Plainsong (Plainsong #1)(66)

Goddamn it, Vicky, Dwayne said. He grabbed at her and got hold of her red purse and jerked it. The strap broke.

Oh, don’t, she said. Let me have that.

Come and get it. He held it away from her.

Here now, the bus driver said. That don’t belong to you.

I don’t give a shit. He stepped back. Let her come and get it if she wants it.

The girl looked at him and immediately there was nothing else to think about. She turned away and when the driver held out his hand to steady her, she took it and stepped up carefully into the bus. The people sitting in seats on both sides looked at her as she faced them, and she moved slowly up the aisle and they watched her pass, and afterward they looked at what was happening outside. Dwayne was moving now along the length of the bus, following her from outside until she found a seat and sat down, then he stood with one hand in a back pocket of his pants and the other hand brandishing the red purse, and he stared at her, talking, not even yelling. You’ll be back, he was saying. You don’t even have any idea how much you’re going to miss me. You’ll be back.

Though she couldn’t hear, she could read from his lips what he was saying. He said it all again. She shook her head. No, she whispered against the glass. I won’t. I won’t ever. She turned away from the window and looked forward toward the front of the bus, her face shiny with the tears she wasn’t even conscious of, and soon the driver swung up into his seat and pulled the door shut and they rolled away from the curb in the dark underground departure bay of the station. When the bus turned up the ramp out into the bright street, she looked once more at him, standing where he had stood before, looking after her, watching the bus as it left, and she thought she might have been sorry for him, she felt she could be sorry, he looked so lonesome and forlorn now.

She slept part of the way. Then she woke when the bus stopped at Fort Morgan. It stopped again at Brush. Out on the high plains the country was turning green once more, she felt a little cheered by that, and the weather was starting to warm up again and she sat looking out the window at the sagebrush and soapweed scattered in dark clumps in the pastures, and there were the first faint starts of blue grama and timothy.

They stopped again in the town of Norka where his mother was. She had never seen his mother. She had only talked to her that one time, from the public phone booth beside the highway when she had tried to find out where Dwayne was, and now she would never meet the woman or even see her, and it didn’t matter anymore. His mother would never know about a baby being born in a town just forty miles away.

The bus went on and they crossed into Holt County, the country all flat and sandy again, the stunted stands of trees at the isolated farmhouses, the gravel section roads running exactly north and south like lines drawn in a child’s picture book and the four-strand fences rimming the bar ditches, and now there were cows with fresh calves in the pastures behind the barbed-wire fences and here and there a red mare with a new-foaled colt, and far away on the horizon to the south the low sandhills that looked as blue as plums. The winter wheat was the only real green.

It was dusk when they turned the last curve west of town and drove under the railroad overpass and slowed down coming into Holt, passing Shattuck’s Café and the Legion. The streetlamps were just coming on. The bus stopped at the Gas and Go at the intersection of Highway 34 and Main Street. She got up from her seat and came slowly down the steps. The evening air was chilly and sharp.

The driver removed the girl’s box from underneath the bus and set it down on the pavement, then he nodded to her and she thanked him, and he stepped into the gas station to buy a paper cup of coffee and he came back holding it out in front of himself so he wouldn’t spill it, then the bus went on.

The girl carried her box over to the side of the building where a telephone was bracketed to the wall under a little hood. She called Maggie Jones again.

Victoria? Is that you? Where are you now?

Here. I’m back here in Holt.

Where?

At the Gas and Go. Do you think they’ll take me back?

Honey, nothing’s changed since this morning. Maybe they will. I don’t know. I can’t speak for them.

Should I call them?

I’ll drive you out there. I think you should do this in person.

You haven’t told them I’m coming, have you? That I was coming back?

No. I leave that for you to do.





McPherons.

Once more, as on that other Sunday in the fall, she drove her out into the country seventeen miles south of Holt and the girl was frightened again as she was on that previous day, yet she looked at everything closely now as they passed along on the road because it had become familiar to her, and after twenty minutes they pulled up the track to the old country house off the county road and the car stopped at the wire gate. The girl sat for a long moment looking at the weathered house. Inside, the kitchen light came on. Then the porch light above the door and Raymond stepped out onto the little screened porch.

Go on, Maggie Jones said. You may as well find out.

I’m afraid what they’re going to say, the girl said.

They’re not going to say anything if you just sit here in the car.

She opened the door and got out, still looking at the house and at the old man standing on the porch. Then Harold appeared beside his brother. The two of them stood unmoving, watching her. She walked slowly, heavily up to the porch, leaning back a little to balance her weight. In the cool darkening evening she stopped at the bottom step to look up at them. The wind gusted up. The winter coat she wore was too tight now, it was unbuttoned over her stomach and the coatskirts flapped against her hips and thighs.