Wayne said, “You do some deer hunting, uh?”
“Yeah, I go over to Bollinger County along the Castor River track, it’s only about fifty miles, full of whitetail in there.”
Carmen went outside. She got her sweater from the car and put it on. It was quiet. She held her arms to her body and rubbed them for warmth.
Trees against the night sky could be trees anywhere, but she could feel a difference knowing she was in a strange place. There were people a block or so down the street in the homes where lights showed, but she didn’t know them and couldn’t see the town now, out here, with its postcard look from the bridge, the church steeple, the courthouse, the friendly town where people might stop you on the street wanting to know you. ...She thought, How did we get here? How did it happen so fast?
Wayne and Ferris came out of the house and across the yard, Ferris saying, “If you haven’t seen one then you wouldn’t believe a swamp rabbit. I mean the size of him. He’s different’n a cottontail and two or three times bigger. I got me one, was on Coon Island in Butler County, weighed eighteen pounds.”
Wayne asked if they were good eating.
“Good,” Ferris said, “swamp rabbit’s so good to eat people have just about killed him out.”
He shook their hands, ready to leave, then spoke for several minutes about motels and places to eat out on the highway, recommending the ones he said wouldn’t cost them an arm and a leg, then telling Carmen about West Park Mall, knowing, he said, how women loved to shop whether they needed anything or not. “Hey, Wayne? Isn’t that the truth?” He told them he’d be by tomorrow and drove off with a couple of toots from his car horn.
Wayne turned to Carmen. “The guy’s a moron.”
“But a deer hunter,” Carmen said. “Doesn’t that make a difference?”
“Ferris does push-ups and lifts weights. I’ll bet he likes to arm-wrestle, too.”
“Why did he say he doesn’t want us to think of him as a parole officer? Did you hear him? Why should we?”
“I don’t know. He probably meant as far as we don’t have to report to him.”
Carmen was silent looking at the sky, picking out faint stars. After a moment she said, “I think he meant something else.”
After another moment Wayne said, “The whitetail season here’s only seven days, the week before Thanksgiving.”
14
“ALL I COULD THINK OF,” Lenore said, “you were in a terrible accident. I’ve been worried sick.”
“Mom, you know we got here okay. I called you from the motel, soon as we walked in the door.”
“I mean since then I’ve been worried.”
“And I called the other night. Didn’t I?”
“Once, since you got there. Don’t your neighbors have phones you could use?”
“We don’t have neighbors. We’re sort of off by ourselves. I haven’t met anyone yet. Anyway, Mom . . .”
“You’ve been gone six days, almost a week counting today. I have it marked on the calendar. You didn’t even come see me before you left.”
“I told you, it happened all of a sudden,” Carmen said. “Anyway, we have our phone now. Southwestern Bell came this morning—I had them put it in the kitchen, well, actually in the breakfast nook. It’s like a little booth, you know, with benches built in? You can look out the window . . .
The washer and dryer are in the utility room, right off the kitchen, having the phone here it’ll be handy.” Carmen letting her mom know she could be seven hundred miles away but was still the happy homemaker, out here baking pies, washing Wayne’s coveralls, fixing dinner off recipe cards. “There’s a woods behind the house, not like the one we have at home, Wayne says it isn’t a woods it’s a thicket, but it’s nice, you hear birds out there.” That might sound as though she was having a good time, so Carmen said, “We’ve been working since we got here. We had to shampoo the carpeting, the sofa and two chairs in the living room, rent one of those machines, scrub the kitchen floor, do the cupboards, the refrigerator and my least favorite of all jobs, clean the oven. Wayne helped a lot, he didn’t report to his job till this morning so, you know, we could get settled. We may do some painting, we’re trying to decide, depending on how long we’ll be here.” Carmen paused to think of what else she wanted to say.... Yeah, remind her not to tell anyone where they were. She said, “Mom . . .”
Too late.
“You said a few weeks.”
“That’s what Wayne thinks.”
“I don’t see why he has to go all the way to Missouri to get work. Like there isn’t any around here.”
“It’s a change,” Carmen said. “He’ll know more in a few days. It’s not a real big job.” He did go see about one this morning, that much was true, though it wasn’t structural work. Wayne said he didn’t care, he had to be doing something; threw his coveralls in the pickup and took off to meet Ferris Britton at Cape Barge Line & Drydock.
“What’s your weather like?”
Her mom would ask that daily, when they were living only thirty miles apart. “It’s around seventy,” Carmen said, “sort of cloudy, but it’s been nice all week.”
“It’s raining here, and cold. It’s suppose to go down to forty tonight. I hate this weather.”
“You could move to Florida, nothing’s stopping you.”
“I don’t know anybody in Florida. What if something happened to me? Like one of my back seizures and I can’t move, I have to lie perfectly still. There is nothing like that pain when you try to move. I felt one coming on the other day, I called the doctor . . .” Lenore stopped. “I may have to change my number again. Either that or have the Annoyance Call Bureau put a trap on my line, find out where he’s calling from and get him.”
“You had an obscene phone call?”
“I had two hang-ups the same day. The kind where you know the party is on the line but they don’t say anything.”
“Didn’t even breathe hard?”
“It happens to you, you won’t think it’s so funny. I thought it was the doctor, I was waiting for him to call me back. You can wait all day, they don’t care.”
“When was this, Mom?”
“Soon as I started to feel the pain. When do you think? You know they call to find out if you’re home, that’s how they work it. Call and hang up.”
“Or it’s someone who got the wrong number,” Carmen said. “Have any of our friends called?”
“Why would they call here?”
“I doubt if they will, but if you do get a call . . . See, we didn’t tell anyone we were going. Wayne doesn’t want the guys in the local to know he’s working out of state. I don’t understand it myself, but if anyone calls just say we’re driving down to Florida and you haven’t heard from us yet. Okay? So Wayne won’t have to worry about it.”
“You don’t know when you’re coming home?”
Getting an old-lady quiver in her voice. Lenore was sixty-seven years old, she could be tough as nails, dance on a table after a few vodkas with grapefruit juice, or she could sound utterly helpless, real whiny, when she wanted something.
“Wayne says he’ll know pretty soon. He just started today, but as soon as we find out ...We’re gonna be talking anyway.”
Lenore said, “If I get one of my seizures . . .”
“Try not to think about it.”
“I don’t know what I’d do, being all alone. I don’t even have your number. What’s that area code, three-one-five?”
“Three-one-four.”
“Are you sure?”
“It’s right on the phone,” Carmen said, looking at it.