Listen, I was thinking about driving down to Natchez, he said. If I stopped in Tupelo do you think I could see you?
No. I don’t have the time or inclination for this.
Just for a little while.
If I said yes I’d be a fool, she said. If I said no I’d be a liar. I prefer to be neither.
That’s good enough for me, Crosswaithe said, and broke the connection. His face felt hot and flushed and he leaned it against the cold glass. I heard the news, there’s good rockin tonight, he said aloud.
At the bar he drank a cup of coffee. There was a subtle difference in the atmosphere of the room. An undercurrent of unease, he could smell violence like the scent of ozone in an electrical storm. In the far corner a fight erupted in a cascade of overturned tables and flying bottles and spread toward him like ripples on water. Hey good buddy, a voice said. He turned. It was Chessor with the checked cap with doglike earflaps. He put a proprietary arm about Crosswaithe’s shoulders. Let’s get drunk and kill somebody, he said.
Crosswaithe twisted away. He drained his coffee cup and set it on the bar and started toward the corner Carmie was in. Halfway there someone hit him in the side of the head and he went down and went the rest of the way to the door on his hands and knees, through a forest of denim-clad legs, buffeted by thrashing bodies, the brawl following him like a plague.
He was already in the truck with the engine running when she came out. She got in and offered him a half-pint bottle. Get you a drink, she said. You’ve got blood on your mouth.
He took a drink and rinsed it around in his mouth and rolled down the window and spat bloody vodka onto the snow.
Did we eat today, she said. I’m beginning to feel awfully peculiar.
I think we had a steak somewhere this morning.
We never did make it to bed though, and that was sort of the point of this whole thing. Why don’t we find a warm motel and a warm meal and a warm bed and start out for Key West in the morning?
Why don’t we, Crosswaithe said.
HE BACKED THE TRUCK carefully up the incline to the loading dock at PETTIGREW MAGNAVOX. It was drifted with snow and the rear wheels began to spin sideways, whining wildly on the ice. The hell with it, he said. He got out and slammed the truck door and lowered the tailgate. He got the two-wheeler lifted and the television set onto the tailgate but he couldn’t get it turned properly and he couldn’t decide what to do with it. His hands were freezing and finally he lowered the two-wheeler back onto the bed of the pickup. You heavy son of a bitch, he told it. Carmie stood in the snow watching him.
At last he leaned his back against the truck railing and braced his feet against the television and shoved. It went freewheeling off the icy tailgate and slammed onto the asphalt, striking on one corner and settling heavily onto its back with the screen collapsing inward and snow drifting into it.
Jesus, the girl said.
Crosswaithe was shaking with silent laughter.
What the hells the matter with you? Carmie asked.
Oprah Winfrey came out of that thing when it hit like a bat out of hell, he said. Did you not see her?
You’re crazy as shit, the girl told him.
At least that crazy, Crosswaithe agreed.
WHEN HE PULLED INTO the hospital parking lot the girl was asleep but she awoke and looked wildly about. Where are we? This is not a motel.
I have to see somebody a minute.
Who?
My ex-wife.
Weeks seemed to have passed since he had left her at six o’clock in the morning but here the clock hands seemed not to have moved at all. His coffee cup was still in the wastebasket, the machines that lived for her had not missed a beat, van Gogh’s sun-flowers tilted toward a sun that had not moved in the sky. He studied her face remembering for a moment things she had said and the nights when she had clung to him with sweet urgency, like drowning, like dying. What’s it like over there? he asked her silently, but her face had no secrets to tell him and if she knew what it was like over there she was keeping it to herself.
Outside he stood on the concrete steps breathing deeply, sucking his lungs full of the cold air until he could feel the oxygen run in his veins like ice. Snowflakes melted in his lashes, on his face, he could feel them in his lungs.
The girl was asleep with the bottle of orange vodka clasped loosely in her hands and her head resting against the window glass where she’d jury-rigged a pillow with a folded sweater but halfway to Waynesboro she awoke and looked about as if she’d see where she had got to. Crosswaithe was thinking about where the old man leant again: the beech with the rifle propped against him and the world going to ice when as if she’d read his mind or simply judged what he’d be thinking she said,
I guess Daddy’s about snowed under by now.
All day long Crosswaithe had wondered how the girl could switch back and forth from beer to vodka with no apparent sign of it but now it seemed to have caught up with her. Her voice coming out of the darkness was slurred and after a while she began to chuckle softly to herself.
Crosswaithe lit a cigarette from the dash lighter. The snow blew into the headlights and went looping weightlessly away and the road melted out by the lights looked like a tunnel into a perpetual ice storm.
The last few weeks with Daddy were just hell, Carmie said. Pure hell. He stayed on to me all the time. Like I had give him that cancer or could take it away if I wanted to and just wouldn’t. He used to call me names with his talker, bitches and whores, worse names than that. If I was a whore he made me one, didn’t he?
Crosswaithe could feel her eyes on him demanding an answer but he didn’t say anything. He cranked the window down for the cold air to clear his head.
Can you keep a secret? she asked.
I’ve already got more than I need, Crosswaithe said. I’ve got secrets people have given me I haven’t even taken out of the box yet.
Finally I took his talker away from him and threw it in the stove. One day he was mouthing names at me while I was changing his sheets and I just picked up a pillow and laid it across his face. Just to keep his mouth from working. But then I caught both sides of the pillow and leaned on him as hard as I could. He fought awhile but he was real weak and after a little bit he just quit.
I’ll bet he did, Crosswaithe said.
They were coming into Waynesboro, strings of neon night lights, no other traffic about. On the square there was a bus station with a running greyhound outlined in blue neon and he pulled the truck up to the curb.
Why are we stopping here? What’s this place?
Go get us a couple of cups of coffee. I’m running down or something. Driving through this shit’s hard on the nerves.
Can’t we get some at the motel?
We’ve got to find one first. Crosswaithe was fumbling out money. He handed her a five and she got out bunching her shoulders against the cold. Keep the heater going, she said.
She was halfway to the bus station when he leaned across the seat and called her back. He slid two one-hundred-dollar bills from the rubber-banded money and pocketed them. He reached the money to the girl. Put this in your purse before I lose it, he said. We need to hang on to it.
HE THOUGHT FOR A MOMENT she was going to refuse it but then she shrugged and walked away stowing it in her purse. He watched her. She went in. The windows of the bus station were steamed from condensation and she looked gray and spectral walking away, as if she were fading out, not real at all.
He eased the truck in gear and drove away. He turned onto the Natchez Trace Parkway five miles out of Waynesboro and the first thing he saw was a sign that said TUPELO MISS 121 MILES. He was a believer in signs and portents and took this as an omen. He rolled on. He drove with the windows cranked down for the cold astringent air and when he crossed the Mississippi line it was hardly snowing at all and a band of rose light lay in the east like a gift he hadn’t expected and probably didn’t deserve.