Mr. Tall (12 page)

“A long time ago,” she said when she opened her eyes, “a long,
long
time ago, Keith Lee Carson of Carthage, Tennessee, was a very nice boy.”

That morning, while settling on the bandanas, the chinos, the denim shirt, the leather jacket, and the hiking boots she now wore, she had begun to worry that the plumber might take her off somewhere and kill her. She had tried to dismiss the thought as paranoid—when Keith left he seemed to have taken all the crazies in Nashville with him—but when she saw the plumber's truck pull through the gate, she scrawled his name on a Post-it note and stuck it to the mirror in the bathroom where he had fixed the toilet. She was fine on the interstate coming north. The plumber seemed normal enough, slightly sleazy in the way most of the divorced men she knew were, but, other than that, okay. Once they exited onto Dickerson Pike, though, she started to worry again. The motels they passed had bars on the office windows and signs advertising hourly rates. She saw a prostitute leaning through the window of a parked car. A man with a bright red face and vivid, stricken eyes staggered across all four lanes of traffic. She began to picture that pretty Greek reporter from Channel Four doing a live report from in front of the woods where somebody—deer hunters, probably—had found her partially clothed body.

“It wasn't always like this,” the plumber said, as if reading her thoughts.

“What?”

“Dickerson Pike. It wasn't always like this. It's always been working-class, don't get me wrong, but you didn't used to see all the whores and crackheads and shit like you do now. I wouldn't have brought you over here, but this is where the statue is.”

She tried to smile in a manner she hoped made her look brave and game, a formidable person, but in the distance behind the reporter she could see police tape strung through the trees. “Oh well,” she said. “I'm glad I dressed for adventure.”

The plumber stopped his truck in front of an abandoned bungalow, the last house on a dead-end street in a sad neighborhood south of Dickerson. The windows of the house were boarded up, and somebody had spray painted obscenities and what she assumed to be gang graffiti, or satanic symbols, on the plywood. Briars and broom sedge and young trees grew waist-deep in the small portion of the yard that hadn't been overrun by a marauding privet hedge. The plumber looked around carefully, studied his mirrors, then gunned the truck up over the curb, through the yard, and around the back of the house, where he stopped it out of sight of the street and cut the engine.

“Okay,” he said. “Here we are.”

She tried to remain calm, but had to concentrate very hard to keep from seeing what lay inside the police tape. Then the plumber reached over, opened the glove compartment, and pulled out a shiny black handgun. She recoiled as if he had magically produced a rat, or a rattling snake. She yanked and yanked on the door handle, but her door would not open. When he touched her on the arm, she pushed herself as far back into the corner as the door would allow her to go and stared wildly at him.

“Oh Lord,” he said. “Oh Lord. I'm sorry.” He flipped the pistol in his hand until the butt pointed toward her. “Here. You take it. You can carry it. Oh, darlin', I am so sorry.”

She looked down at the proffered pistol, and then up at his face. He appeared ready to burst into tears. Please don't cry, she thought.

“Darlin', I didn't mean to scare you, honest to God. But we just ain't in the best neighborhood right now, that's all. I promise. I got a permit.”

Without taking her eyes off the plumber's face, she slowly shook her head. “No,” she said. “You keep it. I'm all right. I'm fine now.”

“You sure?”

“I'm sure. You can stop calling me darlin'.”

The plumber smiled a little. “Okay,” he said. “Good. I'm sorry about that. I guess I should've told you, I keep my
gun
in my truck.”

She didn't laugh. He reached back toward his armrest and pushed a button. She heard the door behind her unlock. He stayed in the truck while she got out and sat on the bumper with her hands on her knees and concentrated on breathing. He didn't open his door until she stood up.

“Tell me where I am,” she said. Now that she had convinced herself she wasn't in danger, the adrenaline still coursing through her body made her feel powerful, strong, like a cop at a crime scene rather than a corpse. She wanted to ask questions, get to the bottom of things.

“This house here used to belong to Miz' Louise Twitty. She was a black woman who used to keep me when I was little. Her mama helped raise my mama, and she helped raise me. I rode the school bus here every afternoon until I got old enough to stay at home by myself.”

“What happened to her?”

“She died seven or eight years ago. Fell and broke her hip. Almost starved to death before anybody came to check on her. Died in the hospital.”

“That's a sad story.”

“It is,” he said. “It is a sad story. She was a good woman and deserved better.”

“And she had an Edmondson?”

The plumber nodded.

“I'm not going in that house,” she said. “You can forget about that.”

