In An Arid Land (19 page)

Here is Helen, easing the Chevy up the driveway to park it behind the truck. Millhouse brings in the groceries, complaining, "I knew you shouldn't have taken that job."

"I told you I was going to the store after work."

He says, "How am I to remember everything you tell me?" She stops, looks at him closely, kisses his face between two grocery sacks. They put away the perishables and then Millhouse reheats the Spam he fried for supper. "Spam?" she says. "It's all we had." She says, "I told you I was going to the store." They eat in the kitchen and stare into the hole under the counter next to the sink where Millhouse plans to install a dishwasher.

III

It's early morning and Millhouse is at the doctor's office, the third since leaving his job. "I can't find anything," says the doctor, a boy in a blazer. "Tell me again, when do you have these pains?"

"All the time. Whenever I think about my life."

The doctor blushes and fidgets, says not to worry, it will pass, and he gives Millhouse a prescription for sleeping pills. In the truck Millhouse wads up the prescription and throws it out the window. He doesn't know why he keeps going to doctors except that it's paid for, mostly, by insurance and that Helen wants to be sure. "At your age, better safe than sorry," she says, but she misunderstands him when he talks of pain.

He stops at the pier to look at the lake, just look. A thin fog still curls over the water, obscuring the far shore. The glassy surface of the lake appears solid, impenetrable, the cove deep and lifeless, somehow frightening. He stares trance-like at the water until a fish breaks through, sending out its concentric circles like a message to the shore. The quiet closes in on him, so he gets in the truck and goes home.

At noon the postman's jeep appears on the road. Millhouse stalks down the driveway, looks inside the mailbox and takes out the small brown envelope. Handling it, turning it over, he reads the fine print on the back and waits several minutes before ripping open the seal.

The afternoon burns amber outside the windows of the bank in Huntsville. Millhouse fills out a deposit slip and gives it to the teller, young and pleasant, a black woman with a strand of pearls around her neck. "It's my first one," says Millhouse. "My first check from the government. Like Welfare." He grins.

"Ah," she says, letting it linger in the air, moving her hands over the machine. "Congratulations. You should frame it."

"Naw," he says and sort of laughs.

"Enjoy," says the teller, handing Millhouse his receipt.

Outside he gets into the pickup, sweltering from the sun, and drives down Bowie Street. He passes the Walgreen's where he gets a Senior Citizen's Discount and then stops at Hank's Lumber and Hardware. Almost everyone at Hank's knows Millhouse by now and he waves to a couple of men as he makes his way past the heavy green nail buckets and the row of lawn mowers to Helen's office. She's doing the inventory ledgers. He can see her through the glass in the door, the big books open on her desk, the finger working the adding machine one key at a time.

"What are you doing here?" She's cheerful, glad to see him.

"The bank. It came."

"I knew something good was going to happen today. Was it what you thought it would be?"

"Two dollars more."

"Well, see. I told you it wouldn't be so bad." She gets a satisfied look on her face. "You can buy yourself a lime freeze for the ride home. I saw that Dairy Queen's got a special on."

They talk for a while and she tells him that Gloria called to say she and Roger will bring Josh up on Saturday. Josh is their eldest grandchild and he spends a week with them every year during their vacation. But Helen won't get vacation this year.

"She said all he's been able to talk about since school let out is Papaw, Papaw. He wants you to teach him how to fish."

"For a whole week?"

Her face oozes mirth. It's that grin that used to infuriate him with its shrewd, teasing squinch around the eyes. Now he knows it's just Helen and accepts it as he accepts the smelly Ben-Gay rubs she gives him when he's been working on the land.

"I'm afraid it's two weeks," she says as if she's about to laugh. "Gloria promised him."

Millhouse remembers the noise, the questions, the broken keepsakes, the general trauma Josh inflicts on their lives when he comes to visit: "He'll drive you crazy."

"It's not me . . . " she says. "Oh, Charlie, you'll enjoy it. He sure loves his Papaw." She glances around quickly and then kisses him on the cheek. "Now go. I've got work."

On his way out he hears one of the salesmen call to him from across the showroom: "Have you caught the big one yet?" He's holding his hands in front of him as if approximating the length of a yardstick.

Millhouse isn't sure he understood and, with an exaggerated tilt of his head, cups his ear to get him to repeat it.

"The big bass," the man hollers between hands now shaped around his mouth like a megaphone.

"Ah," Millhouse calls back. "I'm trying."

The man yells, but not quite loud enough: "I wish I . . . leisure . . . take it easy . . . ."

Millhouse nods and waves and walks out the door to the parking lot. "Leisure." He spits the word at the truck and then gets inside. He drives up Lamar to Main Street and cruises the business district, watching the small-town, county-seat activity. He sees a HELP WANTED sign in the window of the Western Auto. Craning over the steering wheel, he tries to look into the store but the glare of the sun is too great and all he can see is the reflection of the truck sliding by in ripples across the glass.

