A Ford in the River Read online

  “We can’t make it tonight. The goddamned brakes went out last night. We’re stuck here, stranded, up shit creek without a paddle.”

  I lowered the bar of Dial. Felt the seashell pulse in my tympanum, the Rise glob insanely seething. Heard, or thought I heard, a whisper, insidious. Give Mona up. Put her out of your life. Or was that Roebuck whispering?

  I laid the Dial and the Rise on the bed table. Watched her pick them up, her moving lips.

  “Roebuck,” said her lips. She clenched her fists, she glared at me. “Please don’t try to telephone him. You know he won’t listen to you.”

  “I will listen,” I protested passionately, knowing she wouldn’t listen, heed, do anything to help me help her. I had to watch her go to the bathroom, I had to sit on the bed while she brushed her teeth. This she did with concentration. Her straggly hair showing rust streaks which she seemed to be trying to lather out. Soapsuds laced her nipples and aureoles, seen through the bathroom mirror. The pipes groaned as she rinsed.

  We had a late breakfast in the coffee shop. It adjoined the bar and beauty parlor, these facing away from the lobby, fronting a side street of plum-colored brick. There was a familiar marble-topped counter, a tarnished nickel coffee urn, booths, a tessellated floor, an ornate cash register from times gone by, a glassed-in cigar and candy counter, another with slices of various pies, apple, lemon meringue, pumpkin.

  Mona was slumped on her side of the booth. Her eyes were dulled. She was wearing her purple T-shirt, appliqued with a yellow cello. Brown crystals choked up the salt cellar. The plum-colored bricks outside were rippling with maple-leaf shadows.

  Suddenly Mona spun something dire for me out. “This town is a good place for you. Your family is here. Your friends. Me, I’ll be moving on. On and on,” she crooned.

  I made myself tune Mona out. The plum-colored brick, the soft maples, the darker green of a tree lawn on the other side of this side street, an embankment, steps, a front porch, green shingles, blazing white imbricated boards. Black Packard, Dad’s, in the driveway. Other members of my family in other booths, for the coffee shop was familiar, the cashier had a bow tie, red polka dot, a clip-on, like Dad had on. He had nicotine-stained teeth like Dad.

  I thought of E. A. behind the prescription counter of the vanished West Side Drug Store. A laxative is it you need now. Or a ladies aid. Or salted nuts. Is it Sal Hepatica you need.

  “It fits,” I exclaimed, “it figures.”

  Mona’s rosy lips agreed. “Right, it figures. Your dad is in a back booth. The old fart who balled his fountain girls.”

  “When he had the chance,” I said buoyantly, for we were having a conversation.

  I ordered black coffee. The coffee arrived in pea-green mugs that I had once beheld brimming in Ovaltine. “Okay, so my Dad did my Mom dirt.”

  Mona patted the yellow cello. The conversation was over. “I want soft-boiled eggs,” said Mona when the waitress showed for the second time. Her iron-gray hair and beaming face loomed like a No Smoking sign. I stared at—who else—Mom. Right here! Bless her! Love her! It was Mom who’d kept my Ovaltine hot. E. A’s Vera C. E. A.’s blood pressure she’d monitored—made him lay off strudel and shortcake. Now she waited to take my order.

  “You make his sunny-side up. And lotsa hash browns. Lotsa toast.” And then, “Looky there in the back booth.” Mona smacked her purple T-shirt, cello reeling, wambling, straightening up. “It’s your cousin. Your nutty uncle and aunt.”

  A chubby lad munching a grilled cheese, slurping a cherry Coke through a straw. Sweet pickle slice, sweet disposition, sitting next to Uncle Dell. Uncle Dell ran a ladies’ shoe store. Aunt Flo juggled Indian clubs back in vaudeville days at B. F. Keith’s. Uncle Dell chewed on a dead cigar, incessantly working crossword puzzles. Urea again. Ormolu. Cousin Robert made model airplanes. His fingers were gummed with airplane glue. Hunks of balsa wood in the bathtub. It was a race with hungry white corpuscles that Cousin Robert had run and lost. Yet here he was slurping a cherry Coke, munching grilled cheese. Dell and Flo wolfed down pasta. They were good people living careful lives. They ignored my funk, Mona’s mania as they might cripples. Just passing through, I grinned at them. Try not to let on they are sickos, Morse-coded their chinking forks.

