A Ford in the River Read online

  A Ford

  in the River

  Stories by

  Charles Rose

  NewSouth Books

  Montgomery | Louisville

  Also by Charles Rose

  In the Midst of Life: A Hospice Volunteer’s Story (2004)

  NewSouth Books

  105 S. Court Street

  Montgomery, AL 36104

  Copyright 2011 by Charles Rose. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by NewSouth Books, a division of NewSouth, Inc., Montgomery, Alabama.

  ISBN-13: 978-1-60306-112-4

  eBook ISBN-13: 978-1-60306-113-1

  LCCN: 2010015018

  Visit www.newsouthbooks.com.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  The author and the publisher gratefully acknowledge the following publications in which stories in this collection first appeared: “The Skater,” “Remission,” and “White Orchid,” in Shenandoah; “Photographs,” “Island Grove,” and “Kelp,” in The Chattahoochee Review; “Vigil,” “A New Roof,” and “Mr. Hardcastle,” in Alabama Literary Review; “Harmonica,” in Crazyhorse; “Chairs” and “Treasure Hunt,” in Southern Humanities Review; “A Ford in the River,” in Blackbird; “Complicity,” in Willow Springs; “Pagoda,” in Passager; “The View from My Father’s Window,” in Cricket; “Spink Hotel,” in The Southern Review.

  For Natalyn

  Contents

  Foreword: The Two Raymonds

  Spink Hotel

  Harmonica

  The View from My Father’s Window

  Chairs

  A Ford in the River

  Photographs

  Complicity

  The Skater

  Island Grove

  Vigil

  A New Roof

  Cutouts

  Kelp

  Mr. Hardcastle

  Remission

  White Orchid

  Pagoda

  Treasure Hunt

  About the Author

  Foreword: The Two Raymonds

  Marian Carcache and John M. Williams

  In late December 2008, after this book was initially scheduled for publication, author Charles Rose suffered a stroke and spent a long time recovering, first in Birmingham and later in Auburn. There were times after the stroke, he says, when his mind could not process what had happened to him. “I didn’t know if I was crazy or not. I couldn’t tell.”

  A lifelong reader and writer and piano player, Charlie was unable to read or write or play in the early stages of his recovery. Gradually he became more and more aware of the void the absence of music and literature had left in his life. The music came back first. A baby grand piano was the focal point of the parlor in the facility where he was recovering. As the long winter became spring, Charlie began playing his old beloved jazz standards and hymns for the enjoyment of the other residents.

  Then, in May 2009, he picked up two books, one by Raymond Chandler and the other by Raymond Carver. These works sparked something in the dark confusion the stroke had left in his mind, and his love for writing reawakened. He says he had been making his way through Chandler’s The High Window when he encountered this passage:

  It was a slim tall self-satisfied looking number in a tropical worsted suit of slate blue, black and white shoes, a dull ivory-colored shirt and a tie and display handkerchief the color of jacaranda bloom. He was holding a long black cigarette-holder in a peeled back white pigskin glove and he was wrinkling his nose at the dead magazines on the library table and the chairs and the rusty floor covering and the general air of not much money being made.

  To the average reader this passage may seem typical Chandler and unremarkable, but for Charlie that was precisely its beauty. Something about that passage made him feel the ache and love of writing again. That feeling was only reinforced when, a few days later, working through Carver’s “What’s in Alaska?” (from Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?), he encountered this exchange:

  Jack and Mary came back. Jack carried a large bag of M&Ms and a bottle of cream soda. Mary sucked on an orange Popsicle.

  “Anybody want a sandwich?” Helen said. “We have sandwich stuff.”

  “Isn’t it funny,” Mary said. “You start with the desserts first and then you move on to the main course.”

  “It’s funny,” Carl said.

  “Are you being sarcastic, honey?” Mary said.

  “Who wants cream soda?” Jack said. “A round of cream soda coming up.”

  Carl held his glass out and Jack poured it full. Carl set the glass on the coffee table, but the coffee table smacked it off and the soda poured onto his shoe.

