Eleven (7 page)

Red Dog whined at her, and she dropped the suitcase and ran back into the house with his empty pan, got a hunk of stale cornbread from the breadbox and crumbled it, scraped skillet grease over it and with reckless extravagance the rest of the beef stew, too. Wouldn’t Red Dog be surprised at such food at eleven in the morning? Red Dog was so surprised, he got onto his legs for it, wagging his old red tail that was as thin and full of jagged points as a rooster feather.

Hopping and dodging the puddles of red water, she ran daintily in her high-heeled grey lizard pumps down the rut of a road across the west meadow. She felt happy as a lark this morning in her best shoes that weren’t at all practical for travelling, she supposed, with their open toes and heels, but gave her such a lift! At the edge of the thicket, she turned and looked back at the farm. It wasn’t the time of day she liked best. She liked just before sunset and just after sunrise, when the sun caught the tops of things and the level country was dotted with little bright green islands and the grazing cows had streaks of red along their straight backs. Red and green like a Christmas tree, she’d said fourteen months ago when she’d come here to live with Clark, the land always so cool and fresh as if a light shower had just stopped falling and the sun had come out. It’ll be Christmas from now on, Clark, she had said, feeling like the end of a movie, and the teeth bit ruefully for another delicious moment of self-pity. Good-bye to the long brown house, the cow barn and the henhouse and the little privy!

The northbound bus wouldn’t pass for nearly an hour, she knew, so she went on across the highway and into the other woods where
there was a brook, and sat down and washed the red mud off her heels with a piece of Kleenex. The smoke from her cigarette was exactly the color of the Spanish moss. It drifted upward as slow and unbroken as if she sat in a nice room somewhere talking. She sprang to her feet at the sound of a motor, but it was only a big gasoline truck coming up from New Orleans, and then she did hear the bus purring around the curve and she should have known the gasoline truck wasn’t it, because her heart jumped now as if all the happiness in the world lay in the bus, and she was out in the road waving her arm before she knew it. The many, many times she’d watched the bus go by without being able to catch it!

And now she was climbing aboard, the floor rattling and swaying under her feet, northward.

“Where’re you going, ma’am?” the driver asked.

She almost said Mobile, but she laughed and said, “Birmingham,” instead, which was where her sister lived. “But I’d like to go to Alistaire first.” Alistaire was just a little town in northern Louisiana where she’d stayed overnight once with her parents when she was a child, and she’d planned on stopping there for a couple of hours on her way to Birmingham. She paid with the 10-dollar bill she’d taken from Clark’s pocket that morning. Besides that, she had nine dollars saved out of grocery money when Clark had used to let her go with the Trelawneys to Etienne Station.

The bus was so crowded, there were three or four people standing, but when she walked up the aisle, a young man in blue overalls got right up and gave her his seat. “Thank you, sir,” she said.

“You’re welcome, ma’am,” the young man said, and stood in the aisle beside her.

The woman next to her had a little boy asleep in her lap. His head pressed roundly against Geraldine’s thigh. In a moment, she thought, she would ask the woman a question about her child, she didn’t know what as yet. Loosening the imitation sable furpiece around her neck—she’d just realized from the dark blue splotch under the arm of the young man that it was really quite hot today—Geraldine settled back to enjoy the ride. She smiled up at the young man and he smiled back, and she thought: how nice everybody is on the bus and they know by looking at her she’s just as nice as they are. And what a relief it was, too, not to have Clark along, accusing her of wanting to sleep with the young man in blue overalls, just because she’d accepted his seat! She shook her head deploringly, felt a curl come undone over her ear, and casually tucked it back. And accusing her of flirting with Mr. Trelawney, when everybody knew Mrs. Trelawney was her best friend and always was along when they drove to town, which was the only time she ever saw him.

“
Women that sleep with ten men at a time never get pregnant!
” Clark’s voice boomed out from the privy before he banged the door to, and fidgeting, Geraldine leaned toward the woman beside her and asked, “Do you have many children?” and the woman gave her such a long, funny stare that Geraldine almost laughed out loud despite herself before the woman answered:

“Four. That’s enough.”

