There’s a woman, enormous, the bulwark of a muscled arm pinched by a dress sleeve, a face, stony and abnormal, as long as Lincoln’s, bony, stretched. “You in need of some help?” Alma is surprised by the high register of her voice. She’d expected something deeper, a man’s voice. Once a year in Marrowtown, the Rotary Club holds a womanless wedding, and the men dress up as women to sashay around on stage. Sometimes you’ll find an errant member pumping gas wearing lipstick and his mother-in-law’s outdated Sunday dress. But this is a woman—distorted, elongated, but a real woman, young, maybe twenty. Alma catches herself glancing up and down the street, looking for more of them, as if this one has wandered from a herd, but the road is empty. Alma looks up into the woman’s face. She says, “It won’t start up. It died on me.”
“I see.” Her jaw is oversize and heavy because of it. She ambles to the front of the car. She’s wearing a handmade dress with a sloping hemline and work boots. Alma supposes it’s hard to find women’s shoes big enough. The woman has the leanness of a twelve-year-old boy, the awkward body that’s being stretched tall and newly grown into. There’s a loose lankiness to the way she walks, as if all her joints aren’t completely stitched together. She fiddles with the hood and pops it open a few inches. “I’ll take a look, if it’s okay by you. I have six brothers, and so I’ve learned these things.”
Alma nods. “That’d be just fine with me, as I am in trouble if it’s gone for good.” The woman disappears behind the hood. A few seconds pass. Alma imagines her brothers as buffalo. “My name’s Alma.”
“And I’m Roxy.” Her voice is a muffled echo as she leans into the engine.
“I’ve been traveling on my own for a bit. My husband has decided to stay behind in Florida, just to take advantage of a possibility down there.” She tries it on to hear how it might sound when she says it to the nun, but it’s not quite right.
“Start her up now.”
Alma turns the key, pressing the button, and the car catches and purrs.
“And give her some gas.”
She does, and the engine revs.
Roxy walks around to the window. “I’m hitching north. I saw the stalled car and then you at the wheel. It gave me a start. I thought you’d fallen ill or dead. My mother just died, you see. Not in a car—in her bed. A slow death, but now I find myself on guard for it.”
Alma understands her watchfulness. “Oh, no,” she says. “I’m fine, really. Where are you headed?”
“I’m looking for work or something. I’m hoping I’ll know it when I see it.”
“I can drop you as far north, and a bit westerly, in Marrowtown, West Virginia. It’s where I’m headed.” Even in saying the name of her town, she feels the air collect a stenchy thickness, smoke and char.
“I’ll take it.”
Roxy jogs around the car, heavily weighted by her thick bones, and climbs into the passenger seat, her knees suddenly high, popping up below her hem, her back rounded so she can fit, and just barely at that. She folds her hands—huge-knuckled, the way you’d imagine God’s to be—in her lap, a dainty leftover habit from having once been taught to be a lady, but her knees don’t fit, even if tilted to one side, so she’s pulled them up, pressed against the dashboard. Alma puts the car in gear, bumps onto the road.
It’s as if she’s put Roxy in gear, too. She starts to talk. “When my mother called me to her deathbed, I thought she was going to tell me to take her place, to take care of my daddy and all the boys. But she pulled me in close, and I could see the shine of her scalp because her hair was so thin, and she handed me an envelope of money. She told me to leave or I’d be slave to them for the rest of my life, and it would put me in my grave as surely as it did her. And so here I am. She is now dead, and I am out in the world.”
Alma can see the dying woman, tall in her own right—she’d have to have been—but weak, her stark head. She doesn’t know what to say.
“It’s beautiful here,” Roxy goes on. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything as green as that field with them flowers dotting it, just purple and yellow, sprung out like some kind of beautiful rash. You’d cry if you looked at it too long.” Roxy seems pure. Alma sees something of herself in her, a longing. She feels like taking care of her, perhaps because she’s just heard that she’s motherless and Alma is without her own children, hollow.
Alma looks at the field. It’s the same one that she’d searched for the farmer who might see her pissing by the roadside, but it isn’t the same, either. She hadn’t seen the flowers or the green so bright as all that. She’s seen too much, though, too much. She wants to close her eyes to the glowing field and Roxy’s dying mother and all she’s seen, good and bad. She’s tired. It’s wearied her.