“It ain't in the house. It's back there.” The plumber pointed with his chin toward the far corner of the backyard, which, if possible, was more overgrown than the front. “It ain't going to be easy to find, but that's where it is.”

She followed him into a small thicket of briars and honeysuckle. He tried to mash the briars down with his feet to clear a path for her. “I had no idea it had grown up like this,” he said. “This has all gone to hell. Miz' Louise would pitch a fit if she could see this.”

When they neared the back of the lot he slowed and leaned over and began to look around on the ground, as if searching for the tracks of an animal. He pointed out an irregularly shaped piece of limestone. “We're getting there. Gene was standing in the middle of a circle of rocks.”

He told her that Gene had been Miz' Louise's husband. He had died at Pearl Harbor, and she had put a statue of him up after the war.

“And there ought to be some seashells up in here,” he said. “She put seashells inside the circle since Gene was killed in the Navy. We used to bring her back a sand bucket full from Gulf Shores every year.”

She dragged at the honeysuckle and briars with the toe of her boot until, beneath a layer of old leaves and dead vines and briar stems, she saw the white, scalloped back of a seashell. A cold puff of adrenaline squeezed through her scalp and vanished into the air. When she reached down to pick up the seashell, a piece of briar she had been holding back with her foot snapped forward and latched itself onto the back of her hand. “Ow,” she said, and jerked her hand away. “Shit.”

“Careful,” said the plumber. “You all right?”

“Yes, damn it,” she said, sucking at the back of her hand. “There's a seashell.”

The plumber held his palm flat in front of him and moved it in a circular motion, as if waxing the hood of a car, or divining the area for spirits. “There was a circle of rocks here about five yards across,” he said. “And inside the rocks was a layer of seashells. And in the middle of the seashells was Gene.”

“Can you remember when Gene was killed?”

“Lord, darlin', I ain't nearly that old. What I do remember is Miz' Louise wearing me out with a switch one time for setting foot inside the circle. She didn't allow nobody inside the circle.

“She used to keep a whole bunch of us little kids, whites and blacks, while our mamas and daddies worked. Before I started school, I don't guess I could even tell the difference between white and black. Them little black boys were the first friends I ever had. But after we got to high school, I wound up fist fighting just about every one of 'em. But they turned out all right. We speak and everything. Most of their kids, though, is on crack.”

“You got any kids?”

“I got a daughter.”

“Is she on crack?” She asked the question before she had time to consider its politeness and discard it.

“No,” said the plumber. “Her specialty is eating Krispy Kreme doughnuts and having illegitimate children.”

He kicked at a clump of honeysuckle, and his shoe thudded dully against something solid and hard. He stomped the briars down as best he could, and reached over and jerked at the honeysuckle with his hands. When the vines came away, a small face appeared suddenly between his legs. She leaned over and gasped and clasped her hands together in front of her chin.

“There he is,” the plumber said. “Gene.”

“Oh God,” she said. “Let me see. Let me see.”

The plumber knelt down and pulled away the vines still clinging to the statue. What she saw at first was what she wanted to see, an undiscovered statue by William Edmondson, the Edmondson she had planned to steal and display in her house in Brentwood. It took a moment for her to see the cracked and rotting cast-concrete figure actually standing there. Yard art.

“It's not an Edmondson,” she said.

“It's not?” said the plumber. “Sure it is. See, he's a sailor. Look, he's wearing a little sailor hat.”

She shook her head.

“And look at the suit. Look at the kerchief. And the yoke on his shirt. He's wearing a sailor suit. Gene was a sailor.”

“Listen, Arlen,” she said. “It's not an Edmondson. It's made out of concrete. It's a replica of the sailor on the Cracker Jacks box.”

The plumber sat still for a moment. “Cracker Jacks,” he said.

“Cracker Jacks.”

“Miz' Louise always said he was looking up at the sky. She said he was looking at the planes and knew he wasn't coming home. She said she could tell that he was thinking about her. But it's the Cracker Jacks guy.”

“That makes me want to cry,” she said.

“You know, when I was a little fellow, I thought Miz' Louise was already as old as dirt. But she couldn't have been what, forty, forty-five years old? She was still a young woman, but she never married nobody else. She just come out here and looked at that statue.”

The face of the statue had worn almost completely away, and what was left was scarred with lichens. Gene stared up in what seemed to her a rigor of anguish. He had known he wasn't coming home, but she was certain his final thoughts had not been of his wife back in Nashville. He had thought instead of burning oil, or of water pouring into the twisted steel room in which he found himself trapped. She could see it in his face. Her eyes filled with tears and she turned away. Miz' Louise had not commissioned a statue from William Edmondson, an old man who believed God had ordered him to carve figures in stone, later anointed a genius by the likes of Edward Steichen; Miz' Louise had gone instead to a gravel lot scattered over with birdbaths and garden benches and fat cherubs, and selected a replica of the Cracker Jacks sailor from a line of identical figures.

