The Coldest Night (6 page)

She moaned and at first he was not sure why, but then he understood it was simple and overwhelming pleasure.

“Let’s make our own life,” she said. “Let’s not go back until we’re old.”

She lay across the seat with her head in his lap and slept in those early hours of flight, making small movements and small sounds. In sleep her fists would clench and then open and then they would clench again. He held her to him and the sounds would subside and then after a while they would start up again and he could feel the rage that was inside him.

“Would your father ever let that happen?” he asked.

She did not say anything but responded with a look of fear and anxiety and he thought he’d never hated so virulently. He tried to understand but couldn’t. He’d never wanted to fight someone and beat them down as he did now.

“It is a conversation I do not want to have,” she said, and then after a time, she said, “I miss the Gaylen horse most of all.”

As the land flattened and dulled, constant was the mirage of water, blurring and gaseous, and in his head came a clicking sound for some miles and he thought it to be a feature of flatness, or an attribute of mirage, or caused by the blanketing heat until finally he found a throbbing vein in his forehead and pressed his finger to the skin lest it burst and fill his eyes.

Henry let his hand rest on Mercy’s shoulder. Then he reached down and not wanting to wake her, he slowly pulled up her shirt. He wanted the skin of her back. He had studied her back and learned the names of its parts, and while she slept, and beneath the rucked cloth, he trailed his fingers along the vertebrae that supported her skull, that held her head erect when she stood. He counted her ribs, those long slender spines on heart-shaped bodies and the lumbar of her column, curved, erect, mobile, balanced. Sometimes he thought the only reason to love her was her back.

Henry pulled over and held Mercy to him as the engine idled and she came out of her dream. Long ago they’d come down from the mountains and crossed the moatlike Ohio River, its surface shiny and combustible. She flexed her body into his, her face to his belly as if inside was something precious she’d lost and then found. She bore no marks from her past, but inside she was like knotted ropes. He held her as tightly as he dared, which was as tightly as he could and felt for the deep muscles of her back, his left hand to the latissimus wrapping under her ribs and his right hand passing over top her deltoid to the teres major. She sighed and went back for better dreams, or no dreams at all, and he thought how holding her was holding himself.

In her sleep she fetched his hand inside her shirt front to cover her breast and then with her own hand she covered his lap and told him to please keep driving. She wanted him not to be tired but to drive the car and take them away. They were bound for New Orleans where the Mississippi was yellow in the sunlight and slow running behind its high levees. They would live their days in New Orleans, shy and hidden away.

They crossed the Ohio again and at a diner they ordered milkshakes, strawberry and vanilla, and hamburgers and fries. When they were asked to change tables for no apparent reason they looked at each other, suspicious of the simplest request. Henry scanned the diner for a face he might recognize, a man or woman, a couple eyeing them, and then turning to confer, maybe it’d be her brother or father. But he did not fix on anyone so his mind gave up the thought and did not care who it was or who it could be or what they wanted.

I’m not nobody, he thought, and reached across the table so she might twine her fingers with his.

That night they took a room on the Natchez Trace, all those thick vines and Spanish moss hung by live oak and catalpa outside the room, running alongside the walls. When she went to turn off the radio, he told her to leave it on because he liked to sleep with sound in the room.

“You are like a little baby that way,” she said. “The way little babies like to have sound when they sleep.”

“Then turn it off,” Henry said.

“No,” she said. “I was only teasing.”

Soon after they fell asleep, he awoke to Mercy making sound again and her body articulating that sound. It was like a cry or a whimper and then she woke with a fright, and when she turned on the light they discovered it was her time of month and she’d bled onto the sheets. She insisted they strip the bed and rinse out the sheets and hang them from the shower rod and they spent the rest of that night on the mattress covered with a blanket.

In the morning he awoke to find her sleeping atop him. She woke too and asked him if it was morning.

“What we are doing is not right. We should go back,” Mercy said. “I need to sort things out.”

In that moment he could no longer imagine another future.

“Don’t do that,” she said. “Don’t be that way. My determination is fixed to have you.”

She took his face in her hands. She was telling him her words were true and she was desperate he understand.

Henry thought how all life must be strange and fantastic to Mercy, life without limitations. Hers was the charmed life.

Then he was alone and she was gone to make a phone call. Is this love, he wondered, and why did it make him feel so alone even when he was with her? He did not know if he understood what she wanted from him.

“What are you thinking?” she said when she returned. He was dressed and his satchel was packed and he was smoking a cigarette in a chair by the door.

“Nothing. I was just away in my mind.”

“Can’t remember?”

“No. Not really,” he said, and it was true, he could not remember.

“My father,” she said, going down on her knees. “He is a thoroughly bad man.”

In his mind he repeated her words and thought for the first time his own father might be the same, a bad man. It was then he understood his hatred of Mercy’s father, the distillate of so long a love, a hatred, a never knowing who his father was. He’d not so much cared before now, but now he did.

“You can leave me here,” he said. “I will keep going on my own.”

“I am always saying the wrong thing,” she said, and raised her hand from his knee to her mouth as if next time to catch the words. He felt her leaning toward him as she spoke. Her words came restive and urgent, as if more for herself, and they incited a dull aching restlessness inside him.

“I am ready,” she said, reaching around his waist. “We can go now.”

“Did you make your phone call?”

“I have given you my heart,” she said. “I am your own forever.”

“Is that so?” Henry said.

“I promise.”

“Who did you call?”

“I called Walter to tell him we wouldn’t be there.”

Nothing more was said and they did not talk about it again. He was thinking of love as if it were a place and not a person, not an emotion of the human kind, but where you stood and in the air you breathed. His mind was hopeless with the mystery of her, struggling for reasons why she did what she did.