Alma remembers that her heart was an engine, just a week or so ago. But she’s had no time to think like that since. There’s been too much to keep track of in her mind. She wonders whether she’d point out the field of flowers to her children if they were here. If she would let them get out of the car and pick some. She imagines them coming at her with beautiful ragged bouquets.
8
Irving remembers the twisting ride, Sir Lee’s car grinding uphill, a monstrous huff and growl through the rain, like a wild boar rooting through mud. The front tire rammed the lip of a pothole, pitching Irving from his seat. He was dimly aware of the second car, a man named Fox—appropriately reddish and wiry—who was following for a card game, the flood and fade of his headlights through the car, crisscrossing Sir Lee’s hair, slick as a wet beaver, his wide face each time he looked back over his shoulder. Sir Lee passed Smitty and Irving the glinting flask. He called it monkey rum straight from the row. It scorched Irving’s mouth and throat, burned in his stomach like a hissing coal. The chicken he’d eaten began to churn, steeped in liquor. The spare front room of Sir Lee’s cabin was stuffy with the windows shut against the rain, the chain-pulled bulb swaying, the hulking, slippery shadows. Sir Lee drank his liquor with a pinch of powder that he swirled with his thick finger till the ginger drink clouded. Then he sucked his finger, or Delphine did it for him.
But now Irving is in Sir Lee’s closet, listening to the thump and tussle of bodies in the front room. Delphine’s occasional screech. He knows there are knives. He saw them glint, and a rifle, too, perched on top of a wardrobe. Beside him, Smitty rocks, his body contracting so that his skull knocks the plastered wall, Sir Lee’s hung pant hems brushing his shorn head. Sir Lee’s shoes, four pairs lined against the closet wall, each heel a measured fat thumb-distance apart, are gaping holes, black yawning mouths. Irving imagines Sir Lee’s giant, fat-padded feet fitting into the shoes, the cinch of laces. Irving squats to one side, afraid to disturb them. Smitty doesn’t touch the shoes either. The closet smells of shoe polish, starch, Maccassar—this simpering, unctuous version of Sir Lee—and too, the dogs, smoke, liquor, a kind of angry bile. It’s nothing like Irving’s father’s closet, where things are barely hung, one dark suit, a row of overalls slung loosely by their straps. Irving misses his father, his nonconvoluted scent, his straightforward manner. Although his moods confound Irving—the sourness that can take hold of him for days at a time and then, just as miraculously, lift, as if his father has been under a table and emerges pretending the tablecloth is a maiden’s kerchief—he has never been frightened by them. Sir Lee is a different sort. Irving would like Smitty to show him how to act. He misses Smitty’s cool bravado, the way he ushered him into the car and invited him along, without even a word to Sir Lee, like he made his own decisions. He misses Willard and Lettie, too, because if they were here, he’d tell them—like he always did—that everything was going to be okay, which often convinced him, too. Irving feels dazed now, trying not to think of the fight—the heaving, the boot-scraping. The front room was spare and humorless, but this closet scares Irving, its pants hung so that the pleats stay perfect, each hem the same length from the floor, folded just so over the hanger, as if everything were measured, even the dark thicket of hung belts. It
’s the closet of a crazy man, Irving thinks, and he feels a little crazed himself. The floor is soft, movable, watery, like one time when he remembers sitting in the foot well of the car because his father was picking up an old bedframe, and he couldn’t see what was coming. The car had rattled and shifted beneath him.
Sir Lee isn’t the same smiling man who’d stride up with his boy carrying in the box of liquor, but ugly and dark, and he could beat you for anything, even touching his shoes. The man in the other room, Fox, said the wrong thing—who knows what. Sir Lee stood up so fast at Fox’s words that he stumbled, gawkishly, and when he caught himself, he had something to prove. So Sir Lee lunged at him. Smitty pulled Irving down the hall to the closet. He felt dull, numb, his arms and legs heavy as if he were taking on Sir Lee’s weight. Now Smitty has gone blank with fear and there’s still shouting and cursing, low and guttural, the shuffling of bodies. It surges up above the rain rattling against the roof. It occurs to Irving that if Sir Lee wins this fight, he might just come after the two of them. The sores on Smitty’s arms are cigarette burns, just as clear as day, and not by accident, not the way they’re lined up, measured as this closet. And Smitty’ll let Sir Lee know just where they are with his head banging against the wall. Irving is scared, can feel his heart beating away in his chest. He decides he might be able to make it out, what with all of the action in the other room. He can slip out and nobody’ll even notice him. And then he’ll be in the cool night.