She had considered Miz' Louise's story romantic, even mythic, when it contained an undiscovered Edmondson, but now it seemed small and ordinary and so simply and terribly
sad.
There was no other word for it. Had the little Cracker Jacks dog been included in the price? What had Miz' Louise done with the
dog?
She pressed the heels of her hands into her eyes. She cried for Miz' Louise and her cheap statue, and because Keith Carson's money had made her the worst kind of snob. She cried because a long time ago she had loved a boy who had washed her car even though his hands had ached in the cold, but now that boy was dead, as surely as the girl who had loved him. She knew then that she would sell her house and buy a smaller one. She would go back to work and pull babies screaming into the world. She would donate Millie and Joe to a museum, where they would smile out at visitors from beneath a golden beam of light. She would marry a man who would stay with her until she died, a man who would select a stone for her grave from a line of identical, machine-cut stones. Once it was placed at the head of her grave, her name incised on its slick face, he might even consider it beautiful. His grief, she imagined, though remarkable to him, would be ordinary. Her shoulders began to shake. If that's all there was to hope for, why couldn't she accept it as enough? Why couldn't anybody?

The plumber stood up, his back still to her, and stared down at the statue.

“Well,” he said. “Fuck.”

H
ARDY AND EVELYN
have been married forty-eight years. Evelyn believes the cars passing her house contain secret agents come to watch her, that the boys who play basketball across the road want to see her naked. Her feet inside her bedroom shoes are slowly turning black.

Hardy dabs at a spot on her thigh with a cotton ball dipped in alcohol.

Evelyn says, “You're not trying to poison me, are you, Hardy?”

Hardy thinks, too much medication. Hardy thinks, you are just about crazy. He squints at the numbers on the side of the syringe.

Evelyn says, “It would be easy for you to poison me if you wanted to harm me. You wouldn't ever harm me, would you, Hardy?”

“No baby,” says Hardy. “I would never harm you.”

Evelyn says, “I know you love that dog more than you love me.”

Hardy says, “Hush, hold still.”

Hardy was a hero during the war. The first man he killed had leapt out of a foxhole in North Africa and tried to run away. Hardy led him slightly and dropped him like a rabbit. The last man Hardy killed had been taking a leak, in Czechoslovakia, two days before the war ended. Hardy stepped out from behind a tree. The man smiled and said, “No Kraut.”

Hardy shot him through the heart. By then he didn't care anymore.

The dog is a Brittany named Belle. Hardy walks her across the yard toward the cornfield that opens up beside his house.

Evelyn yells from the porch, “Where are you going, Hardy? Hardy, you come back here.”

Hardy hears the basketball stop bouncing across the road. If he answers, he will not make it into the field. He keeps walking. Evelyn slams the back door. The ball starts bouncing again. At the edge of the field, Belle looks up at him and whines. She is the best bird dog Hardy has ever had. He carries the shotgun only because Belle doesn't like to work unless he's armed. “Hunt,” he says, and the dog bounds into the corn stubble.

One night, after Hardy had come home from the war, he woke up out in the yard. He didn't know where he was. Evelyn stood off to the side in her nightgown, calling his name. He moved his eyes toward her but didn't dare turn his head.

“Hardy,” she said, “I brought you a blanket. I thought you might be cold.” Her nightgown glowed in the moonlight. Hardy motioned for her to get down. Evelyn knelt in the grass. “Hardy?” she said. “It's me. Evelyn. I'm your wife. We're home. I'm not going to let anything happen to you.”

As Hardy steps past the dog, two quail explode into the twilight. He intentionally draws a bead behind the nearest bird and squeezes the trigger. The orange flame from the muzzle licks out against the darkening sky. The shot claps and echoes as the birds arc unharmed across the field toward the woods. Hardy hears their wings whir. For a moment he is intensely happy. The dog breaks point and turns and looks at him. “I missed him, Belle. It's my fault, girl. It's all my fault. You did a good job. Hunt.”

