and newsstands and anywhere else with a till or a cash register. Except for a bank. Crooked as bankers were, Sinkler should have realized how quickly they’d recognize him as one of their own. No, he’d not make that mistake again.

  That night, when the stockade lights were snuffed, he lay in his bunk and thought about Lucy Sorrels. A year and a half had passed since he’d been with a woman. After that long, almost any female would make the sap rise. There was nothing about her face to hold a man’s attention, but curves tightened the right parts of her dress. Nice legs too. Each trip to the well that day, he had tried to make small talk. She had given him the icy mitts, but he had weeks yet to warm her up. It was only on the last haul that the husband had come in from his field. He’d barely responded to Sinkler’s “how do you dos” and “much obligeds.” He looked to be around forty and Sinkler suspected that part of his terseness was due to a younger man being around his wife. After a few moments, the farmer had nodded at the pail in Sinkler’s left hand. “You’ll be leaving that, right?” When Sinkler said yes, the husband told Lucy to switch it with the leaky well bucket, then walked into the barn.

  Two days passed before Lucy asked if he’d ever thought of trying to escape.

  “Of course,” Sinkler answered. “Have you?”

  She looked at him in a way that he could not read.

  “How come you ain’t done it, then? They let you roam near anywhere you want, and you ain’t got shackles.”

  “Maybe I enjoy the free room and board,” Sinkler answered. He turned a thumb toward his stripes. “Nice duds too. They even let you change them out every Sunday.”

  “I don’t think I could stand it,” Lucy said. “Being locked up so long and knowing I still had nigh on three years.”

  He checked her lips for the slightest upward curve of a smile, but it wasn’t there.

  “Yeah,” Sinkler said, taking a step closer. “You don’t seem the sort to stand being locked up. I’d think a young gal pretty as you would want to see more of the world.”

  “How come you ain’t done it?” she asked again, and brushed some loose wisps of hair behind her ear.

  “Maybe the same reason as you,” Sinkler said. “It’s not like you can get whisked away from here. I haven’t seen more than a couple of cars and trucks on this road, and those driving them know there’s prisoners about. They wouldn’t be fool enough to pick up a stranger. Haven’t seen a lot of train tracks either.”

  “Anybody ever try?” Lucy asked.

  “Yeah, two weeks ago. Fellow ran that morning and the bloodhounds had him grabbing sky by dark. All he got for his trouble was a bunch of tick bites and briar scratches. That and another year added to his sentence.”

  For the first time since she’d gone to fetch her husband, Lucy stepped off the porch and put some distance between her and the door. The rifle and axe too, which meant that she was starting to trust him at least a little. She stood in the yard and looked up at an eave, where black insects hovered around clots of dried mud.

  “Them dirt daubers is a nuisance,” Lucy said. “I knock their nests down and they build them back the next day.”

  “I’d guess them to be about the only thing that wants to stay around here, don’t you think?”

  “You’ve got a saucy way of talking,” she said.

  “You don’t seem to mind it too much,” Sinkler answered, and nodded toward the field. “A
n older fellow like that usually keeps a close eye on a pretty young wife, but he must be the trusting sort, or is it he just figures he’s got you corralled in?”

  He lifted the full buckets and stepped close enough to the barn not to be seen from the field. “You don’t have to stand so far from me, Lucy Sorrels. I don’t bite.”

  She didn’t move toward him but she didn’t go back to the porch, either.

  “If you was to escape, where would you go?”

  “Might depend on who was going with me,” Sinkler answered. “What kind of place would you like to visit?”

  “Like you’d just up and take me along. I’d likely that about as much as them daubers flying me out of here.”

  “No, I’d need to get to know my traveling partner better,” Sinkler said. “Make sure she really cared about me. That way she wouldn’t take a notion to turn me in.”

  “You mean for the reward money?”

  Sinkler laughed.

  “You’ve got to be a high cloud to have a reward put on you, darling. They’d not even bother to put my mug in a post office, which is fine by me. Buy my train ticket and I’d be across the Mississippi in two days. Matter of fact, I’ve got money enough saved to buy two tickets.”

  “Enough for two tickets?” she asked.

  “I do indeed.”

  Lucy looked at her bare feet, placed one atop the other as a shy child might. She set both feet back on the ground and looked up.

  “Why come you to think a person would turn you in if there ain’t no reward?”

  “Bad conscience—which is why I’ve got to be sure my companion doesn’t have one.” Sinkler smiled. “Like I said, you don’t have to stand so far away. We could even step into the barn for a few minutes.”

  Lucy looked toward the field and let her gaze linger long enough that he thought she just might do it.

  “I have chores to get done,” she said and went into the shack.

  Sinkler headed back down the road, thinking things out. By the time he set the sloshing buckets beside the prison truck, he’d figured a way to get Lucy Sorrels’s dress raised with more than just sweet talk. He’d tell her there was an extra set of truck keys in a guard’s front desk he could steal. Once the guards were distracted, he’d jump in the truck, pick her up, head straight to Asheville, and catch the first train out. It was a damn good story, one Sinkler himself might have believed if he didn’t know that all the extra truck keys were locked inside a thousand-pound Mosler safe.