Geraldine nodded, and glanced up at the young man standing beside her who shifted and smiled down at her, showing pink gums and big white teeth with one upper molar missing. Young and shy and lonely, Geraldine thought, almost as fine as the young sailors in Mobile, only not so handsome as most, but she edged away from
him nevertheless, because the blue overalls seemed to be rubbing against her shoulder in a way she didn’t like, or was she getting just as prudish as Clark? Oh yes, if they asked her any questions, she’d tell them what a prudish old maid Clark really was, not even fulfilling his marital duties, not that she cared, but she’d heard of a lot of women suing for divorce just for that. Then accusing
her
of not being able to have children! Everyone in Etienne Parish knew Clark was strange. He’d served a jail sentence for swindling a business partner when he was young, and not so long ago people couldn’t remember had been clapped in jail for preaching religion, but preaching like a maniac and nearly killing a man who had disagreed with him. Geraldine crossed her legs and pulled her skirt down.

The bus made her feel safe and powerful, as if she were in the center of a mountain, or awake in the center of a rather heavy, pleasant dream that would just keep on and on. She might stay on until her money gave out, then stop off and take a job somewhere. She’d go back to her own name, Geraldine Ann Lewis, plain and simple, and rent a little furnished apartment and potter around every evening cooking things, going to a movie maybe once a week and to church Sunday mornings, and be very cautious about making friends, especially men friends.

The little boy’s head pressed harder against her thigh, the bus turned, and she saw they were approaching a town. She didn’t know it, she thought excitedly, but she did. It was Dalton.

And if anyone cared to question her as to why she had done what she did, she thought as she made her way down the aisle, taking her suitcase with her, she would tell them the whole story, how Clark had told her he loved her and asked her to marry him and live with
him in his house near Etienne Station, north of New Orleans, and how she had cooked and cleaned and been the best wife she knew, and how as the months went on she saw that Clark really hated her and had only married her to be able to pick on her and—she saw it clearly now—had deiberately chosen a wife from a place like the Star Hotel so he could hold it over her and make himself feel superior. She poked her straws through the hole in the top of the milk container.

“Hey, cain’t you say
nothin
,” girl?” It was the young man in the blue overalls grinning down at her, the sudden burr of his voice making her think first of a man who’d bent down to say something to her in a wheatfield once where she’d come with her father to watch the threshing, then of the sailors’ voices in Mobile, and fear dropped like a needle through her before she could even wonder why she’d thought of that wheatfield she hadn’t thought of since, and she turned away, leaving the 15 cents on the counter, not knowing if it was his or hers, replying, strangely breathless:

“I just can’t talk just now!”

She’d been riding several minutes on the bus before she noticed the young man wasn’t aboard. If he got himself a girl in Dalton, she hoped she’d be a nice girl. But maybe he was just going home to his folks, why should she even think he was going to a girl? She’d stop thinking things like that once she got far enough away from Clark. Clark wouldn’t even let her ride to Etienne Station with the Trelawneys any more. She could let them know about the last time she’d gone with the Trelawneys, when Clark had been off somewhere for two days and there’d been no food in the house. He’d knocked the groceries out of her arms and slapped her face, back and forth, not saying a word, until she just collapsed on the groceries, crying
as if her heart would break. And the scar from the belt buckle, she could show them that.

Without looking at it, she massaged the U-shaped scar on the back of her hand. Since she had got on the bus, her hands had never been still, the long backward-bending fingers clamping the soft palms symmetrically against the corners of her handbag, only to fly off to some other perch, as if she kept trying to pose them properly for a photograph. Her lizard pumps stood upright, side by side on the vibrating floor.