  “Goddam it,” Carl said. “How do you like that? I spilled it on my shoe.”

  “Helen, do we have a towel? Get Carl a towel,” Jack said.

  “Those were new shoes,” Mary said. “He just got them.”

  “They look comfortable,” Helen said a long time later and handed Carl a towel.

  “That’s what I told him,” Mary said.

  Again, unremarkable. But our laughter as we sat in his room and read this passage again and again, brought delight to the soul in a way too simple and sublime to explain.

  Marian: When I first saw Charlie, I was a high school senior who had come to Auburn for a College Day. He was sitting in his office in Haley Center, perhaps the least interesting building that has ever been. I was not very excited at the prospect of leaving my home in rural Russell County, surrounded by a pecan orchard and a ryegrass field, to take up residence in a girls’ dorm and attend classes in a brick and metal monstrosity. But there sat Charlie, working behind his desk cluttered with papers and books and coffee cups, wearing a seersucker suit and dark glasses. I knew at that point that Auburn did have something to offer me in spite of the otherwise sterile surroundings I had found there. My overly romantic eighteen-year-old mind named him “the gypsy scholar” when I told family and friends about him upon returning home. Later, when I became a student at Auburn, he was my fiction writing teacher. He also taught me The Short Story and The European Novel. Those who knew him superficially did not always recognize his brilliance as both a literary scholar and a writer. Nor did they always appreciate his unconventionality. He was, and still is, peerlessly brilliant on a plane that many never visit. Years ago, when I was assigned to write an essay loosely based on the Theophrastus Character for advanced composition, I wrote about Charlie—dark-complexioned, small build, soulful brown eyes, a brilliant mind, a quiet man—both larger and smaller than life. Twice in the past few years, I feared losing him, but like the Phoenix, Charlie, the small and quiet man, the larger-than-life man, is back.

  Johnny: I never had Charlie as a teacher. But it doesn’t matter: my cousin had him and reported to me about this odd bird (in a flock of them, in those days)—how in discussing The Confessions of Felix Krull, for example, cigarette in hand, Jack’s coffee cup nearby (those days!), he would sporadically erupt in flashes of searing insight like galaxies from a mumbled continuum of dark matter. I had imagined Coleridge, in his “Sage of Highgate” days, doing exactly the same thing, and the analogy has persisted. I’ve known Charlie maybe thirty years, and our many, many conversations about literature and music and everything else during those years, in numerous locales, will stand out, I know, when I’m looking back over it all. I’ve been fortunate to know him. Since there is nothing remotely petty, mean, cruel, or nasty in the man, the stroke seemed a really cheap shot. But my God, is he resilient. I’ve seen him recover from a series of setbacks, and now here he is recovering from something that would have sile
nced most of us—not only recovering but falling in love again. These two passages brought him some great joy which struck me as profound. The mountains are mountains again. I’m telling you, you just don’t find them like him anymore.

  This book, containing some of Charlie’s best stories, is a testament to his talent and strength of spirit.

  Spink Hotel

  The brakes went out at the traffic light. My right foot crashed on the brake pedal. We ran the light, doing sixty. The emergency jammed. Mona gasped. Birdbaths, horrendous porch swings, a feed and seed store, a barber pole streamed by like bits of wreckage. I geared down, regained control of the car, felt it glide to a stop like a taxi. Sweat trickled out of my armpits.

  I switched off the ignition.

  “We are not going to make D.C. tonight,” said Mona, lighting a cigarette. She handed over the cigarette.

  I took a drag and gave it back to her. Mona was right. We were not going to make D.C. tonight. Or tomorrow. The nation’s capital was nearly four hundred miles away. Mona had pushed us along all evening, setting sunup as our ETA. Out of Cincinnati along the Ohio River, doing seventy on the two-lane, eighty on I-64. We were deep into West Virginia when Mona ordered me off the freeway. She said we couldn’t go on because a black sedan was tailing us. She clenched her fists.