  Mona blurted with conviction. “Only creeps and weirdos, sickos will be members of Roebuck’s family. Every one of us is an only child.”

  Mistake! I wanted to cry out, shake her into sense. There would be Sally, Alex in Richmond. She wasn’t alone. Help was on the way. A fly buzzed in the sun haze, the simmering, down-home apathy. Mona chain-smoked, pecked at her hash browns, cracked a soft-boiled egg, let the yolks ooze out. A Greyhound brayed on the plum-colored brick. The coffee tasted like bitter lye, as if it had pooled in the nickel urn for a month. Nobody was slurping a cherry Coke. Mona eyed the cashier’s bow tie. She ground her cigarette into egg yolk.

  “Either you get me some chewing gum or I turn you in to the management.”

  Again the carillon, the chimes. I picked up a fork and a butter knife.

  “Hello! Put me through to Roebuck.” The fork pricked my earlobe. The blade of the knife nuzzled my lower lip. “No, you’re not going to put me on hold. I’m a taxpayer. I won’t stand for it. You put me through and I mean now.”

  A fly was buzzing our eggy plates. I brandished the butter knife, shouting. “You tell Roebuck I don’t have a family. I have Mona. Only Mona.”

  Mona was clenching her fists.

  Mona was curling her big toes. Her feet were propped on the footboard. She was staring out the window. She had taken a Valium willingly in the coffee shop after I bribed her with Chiclets. A police car jarred the plum-colored brick. Temper tantrum, I’d thought of signaling. The all too familiar carillon chimed A Mighty Fortress Is Our Lord. All this before noon.

  We had taken a tour of the town, up Main Street to the surrounding hills, down a side street, left, then left again, down Oak Street toward the funeral home. A cedar tree in the front yard, a hearse in the porte cochere. Viewed from Oak, straight on, the funeral home—with its ivied brick, its rambling porch, its mansard roof—should have resembled a harmless domicile, not a giant hen laying a bloody egg. We sat down on the curb, rested awhile. Big daddy, little Mona smoked cigarettes, courted a vagrancy rap. As I discoursed, Mona rubbernecked.

  “Outside of Xenia, Ohio, there is this data bank. In case of sabotage or malfunction its countless records and dossiers can be shunted off to D.C. My divorces, your abortion, all our sins and errors and our slip-ups are on record, mark my words. The day you ran away from home, your first coke hit, on record. My DUI’s, my frantic lust. They have a data bank in Xenia. For the losers who will go first! For the oddballs, the peeping toms, the stewbums over fifty. Baby our days are numbered.”

  A steady stream of traffic flowed past us, like a funeral procession, pickups, sedans, SUV’s, a decrepit coupe. The jingle of loose fan belts, the whickering slap of corroded plugs mingled with boom boxes. Finally, only birds and maple leaves delineated a breeze soft and silent like a balm.

  “Tell all that shit to Roebuck.” Mona stood up, lit a cigarette. She was skywriting big and little R’s with smoke from her cigarette. The Roebuck I knew, eye patch, oblong noggin, remained hidden from me, like the birds I heard in the foliage.

  “Don’t tell me my days are numbered. Yours are. Always have been.”

  Along with E. A’s, Uncle Dell’s, Aunt Flo’s, Cousin Robert’s. Mine too. Me, her husband. Washed up, replaced by Roebuck. Mona’s dove-gray eyes were turned on me, quietly scanning me up and down. For a nanosecond she was beautiful.

  The Chiclets were on the chiffonier, on one side of an Indian club I had sized up as a delusion. I turned to the open window. A hearse was still in the porte cochere. A cigar butt stuck on the driveway. Mona crooked her big toes. She sat up and turned to the satyr, thumbing Chiclets into its penis. I gripped the n
eck of an insubstantial Indian club, screwing its head into my left ear.

  “Front desk, please. Long distance. I mean long, the Washington Monument.”

  I heard a seething inside my left fist. I lowered the Indian club, replaced it on the chiffonier. A useless instrument, this telephone. I rummaged through Mona’s loaf-shaped makeup kit. Found the Valium, went to the bathroom. The stain on the basin of the sink took on the shape of a fetus. Running water wouldn’t eradicate it—and wouldn’t drown out Mona’s jubilation.