Irving gently kicks the closet door. It swings open wide. He crawls out of the closet and through the bedroom door. He walks down the hall with his back sliding against the wall. When he gets to the end of it, he scoots down again. He can see everything now—Sir Lee on the floor, the lard bulk of his back, his thin white shirt with its whiter T-shirt beneath. Fox is small, but his face is large, angular, shining with sweat. He’s up above, kicking Sir Lee, who’s curled up as best he can with his girth. And Irving finds himself rooting for Fox, hoping that he does Sir Lee in enough to knock him out. Delphine comes at Fox now, and just a minute ago she was calling him sugar, saying, “Can I get you anything, doll?” He hits her, his flat arm across her chest. He sends her to the floor. But this gives Sir Lee some time. Hunkered as he is, he pulls a knife out of his boot, half stands, and jabs. It’s slow, this part. He stabs Fox in the side. All the rushing stops. Everyone is quiet. Fox folds in on himself like a chair, drops to his knees. He holds his wound and checks his hand for blood. It’s wet with it.
Sir Lee wipes off the blade with a handkerchief. He walks to Delphine. She smiles lightly, relieved. But then he grabs her by her frail wrist. He pushes her hand against the table, the knife blade poised over it. Irving can’t see the knife, Sir Lee blocking with his wide back. But he can tell by the motion of his arm and the pinched whiteness of Delphine’s face that she’s being cut. He doesn’t say a word, just slices deeply across her four fingers.
Sir Lee says, “Next time, I take off all your fingers. You hear me?” Irving doesn’t know why he’s saying this. Next time she does what? And maybe, Irving figures, Delphine doesn’t really know either. Blood drips on Sir Lee’s boots. He takes the handkerchief, puts his boot on a chair, and wipes off the shiny leather, actually polishes in tiny circles till it looks like it could squeak. “Clean this shit up!” He throws his stubby arms out to his sides, walks around the man on the floor, and punches open the screen door, his fist on the wood. The car starts up. Only now can Irving hear Smitty’s head against the wall. It’s gotten louder, and Irving wonders if it isn’t so loud that he’s actually calling for Sir Lee to find him, calling out in his own way.
Irving watches Delphine in the light from the bare bulb hung over the square table. The bright reflection glitters with rain on the window. She shuffles to the kitchen. Fox moans. He says something like sugarbaby.
Delphine saunters in, says, “You ripped my dress.” She wraps her hand in a rag, stands in front of Fox, showing him her long leg and the tear a couple of inches up one seam. She walks behind him, bends, grabs him under his arms, tries to lift and drag him. He pushes a bit with his feet.
Irving can hear himself breathing loud. He doesn’t want to be found out from his own panting. He wants to be a man, to be of use. He stands up and stumbles into the room’s light.
Delphine pauses. They stare at each other a moment. “You gonna stand there all big-eyed or are you gonna help?”
Irving runs over to her, and together, they drag Fox out of the house, down two steps into the cluttered yard. The rain has dulled to a soft ticking. The wet dogs come at them, and Delphine pushes the dogs’ ribs with her leg, slaps a few on their wet noses. She pops open the door to his car and counts, “One, two, three.” Together they heave his body up. Fox cries out, like a crow, but once up, he helps to push himself across the seat.
“Go get Smitty,” Delphine says. “Drag him out if you have to. Son of a bitch’ll beat him to death.”
Irving starts to run inside, but there’s Smitty, standing in the doorway, dry and pale. “I’m not going,” he says.
“Get in,” Delphine says. She’s in the driver’s seat now.
“He loves us, Delphine. He could have done worse to you. He was a Dellslow prize boxer when he was young. But he loves us, you know that. He’s like my daddy. And one day he’s going to go to California, and if you’re not here when he goes, then you’ll be left behind. You heard him say that, didn’t you, Delphine? Stay here with me. He’ll come back and he’ll be fine by then. And if we go to California, well, you won’t get to. I want us to all go, Delphine. All of us together.”
