Mitchell Smith (34 page)

“He had me cold.” Muttered.

“What? -What did you say?”

“He was right on me … Sergeant. He had my ass cold-I was fuckin’

cold meat up there!”

“You certainly were,” Tucker said. “-You were ducking and dodging behind that poor crazy old woman like Chicken Little. -And whose fault was that?”

“Wasn’t mine… ! He killed the Lieutenant!”

“We aren’t talking about officers, here, Mason. We are talking about troops-combat personnel-men!”

“He had me cold. . . .”

“I’ll tell you what, Mason-you listening up?”

“Yes, sir … Sergeant.”

“I’ll tell you what, Mason-the very next time a man points a weapon at you in a firefight, you will-you will instantly take a long step to the left while drawing your weapon, and you will fire rounds into that opponent commencing with hits low middle. -That sound familiar to you, Mason?”

“Yes … Sergeant.

“And you will do it-oh, Yes you will! Because if you don’t-no Matter what else is happening, no matter what shit is hitting what fan-I am personally going to put a round through your intestines.” I’m going to blow those yellow guts right’out of your belly onto the floor. -Do you believe meT

“Yes, Sergeant.”

“Then you’re smarter than you look. Now, you come on down to that room with me, and you’re going to clean every bit of that ‘vomit up with your undershirt and your underpants. -Then, you’re going to put that underwear back on, and wear it, just so you remember our little talk.

-And you remember something else. When you kill a man, you show him decent respect-you don’t call him a greaser or -a kike or a nigger.

-Have I gotten through to you?”

… Apparently, he had.

Tucker, having lathered and rinsed, now turned the water to cooler, worked some Essence des Pins shampoo into his hair, and began to sing “I Heard It nrough’the Grape Vine,” upbeat, in a soff, accurate falsetto.

Ellie drove north in whizzing traffic through a cool and glittering morning just past Greenwich on Interstate 95, looking for the next exit.

-She’d felt fine when she got up, t!1enough her breasts were a little tender, but a soft, gripping cramp had set itself into her on Bruckner, and wasn’t getting better. There was no oily, tickling feeling of flow yet, but certainly would be, and pretty soon. She was a little early this month, and didn’t mind it, except for the inconvenience now. She always enjoyed her periods, though not the cramps, and was pleased to bleed in secret while men went their noisy, dry, public way. -She was sometimes afraid they could smell her, though, and then was uneasy, and would prepare herself with patted clouds of powder, tug barely damp Tampax out, and insert fresh.

An exit came and went, and caught her still in a left lane. Ellie dropped down to fourth for more acceleration, let a tractor-trailer get past her on the right (a thundering, trembling wall, painted white, long black letters slanting up it), signaled, and steered the old Civic into that lane-and quickly over one more to exit without signaling. In her rearview mirror, she saw a man in a tan car just behind her, glimpsed his face as he shook his head, then wheeled the Honda down onto the exit ramp for Stamford, down and half around, the little car’s engine buzzing to keep up with the larger others bowling along beside.

Ellie drove five blocks along a west-east access road, stopped for two red lights, then saw a Standard station on her right, and pulled into it.

She got the ladies’ room key (lightly chained to a wooden paddle) from a handsome young black man with a goatee, who sat perched on a steel-legged stool behind his cash register, lean and lazy in neatly ironed jeans.

In the rest room, Ellie took off her suit jacket and skirt, folded them carefully, and hung them over the doorless partition between the grimy toilet and drip-rusted sink. She spooled some toilet paper off a diminished roll, tore it, and laid strips along the seat, then pulled her panty hose down to her ankles, sat, and searched for a Tampax in her purse. She unwrapped it, spread her knees, lifted her right knee slightly, then reached down, gently held herself open with the fingers of her right hand, and inserted the Tampax with her left. Slightly uncomfortable, and comforting.

An hour later, she was past Norwich, looking for the exit to 97 for Baltic and South Windham, enjoying the humming vibration of speed through the steering wheel, enjoying being alone among so many, hurrying, speeding. She thought of painting busy highways, thruways, beltways, parkways, expressways: wide black rivers of pavement—endless, immobile stages for millions of momentary dramas, movies, short stories, romances, horrors . . . rolling, rolling, day and night-missing each other, striking each other, passing, catching up and leaving behind in gorgeous glaring colors at night, subdued, sunburned tones of acceleration through the day. And all trembling as the big truck had trembled, passing her.

