The Death of Jim Loney, page 2
Loney glanced at Harve, but Harve had one big farmer’s hand covering his face. He hadn’t seen a thing. He looked like a man at a funeral.
2
Loney walked through the smoky night. Away from the people and the lights, the rain was colder. He moved his shoulders up and down to make them warm. He stopped and lit a cigarette and glanced back toward the field. The banks of lights had been turned off and Loney could hear the noise of car motors racing. He lived two blocks from the football field and he smelled the smoke from the wood stoves banked against the night and the rain.
Four cars speeded by, horns honking, people yelling. A girl leaned out the window of a pickup and screamed, “Go, Big Orange!”
It was the first week of October and the rain had been falling for three days without letup. Before that, there had been one clear day, and before that, a long week of rain. Loney had been working for a farmer out north, helping with the summer-fallowing, but the rain had wiped them out and he didn’t mind. That one clear day the farmer had come to Loney’s house and told him to come to work the next day. But when it rained again, Loney sat at his kitchen table and watched it. He had made enough from harvesting to keep himself for a while. His needs were few and not great in his mind.
It was early and Loney did not want to go home. He wanted to go downtown for a drink. But because he didn’t go out much anymore he had to stop and decide where to drink. He was a block from the bars and the rain had soaked through his shoes. For a moment he thought of giving up the idea. He had a bottle of wine at home, but he wanted a drink of whiskey, a drink that would warm him inside and out. He decided on Kennedy’s, but his father might be there, so he settled on the Serviceman’s.
As he walked toward the lights, he thought again of the Bible passage. He hadn’t read the Bible in fifteen years. He wondered why he had remembered that particular passage. Did it have to do with the players, the people around him, himself? He decided the passage was wrong, he had gotten it wrong. There was no sense to it.
He walked and he realized that he was seeing things strangely, and he remembered that it had been that way at the football game. It was as though he were exhausted and drowsy, but his head was clear. He was aware of things around him—the shadowy trees, the glistening sidewalk, the dark cat that moved into the dark. The wood smoke had been with him for days and he felt drowsy on it and he smelled the wet leaves in the gutter. He saw and smelled these things and his head felt light, and he thought, I hear nothing, it is as quiet as death, and he did not hear the rain. The rain did not make a sound as it fell. The night glistened with the smell of wood smoke.
3
The bar was full but not packed. And it was quiet for ten o’clock on a Friday night. Loney felt awkward as he made his way down the bar. A young couple glanced in his direction, their faces blank with indifference. He found an empty stool beside the man and slid onto it.
The bartender, a lanky Indian named Russell, looked at him while he wiped his hands on a bar rag. “The Lone Ranger,” he said.
“What’s up?” said Loney.
“Business as usual. Trying to keep the women happy.”
“It’s tough,” said Loney.
“What’s your pleasure?”
“Bourbon—with a little water.”
“You’re coming up in the world.”
Loney rubbed his forehead. It was wet. He settled down and waited for his drink. He hadn’t been in the Serviceman’s since last June, since Chuckwagon Days, when the fat government worker got thrown through the plate-glass window. The window was still gone, replaced by a large sheet of plywood. Someone had scrawled in lipstick: SLOW ME DOWN LORD.
Russell set Loney’s drink on the bar. He had been a drinking acquaintance a few years ago, but that was history. Now is now, thought Loney, and he drank half the drink. It was almost pure bourbon.
“How’s that?” said Russell.
Loney sat up straight and lowered his head, waiting for the burning knot to settle in his stomach. Then he swallowed and reached into his breast pocket for his cigarettes.
Russell wiped his hands on the bar rag and watched him. “You want some water?”
“It’s fine. Jesus Christ, it’s all right now.”
Russell laughed. He didn’t like Loney. He had never liked him and he could not say why. Even when they used to drink together he hadn’t liked Loney and it always puzzled him. If it had been a woman, if we had fought over a woman, Russell thought, I could understand that. But it had never been a woman. When they drank together, they drank as men do who do not like each other. They drank quietly but tensely, neither of them wishing the other ill or well, only survival until next time. The only time a woman had been involved Russell had won. He took the woman home and fucked her. But even then he felt that he had been given her, that Loney hadn’t cared one way or another. And maybe that was what he hated in Loney, the fact that he didn’t seem to care. Russell, in his victory, had been made foolish.
But Loney had never really done anything to him, and right now Russell could almost pity the poor bedraggled bastard trying to light a cigarette with a book of wet matches. He leaned over the bar and struck his Zippo. “You been to the football game?”
Loney sucked in his smoke and nodded.
“How bad was it?”
“Thirteen to twelve.”
“Theirs?”
“Yes.”
“Hell, that’s a moral victory. Your goddamn right.”
“Skin you.”
“Skin you too.”
They both laughed. It was an Indian joke.
“What have you been up to?” said Loney. He wiped his wet hair back away from his forehead.
“Eating the wife’s cooking, getting fat.” Russell bounced a fist off his flat belly. “You know I got married? Estelle Pipe? Almost a year now.”