  “Roebuck. Babe, it’s Mona. Yes, I reversed the charges. Okay, I won’t call you again.” The things she was offering him. Exotic patterns of sex, highs I had never dreamed of. My face in the mirror was a guardian’s face, jowled and haggard, obsolete. The muffled chimes were back, the planing of coffins, the hammering. I gulped a Valium, steadied my hands.

  “Him? He’s nothing. He can never be what you are to me. That’s why he’s trying to trick me.”

  Slowly, I turned off the water.

  I’d had a beer in the hotel bar. I’d put in a long-distance call to Mona’s sister in Richmond, Virginia. I told Sally about my little problem here, brake failure, Mona going bonkers. I told Sally Mona had taken a sleeping pill. Sally put Alex on the phone.

  “Eddie you must be on the sauce.”

  “Get over here as soon as you can.”

  “It’s three hundred miles. Are you out of your mind?”

  I hung up on Alex, why not, what good was he to me? I went out to the lobby and sat down in one of the wing chairs and stared out at the street. I thought of Mona asleep up the stairs in room 411. Several sleeping pills had done the job. I remembered how before she had taken the pills, she had craftily eyed her glass of water.

  In the rouge light outside a girl carrying a loaf shaped makeup kit was standing under the neon. She was ambling across the street, toward the arc lights pooling the courthouse square.

  The night clerk opened the register. With a ball-point he scratched out my signature. I got up, trudged toward the exit. I left the hotel, breathed in noxious particles of neon like bug spray. Then sweet night air. Mona, a distant figure now, in the last of the arc lights, was running. I would follow her to the edge of town, catch up, we would hitch a ride to D.C. We would make D.C. by tomorrow night, find a hotel, any hotel. Crawl into a bed like a diving bell, sleep, drift on, sink deeper.

  She was skipping invisible rope in the headlights of a patrol car. One officer picked up her makeup kit. I had to walk away from Spink Hotel, toward the patrol car, its flashing red and blue lights. What I had done before I would do again. Follow her, try to extricate her. See her as somehow recoverable. Or was I the seen, in a tracking shot still unrolling as the red and blue lights glided farther away, the hotel receding behind me, as I clopped over plum-colored bricks—crying Mona come back to me Mona—toward Roebuck, my Roebuck, his oblong noggin swelling, his one good eye drilled into mine.

  Harmonica

  Uncle Walton was still on the telephone. Danny Bledsoe would have to wait awhile before he could talk to his uncle about his car. He had come here right after the accident, to his uncle’s paint and body shop. He wouldn’t take the car to the trailer, not with the front end bashed in. His stepfather, Slade Futral, would be there. Slade had started in on the bourbon by now; he was engrossed in “The Price is Right.” The ladies stroking the new car, the washers and dryers, the console TV’s, that was exciting for Slade, not the mangled metal in the front end of Danny’s car.

  “Just bring me one hundred dollars cash. If you haven’t got it, I’ll settle for sixty. No I’m not going to make it forty. I’m not that generous, Danny.”

  Danny fidgeted in the armchair that had been his father’s, trying to make up his mind if he could get his uncle to come down to fifty. His father would sit in it watching football games, the springs creaking as he reached for a beer. Danny missed seeing his father’s boots, on the carpet beside the footstool. His mother had dumped the footstool. Uncle Walton had gotten the armchair when his mother moved into the trailer with Slade. She wanted new things in the trailer. She had an exercise bike, a little present from Slade Futral. You could stand to lose a few pounds, Lorraine, but his mother never used it. And when Lorraine refused to use it today, when Lorraine refused to get slim and trim, Slade put the exercise bike out with the trash. It sat out for anyone to steal. Slade didn’t know Danny had stolen it, taken it away and pawned it. Put money in my pocket, Slade.

  Uncle Walton finally hung up. Pursed lips, freckled arms and face and neck, eyes off at something besides Danny, something distant, not worth getting but worth looking at tolerantly to pass the time. What can we do for you, Danny?

  Danny had bashed in the front end of his car, rear-ending this lady’s station wagon. He couldn’t drive with one headlight. He couldn’t open the hood of the car. Uncle Walton said he had to get on the telephone, locate a header. Uncle Walton was calling used part shops. No header for that Pontiac, Danny. They stopped making them fifteen years ago. He’d keep trying, come back this afternoon. Uncle Walton could put in a headlight, chop out half the header.