  Arc lights on the courthouse square, one sputtering, stone facades and cornices of drab buildings, a church on the opposite corner—hulking and short-steepled, flaunting its dank red brick. A carillon chimed a hymn. I walk through the garden alone.

  A neon sign flaked rouge off, sifting down to the sidewalk. The hotel was four stories high, the windows set close together. Beyond the neon, a lobby spilling sour light like bile. Mona looked up at the neon, spelling out Spink Hotel.

  “Should be pink, not Spink,” Mona said.

  I said carefully, “Here there are no pink hotels.”

  “Okay, it’s a Spink.” Mona grabbed her loaf-shaped makeup kit after slipping on her cheapo wedding band. Got out of the car. “Remember if anyone stops us, it was your idea to stop here. I wanted to make D.C. tonight.”

  We had to stay here until I could have the brakes fixed, in this hotel in West Virginia, in a town that looked clean, respectable. Only the church looked ugly, still chiming about the garden. And the joys I share are beyond compare. What joys, whose? The carillon stopped with a lurch, an off-pitch, cretinous sound. I hauled the suitcase out of the trunk.

  I followed Mona into the lobby. Metal ashtrays, sour green leather wing chairs, rust-flecked, junk cigarette machine. From his cubbyhole behind the registration desk the night clerk wobbled to greet us. He wore a Civitan pin in the left lapel of his iron gray gabardine suit coat. His head was bald as a billiard ball.

  Mona sat down in a wing chair, crossed her legs, wiggled her toes in espadrilles, pulled her miniskirt down. She opened a package of Chiclets and popped a wad into her rosy mouth. I asked the desk clerk for a room for two.

  He sized us up and shook his head like a deacon seeing his church profaned, then relaxed, realizing a buck was a buck, even at Spink Hotel. “A single is all we have available. I can arrange to put in a cot.”

  “As you see we’re married.”

  As he saw Mona was jailbait. But he opened up the register. “Sign it mister and missus.”

  My ball-point signature skittered into illegibility. The night clerk turned to the mail slots and extracted a key with a dull green tab. Room 411 it told me. Mona was out of her chair, hugging her makeup kit as she made for the stairs. The night clerk lit up a Camel. He took a drag and coughed phthistically, spraying ashes on gray gabardine.

  “We can’t afford to have your kind here. One night will be your limit. Or do you want me to call the law?”

  I said we would be leaving tomorrow. Maybe late. We had car trouble.

  “Two nights then.” He took another drag, closed up the register, turned toward the plate-glass window, the street outside. I turned too. A patrol car idled in front of the church. My car was parked by a meter but we had an out-of-state tag. At this hour worth checking out, along with certain guests at the hotel, who could be taken into custody if such was the night clerk’s whim. The night clerk nodded me toward the stairs. The patrol car glided out of view.

  I passed the junk cigarette machine. There was a gum machine by the stairs, dispensing Chiclets along with other brands. Mona’d parked her wad on the coin slot. Thumbed it like a kidney. She’d kept on climbing, to the fourth and top floor, I was sure.

  I climbed the first flight of stairs. Alone on the darkened landing I tried to clear my mind. For eighteen hours a day I had kept Mona off the streets of Cincinnati. Her sister was three hundred miles away, in Richmond, our real destination. Sally had promised me she would take charge of Mona’s care. There Mona might get straightened out, live without me. With me she would only get worse. Yet I knew, as I stood on the landing, mustering strength to keep climbing, that I wouldn’t be able to let her go. That was why I’d veered off the I-64 exit ramp, come to Spink Hotel.

  Mona was still asleep. I lit a cigarette and got out of bed. I straddled a rickety chair, rocking with a furry squeak. Our room had a ponderous chiffonier beside a door to a tiny bathroom. On the other side of the bed a window overlooked a funeral home. Dust hung in the sunlight streaming in, lacing the carpet with hieroglyphics. The bed had a low headboard depicting a pastoral scene in low relief—a nymph being enticed by a satyr, in a scratchy, ivory stain. The satyr was playing a flute of some sort and the nymph was shielding her seat of love with both hands, fingers entwined. Smoking, I rocked with the back of the chair.

