The Passenger (The Passenger, #1)(50)

How much tip do you want me to leave?

Well I dont know, Darlin. Whatever your heart tells you.

All right. You want to flip for double or nothing?

How would I know how much I was flippin for?

What difference would it make? It will either be twice that or nothing.

All right.

You do it.

Why?

I might have a two-headed coin.

Yeah, she said. Knowin you you might.

She took a quarter from the pocket of her apron and flipped it and caught it and slapped it down on her forearm and looked at him.

Heads, he said.

She lifted her hand away. It was tails.

You want to go again?

All right.

She flipped the coin again and he called heads again and it was tails.

One more time?

How much do I have now?

Four times what you had to start with.

I know that. I can do the math. You just want to keep doublin till I lose.

That’s right.

Well I think I’ll quit.

Smart girl.

I got to wait on them people. How much do I get?

He took a fold of bills from his pocket. I was going to leave two dollars. So you get six.

No I dont. I get eight.

Just checking that math of yours.

I was good at math in school. English was what I hated.

He handed her a twenty dollar bill and she reached in her apron to make change.

That’s all right, he said. Keep it.

Well thank you.

You’re welcome.

I didnt know if you was some sort of smart-aleck or somethin.

But you do now.

Sort of. I got to go.

What’s your name?

Ella. What’s yours?

Robert.

I’m off tonight.

Your husband will shoot me.

My husband’s in the penitentiary.

You never did say how you got those stitches.

Maybe I’ll tell you when I know you better.

He slid out of the booth and stood. I’ll see you Miss Ella.

Bye.

He walked across the parkinglot and got in the car and started it. When he pulled out into the street she was watching him from the window and she held up her pencil to say goodbye.

He pulled up into the driveway under the old walnut trees and shut off the engine. His grandmother’s car was gone. He sat there looking at the place. Tall white clapboard farmhouse. In need of paint. He thought he saw the curtains move in the bay window. He got out and stood there looking out across the fields. The winter woods along the ridge behind the house were dark and bare and everything was strangely quiet. He could smell the cows. The rich odor of the boxwoods. When he shut the car door three crows lifted silently out of the trees on the far side of the creek and hooked themselves away over the gray winter bottomlands.

He opened the screen door and tapped at the glass and closed the door again and stood waiting. The cows had come out into the barnlot and stood watching him. So little changed. Nothing the same. The door opened and a young girl stood looking up at him. Yes? she said.

Hi. Is Mrs Brown in?

No, she’s not.

What time do you expect her?

She said she’d be back around twelve oclock. She’s went into town to get her hair done.

Western looked out across the lot toward the barn. He looked at the girl. I’ll come back, he said.

Did you want me to give her a message?

No, that’s all right. She’ll know who it is. I’m going to leave my car here and just go for a walk. I’m her grandson.

Oh. You’re Bobby.

Yes.

Did you want to come in?

No, that’s okay. I’ll be back in a little bit.

All right. I’ll tell her.

Thanks.

He got one of the soft leather bags out of the floor of the car and with the door open he sat on the broad carpeted sill and changed his shoes. Then he shut the car door and set out.

When he got to the creek he followed it up into the woods and crossed on the flat stones below the old wooden spillway. The spillway boards were cupped and black with age and the water that ran over them looked dark and heavy. Of the gristmill itself nothing was left save the stones of the foundation together with the rusted iron axle that had once carried the millwheel and the rusted iron collars in which it once had turned. He walked out the path and sat under the cottonwoods and watched the pond. He’d gone to the finals of the State Science Fair when he was sixteen. His project was a study of the pond. He’d drawn life size every visible creature in that habitat from gnats and hellgrammites through the arachnids and crustaceans and arthropods and nine species of fish to the mammals, muskrat and mink and raccoon, and the birds, kingfisher and wood duck and grebes and herons and songbirds and hawks. Like Audubon he’d had to draw the great blue heron leaning over the water because it was too big for the paper. Two hundred and seventy-three creatures with their Latin names on three forty foot rolls of construction paper. It had taken him two years to do and it didnt win. Later he’d gotten scholarship offers in biology but by then he was deep into mathematics and pond ecosystems were little more than a childhood enthusiasm.



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He sat there for a long time. A muskrat had put out from shore at the deep end down near the dam and it swam up the pond toward him. Just its nose and a widening V of water. Ondatra zibethicus. One winter they’d built in the pond a house of woven sticks and reeds that was a perfect miniature of a beaver house and he’d asked his biology teacher if this meant that the muskrat’s knowledge and the beaver’s descended from a common source but the teacher didnt seem to understand what he was talking about. He’d paddled out to the house in his duckboat and cut a small hole in the dome of the roof with a keyhole saw and peered in with a flashlight. A nest of grass on a platform of sticks just above the waterline and a warm sweet smell that flooded up and stopped him where he sat astraddle the board seat in the little boat. A memory long forgotten swept over him and he was a child four years of age standing in the front seat of the 1936 Studebaker his father drove all through the war and his mother was sitting beside him in her best dress and coat and she had wet her handkerchief with her tongue and wiped his chin and his mouth and adjusted his cap while his father backed up the car and the wartime plywood house in which they lived receded before them. It was the smell of her perfume on that day that had flooded his nostrils. The muskrats would repair the roof faultlessly. But they never built another house in the millpond.