She looked up at him and thought to make a comment, but recognized something of self-pity and resentment in it, beyond the puzzlement, and buttoned it.
He turned the crank and got into his car. Grace sat in the passenger seat as still and silent as someone with a gun held to her head but who seemed entirely unconcerned about the danger of the situation. He patted his jacket pocket as if to check for something, waved to Jane, then made the turnabout in the drive and headed out.
Grace isn’t even wearing a hat, Jane thought, watching them go. The dust raised in the hot still air by the car’s wheels like the dusting away of Grace herself into what it was said people came from. She had never thought literally of that before. A human being made out of dust from the earth would never hold up, and a human being made from mud would be nothing but a crumbling mold creeping about swamps to keep from drying and whisking away in the wind, like the dust she stood watching drift and settle back onto their driveway, no longer disturbed.
IN MERCURY after dropping the girl off at the dry cleaner’s, he posted his letter, stopped by Hellman’s speakeasy for a beer, then on a whim he’d never indulged before stopped by a popular whorehouse on Ninth Street to have a drink with the men there, thinking he might think on one of the ladies there. He’d been disturbed in that way by Grace’s demeanor and didn’t know what to do about it. He got caught up in a poker game that was interrupted by a fistfight between two young men named Bates and Urquhart and escaped the brawl quick as he could. It put him in a better mood, though, those boys fighting over a girl. He headed back downtown to Schoenhof’s to pick up a sack of oysters fresh from the Gulf, plus a sack of crushed ice, then at a bootlegger’s for a pint of bourbon and a case of Pabst Blue Ribbon beer. He put several beers and the oysters into a broad bucket in his car’s trunk, dumped the ice onto them, and headed out.
Driving home, he took a long swallow from the bourbon and relished the new calm in his blood. About halfway there he started thinking about the girl Grace again. The way she’d sat there in his car’s passenger seat, he’d swear to God he could smell her the way a stallion scents a dripping mare, and he’d wished he had a drink right then. And how he was sure he saw her, from the corner of his eye, looking him over with a frank stare like she was sizing him up in a way she never had before. He smoked hell out of his pipe most of the drive, and neither said anything much.
“There’s a canteen of water for you there under your seat,” he said once over the clatter of the motor and wheel noise.
“Thank you.”
“I presume that medicine I gave you worked out all right.”
“Just fine.” Then, “I don’t like you wouldn’t take my money.”
“I don’t like how you got it.”
When he’d dropped her off he offered to carry her valise and she said no, thank you, it didn’t weigh anything.
“Anything in it at all?”
“Just a few personal items,” she said with a half smile that taunted him to say more.
“So you just got the one dress you’re wearing, then.”
“I’m going to be a seamstress,” she said. “When I need a new dress, I’ll make it.”
“Makes sense.”
“So where you headed, then, Dr. Thompson? Going to have some fun?”
“Just a little business.”
“Busy-ness,” she said, smiling.
And with that she closed the car door and walked toward the door of the shop, letting her hips move casually in the yellow summer dress she wore, and when the afternoon light shone through it, good lord, he was right. Nothing at all underneath, and the shadow of her young little bushy hair in the gap between her slim legs below her hips.
Now, driving home, he muttered to himself, “I am nothing but a sad case of horny old low-minded pitifully lonely son-of-a-bitch.”
Out of a low-frequency guilt and the need to somehow expunge it, he went on past his house and back to the Chisolms’, pulled into their yard honking the Klaxon. He got his lanky bulk down from the driver’s seat and wobbled a bit before getting his feet back and checking to see that the tub with ice, beer, and oysters hadn’t bumped out along the way. Everyone came over and crowded around. First the doctor took a brown bottle from the ice, flipped the crimped top of it off with a church key, held it out.
“Taste of cold beer, Chisolm?”
“By god,” Chisolm said. “On ice, is it?” Chisolm hesitated, then took the beer and drew a long swallow, his Adam’s apple bobbing, then held it out in front of him looking at it, blinking like his eyes were smarting in the sunlight. The doctor extracted another bottle from the ice and uncapped it.
“Mrs.?”
Jane’s mother glared at him and set her lips. He shrugged and drank, himself.
“What’re those rocks in the ice for, or did you just put them in there to steady your bottles of beer?”
“No, ma’am, these are oysters, straight from the Gulf of Mexico, come up on the train to Mercury for Schoenhof’s Restaurant.”
“Oysters,” Mrs. Chisolm said, twisting her mouth around the odd word. “What is it?”
The doctor lifted his chin and looked at her. Yes, he was a little tight.
“Let me show you.”
He produced from his belt a small dagger-looking knife and grabbed one of the rocks with his left hand, and went to prying at one end of the rock with the knife in the other, and the oyster parted like a mouth with a sound like a suction cup coming off the sink bottom.
“This is called shucking them,” the doctor said.
“Shucking!” Mrs. Chisolm said. “That’s what you do to an ear of corn.”
“Well, they use the same word for this,” the doctor said.
He handed the top half to Jane’s father and said, “You can use that for an ashtray.” He wiggled the tip of the dagger gently underneath some kind of jelly-looking gray-white blob lying in the bottom half, and next thing you knew he put the lower half up to his mouth and slid the blob out onto his tongue and was chewing the thing, his eyes closed, and then he was swallowing and smiling.
“What in the world?” Jane’s mother said.
“What is it?” Jane said. “You ate it!”
“I did,” the doctor said. “It’s delicious. It’s a mollusk, from the sea. You harvest them from the ocean bottom and keep them on ice so they don’t die and eat them fresh as you can.”
“You mean that thing you just ate was alive?” Jane’s mother said. “My land, that’s horrible.”
“Looks like something that ought to come from inside something,” Jane said.
The doctor cocked an eye at Jane, amused. “I guess that’s kind of what it is, then.”
“Oh, for heaven’s sake!” Jane’s mother said.
“As I said, it’s delicious. And perfectly safe, mostly. These are, anyway. I ate several before purchasing this sack. Try one. The Indians down on the Gulf used to practically survive on these things and a few fish.”
“Mostly safe is not near good enough for me,” Jane’s mother said. Then, under her breath, “Indians.”
“I’ll eat one if Papa will,” Jane said.
Her father looked at her, eyebrows raised. Then he nodded at the mound of oysters. “All right, shuck me up one of them.”
“I’ll not witness it,” Mrs. Chisolm said, and went into the house. She stuck her head back out the screen door and called out, “Won’t be on me if you all get sick and die.”
The doctor took an oyster from the pile and shucked it, handing the bottom half to Jane’s father, then did the same and handed one to her.
“Okay,” the doctor said, “just tip it back into your mouth. And chew it, now, don’t just slide it down.”