  From a room below I heard hammering, intermittently, yet with what seemed a willed intent. I was now on my second cigarette. Smoke from the first blimped over the bed. In her sleep, Mona’s breath mushroomed, lofted smoke toward the scarred plaster ceiling. Rust streaks showed in Mona’s frowsy hair. The hammering had given way to the sweeping clip of a carpenter’s plane. Next door, beyond the bathroom, the chiffonier, a lachrymose bleat of a radio emitted theme songs from old soaps, “Stella Dallas,” “Lorenzo Jones,” “Mary Noble Backstage Wife.” Must be a geezer next door, over ninety, or were these songs meant for me. He walks with me and He talks with me, the carillon chimed, way off key.

  Mona slept like she used to once, as if in a sodden sleep of depression. She used to total sixteen hours, waking up to watch Turner Classics, play solitaire, do crossword puzzles. I would come home to find her waiting up for me, with a list of words she was stuck on. Animal waste, urea, golden brass, ormolu. Oh the blessing of torpor, easy ease as I did my tasks, drove a taxi, worked in a housepainters crew, did whatever it took to keep her happy.

  All this before the telephone call from her shadowy lover, Roebuck.

  The chiming stopped, the radio stopped, the carpenter planing coffin boards stopped, in sequence, as if on cue. I pictured Roebuck’s oblong noggin, his bulging, baleful left eye. A black patch masked his right eye. I had inquired concerning the telephone call—your lover, who might he be? She had touched up a photo of Tom Cruise, inked in an eye patch, blackened in teeth. “This isn’t the Roebuck I know. He’s the Roebuck you think you know.”

  She raised her head up to the headboard. Scrutinized me out of a sunny haze, knowing instantly where my mind was, on the Roebuck she, not I, had known. She’d claimed Roebuck was a lobbyist for Harlan County Strip mines. Promoting strip mining in D.C., driving a tan SUV. She had met Roebuck in a Covington, Kentucky, strip club in her last little manic excursion across the Ohio River—where she had been—mistake—a cooperative cocktail waitress. She had run off with Roebuck in his SUV, barreled around D.C. with him for a glorious month while I suffered an agony of worry back home. Dumped, she had come back home. Come back to me on a Greyhound bus.

  Roebuck had sent her a postcard, last week, the Washington Monument. He had printed in caps “I need you. Let bygones be bygo
nes,” and in lower case “Meet me at the Harrington Hotel. A fleabag on Tenth Street.” He’d telephoned her at home. I’d picked up the receiver. Roebuck’s baritone had bombarded my ear like amplified Ezio Pinza. Can you connect me with Mona? Connect? A singing telephone call. Unwillingly I had connected him to her. Before she picked up the receiver she had taken a drag from my cigarette. She had stubbed it out, as she was doing now.

  “We are going to march on the White House. You were one of us but you finked out.”

  Said Mona. The loonies, the kooks, the feebs, the nuts and bolts of the nation. Fink out, a Roebuck locution. My Roebuck’s, not hers. For only I used words like fink out. Only I had thought of marching on the White House once, so far back in time it seemed primeval.

  Mona squinted. She clenched her fists and rolled her eyeballs. She was receiving messages. My gut knotted as I waited for her to get through yet another delusion. Her demons were floating across the room as she motioned them out the window. “Out! No, don’t move! Sit!” Sally had to keep her in Richmond. Sally’s husband had to pay for the therapy. Alex, a textile engineer.

  This D.C. business was a ruse. No march. No Roebuck.

  “We don’t need you anymore. We’re strong. We have each other.” From Mona, in a monotone.

  I was able to get out of the chair. “I’m going to telephone Roebuck personally.”

  Extemporize, invent! Get her mind into phase with mine. A bar of Dial and a can of Rise would serve for receiver and mouthpiece. For these I went to the bathroom, pried the Dial off a squash colored stain, grabbed the Rise from the medicine cabinet—our Dial, our Rise. Squirting Rise into my left ear, I put in that call to D.C. Front desk, please. Long distance!