Alistaire was the next rest-stop. She didn’t remember too much about the town except the name, or perhaps the town had changed a good deal in ten years, but the name was enough, and the fact she’d spent one of those happy, carefree nights in a tourist home with her family on one of their summer vacations. The sun was already down, so she decided to stay the night and get an early start tomorrow, as her father had used to say on their tours in the car. “Where you reckon we’ll sleep
tonight
, papa?” she or her sister Gladys would ask him from the back seat, where the khaki blankets and the picnic lunch and probably a watermelon would be tied up and stowed away in such apple-pie order it was a pleasure just to crawl in the little space beside her sister. Her father’d say, “Lord knows, sugar,” or maybe, “Guess we’ll make Aunt Doris’ by tonight, Gerrie. Remember your Aunt Doris?” which was almost as exciting as a new tourist home, because like as not, she’d have forgotten her aunt’s house since the year before. Wouldn’t she like to forget Clark’s house in a year’s time, too, but the memory didn’t work like that once you were grown, she knew. She remembered the Star Hotel only too well after fourteen months, every six-sided tile in the brown-and-white floor of the lobby
that always smelled of disinfectant like a clinic; and the view from her room window of the lighted glass star that hung over the entrance.

Not far from the bus stop, she found a house with a roomers sign on the front lawn, and though the woman seemed a little suspicious at first because she didn’t have a car and then because she didn’t have a man with her—but what could be suspicious about
not
having a man?—she was soon in a clean, very tastefully furnished front room all to herself. Geraldine bathed in the bathroom down the hall, lifting the washrag so the water ran caressingly down her arms and legs, thinking—“How long it’s been since you’ve been my very own!”

She put on her nightgown and went right to bed, because she wanted to lie in the dark and think. No one would likely find Clark for three days, she thought. His cheeses were due at Etienne Station tomorrow, but they were used to his being a day late when he was on a bender. And since this was Thursday, the Trelawneys weren’t likely to stop by until Saturday when they went to town, if then.

“
I married you to help you, but the truth’s not in you. You are the first entirely evil human soul I ever saw and it’s my everlasting curse that I’m married to you!
”

She spread her legs restlessly under the sheet, and brought them together again like scissors. The crisp new sheet rattled about her with a sound like thunder. She pressed her fingertips harder into her thighs. Her mother in Montgomery would say, “Well, you did finally fill out, didn’t you, child?” Geraldine turned on her side and let a few tears roll out, over the bridge of her nose and into the pillowcase, because her mother had been dead almost a year now. The wind gave a sigh that blew the bottoms of the curtains out, held them reaching toward her for a moment, then twirled them like two capes. And she let a few more tears roll, thinking of her and Marianne’s apartment
in Mobile and of how young and happy they’d been together when the fleet was first in. Oh, she’d tell them all about Mobile, too, if they wanted to ask her, she hadn’t a thing to be ashamed of. It was the country’s lawmakers themselves and the police who made money out of it who ought to be ashamed.

She wouldn’t tell them about Doug, though, because it hadn’t been his fault. She’d say she came to the Star Hotel accidentally when she hadn’t any other place to stay, which was true. She could see herself telling it to some solemn judge with grey hair, asking him to judge for himself what on earth else she could have done—right up to the moment she lay here now in a strange tourist home—and she could hear him assuring her she couldn’t have done otherwise. She’d come to Mobile with her friend Marianne Hughes, from Montgomery, to take factory jobs after they’d finished high school, but they’d had to take jobs as waitresses until the factory jobs were open. She and Marianne had had a little apartment together, and she’d been able to send fifteen dollars a week home to her mother, and they hadn’t been there any time before the fleet came in. Not even the fleet, just a couple of cruisers and a destroyer stopping for repairs, but the city was suddenly full of sailors and officers, everything going full tilt day and night, and Marianne used to wake her up every morning at a quarter to six yelling, “
Out of bed, honey child, the fleet’s in at Mobile!
” which might sound silly now she was grown, but at eighteen and free as the wind, it had made her jump out of bed feeling like a million dollars, laughing and tingling with energy, no matter how tired she might be really.

She and Marianne would throw on their waitress uniforms and hurry down to the restaurant without even coffee, through the streets
that would be even then full of sailors, some up early and some still out and maybe drunk, but by and large, she’d still say they were the finest, cleanest young men she’d ever met. There were always sailors in the restaurant for breakfast, and she and Marianne would tell them they were going to work in the marine supplies factory in five weeks, and the sailors would probably ask them for dates, and if they were especially nice looking, she and Marianne would accept.