Beautiful … so beautiful . - - full of life and intention. -Worlds traveling together, the metal working, cracking back and forth faster than a human hand could imitate, laboring in tight, black, snoring steel to make the hot wheels spin.

Light, thin paints, spread fine as water—carefully, carefully drawn-that would be so much work, so much work–so her colors wouldn’t be betrayed. Sheets of gray buried in chrome and fire-engine red, divided up -and down the picture with necklaces of cream and custard and dusty blue. The cars’ big blind eyes glittering in sunshine.

And all their people a foot or two from dying …

talking, arguing, listening, steering a few feet from their deaths.

Death running alongside each car, galloping along, handsome, odd, long-haired, inhuman, its paw on the handle of the front passenger door, listening, bored with the conversation, the music on the radio-lifting the handle a little, ready to swing it open, reach in in a thunder of smashing metal, the second thunder of exploding gas—to reach in and snatch a person out and hug them, until, in much less than a second, they broke.

The cars well drawn—she would have to take her time and draw the cars really well (anybody seeing the picture would know she could draw, seeing how fine the cars were)-and then tell the people and death mainly in color, moving shades from dark to light and back again.

Tint-rose to violet, mauve to purple to bruise. It would be wonderful to do, if she could do it. After the river painting. Maybe before.

Someone, a woman with a baby in her arms, goes out the car door to death in the first of a triptych, in realistic colors, as much like a color photograph as possible, and then-in the second panel—she understands, struggles, tries to save her baby-throwing the baby through the air as the cars begin to collide, racing side by side, shedding bright metal, ilass, thermos bottles, magazines fluttering through the air like birds_-but another death with different colored hair is waiting for her baby in this picture, and catches it in midair across the traffic in the fury of the crash, stoops, handsome, inhuman, bored, and rolls the baby under the right front wheel of a bus racing by-the passengers not yet seeing anything. —One of the passengers, a sailor, beginning to see through the next to last window … his mouth and eyes opening together.

The third picture, the third picture, the third picture … the explosion of the gas-blast and fire, the tangled wreck (the woman’s husband trapped in the folded car, already dreaming of another woman he loved more than her, writing the woman’s name in his blood on the frosted splintered windshield). Helen.

The mother now doesn’t care. Knows too much to know that anymore. Now she doesn’t care about anything. She only is—is like a tall slight shaft of stone.

Now, she is standing in the fire and blast above the torrent of traffic, her hand on death’s odd shoulder as if to comfort him. Her dead baby is racing away with the traffic. The other death is carrying him piggyback, leaping from car top to car top, as the cars, trucks begin to swerve, collide, turn aside and skid to avoid the wreck.

The woman doesn’t look back at the baby, but the baby looks back at her.

Three big pictures set among mirrors, so that people see many pictures of the same picture, and see their faces as they see. Call them…

Traveling—One, Two, and Three.

Maybe buy stretched canvas… maybe just do sketches, try to get it right. Maybe start with the river painting …

or the one of Clara.-Finish that one, first….

“Can I tell you something?” Clara had said. “-You won’t get mad? …

You won’t be hurt?”

“No,” Ellie had said, “-I won’t get mad.”

“There’s nothing the matter with your drawing,” Clara said. “Plenty of painters can’t draw any better than you can. It’s not your drawing.

It’s your nerve. -O.K., now, you said you wouldn’t be hurt.”

“I didn’t,” Ellie had said. “-I said I wouldn’t get mad.”

Ellie saw the sign for the 97 exit, glanced over her right shoulder and slowed a little, waiting for a break in the traffic over on the exit lane. A dark blue van, two …

three cars behind that. There was a break then, and she signaled and steered in behind the last car of the three, a station wagon, painted coffee and cream.

