Quite a Year for Plums (17 page)

“What a nice seat you have found,” she said.

“Here,” said Heather Bell, shifting over to make room. “You can sit down too.” When she smiled and pushed her hair behind her ears, Hilma could see that she really had a pleasant face, with a generous jaw and appealing-looking crooked teeth.

It was a surprisingly pleasant seat, springy and ample, with the trunk of the vine forming a backrest. “Why,” said Hilma, swinging her feet happily, “I feel that my mind could almost soar in this spot.”

“This is a beautiful place,” said Heather Bell.

“And how nice a home is when there is no house there,” said Hilma.

They dangled together for a few minutes, quite companionably. Then Heather Bell asked, “What is it they are all looking for up there on the hill?”

“Oh,” said Hilma, “years ago there was a town over there, miles away, and on a clear day it was said that from the upstairs windows of this house you
could see the white buildings of Perote. Now, of course, the house is gone, and the town is gone too, just a crossroads and a few mobile homes.”

“But people still look for it?” asked Heather Bell.

“Oh yes,” said Hilma, “on clear days like this, a few people still look for Perote.”

H
e's cooking the rabbits that ate the
R
out of
RIGHT HERE
,” said Eula. “That's what you smell.” It was a warm day, the kitchen windows were open, and from Louise's house next door the smells of thyme and garlic and meat slowly cooking in wine wafted across two side yards and part of a garden.

“He's a good cook,” said Ethel, “I'll say that for him. I just hope they don't both get tularemia and die.”

“I just hope he doesn't accidentally shoot himself—or you or Louise either, Eula,” said Lucy. “He probably never held a gun in his life before this.” They were talking about the typographer from Kansas City, who had stayed on and on and on at Louise's house after his wife had left in a huff, wearing strange clothes and behaving oddly. At first Louise had visited him shyly, taking little gifts of letters and numbers, but then she had begun helping him with his assemblages, putting together collec-
tions of wood and metal and plastic junk mixed in with random letters and bits of phrases from roadside signs. Gradually Louise had moved back into her house, and now, in the spring of the year, there they were, Louise and the typographer, living together quite cozily, cooking, eating, working, and shooting rabbits, happy and content in a way that nobody could quite understand.

“Louise did the shooting,” said Eula. “He was sleeping out there to keep the rabbits out, between the R and the I, flat on his back on the bare ground, every night, drenched with dew, then the rabbits came in when they were gone hunting for letters on the road, and ate the tail off that R, and Louise got out the gun and shot two of them.”

In the middle of Louise's garden, the typographer had flattened a section of raised beds and he and Louise had sown garden cress to spell out the words
RIGHT HERE
in capital letters. Beyond the words, in an undisturbed raised bed, the numbers 0 to 9 in rye grass ran west to east.

“What does it mean,” asked Lucy, “’
RIGHT HERE
023456789’?”

“Oh, you know Louise,” said Eula. “She thinks the time is right, spring, and something about this full moon and the letters and numbers, the spacemen are coming down this week, she says.”

“And what about him?” said Ethel. “Is he waiting for the spacemen too?”

“Oh, him—spacemen wouldn't surprise him. When we were skinning those rabbits, that man told me …” said Eula, and she put down a bowl of beans
on the table and beckoned Lucy and Ethel to the window, where they leaned against the sink and looked out into Louise's garden. “Skinning those rabbits, he told me where he used to work at his last job the rabbits all wore clothes! Little outfits! Shoes! Hats! Little blue coats!”

“Hallmark cards,” said Lucy.

“Oh,” said Eula. “Well, he don't care about the spacemen, any more than he cared about that wife that left him and flew back to Kansas City. He's just in it for the letters.”

“Look at Tom out there trying to talk redneck to him,” said Ethel. The typographer was watching Louise fasten a rusty piece of corrugated metal to a panel of hog wire, and Tom was standing back, slouching a little and looking grim and uncomfortable.

“Tom's worried about Louise,” said Eula. “He thinks the typographer is up to something—raping, strangling, stealing, although I don't see that in him.” They all three shifted a little closer and peered out the window at the typographer. He was wearing purple short pants with a drawstring waist and a big shirt with giant red and mauve flowers all over it. His toes grappled over the edge of his pink shower shoes.

