She knelt and pulled her skirt down over her knees and arranged the tacky remnants of flowers to some semblance of order she carried in her head. Hands gentle to rotted crepepaper leached colorless and limp.
“He never helped me much, but he might’ve if he hadn’t been so sick. I was a kid when they put him in the ground,” she said. “It was just this year but I ain’t a kid no more. I seen the hearse come all new and shiny and they took him out in that box and drive away. ‘Goin back after another one,’ I thought. I had never thought about folks doin that for a livin. I get a little boy I never want him to be one of them.”
An old man and woman were passing among the gravestones. Old gray man in a black suitcoat. Winer watched him. Prospective tenants perhaps, folks just visiting their neighbors. He wanted gone.
She arose. She was crying brokenly. She clung to his arm. “They had to break his back,” she said. “They ought never to have done that.”
He put his arms around her and drew her wet face into the hollow of his throat. He couldn’t think of anything to say.
“You got any money?”
“Sure I got money. Why?”
“Stop here.” She pointed.
He pulled into the empty parking lot. It was the Cozy Court Motel. They sat for a time, his fingers awkwardly drumming on the steering wheel, she was a calm serenity, staring out across the cold-looking pavement toward the numbered doors.
“We’ll play like we’re somebody else,” she said. “Somebody real nice.”
He didn’t say anything. He got out and closed the door and went across the asphalt to where blue neon said the office was.
Later they lay in bed, her back to him, the length of her body against him. The sun was lowering itself in the west and threw the window yellowlit and oblique on the eastern wall. Past her rounded shoulder he watched it slide slowly across the limegreen plaster and he wished there was some way to halt it but there was not.
He stopped the car on the last curve before Hardin’s and cut the switch off and drew her against him.
“We ought not to have drove back here at all. We should have just kept goin.”
“Goin where?”
“I don’t know.”
“Will he hurt you?”
“He never has really.”
“Tell me if he does.”
She looked at him wryly. “Why? What will you do? Kill him? Defend my honor? It’s easy for you. All you have to do is drive out of sight and it’s over for you.”
They sat in silence. He thought of the curious progression of things, the way the ragged edges of one event dovetailed into another like the pieces of a puzzle, no single piece independent of the whole.
“It ought not to have been like this,” he said suddenly.
“What?”
“If any one thing had been different then the rest would have too. We might be married. We might be a thousand miles away.”
She smiled. “We might be dead,” she said. “You want to see everything at once, Nathan. You want it every bit in front of you where you can look at it, make choices. I ain’t like that. I never had a choice to make. I just do what there is to do and then I don’t worry over it. It’s done.”
“All I want right now is for you to never get out that door,” he said.
She leaned and kissed his cheek. Then she got out anyway.
She traced the outline of her lips with a pink lipstick, pressed her lips together to smooth it. She studied her face speculatively in the mirror. Her eyes opened startled when Hardin’s reflection appeared behind hers.
“Think you’re goin somewhere?”
“Nathan Winer’s takin me to the show.”
“No he’s not.”
“Yes he is. Mama’s done said I could go.”
“Mama don’t call the shots around here and ain’t never if memory serves.”
“Well, she calls them with me. You’re not my daddy.”
“I damn sure ain’t,” he said. “And never claimed to be.” He came up behind her until their bodies touched and took the mirror from her hand and laid it aside. He embraced her from behind, a hand cupping each breast.
“Quit,” she said, twisting away, but his arms tightened and finally she stood without moving, slack in his arms. His touch appeared to drain her of any will of her own, as if she were absorbing some slowmoving but deadly poison from his body to hers. She was quite still, like some marvelous representation of human flesh lacking any spark to animate. They stood so for a long time.
“Mama’s crazy. She’ll kill you one of these days.”
“I’m like a cat,” Hardin said. “I take a lot of killin.” He kept on massaging her breasts gently.
“I’m a grown woman, Dallas. I can pick up and leave here anytime I want to. And if I’m of a mind to go with Nathan Winer or anybody else I want to, you can’t stop me.”
“I just did,” Hardin said. “And it didn’t hurt a bit, did it?”
He turned her toward him but she twisted her face away. “Quit,” she said. “Quit it, Dallas.”
“You think I don’t know? You think I’m going to let you throw yourself away on some redneck with dirty fingernails and no idy at all what he’d got? Sure I am. The hell I am.”
He released her. He lit a cigarette and stood studying her.
“Throw you a change of clothes in a suitcase,” he told her. “Long as you’re already dressed up we might as well go somewhere.”
“Go where?”
“You’ll see when we get there.”
“You think I’m going anywhere at all with you you’re badly mistaken.”
“Get it packed or you’ll by God go without it.” Hardin turned on his heel and went through the long front room just as Pearl came through the door. She stepped aside to let him pass and then stood there watching Amber Rose and Amber Rose watching her, but neither of them spoke.
Winer smelled strongly of Old Spice and he had something on his hair that plastered it gleaming to the contours of his skull and he had on a new white shirt. One long room of the honkytonk had been sheetrocked though not yet plastered or painted. A bar was aligned against the narrow end of the room and tables and chairs were spaced about the floor. Winer passed through the doorway and into the sounds of Saturday-night merriment as though he were accustomed to it and seated himself at one of the bright new stools at the bar.
“Lord God, Winer,” Wymer said. “You smell like you broke a twenty-dollar bill in the barbershop and had to take the change out in trade.”
Winer gave him a small, tight smile and sat absentmindedly tapping a halfdollar on the bar. “Let me have a Coke, Wymer.”
Wymner set up the bottle but refused the coin. “Pearl’s givin it away tonight,” he said wryly. “Everthing’s on the house.”
“Do what?”
“Hell, yeah. She’s pissed at Hardin about somethin and she’s already give away enough beer and whiskey to give the whole county a hangover.”
“What’s she mad at Hardin about?”
“You’d have to ask them. They don’t tell me their business.” He stood unsteadily, arranged his thin hair with his fingers to cover his bald spot. His small eyes flitted drunkenly about the room as if Hardin might be crouched behind a table watching. “They got me right in the middle,” he complained. “He’s gone off God knows where and all I know for certain is he’s goin to have a shitfit when he does get back. I just may be somewheres else when it happens too…He keeps talkin bout this Mexcan feller he’s bringin up from Memphis. I guess I’m out of a job anyway.”