“Congratulations.”
“You should try it.”
“I just might.”
“Keep your hands off your meat. Best year of my life.”
“Congratulations.”
“You got a woman?”
“Yes.”
“Really?”
Loney nodded.
“What’s her name? Do I know her?”
“No, you wouldn’t know her.”
“Why not?”
“She doesn’t come in here.”
“What’s the matter with this place?”
“She’s a schoolteacher.”
“Ohhh.” But Russell didn’t believe him. He didn’t believe Loney had a woman and it irritated him. “I hear from Sylvester that you’re working for old Gronabeck.”
“I was, until this rain got the best of us.” Loney felt about ready to try the bourbon again.
“You should get a real job.”
“That’s the truth.”
“You should work it for a while instead of sitting on it.”
“Maybe.” Loney lifted his eyebrows.
And Russell felt a little sorry for him. “Working for them farmers ain’t so bad. You can’t beat the hours.”
Loney laughed and swallowed the whiskey. Russell laughed too. He could buy him a drink now. We’re neither of us bad guys; just adversaries, that’s all.
In the Serviceman’s that night, nobody was bad and the night turned noisy and incidental to the long run.
4
Rhea rolled over onto her back and sighed, and the sun filled the room. It took her a moment to realize that today was Saturday and she had made it through another week. She began to feel the possibility of spirit again. It had been a long time; not a bad time, just a vaguely discontented time. The malaise had fallen over her like a patch of winter fog and she thought it had to do with the onset of winter in a cold country. But yesterday’s snow had lifted her and at the same time had prepared her for the unruly months ahead, and today’s sun burned away the traces of her malaise. She felt resolutely human.
She studied the picture on the wall above her bed. It was a print of a painting of a girl with orange hair and black dress. She often glanced at it in the morning, but this early sun threw a rare light on it and she decided it must be true. The man who had presented it to her had said the girl looked just like her. Today, for the first time, the long neck, the slender face, even the hair, although the wrong color, seemed much like her own. It was in the eyes that she found a resemblance that mystified her. There was something Oriental about the eyes and she had never thought of her own eyes that way. Moreover, the eyes were dark, opaque, while her own eyes were green and deep. Lively, she thought. Why do they always paint such passionless women? But I have been passionless the last few weeks. Maybe that’s the resemblance. Two passionless women waiting for something to happen.
The clock/radio said 9:03. She walked into the bathroom and turned on the light above the mirror. Without her lipstick, her eye shadow and mascara, she looked less like the girl than she had imagined. She began to take off her nightgown to look at her body, but she thought, This is silly; a girl on a piece of pasteboard is making me do this. Still, she moved her gown to one side so she could see her shoulder and it was smooth and white and did look a little like the girl’s one visible slightly rounded shoulder. She made a face. At least I have passion in me. And big white teeth. I could bite through a tree. “Grrr,” she said. It always surprised her when friends, men especially, told her she had wonderful teeth. She always felt they were much too large for her mouth. And a little crooked. Sometimes when she listened to a person talk directly to her, she felt her lips pulling apart and she became conscious of her teeth and she couldn’t concentrate on the words. At best, she thought her teeth were eccentric.
“I’m twenty-nine years old,” she said as she ran the washcloth over her face.
She slipped into her robe and walked to the kitchen to put on her tea water. Then she went to the front door for the newspaper. The street was already black and drying in spots. What a strange country.
And she thought of the day before. That late afternoon she had been visiting Loney in his house, scolding him really, for she had found him drinking wine and half drunk. He would say nothing to her and she had decided to leave, perhaps for good, when she looked out the kitchen window and saw the thick heavy flakes. She had blurted, “Oh, look!” and together they watched through the window the snow turning blue in the dusk. She heard again the ticking clock as she ran her fingers through his hair. And she remembered the yellow stucco Catholic church across the street, as large and ominous as a ship on a swell. And the four box elders on the boulevard twisting darkly to the gray sky. Rhea had watched the first snow of the year drift and cover everything small and she thought she had never seen anything lovelier.
Now she touched her blond hair, cut as short and almost in the same style as Loney’s, and the disappointment of seeing the first snow running down the gutter was tempered by the brilliant sun and the raw noise of a magpie in a tree across the street.
She fixed her tea and toasted an English muffin and carried them into the living room, where she sat down on the rug in a square of sunlight. She opened the paper to the weather section and ran her finger down the column of cities until she came to Dallas: 82° and 63°. That was warm for this time of year. She tried to imagine what her parents were doing right now. They would have finished breakfast hours ago. They got up at dawn every day. Saturday. Her father would probably be out shooting clay pigeons. A dumb sport. And her mother? Perhaps sitting in the sun reading the newspaper, or working on one of her splashy watercolors.
Most mornings when she read the Dallas weather, Rhea longed for those hot dry days, those empty afternoons of sunning or shopping or driving to Fort Worth and her grandmother’s estate. She loved Fort Worth. It had a personality, with its old buildings, the cattleyards and the museums.