“Why does Tom wear that cap?” said Ethel. “It's deforming his head.”

“How you doing?” said Tom, nodding and touching the brim of his cap. But he didn't smile, and his jaws were tight.

“Hi there!” said the typographer. He was holding a
red-and-white-striped scrap of board from a railroad-crossing sign in one hand and a piece of galvanized guttering in the other. Louise was squatting down,, carefully attaching black letters printed on clear plastic along one edge of the hog wire.

“Tom,” she said, “there's not gon’ be chairs enough for them.”

“Name's Tom,” said Tom, reaching over Louise to shake hands with the typographer. “I was raised right: over there next door. Louise is my aunt.”

“Tom,” said Louise, “the fields is gon’ be glittering with their eyes.” She took off a capital F and replaced! it with an H. She twisted an R and straightened an 1VL No matter how you read it, the letters didn't spell anything. The typographer stood back and shook his head.

“Look at that,” he said. “It's all in the juxtaposition, that's the key. Man, she's got the touch.”

Tom paced around Eula's kitchen, picking things up off the counter and then putting them back down, glowering out from under the brim of his Feed Rite cap.

“It ain't right,” he said, and Eula sighed and began putting food down on the table. “The man is a nut. He's worse than Louise! The touch,’ he says, yeah, right, he ought to know—he's touched worse than Louise, touched in the head!”

“Oh, Tom,” said Eula, arranging the handles of the serving spoons so that they aimed at Tom, “everybody's a little crazy if you get to know them good enough. Take Roger's little girlfriend Delia, always
pacing around with that gone look in her eyes, yet a perfectly nice woman, and knows her birds. Your own daddy, my Melvin, much as I loved him, I wouldn't say he wasn't crazy on the subject of fighting cocks. Why, look at Ethel—”

“Whoa, Aunt Eula,” said Ethel.

“Everybody's got that little side to them, Tom, it's just some of them you see it sooner. He ain't no worse than most.”

“It ain't right,” said Tom, glaring across the butter beans at Ethel. “Your own mama, Ethel, living in that house with a lunatic. You could go over there one morning and find her raped and strangled.”

“And we would never know whether it was the spacemen or the typographer that did it,” said Ethel, “would we, Tom?”

“The Bible says you're supposed to honor your father and mother, Ethel, you're supposed to take care of them when they get old and feeble. You're not supposed to sit back and look on while some nut from the Wild West moves in and eggs her on to be crazier than she already is. You don't know what his intentions are, why he's there, how long he's going to stay. Hell, I don't even think he's paying her any rent!”

“I am taking care of her, Tom,” said Ethel. “I'm leaving her alone.”

But that afternoon when Tom had gone back to marking trees and the typographer had driven off in his van (“Grocery store,” said Eula, “you watch, he'll come back with three bags”), Lucy and Ethel went over to Louise's house.

“How long is he going to stay, Louise?” asked Lucy in a loud voice.

“5:35 a.m. in the morning, Lucy, is when they're coming. We calculated it with an alarm clock,” said Louise, and on the scrubbed kitchen table she lined up three early peas and turned the saltshaker on its side. “Ethel, honey, you ought to come home for this.”

But Ethel was poking around in a container of rabbit stew in the refrigerator. The kitchen had a clean lemony smell. “Look at this—” Ethel stood back and gazed deep into the refrigerator. “No moldy beans, no withered Fig Newtons, no rotten milk. Did the spacemen clean out this icebox, Mama?”

Louise flinched and sucked in her breath. “Don't say that, Ethel!” she snapped. “You don't talk like that! They could hear you, change their plans! You know you can't trust these new clocks from Wal-Mart. Sometimes they tell you the time is right, sometimes they tell you the time is wrong.”

“Just tell us one thing, Mama,” said Ethel. “Who cleaned out this icebox? It wasn't you, so who was it?”

“Oh,” said Louise, “that was him. He does all that in his spare time.”

“How long is he going to stay, Louise?” Lucy asked again.

“5:35 a.m., tomorrow morning, they'll swarm through this house like fire ants, through the cracks in the doors and windows they'll come in like mist, their little hands and feet will be all over everything.”

The next afternoon Roger stopped by to see Eula on his way home from work. She was standing at the sink, looking out into Louise's garden in the dusk.

