Stormy Weather (2 page)

H
e brought her with him down to the blacksmith shop in Mexia; an abode of men and fire and iron and cars in various stages of disassembly. He backed the Model T into the open shed and called out to the men sitting beside the forge fire and pulled the hand brake.

“I’m just going to see what the boys are up to,” he said. He slapped Jeanine’s arm in a comradely way. “You sit out here in the car and watch for the law. If you see a Texas Ranger, you say, ‘Cheese it, the cops.’”

“I seen that movie,” said Jeanine. “Why do I say cheese it the cops?”

“They don’t like us playing cards. They get into people’s private business.”

The men all went out to the yard behind the shop and cleared a worktable. Cards spun out to each in turn. Jeanine didn’t want to sit in the car. Instead she stood at her father’s elbow and looked at his cards. She listened to him talk in fragments of sentences with a younger man across from him at the worktable; he was talking about selling the
team. Her father said he needed to buy a truck, comes a time when you got to face facts. I’ll save an hour a day not having to throw a harness on them. Cigarette smoke drifted over their heads in gray planes.

“This here fellow is Ross Everett,” he said to her. “You wouldn’t mind if he bought our team, would you? He ain’t but nineteen years old but he says he’s figured out how to feed them.”

Jeanine was nine now, and she knew better than to plead and besides it was not in her nature. She would bargain, try to salvage something, fix things.

“I guess you can,” she said. “But I want Big Man. He can have Maisie and Jeff and Little Man.”

“Pistol, Big Man would be lonely,” her father said. “He’d cry every night, he’d get drawn down.”

The talk drifted to racing, to bloodlines and quarter-mile and eighth-of-a-mile times and what the Cajuns were going to run in Louisiana. They got that mare named Della Moore, they’re coming over to get into Texas racing. One man said he’d never been to Louisiana; he said it just for the record. Another man with his front teeth crossed one over the other said them boys are hot. They turned that stud San Jacinto loose at 350 yards in Eagle Pass and he ate everybody up.

Jeanine lifted her square face and smiled anxiously.

“But, Daddy, didn’t you say Red Nell was the one to beat at 350 yards?”

“What did I tell you?” He looked around at the other men. “What did I tell you. She knows more than Ott Adams.”

The younger man didn’t laugh. He glanced up from his cards at her. She wasn’t supposed to be here. She already knew this, that her father took her places that girls weren’t supposed to go. She turned away and went to poke sticks into the forge fire. There was a pack of old playing cards burning. They were used up, the men had thrown them away, and the queen of clubs dissolved into flame. Maybe he would get so drunk he would forget about selling the team.

After a while she fell asleep in the Model T on top of the groceries; bags of flour and sugar and a jug of kerosene, soup bones and bologna wrapped in brown paper. When she woke up the blacksmith’s shop was silent and dark. She couldn’t hear any voices. Everybody was gone. For a few terrified moments she could not remember what town they were in. Mexia, she thought, we’re in Mexia. She did not know what hour of the night it might be, or what could have happened to her father.

She waited for a while and watched the last gleams from the forge fire run over the walls, the coals were a deep gemlike red and seemed like something you could hold in your hand. A cat came out from behind the quenching vat with a rat in its mouth. Jeanine sat there for a long time and was perfectly still, like a small animal in the face of unknown dangers.

She grasped the lever handle on the passenger door and opened it and stepped down. He had been out in the back. There had been a lot of laughing and talking and drinking but they must have all gone home and possibly her father had gone too and forgotten that he had come in the car and that she was with him. The floor was crusty with hoof shavings and bits of metal. She walked by the last light of the fire toward the back bay doors. She heard a noise beyond the wall, it sounded like something was dying. Long snarling groans.

Jeanine eased herself through the doors. By the remote light of the street gas lamps and a quarter moon she saw a man sitting upright in a kitchen chair with a cane in his hands. He turned his head in her direction.

“Who’s that?” he said. “There is somebody there.”

“Yes,” she said. She kept her eyes on his cane.

“Well, who is it? It’s a child. Who are you?”

“Jeanine,” she said.

“What are you doing here?”

“I’m looking for my dad.”

“Is it dark?” he asked.

Jeanine put her hand to her mouth in confusion. “Is what dark?”

The man was heavy and fat, his shoes were not at all worn but his coat and pants were threadbare. The inhuman noise came from beyond a wooden wall, on the other side of the open space.

“I’m blind,” he said. “I’m just sitting up here all night until people come in to work. In the morning. They forgot me.”

Jeanine said, “They forgot me too.” She saw that his eyes moved and jittered, they were never still. “Do you know what happened to my dad? Jack Stoddard?”

The blind man said, “He’s asleep, honey. He’s passed out. Over there.” His eyes roved and trembled in their sockets and their movement seemed to have nothing to do with where he turned his head or the gesture he made toward the coal storage shed beyond the wall. His eyes seemed to have some secret life of their own.

She slipped past the blind man and took the latch of the shed door in both hands and pulled it open. Her father slept on his back atop several bags of coal. His handsome face was slack, his dark hair sprayed across his forehead, and his shirt stained with coal dust. He sounded like something being slaughtered in a lonesome dirty pit.

She shook his arm and said Daddy several times but he did not wake up. He jerked his arm away from her and thrashed one way and then another on the coal and then started snoring again. She started to cry but crying only made her feel worse. She went back to the blind man.

She said, “Sir, can you help me get him home?”

“I don’t know what I could do to help you.” He cleared his throat. “You should wait until morning and some people will come. George Dillard, he owns this place, he’s the blacksmith. He’ll be here about seven.”

“I have to get him home,” said Jeanine. “My mother will be worried. We don’t have any food or anything. I have to go to school.”