Back at the house, Hardy discovers four pills inside the dog's bowl: two Elavil, a Lasix, and an aspirin. He imagines Evelyn emptying her medicine onto the kitchen counter, picking through the pills the way a child might choose crayons from a box. Hardy allows his shoulders to shake exactly twice. When he came home from the war, he couldn't hold down a job or sleep inside a house. Evelyn had loved him back into the shape of himself. That she breaks his heart now seems to him only fair. Hardy drops the pills into the pocket of his hunting coat. He walks toward the door slowly, but in a straight line, and does not stop.

Ray and his wife, Charlene, have rented a house that looks down onto a small town piled into a narrow gray valley four hundred and fifty miles from home. All the houses Ray can see are built of the same rust-colored brick. His house is that color, too. The great river for which the valley is named flows north; downstream is up on the map, while home, south, lies upstream, facts of geography Ray finds disconcerting.

Ray was a newspaper reporter until he began to forget how to spell. First, he lost track of the number of
r
's in “sheriff,” then he lost the
f
's. “Commission” began to look right no matter how he spelled it. Charlene teaches information technology at a small Christian college. That's how they came to this little town by the river. She is serious and pale, unashamed to pray out loud in restaurants. Ray stopped going to church with her about the time the letters in the word “Episcopalian” flew apart as if they had been held together by springs. He could still spell “God,” but found that he no longer cared to.

Mornings, after Charlene goes to school, Ray lies on the couch and tries to think up ways to make his day seem constructive. He has never bothered looking for work at any of the small newspapers in the valley. He doesn't even know where his clip file is. Afternoons, he walks down the hill into town, where the square, the buses, the restaurants and barber shops are filled with old men waiting to die. The old men once made steel for bridges. This is what they talk about while they wait. The steel they made. They built the bridge that leaps from the town square out over the river. The bridge is green and intricate, held high above the water by four tall, delicate-looking towers.

Ray can see the bridge from his kitchen window. He sneaks into the kitchen forty, fifty, maybe a hundred times a day to look at it, to make sure it is still there. He does not actually expect the bridge to disappear, but still takes a kind of giddy, secret pleasure in keeping watch. Sometimes when Ray looks at the bridge he can feel himself falling toward the river, a sensation he tries to control. He has been told by a trained professional—Charlene's idea—that he is in danger. Ray, however, does not feel as if he is in danger, although he likes the sound of the word.
Danger!
Recently he has begun to feel very light, unencumbered, almost invisible. He sits among the old men in the square and they never look at him. He startles them when he speaks. What is dangerous, Ray thinks, is paying some stranger one hundred and seventy-five dollars an hour—even though the college picks up the tab—for the stranger to tell him he shouldn't be allowed to drive his car, that he might suddenly decide to drive it into oncoming traffic. What the stranger doesn't realize is how much Ray loves his car, even though it is old. He changes the oil every twenty-five hundred miles; his tires are new, French, religiously rotated, precisely inflated.

One evening, after talking to the stranger, Ray tells Charlene he is feeling better. She smiles and suggests he walk down the hill and return the DVD they watched the night before. It is an Italian movie set on a Greek island where nothing bad ever happens. Ray removes the disc from the machine and promises his wife he will be good. Because he did not intend to lie, he is surprised and a little embarrassed when he drops off the movie and heads immediately for the bridge. He knows he will be in big trouble if Charlene catches him anywhere near it, so he hurries. The streetlamps blink and open. He looks down and away from the headlights of the approaching cars.

Ray begins to smile as he turns the corner at the square and starts toward the river. The thought of seeing the bridge up close makes him happy. What he likes about the idea of falling—he has no intention of
jumping,
he is sure of that—is that shortly after hitting the water he will be
somewhere.
Not just in the river, which wouldn't matter, but someplace else. Ray has no idea where that place might be, or if he would even like it, but the existence of so many possibilities so near his house intrigues him. The bridge is a gate, a wardrobe, a looking glass through which he can travel. Ray also knows that his thinking of the bridge as metaphor would worry just about everyone he could think of to tell, so he keeps it to himself. Most people, Ray thinks, are satisfied with simple ideas: bridge as bridge, road as road.

The bridge seems alive when Ray approaches it—resting, breathing, capable of sudden movement. He thinks of a horse, lathered and steaming after a long run, breathing in rhythmic clouds. The hair stands up on his arms. He can't see the river, only the ancient steel curving out over it. Up close the towers are taller than they look from inside his car. Ray walks through a wall of cold air and can now smell the water. He inches forward and reaches his hand toward the bridge's cool, green flank. The steel vibrates beneath his palm. He says, “Shh,” and pats the steel. “Shh.” The bridge wants him to walk out on it; he can feel it. That's why the old men made it.

