Sentimental Journey (18 page)

He paused and listened.

“‘I’m Getting Sentimental Over You,’“ she said dreamily, eyes closed.

“Must be my
Texas
charm.”

She stopped and looked at him, then burst out laughing. “That’s the song title, and you know it.” She looked past him, over his right shoulder. “What’s that over there?”

He turned as she moved toward the piano behind an old, faded screen with bamboo painted on it.

He felt his smile melt away.

She faced him. “Do you play?”

“No.”

The radio announcer marked off the time, and there was a commercial for Ovaltine.

He was quiet. It was one of those awkward silences where you thought you should say something but, for the life of you, you couldn’t think of a thing to say that wouldn’t sound as if you were reaching for something to say.

She sighed and bent down to pick up a green canvas flight bag she’d brought in earlier from the plane. Straightening, she said, “I should turn in now, and let you get some sleep. Me, too, I guess. I’ll need to get an early start tomorrow.”

“Follow me, then.” He moved toward the small narrow hallway. “You know where the bathroom is.” He went past it to the two doors at the other end. He opened the one on the right and flipped a switch.

There were two small beds in the room, both built into the wooden walls. Each bed had a thin, blue-and-gray ticking mattress on it and a feather pillow. Years before, he and Nettie both had slept in here. Once his daddy had passed on, Red moved into the other room with the double bed. Nettie refused to sleep in a bed that her mother had slept in . . . ever.

It hadn’t been easy for Red, caught in between Nettie’s anger at their mother and his father’s crushing, defeated sense of hurt. When one person feels so strongly one way, and another the opposite, it’s difficult to be in the middle. You’re afraid to feel anything because you might be like them; you might take it too far. So you don’t let yourself feel at all.

He stepped into the room and she followed him inside. “It’s not much—”

“It’s fine. Really.”

He looked levelly into her eyes and warned, “It’s a short bed.”

“Don’t you find at our height everything is too short? Especially beds?”

“Yep, that’s true.”

“It doesn’t matter,” she said casually, standing so close to him he could smell her hair. It smelled like lemon. “I sleep all curled up anyway.”

He took a step backward, into the doorway, where there was only the old wooden doorjamb next to him. No tall, sassy woman who smelled too good to be true. “The bed’s not made up, but there are sheets and blankets in the dresser.”

She sat down on the edge of the bunk. “Great. Thanks again.” She was sitting on his old bed.

“Sure.” He turned, feeling bigger than the door he walked through. He went straight into the kitchen, drank three glasses of tap water, then leaned against the counter and wiped his mouth with a sleeve, while the water sloshed around uncomfortably in his belly. A few deep breaths and he set the glass down, then switched off the light.

The soft and wavy moan of a muted trumpet playing the blues came from the radio. Cab Calloway began to sing.

Red turned off the radio with a sharp flick. He managed to get about four steps into the dark, narrow hallway before he stopped.

She was humming the song.

The door to his old room was half open, and the light cast her silhouette on the door. Her shadow moved provocatively while the sound of her humming drifted all around him.

He couldn’t move, not for a few moments. Instead, like some kind of Peeping Tom, he watched the shadow get undressed. She moved out of the light.

He rushed past. But at his door, he took one last look over his shoulder.

The silhouette was gone. She stopped humming. A second later she turned out the light, leaving nothing but silence and a hollow feeling that he knew too well.

He closed the bedroom door behind him, stripped, and got into bed. The sheets were scratchy and stiff from drying on the line out back. He lay there in the dark, staring at the door.

Tomorrow she would be gone, flying off to do her job.

Tomorrow he had to fix the Baptist minister’s oil leak and take new tires out to the Streit farm.

Everything would be the same old, same old. He would eat alone and listen to the radio alone, and life would be normal and dull and familiar. He closed his eyes for a second, but all he could see was the silhouette of a tall woman, humming the blues. He jerked the sheets up to his neck and felt his feet slip out the end of the bed. He lay there on his side staring at the door again.

I sleep all curled up anyway.

He was nuts. Too many bags of peanuts. He turned away angrily, his bony bare feet sticking out of the bed. But he didn’t give a hoot. He punched his pillow a few times.

He’d been living alone for too damn long.

“SHOO
FLY
PIE
AND
APPLE PAN DOWDY”

The next morning Charley paused in the doorway of the living room, where Red was sitting at the table, absorbed in reading a newspaper. In front of him was a pastry in a pie tin and a pot of coffee. They both smelled wonderful.

“Good morning,” she said.