“How old are you?”

“I’m nine. Is there anybody close by that could help me?”

“Well, if you want to go get the town constable.”

“No, I better not.”

She cried noiselessly. Her mother and father were supposed to love each other but they yelled at each other so much, and these things kept happening. Now it was the middle of the night and she was abandoned here in a blacksmith shop with the old Tin Lizzie and the meat going bad in the heat.

“Well,” he said. “Can you drive?”

Jeanine wiped her face on her dress. “Yes,” she said. “Yes, I could drive. Daddy has let me drive. I think I know where we live.”

The blind man leaned on his cane. “Do you know how to work the pedals?”

“Yes. But I don’t know how to start it.”

“Well, I’ll tell you how.” His fingers wandered up and down the cane like white caterpillars in the dark. “Do everything I say.”

Jeanine went over to the old Ford and stood waiting for the blind man to tell her what to do.

“All right, turn on that lever on the tank. That opens the gas line to the engine.”

She turned the tank lever, and when he told her to, she reached into the driver’s side window and pushed up on a left-hand lever. She found the hand brake and skinned her knuckles setting it.

“Your dad ought to be jailed,” he said, “for getting drunk and leaving you in the car. There ought to be a law.”

“Oh no,” said Jeanine. “Don’t tell anybody. I can take him home.”

“Can you see over the dashboard?”

“I can!” she said. “It’s easy, I can see over it good.”

“Turn that coil box key,” he said. “That’s your electrical system.” The fingers of his right hand waved in the air as if they were independent of him or he did not realize he was doing it. “I could take one of them Tin Lizzies apart blind. They won’t let me. I could do it easy.”

Jeanine turned the coil box key, and then he told her shove up on
the lever on the steering wheel that retarded the spark. She turned the key and pressed down with her heel on the starter. The motor purred smoothly, the lights came on and the blind man sat in the beams with a smile on his face. He was illuminated like an actor on a stage.

Jeanine said, “I got to get him in the backseat.”

The blind man followed her voice in a slow shuffle, his feet like small boats sprayed aside bow waves of straw and dirt and coal ash. She tried to wake her father and after a while he wobbled upright.

“Ahhh bullshit,” he said. “Iss juss bullshit.”

The blind man took Jack Stoddard by the ribs and lifted him.

“Guide me,” he said. “Hey, girlie, point me at that car.”

Jeanine took hold of his sleeve and then opened the back passenger-side door and the blind man felt along the rim of the door while he lifted Jack Stoddard through it with surprising strength. She saw her father grope around and claw his way onto the torn upholstery of the rear seat and slump down again saying, “Well what the hell is this? If this isn’t a way to do a fellow.”

Jeanine said, “Thank you, mister. I sure appreciate it.”

The blind man walked back toward his chair with sure steps, in an upright posture with his head drawn back, as if he were afraid something might strike him on the chin and as he came to his chair he put out his open, white hand in an elegant gesture, letting it fall until it touched the chair back.

“Children driving around at night,” he said. “There ain’t words to describe it. He should be arrested.”

Jeanine climbed in the passenger door. She reached down and took up a heavy twenty-five-pound flour sack and somehow got it onto the driver’s seat and sat down on it so she could see over the dash. The world was now full of obstacles and pieces of metal on the ground that would reach up to pierce one of the narrow tires. She stepped on the pedal and fed gas to the engine and released the brake and drove out of the blacksmith’s yard into the midnight town.

The streets were paved with brick and the tires made a flubbering noise passing over them. It was a town in the middle of the night, something she had never seen before. The daytime had receded like a tide and left all the buildings comatose, all the signs that said groceries and mexia drugs and barbershop had nobody to speak to. Jeanine passed by one street after another, looking for the sign that said brick yard road, afraid of waking up somebody who would come and arrest her father. If she could just get home she would be all right. The headlights glared back at her from storefront windows and behind those reflections were town constables and sheriffs looking for a nine-year-old girl driving without a license with a drunk daddy in the backseat.

She came toward the railroad station. A man in a broad western hat stood beside a team of four horses. He was waiting for the train to come and he would load them up and take them away to his ranch. It was Maisie and Jeff and Big Man and Little Man. Her father had sold them that very night. Their pale straw-colored manes and tails were like lifting flax in the midnight glare of the streetlights, they nodded to one another and shifted their enormous feet.

Jeanine felt that her heart was broken but she dared not try to stop and say good-bye to the team. She felt that they were on their way to some good place and were leaving her behind, it was as if she had been deserted by some roadside. She had not yet passed Brick Yard Road. They lived down that red dirt road somewhere in a two-room rent house alongside other rent houses thrown up at the height of the oil boom and now dwindling back into mere lumber.

She gritted her teeth and held on to the wheel; the old car wavered down the street. Maybe there was such a thing as stars in the heavens coming down to guide you somewhere and she knew there wasn’t. A dog darted out at the car and peppered the night with explosive barks as he ran alongside.
Shut up! Shut up!
She leaned out the window and hissed at the dog. For a few moments she felt savage with rage. All her emotions were too big for her.

The man stepped out of the light of the train station and walked into the headlights and so she jammed at the brake with both feet and killed the engine. He walked up to the driver’s side and bent down to look in, his face in the shadow of his hat brim.

“You’re Jack Stoddard’s girl,” he said. “What are you doing driving this car? In the middle of the night?” He glanced at the backseat to see her father lying there snoring, so ugly and wasted.

She said, “Oh, he’ll be all right in the morning!”

“Where do you live?”

She held on to the wheel as if she were afraid he would take it away from her.

“Down Brick Yard Road. Mister, do you know where it is?”