Millhouse at the Dairy Queen. Millhouse in the truck, sucking on a lime freeze through a straw. The drive from town to home is 18.2 miles. There are clusters of houses along the way, some farms and ranches, railroad tracks and acres of trees. He turns onto the dirt road that leads to the house and waves to Grady atop his tractor, Grady who retired last year and bought the Jenson place with cash savings at the same time he and Helen paid off their mortgage. Grady is mowing what's left from the drought of the coastal Bermuda he planted on his eight acres.

Millhouse and Grady often argue about grass. Millhouse knows for a fact that Bahia is sturdier than Bermuda, but Grady won't listen. He was an engineer and thinks he knows everything. One thing about him, though: he has self-respect; he keeps his place up. He's painted it, repaired the pump house, cleared the land where it needed it. People talk about how pretty it is, how Grady "really saved that spread" after old Jenson let it "dilapidate."

The tractor stops out in the field and Grady crawls down, starts walking toward the road. Millhouse presses the accelerator and then watches in the mirror as big flags of dust billow up behind the tailgate.

At home he goes to the storage shed off the garage. It's cool and damp and crowded with lumber he's purchased to build or repair things around the house, and boxes. One of the boxes, a large one, came from Sears and contains the dishwasher they bought before he retired. Josh's old crib, dismantled, leans against the wall in the corner near a pyramid of new paint cans.

He finds his fishing gear. The eyes on the poles are green with corrosion, one of the reels stiff with age. The tackle box is practically empty some twisted line and a few gnarled hooks, an old hunting knife wrapped in foil. He unwraps the knife and runs his thumb along its rusty blade. The blade pricks his finger and a dollop of blood bubbles up. He licks it away, salty and earthy on his tongue. He says, "I hate fishing." It echoes in the shed and startles him, as if someone may have heard. He lays the poles and the tackle box behind the stacks of lumber where no one can see them, then goes outside to the yard. The horse is grazing in the pasture just down the fence line. Millhouse stops at the fence, calls, "Hey, Knuckles," but she doesn't look up.

Millhouse snacking on peanut butter and crackers over the sink, squinting to read the thermometer outside the kitchen window 96. He makes his afternoon pot of coffee and sits for a while at the table. Millhouse on the phone to Helen.

"You're going to have to call Gloria back," he says. "Tell them I'm not feeling well or something."

"But Charlie, he'll be so disappointed."

"I tell you I don't want to. I don't know how to fish, it's been years. And what if he were to drown or something?"

"Drown?" Her voice is high, stretched with sarcasm. "Charlie, you're being silly. You used to fish all the time."

"I don't want to argue, Helen. And this is long distance."

"Charlie" she begins, but he hangs up. He stares at the phone and then picks up the receiver. He puts it down again when he hears a car pass on the road, and goes out to pick up the newspaper. Back inside he pops the rubber band, pops it, pops it until it breaks, then he sits at the table, scanning the front page. He reads a story about delays in a street-paving project in Houston, and in the story is the name of a city spokesman he's never heard or seen before. That was Hardy's job: City Spokesman. Where is he? What's happened? Already it's changed. He moves on to other news, sees hundreds of words, some large, some small, but doesn't read them. The words are about Houston and the world and have nothing to say to him now.

He rolls up the paper as if the rubber band were still around it and then he throws it with all his might across the room. Pages come loose and fly everywhere, but the core of the newspaper smacks a lamp and sends it crashing to the floor. He looks at the mess and mutters, "This is how I knew it would be."

IV

Millhouse, still in his robe, watching a game show on TV. He hears a horn blowing outside. It's Grady in his truck.

"Man, aren't you up yet?" Grady calls through his window.

"I'm not feeling too well."

"No time for that. Come on. I need some help."

"I can't today."

"It's just some logs."

"Can't today."

"See you in a few minutes."

Grady's truck rolls backwards down the driveway.

He yells, "I can't," but knows Grady can't hear him. "You old loon." Millhouse in the bedroom, putting on jeans, cursing Grady, putting on a shirt and his boots, his cap. He leaves.

Grady, with a foot on a log, is waiting for Millhouse as he walks slowly across Grady's pasture toward the felled tree.

"This'll get us through the winter," Grady says, nodding to the litter of timber before him, and Millhouse grunts a reply. Together they lift logs into the bed of Grady's truck.

"Where you been the past few days?" says Grady, wiping sweat from his big-nosed face with a bandana.

"Busy."

"Fixing the fence?"

"Nope."

They heave logs until they've made a load. Then they get inside. Grady directs the truck toward the woodpile. They bounce over the rough spots in the pasture and Grady complains about the pinched disc in his back. They drop off the logs and return for another load. Millhouse can feel Grady eyeing him.

He says, "Something on your mind?"

"Yeah, as a matter of fact," says Grady. "As a matter of fact I do have something to say. I think you're sitting on your can over there, kind of just waiting for something to happen, and I think that's stupid. There's work to do."