  His mother was vacuuming the trailer. Last weekend Slade had beat her up and stomped off to Knott’s Tavern. She had a black eye again, puffy lips. She ran the machine up and down the wall-to-wall, pennies clicking along the vacuum tube. The feathered dirt stayed where it was, no matter how many ups and downs she did. Danny had to pick up after her. Her ups and downs moved on—to the shared-with-Slade tiny bedroom, where the action was, where the price was right. Taut cord, forgot to move the plug, just thought she could stretch the cord forever like the fat lady’s bulging girdle, the long right arm of Plastic Man. Danny was out on the patio when the police car pulled up. You saw what happened. That I did, sir. Clear case of spouse abuse this time, but his mother had still taken the bastard back. And Slade had come back, dragged his sorry ass back in the rain after lying out drunk in the front yard.

  Slade had tracked mud on the carpet, untied his boots in the kitchen. His mother was turning away from the stove, putting one hand on her puffy lips. She did what she’d done for his father, pulled Slade’s boots off, set them on newspaper. There wasn’t anything Danny could do.

  Uncle Walton turned in his swivel chair. He gripped his eyes on you, fixed you in the armchair.

  “How’s your mama doing?”

  Danny felt something go slack in his jaw. “You know how she’s doing?”

  “Every time I been by to see her she’s gone.”

  “You must not have been by lately. She was working at Piggly Wiggly days. Try coming to see her at night sometime.”

  “I’m not about to do that. No, Danny. Not as long as Slade’s still around. I know Slade’s car when I see it.”

  “You’re family. You could help her.”

  “Lorraine made her own bed, Danny. There’s nothing I can do for her.”

  “She could go to your place if you’d take her.”

  Uncle Walton looked straight at him. “Dee wouldn’t like it. She’s got little Ed and Winona and me. That’s four. You three would make seven. We couldn’t get you all in the trailer. Five’s top. Maybe six. We could take you and little Ben, but not Lorraine. Dee won’t put up with her drinking.”

  “She only does it because of Slade.”

  “She’s been doing it for too long now.”

  The off-in-the distance look was back, Uncle Walton pondering something he would never actually get mixed up in himself. “The only way Lorraine stops drinking is Slade moves out on her. But Slade, he likes it where he is. He isn’t about to get out of her life. Not unless he got cut or got shot, and that just isn’t going to happen.”

  Uncle Walton’s right hand was swinging out. He let it fall on Danny’s shoulder. “Don’t you do anything rash, Danny. You go after Slade, you’ll regret it.” No, kill Slade, you get a medal, but Uncle Walton’s right hand sta
yed where it was. “You got a gun or a knife, I’d stash ’em somewhere. Somewhere you can’t get at ’em.”

  He didn’t have any weapon to get at. But he’d be getting one pretty soon now. Uncle Walton didn’t know this. Uncle Walton was looking to have his lunch pretty soon. He let his hand slide off Danny’s shoulder. It was time for Danny to move on.

  “I’ll have to charge you for the header. If I find one, which isn’t likely. And a headlight will cost you twelve bucks. I won’t charge you for labor this time.”

  “I can pay, Uncle Walton.”

  “Not this time, Danny.”

  Out of Uncle Walton’s paint and body shop, Danny crossed the road to Golden Acres. He stopped off at number nine. The sign on the door said disaster area.

  Billy Hudmon was cleaning his twelve-gauge, running an oil patch through the barrels. He had parked himself in front of the door, the shotgun canted between his fat knees. Pull out the stock, push in the barrel, cold muzzle kissing his goat beard, pull wires attached to the trigger. Coroner’s verdict—suicide Slade. Billy Hudmon pulled out the ramrod. He set ramrod and oil patch between his legs, replaced the oil patch with another.

  “This shotgun isn’t for sale.”

  “You sure?”

  “I told you it isn’t for sale.”

  “I can pay.”

  “How much can you pay?”

  “Eighty-five, maybe ninety-five.”

  He had the hundred and fifty for the exercise bike. Cross the state line into Georgia, head on south for the Florida line. He’d have Slade in the trunk, packed in ice. Ice you down, Slade, take you south.

  “Come back in two hours. Bring cash,” Billy said.

  “Why not now? Why wait?”

  “Read the sign. I can’t let you in here right now.”

  Another sign in one window—ex-alcoholic for fifty-three weeks. Last week it had read fifty-two weeks. Billy Hudmon was drinking a Budweiser. He hadn’t gotten around to taking the sign down yet.