Outside their room the sunlit mist was a cloud of light. Before them was the long stretch of southwest highway, the roadsides rampant with vine and so hot the asphalt quaked and fumed.

Chapter 8

D
EEPER INTO THE SOUTH
they descended, riding over the dissolving ammoniac land, its smells of sawdust and urine, past deserted shacks and abandoned stations, churches fallen in on themselves, sawmills, outhouses, bayous, piney woods. In the trembling heat, he felt their longing and rapture, their ruin, their persuading death. All day he was haunted by the morning’s sudden turn and return. All day was humid and the throb and stink of decay gathered as if from the entire earth. The lush and flaring grass of the planted levees, the radiating, suspiring earth rising and sinking.

At a little store they stopped for gasoline and a pack of cigarettes, the hand pumps shaded by cottonwoods, the fluff of their catkins filling the air. Beyond the highway, past the brake fern was mud and muck and wetness. Little boys were swimming in the still water flats and when they stood they were naked in the unclear light of the brilliant sun. They held aloft the fish they’d caught, fat and alive.

Inside the little store, its floor skiffed with sawdust, the old woman at the cash box was black, her skin almost purple, her eyes milky white and shaded blue as a robin’s egg. Behind her were broken cartons of Camels, Chesterfields, Kools, and open packs she sold by the cigarette. There were dusty bottles of Four Roses whisky and gallon jars of pickled eggs and ham hocks and sausages. A crutch hung by the door. In the shadowed back was a propped-up billiard table with three mahogany legs and leather pockets. Other blacks, men in their shirtsleeves, sat under the waves of a slowly nicking ceiling fan. They looked to be eating from a platter of chicken livers and drinking out of jelly glasses they filled from a stoppered jug.

A girl wearing a pink cotton blouse came in with a bucket of ice.

“Come here, girl,” one of the men said, and when she was near he handed her a silver dollar.

A man with a cardboard suitcase bound with baling twine stepped up and asked him which way he was heading. He was long boned and as if built of pipe. On both cheeks he wore perfect scars that ran to the corners of his mouth. Henry told the man he was headed south and the man smiled and his scars rose and slowly he shook his head.

“No. No. No,” he said as he conducted the air with a shaking hand. “That is the wrong answer,” he said, and the other men laughed and guffawed.

As they came out of the store they were offered and declined the fish the boys had caught, moist in a bucket under a gunnysack. Mercy handed them a few dollars anyway and told them they could sell their fish to someone else.

The evening was a cloudless sky and the setting sun cast a bluish twilight on the land as they traveled an endless cut through piney woods beside railroad tracks. Overhead was a hot starry night and the white strip of highway seemed to glow in the bending light.

To the west the clouds were gray over gray and a mizzle-rain began to fall in the shineless black. Henry pulled over for a spell. He felt alone and he felt the loneliness of responsibility. Mercy stirred in the seat beside him.

“Hush now,” he said. “You sleep while I rest a minute.”

He let his head back and closed his eyes. The sound of an automobile at high speed woke him, the driver blaring his horn. The darkness was thinning with the climbing moon, the windshield wet with rain and fogged with the rising mist. The cottonwoods seemed waiting and unwhispering in the hot air. To look back was to lessen a sense of belonging where he was. He thought of the knife and pistol in the bottom of his satchel. When he awoke again she was looking at him. She stuck out her tongue and crossed her eyes.

The mist had filled the pockets and there was a great winding sound, a bore of sound, and when the train came it came right at them and she screamed before it bent off. It was as if the bluish fog clung to the roaring clatter and hiss of steam the engines poured. They drove on until they saw lights and bumped across the tracks and stopped at a motor court, its neon sign flickering in the darkness.

“This morning about broke me,” he said as he kicked off his boots. The miles he’d driven still thrummed in his hands and arms and his thoughts could no longer be restrained.

“Don’t talk about bad things. Talk about good things.”

“You don’t want me,” he said. “I don’t have anything.”

“I have been waiting for someone to come along and it may as well be you,” she whispered. Her voice was warm and honeyed.

“Don’t be funny,” Henry said.

“I would be so lonely without you,” she said.

“No,” he said.

“Don’t get sore,” Mercy said.

“We never really got to know each other,” he said.

“We know each other.”

“What about you? Where are you getting to?”

“I don’t think about it like that. No, I don’t.”

“What did Walter say?” he said after a while.

“He said he’d manage and we were to have fun.”

She slipped her feet from her sandals and put them in his lap where he held her dusty ankles and dirty feet.

“Take your clothes off,” she said, and when he did she slid her hand inside his thigh.

“I want my baby back in my arms,” she said.

“You’re already aswim with me,” he said.

“I know,” she said. “I can feel it,” and she moved as if the feeling went through her body. Her body contracted and released and she squeezed his thigh and he could feel her nails.

“You want it now?” he said.

“Anytime,” she said. “Always.”

He hovered over her, her eyes a distant gaze, empty and blissful. She told him the day had been a very long time and then she licked her tongue over his nipple. The bed began to shake and there was a roar, another long northbound freight rasping the tracks, the train shuddering to a stop. Then he spent himself and felt within the collapse of his spending.

“That’s a bull’s-eye,” she said.

In the morning they stepped again into the tangled land, and wet and radiant, the morning’s purple horizon. They were parked beside an abandoned depot where the earth was strewn with oil drums and tipped-over milk cans, broken crockery, rusted-out washtubs, a snake. He suddenly flashed on a vision of disaster: women weeping and children and men dying, and it filled him.