Rhea sipped her tea and looked out the sliding glass doors that opened onto a small deck. She remembered the last exhibit she had attended in an annex of the Amon Carter Museum. It was an exhibition of modern cowboy art, mostly plastic art. Most of the pieces were funny and quite serious, but she liked the saloon the best. It was a real saloon and you walked through the rough swinging doors and found yourself in another world. She smelled the manure and she stared at the red neon heart blinking in the dark above the bar. She heard the lonesome moan of a broken-hearted cowboy on the jukebox. There were bottles of Lone Star and Pearl beer and ashtrays full of cigarette butts on the bar, and in the corner, a rumpled bed with a big pile of dirt in the middle. She and her friend, whom she had thought she loved at the time, became silent as they allowed the music and manure to fill their senses. Then they looked at each other and laughed. They laughed until they were breathless, and then they hugged and Rhea had thought her life was perfect in that moment.
But when they walked out into the white light of the museum hall, an old dissatisfaction hit her like a mistral wind and she felt quite empty. She had felt it for some time, since receiving her M.A. from Southern Methodist that spring. She had no idea what she was going to use it for.
She looked at her plate. She hadn’t touched her English muffin and the butter had made it soggy. She stood and walked into the kitchen. The carpet was warm from the sunlight. She found some cigarettes in a drawer and took one. She hardly ever smoked, but her memories had made her antsy.
Back in the living room she lit the cigarette with a large crystal lighter. And she remembered the professor, an assistant professor of literature, who had told her all about Montana. He had spent his summers in Montana since he was a kid. At the family place on Flathead Lake. He had told Rhea about the blue mountains, the green rivers, the small summer theater in Bigfork, and Glacier Park. He had given her an address in Helena where she could find out about teaching positions. Although they were the most casual of acquaintances, he had sensed her dissatisfaction. And so she wrote. And here she was. And she had been here two years. But instead of summer theaters and mountains and Glacier Park, she found herself in country that was all sky and flat land. She was in Big Sky country. With a vengeance. If it weren’t for the Little Rockies and the Bearpaws, small mountains to the south of Harlem, there would be nothing to break the tan and blue horizon. As for summer theater, there was a movie house that showed Walt Disney and adventure films. It wasn’t the end of the world, her grandmother would have said, but you could see it from here. But she said that about Fort Worth.
Rhea lay back and closed her eyes. The sun was grand and she hoped that Loney would be in shape today. She listened to the snow drip on the small deck. It was Saturday and sunny and Rhea felt the possibility of spirit again, an anticipation of something about to happen.
5
Loney was combing his hair when he heard the knocking. He put the hair oil in the medicine chest and turned out the light. The bathroom was on the dark side of the house.
He opened the back door and Rhea stood with her hands on her hips. “What’s the meaning of this?” she said, gesturing with her head at the garbage can. It had been tipped over and a trail of trash led around the side of the house.
He frowned. “Goddamn dogs,” he said.
“You should speak kindlier of them, you beast.”
“Turdhounds,” said Loney.
“You’re an ugly one.”
“Come in.” He stood aside and let her pass.
“Oh, my! What have you done? It’s so spotless!” Rhea walked around the kitchen, running her finger over the counters and shelves, looking into corners and under the table. “Oh, my, who’s your decorator? I must have him!”
“Charles—Charles of Harlem.” But Loney was happy and shy. “Would you like some coffee? It’s only instant.”
But Rhea continued to walk a tight circle in the small kitchen. She seemed to be searching for something. At last her eyes lit on him. “And look at you! You combed your hair. And shaved.” She put her hand to her chest. “And did you bathe?”
Loney nodded. Her soft Southern voice had become a song and it confused him. He didn’t know whether she was mocking him or not. Either way he didn’t mind, because he felt fine and he was glad that she had come.
“Do you think I might have a cup of coffee?” she said. But she kissed him instead. The kitchen was quiet and sunny. Then she leaned away from him and said, “Some of that good old-fashioned coffee you’re so famous for?”
“You smell good.”
“It’s Charlie,” she breathed.
“Charlie of Harlem?”
“Perfume,” she sighed.
They drank their coffee on the back porch in the sun. Swipesy lay between them and slept. Swipesy was Loney’s dog. He was very old and deaf. Rhea patted his head and they were silent for several minutes. Then she looked at Loney and said, “You’re so beautiful today. So doggone gorgeous.”
“Thank you,” said Loney.
“You’re so damned lovely sometimes. Sometimes I think I would just like to take a bite of you.”
“We could go inside,” said Loney.
“I love your dark skin and your dark hair, your noble dark profile. Sometimes you remind me of a dark greyhound. Do you mind?”
“You want to gnaw on my arm?”
“I want to gnaw on your throat,” she growled.
“Everything I have is yours.”
“That’s a song, show-off.” She sipped her coffee. It was half milk and barely warm. “I feel so perfect today. Thank you for being so … in shape.”