A blond little boy in a blue-striped T-shirt sat in the back of the wagon looking out at her. There was a dog in there with him, a big retriever-Golden, or yellow Labrador. Ellie nodded and smiled at the little boy, and he nodded and smiled in return as the station wagon drifted farther right, then swiftly down, sweeping farther and farther to the right along the exit ramp, Ellie’s car buzzing along behind.

She lost the little boy at the interchange-the station wagon turning south on 12, Ellie rolling north on 97 for Baltic, the little Honda relieved to be moving slower, off the interstate, its small engine less noisy, now.

Some suburbs here … a sort of strip. Ellie turned off the vent fan and opened her window. Cool air came muttering, puffing in, patting her arm, fingering her hair.

The air smelled of exhaust and earth, mixed like a dog’s breath in sour and sweetness.

After a few miles, she passed a big shopping center on the left, then some construction scattered along the highway-huge yellow trucks and caterpillar tractors parked, the bulldozers still wearing jaunty summer umbrellas over their driver seats. Men in hard hats-looking frail beside these patient brutes, the raw heaped ramps of earth the great machines had piled—stood in small groups, talking.

Ellie drove into Baltic thinking what she might say to Sally Gaither’s daughter, missed the turn onto 207, and had to go on through for four blocks past a big brick building before she could pull into an Exxon station, turn around past the pumps and pull out onto the main street, drive back to the intersection, and take the turn she’d missed for South Windham.

She thought it would be easiest on the girl if she was just businesslike-if she didn’t hang around too long, a cop who’d come to ask about a murdered inother-a murdered whore. Just ask her questions …

say she was sorry … and go.

Highway 207 was a pleasanter road, narrower, a plain two-lane blacktop unrolling up into low hills, past wooded suburban roads, houses here and there just showing as the Honda passed-a flash of white clapboard …

dark roof. There was a pretty rust-red plant growing along the ditches.

Ellie, driving slower, watched a split-rail fence stilt along beside her for a quarter mile. A green pasture past it-and a little more than a mile farther on, a white wooden fence that traveled almost as far, and five horses scattered, grazing. The two close enough to see well were small, dark, fine-legged, big-eyed horses with nostrils that flared like the Arab horses that Rosa Bonheur painted.

Feude joie.

She drove by a small house on the right just after that, a house back from the road, a yellow Chevy van parked in the driveway. -A person wouldn’t have to be rich to own that house. It had been very small. A cottage …

three or four rooms. She could live in that house, walk from sunny room to sunny room … find north light for a studio….

South Windham was a handsome village with two antique shops. -If Clara had been with her, they would have had to stop, poke around … ask the price of a cherry-wood piecrust table, moderately distressed. ‘-For God’s sake, Clar-that thing was made in Bridgeport yesterday and beaten with chains!” Clara was a sucker for age. Show His. Yale a piece of furniture with ten layers of liquid shoe polish on it, some work with a propane toTch-and out would come the checkbook. The genuine piecrust table would of course wind up with Bekins in Brooklyn, along with a lot of other pieces, each one tried in her apartment for a month.

“Man,” Ellie had said once, when they’d gone up to Providence for the weekend—one of the few entire weekends they’d both happened to have off, the only long trip they’d taken together, ‘-these people see you coming all the way from Seventy-first Street.”

“It’s my money,” Clara had said, “-and lies are my profession.

that had been a nice trip. They’d been like friends on that trip; Clara hadn’t always been after Ellie about love this and love that. They’d just had a good time. Stayed up for hours in that inn room, talking, smoking a joint, giggling like girls….

A pretty dark-haired woman at a grocery store told Ellie how to get out to St. Christopher’s. -Four miles out on the road to Willimantic … a little more than four miles. Then look for a road on the left, Spring Farm Road, and take that for maybe a mile and a half, and the sign for the school is riaht there.

The road out of South Windham, wooded along both sides, roller-coastered slowly up and down low I S. -There’d been no clouds at all when Ellie left New York, but now the sky was full of mountainous white clouds—clouds out of a book of fairy tales, like some book Ellie remembered from childhood, where a young girl in a long old-fashioned dress was standing on a steep, grassy hillside, holding her straw hat on to keep it from blowing away in the breeze—and beyond her, up into the sky, great soft clouds towering high as you could see.

Beyond that hill was a wonderful world, like this one but better …