“How is she?” asked Roger. “5:35 came and went this morning. I thought about her on my way to the methyl bromide alternatives meeting in Morven.”

“Fine,” said Eula. “These things slip away from her, Roger. Next thing you know, she'll have out that alarm clock and have figured out another time. That man keeps her busy, he's all the time got her out there putting junk together, keeps her mind off it somewhat, and keeps her from wandering off, although Tom doesn't trust him, thinks he's up to something.” Eula leaned up against the sink, wiping her hands over and over with the dish towel. “See that car? There's another man over there now, talking to him, you can see them over there by the
right here
, although Louise has let that go, you can't hardly read it with the nut grass coming up between the letters.” A tall man in a suit was looking at the arrangements of junk the typographer and Louise had wired and welded and stapled together. Some of them were lying on the ground. Some were propped up against the chicken-yard fence. Every now and then the man would step back and look at something from a distance or step closer and peer at a letter or a word or a piece of rusty metal as if he expected to be able to read it.

“Tom doesn't trust him, thinks he's up to something. But you know Tom, he always looks for the worst. Now Tom's mad at Ethel, because she won't
take Louise in to live with her, and Ethel's mad at Tom because it ain't really his business, and Tom thinks I'm taking Ethel's side, and, oh, I don't know.” Eula flapped the dish towel in the air. “Just between you and me, Roger, I think she's better off living with a lunatic and a houseful of spacemen than with Ethel, every room filled up with boats, and Ethel like she is, with the men—oh, Roger, I shouldn't have said…oh, Roger,” and she buried her face in the dish towel.

But Roger said, “It's all right to say. that to me, Eula,” and Eula folded the dish towel into threes and went on. “And here I am, in the middle of it, dodging here and there, trying to keep the peace, worrying about Louise, I feel like I'm skating on the rink of disaster, Roger. Lucy's doing her best, she was over there trying to talk to Louise, but you can't find out anything from Louise, it's just spacemen, spacemen, spacemen. Roger, sit down and have a cup of coffee.”

“Why don't you try to talk to him?” said Roger.

“Him?” said Eula.

“They don't understand what you're doing here,” said Roger to the typographer. “And they're worried about Louise. She's hard to reason with because of the spacemen, and they worry about her.”

“Reason with?” said the typographer. “Reason?” He pulled out a black capital track-sign R from a stack of letters and numbers. “If ‘reason’ is a rut, then she is the rising sun,” he said, holding up the R in front of Roger with both hands. “If ‘reason’ is a rat, then she is a white rhinoceros. If ‘reason’ is a roach, then she
is a raptor. That woman has moved so far beyond ‘reason,’ it's— You want to know what I think of ‘reason’?” he said, and he flipped the R and laid it down beside a splintered piece of drip-cap molding, upside down and backward. It was printed on clear plastic, so it read from both sides. “There,” said the typographer, stepping back and looking hard at Roger. “She taught me that. ‘Juxtaposition,’ that one word, that is the key. She taught me that, and, man, I was in the right place at the right time, and I don't mean here—” He spread his arms at the garden and the two houses and the stretch of road and the field across the road, where the corn was just beginning to tassel. “I mean here,” and he tapped his head. “At last, somebody is looking after me.” He threw his head back and held his hands up to the sky. “Thank you, little spacemen, thank you!”

Eula and Ethel and Lucy stood in a row at Eula's kitchen sink and looked out the window. The panels of hog wire, the bedsprings, the piles of letters and numbers and words, and the assemblages were gone.

“He's gone,” said Eula. “Roger went over there and talked to him, and the next thing we knew, he was gone.”

“Where's Louise?” asked Lucy.

“Oh, Louise is right back doing her regular doings,” said Eula, “lining up her letters, winding up that alarm clock, talking about the little hands and feet, you know Louise.”

“Not raped and strangled?” said Ethel.

“Oh, that was just Tom, all that raping and strangling talk,” said Eula.

“Tom!” shouted Ethel. “Where are you? I was right and you were wrong, Tom!”

“What did Roger say to him?” asked Lucy.

“Roger just got him to talking,” said Eula. “Seems like that man we saw here in the rented car wanted to have an art show, just our typographer's artwork, in Kansas City, says Roger, a something, a juxtaposition of his work, something.”

“A retrospective,” said Lucy.