The newspaper crackled when he dropped it on the table. He stood up quickly. “Morning.” His voice was gruff and deep and had that soft touch of a
Texas
twang. He looked lanky tall. He wasn’t wearing old coveralls, but a pair of brown pants, a tooled leather belt with a silver buckle, and a cotton shirt with small blue and brown checks on it and pearl buttons on the pockets. There were creases ironed sharply into the sleeves, and the collar points were pressed and starched. His hair was combed back, slick and gleaming, and as she came closer, she could smell the scent of Vitalis.

She helped herself to the coffee and waved at him. “Sit.” She thought it was sweet, the way he’d dressed up for her.

He bent his long frame back into the chair, resting an ankle easily on his knee. “I was thinking about you just before you walked in.”

She sat down across from him and rested her elbows on the table, cupping the mug in her palms. “So, why was I on your mind . . . or shouldn’t I ask?”

“There’s an article about a pilot here in the paper.”

She looked at it. It was open to the comics. “Moon Mullins or Joe Palooka?”

He folded the page back. “No. Here on the front page. Some guy flew his plane to
Ireland
.”

She frowned. “Why is flying a plane to
Ireland
enough to put the article on the front page? Did he crash?”

“I guess he landed there by mistake.”

“Where was he going?”

“
California
.”

“You’re kidding?”

“Nope. Look.” He handed her the paper.

She scanned the article and laughed a little under her breath, half embarrassed for the guy. “The poor man. They’re calling him Wrong-way Corrigan.”

“Yeah.”

She handed him back the paper. “You wouldn’t be implying that he and I have anything in common, would you?”

He shook his head. “Not me. No sir-ee. Might end up with that chip of yours embedded in my head. Then everyone would say, you know, that Red Walker was a handsome devil until the day Charley Morrison hammered that ugly chip into his head so he looks like Boris Karloff, and it all started when that gal almost landed her plane right into his Texaco gas pumps . . . ”

“I give!” She laughed, holding up both hands. “I admit it. I almost hit your gas pumps.”

He just grinned at her.

She looked down at the pastry. “I thought you said you weren’t very good in the kitchen.”

“I’m not. I change the oil and tune up Cora Miller’s DeSoto and she brings me the best baked goods in the county. Fresh bread, cakes, and pies.”

She took a bite. “This is wonderful.” While she was eating the pie, he reached out and poured more coffee in her cup. He sat there watching her in a way she wished he wouldn’t.

She drank some more coffee, then shifted a little sideways in her chair, and picked up the paper. She tried to read it.

The silence grew more and more awkward, nothing but the sound of the newspaper when one of them turned a page. She quickly downed the rest of her coffee and stood. “Thanks for the great breakfast.” She checked her watch. “I have to get going. It’s late.”

He stood up. His expression said he didn’t want her to go.

She turned and left the room in a hurry. She didn’t want to see the look on his face.

“ALONE AT A TABLE FOR TWO”

Red was leaning against one of the gas pumps when the plane buzzed low over the filling station for the second time, then rocked its wings at him and flew east, off toward Wichita Falls.

He had the sudden urge to run after it. To go out into that field behind the station and just run and run with his arms out to his sides, and maybe some miracle would happen and he would take wing and fly far, far away, away from the ordinary.

It was hot, almost a hundred degrees according to the Oilzum thermometer in the garage. He changed out of his good clothes, back into a clean set of overalls, and as he walked back outside, he stuffed that old red rag into his back pocket.

It was almost ten. Already heat rose from the blacktop in waves, the kind that could boil the breath clean out of your mouth. He stood on that blacktop and could look around him in all four directions. There was nothing but flat
Texas
horizon for more miles than the human eye could see.

He shoved his hands in his deep pockets and went into the garage and began to drain the oil in Reverend Bailey’s pride, a Tudor DeLuxe five-window coupe with mohair interior and dual sun visors.

That evening he went to his sister’s for supper and told her and Louie Lee about the plane landing there and about Charley Morrison.

Nettie listened all through dinner; then she looked at him for a long time over dessert, last summer’s canned peaches and vanilla ice cream that he and Louie Lee had cranked out of the wooden ice cream maker.

She shook her head and said, “You’re just like Mama.”

“Why do you say that?”

“You want out of here so badly, Red. You always have. When the cars and the trucks stopped at the station, you always went on all night about where they were coming from and where they were going. You used to look up in the sky whenever one of those barnstormers flew over, and anyone with half a brain could see that you wanted to fly away. That’s why Daddy took us to see that plane. He knew you were like Mama.”

He stared at the ice cream melting in the bowl. “I’m like Daddy. I like working on cars.”