Plainsong (Plainsong #1)(25)

Don’t you little shitasses ever come back in here, he said. I’ll come in a-shootin next time. I won’t ask no questions first.

We weren’t doing a thing in there, the other boy said.

What’s that? the old man said. By Jesus, I got a mind to blow your shittin little head off right now. He raised the gun again, dangerously, waving it.

No. Now look out, Ike said. We’re leaving. Wait a minute.

The boys went out of the house back through the weeds onto Railroad Street. The old man came out onto the porch and watched them. They turned and looked at him one time and he was still there on the porch standing in the lowering sun in his dirty overalls and blue shirt, still holding the gun up. When he saw them stop in front of the house he pointed the gun at them again, like he was taking aim. They went on.

When they had walked far enough down the road so that the old man couldn’t see them clearly, the other boy said, I got this much anyhow. He stopped and withdrew a candle stub from his back pocket.

You took that? Bobby said. You shouldn’t even of touched that.

What’s wrong with you? It’s a candle.

That doesn’t matter, Ike said. It wasn’t yours. You didn’t see her.

I never had to see her. I don’t care a turd about her.

You didn’t see the way she was that night.

Oh, I seen lots of them without their clothes on. I seen their pink titties, lots of times.

You never saw her, Ike said.

What of it.

She was different. She was pretty, wasn’t she, Bobby?

I thought she was pretty, Bobby said.

I don’t give a rat’s ass. I’m keeping this candle.

They started back along the dirt road toward the house. At the gravel drive the other boy went on by himself toward town, but the two brothers turned and went back past their empty house toward the lot where the two horses were standing dozing by the barn. They went out to the corral to be in the place where there were horses.





Victoria Roubideaux.

One night when she had finished washing dishes at the Holt Café and afterward had eaten her own supper sitting at the café counter, she didn’t go back to Maggie Jones’s house immediately. Instead she walked about town by herself with her coat buttoned up to her chin and her hands pulled up into the sleeves.

She made the call from a pay phone on the highway out at the town limits of Holt where there was a short turnout for cars and where a summer picnic table was set out under four scrubby and leafless Chinese elm trees. Cattle buyers used the phone during the day, leaning over the hoods of their dusty pickups while they talked, carrying the phone out on its cable as far it would allow them and writing their figures on pads of paper. Now it was dark. The sun had gone under two hours ago and a sharp cold winter wind was blowing dirt across the highway in brown skeins, pushing it into ridges along the gutters at the curbing. The new yellowish streetlamps were burning all along the empty blacktop, showing the entrance into town. She called for information in Norka, where he came from, the next town going west from Holt. The operator gave the number that was listed for his mother.

When she dialed the number, the woman on the other end answered at once, and the woman sounded angry from the outset.

May I speak to Dwayne? the girl said.

Who is this?

This is a friend of his.

Dwayne isn’t here. He doesn’t live here.

Is he in Denver?

Who is it wants to know?

Victoria Roubideaux.

Who?

The girl said it again.

I never heard him mention that name before, the woman said.

I’m a friend of his, the girl said. We met last summer.

That’s what you say. How do I know that? the woman said. I wouldn’t know you from Nancy Reagan.

The girl looked out across the highway. There was a scrap of paper blowing along the gutter, tumbling with the dirt. Can’t you just give me his phone number? she said. Please, I need to talk to him. There’s something I want to tell him.

Now you listen to me, the woman said. I told you, he isn’t here. And he isn’t here. I’m not giving out his number to everybody that wants it. He’s got his privacy to think of. He’s working a job and that’s what he needs to be doing. Whoever you are, you leave him alone. You hear me? She hung up.

The girl put the phone back. She felt very alone now, cut off and frightened for the first time. She was not sick in the morning very often anymore, but she still wanted to cry too much of the time, and lately her jeans and skirts were so tight at the waist that she’d begun wearing them unbuttoned with a little piece of elastic strap pinned inside, holding them together, a solution that Maggie Jones had given her. The girl looked up and down the highway. It was empty save for a big tanker truck that was rattling in from the west. She could hear the whistle of its brakes as it slowed, passing under the first streetlights. When it rattled by, the driver sitting up high in the tractor cab looked her over thoroughly, his head turned sideways like he had a broken neck.

Across the highway and up a block toward town was Shattuck’s, and she decided to go there. She didn’t want to go back to Maggie’s yet. She would still be out of the house at a teachers’ meeting, and the old man was there alone. The girl started walking back toward Shattuck’s. She felt emotional and softhearted toward it, as though she were being pulled there by the past. It was where he had bought hamburgers and Cokes for the two of them in the summer, and afterward they had taken the sack of food in the car and driven out into the flat open country north of town on the unnamed gravel roads, driving out alone at that hour when the sky was only beginning to deepen and color up and the first stars were just coming clear, when all the scattered birds of the fields were flying homeward.