Delphine softens. She looks tired, worn down. She says to Irving, “Get in the car. In back with Fox. Hit him in the face if he starts to close his eyes. I don’t want him to die on me.” Irving goes around and gets in, lifting up Fox’s head and shoulder to sit beneath him and keep him a little propped up. Fox stares at him, almost blankly, then he winks. Irving can feel the wetness of blood seep into his pants.
Delphine looks up at the front door once more, and Smitty is still standing there, his skinny, sunken chest and pale, red-pocked arms. Rain beads on the windshield. Delphine starts the engine. It catches and growls. With one hand on the wheel, wincing, the rag on her other hand now blood-soaked, she pulls the wheel, hand over hand, like someone pulling a slack rope waiting for it to go taut. She punches the gas, and the car heaves forward. Irving looks back over his shoulder. Smitty is gone.
Delphine parks the car as close to the doctor’s house as she can get it. There’s a little hung shingle that reads DR. SEVRAS. By now, Fox has lost a lot of blood. Irving’s pants are soaked through and sticking to his skin. Delphine is too weak to help and so, alone in the dark, Irving has to carry Fox up to the doctor’s front lawn. That is as far as he can get him, because Fox can barely help out with his legs now. Irving leans down to the man’s ruddy, broad face and tells him he’s going to be all right, that he’s going to be fine.
But Fox shakes his head. “That Sugarbaby is going to steal my car.”
“Is that your car?” He’d forgotten.
“I want what’s mine, at least that.”
“It’ll be okay, Mr. Fox. I’m sure it will all come out good in the end.” Irving runs through the slick grass, up to the house, knocks hard on the door, darts across the yard, jumping a hedge to the car, fast, just like Delphine has told him. But when he gets to the car, Delphine is in his seat, slouched down with her skirt still hitched from having climbed. Her head rests in the open window, tilted up to see the night sky. She lets the soft rain dot her face.
“Can you drive, kiddo?”
“I can try it.”
“I don’t even know where to go to. I’m in need of a Chinaman.”
“A Chinaman? There aren’t any Chinamen around here, unless you want a steamed shirt.” Irving thinks of the yellow-skinned, slant-eyed man and woman who run the laundry on High Street. There is always an old relative out front, sitting on a bench in silky wide-legged pants unde
r a paper umbrella. The relative is so old Irving can never tell if it’s a man or a woman.
“You take over, okay?”
Irving has to sit at the edge of the seat, with his back as tall as he can stretch it. The windshield wipers pulse, wobbling and jerking. He concentrates on smoothing out his jumpy exchange of clutch and gas. He doesn’t want to jostle Delphine, who seems to be almost sleeping.
“Darling, where are you taking me?”
“I don’t know. I suppose I’m just trying to drive good. Is this Fox’s car? He said it was.”
“Oh, is it? I suppose it is. But it probably isn’t. I mean Fox probably took it from some old lady who was in a bad way for a little shot.”
“A shot?”
“Morphine for her aches and pains. We should go to New York City and find a Chinaman. I could become a philosopher if I got the right amount of pills.”
“How about we go to my grandmother’s house? She’ll have something to eat.” And he realizes that this is where he’s been headed all along, out to the country. He’s ready to swallow his pride and let the old woman glare at him with suspicion and disgust. Anyway, he’s a hero now. He has a woman in need. He’s just being gentlemanly because of her desperate state.
“I must look a fright. I need some makeup for my face. Sir Lee just got me a Lionel compact with a Golliwogg de Vigny perfume puff and some Tangee lipstick. Looking pretty is part of the job. I hate jobs! Don’t ever hold down a job!”
“I think you look just fine. And my grandmother doesn’t care about all that. She’ll help you wash out that cut.”
“Nobody can wash me. I go wild like a mule if somebody tries to take good care of me.” She starts laughing. Her hair kicks around in the wind.
“Why do you stay with him?” Irving asks. It just comes out, just like that, because of the wind in her hair and how beautiful her mouth looks wide open like that, and he is driving a car like a man. He can ask these kinds of questions.