What stops Ray from walking out to have a look at the water far below is the guilty thought that Charlene might be coming any minute in the car to find him. This is a scene he wants to avoid. He can easily picture his old car stopped in the middle of the bridge, holding up traffic, while Charlene shouts for him to get in. Ray hates loud noises; he can't stand shouting, horns blowing, the thumping cars of teenagers, the clacking of printing presses, jets passing over his house, and the only thing worse than loud noises is being responsible for them. Ray pats the bridge again, gently, acknowledging the secret regret they share, and turns to face the line of headlights moving toward the river from the square. Beyond the square, more headlights sniff down the hill on which he lives. One of the cars could be his, with Charlene driving, leaning forward over the wheel, her head filled with God and binary codes and concern. Ray jogs until he reaches a place where he could explain his presence. He considers himself a good husband, a man of responsibilities, a right-thinking man.

When Ray gets home, Charlene is making supper. She seems glad to see him, not alarmed that he has been gone too long. She does not suspect him of sneaking off to the bridge because he promised her he wouldn't. Ray is touched by her simple trust. He considers himself the recipient of a small gift—a seashell, a marble, a stick-man made of pipe cleaners. He smiles and gives her a kiss. He can have a look at the bridge again tomorrow while Charlene is teaching. She will never know. Ray asks what's for supper. He glances briefly at the thin face staring back at him from the kitchen window while he washes his hands. The face irritates him because it keeps him from seeing, down in the valley, the headlights crossing and crossing the dark bridge. He sets the table, draws two glasses of water from the tap, and joins Charlene in the dining room. She bows her head and over their married meal offers an earnest prayer, thanking God for all the blessings of the day.

Harris, his hair gone gray—if you can believe that—gardens for Lula because he still misses his mother, who was Lula's best friend. Harris went to school with Lula's oldest son, Willie, who died of pancreatic cancer seven years ago. Lula does not ask Harris to garden for her; Harris will not accept pay.

Lula sits on the porch and watches Harris working in the field across the road. He is a tall man wearing overalls and a straw hat. From a distance, he could be her son, her husband, her father-in-law—all tall men, farmers, all dead now—and sometimes she secretly allows herself to imagine that he is one or all of them. Her husband, Will, has been dead now not quite two months. Lula doesn't feel sad anymore so much as empty, like a gourd. That's what she told the girls. She feels like a gourd hanging from a barn rafter, waiting for someone to take it down and make something out of it. Perhaps a house for purple martins.

This evening, Harris is hoeing on the far side of the field, close to the woods where the meteorite hit. Lula closes her eyes and wills herself to forget that Harris is Harris, that he has arthritis in his shoulder, and remembers and remembers until she becomes a young woman again, twenty-two, twenty-three years old, a blooming thing, a peach, most of her life still ahead of her.

She stands between Will and Willie, at the edge of a large round hole. The hole is perhaps a foot deep, seven or eight feet across. Willie holds her hand. He is two, maybe three, her first child, and Lula loves him as she has never loved anything in her life. She loves Willie so much that she wants to make another baby every time she lays eyes on Will. She is as happy as she will ever be.

Her father-in-law, Bill, of whom she is affectionately afraid, squats in the hole, pointing at the meteorite. It is about the size of half a brick, the color of a terra-cotta pot, burned looking.

“It's a falling star, Willie,” Bill says. “It fell out of the sky.”

Willie tries to hide behind her leg.

Will says, “I wonder why we didn't hear it coming? I wonder why we didn't hear it hit?”

On the porch, Lula opens her eyes. She remembers that the meteorite stayed for years in the tool cupboard in the dining room. When Will sold the cupboard, she put everything in it into the hall closet. He'd used the money from selling the cupboard to have indoor/outdoor carpeting put down in the hallway. It seems a poor trade now.

Lula carries the boxes one at a time from the closet to the dining room and empties them onto the table. Inside the boxes she finds the creosote-and-sweat smell of the cupboard, which she had almost forgotten. She finds old pieces of harness, coffee cans of nuts and bolts and washers, three broken hammers, a tangled ball of baling twine, collars from dogs long since dead, an emery stone, a hand drill still clutching a broken bit—all told the midden of a working farm in another time—but she doesn't find the meteorite. Disappointed more than she would have thought, Lula wonders if she has made the whole thing up. She wonders where she will find the energy to put the junk back into the boxes, and the boxes back into the closet.

Harris appears in the doorway and Lula studies his leathery face, the wrinkles around his eyes. How in the world has he gotten to be so old? He glances at the junk spread out on her white tablecloth, the greasy cardboard boxes lying on the floor, but he is too polite to say anything.