Plainsong

  A senior came in and paid for gas. He was a tall blond boy with sunglasses pushed up on the top of his head. She knew him from first-year biology. On his way out he stopped in the doorway, leaning toward her, holding the door open with his hip. Roubideaux, he said.

  She looked at him.

  Want a ride?

  No.

  Just back to school.

  No thank you.

  Why not?

  I don’t want to.

  Hell then. You had your chance.

  He stepped out and the door drew slowly shut behind him. She watched through the plate glass window over the top of the magazine rack as he got into his red car, revved it up and turned out onto the highway, making a little squeal when he shifted gears. Before the hour was up she went back to school.

  After classes that day she departed the building with the other students, descending the front steps in that daily afternoon noise and exhilaration of release. She was alone again, taking the reverse of her morning’s path to school. Turning north up Main, she walked by the boxy houses and under the tall legs of the old water tower, passed a few scattered businesses and along the three blocks of downtown where the stores were crowded together behind their false fronts, starting with the bank behind its tinted windows and the post office beneath its flag.

  When she arrived at the Holt Café on the corner of Second and Main she stepped into the long fair-sized rectangular room. A pair of old men in adjustable caps sat talking and drinking black coffee from thick mugs at one of the tables, and there was a young woman in a print dress drinking tea in one of the booths along the wall. The girl went back to the kitchen and removed her jacket and hung it on a peg in the closet and draped the purse over it and then pulled on a long apron over her shirt and short skirt. The cook, standing at the grill looking at her, was a short heavy man with eyes hooded in his red face. The apron was stained over his thick middle and again at the skirts on both sides where he’d gathered up the apron to wipe his hands.

  I’m going to want me some of them pots pretty quick, he told her. Quick’s you can get em washed.

  She immediately began to clear the two gray industrial sinks, lifting out the stacked dirty pots and pans and setting them on the counters.

  And that fry basket. I put that in there for you too. It needs cleaning.

  You’ll have it in a minute, she said.

  She ran water in the sink and dipped in powdered soap from a box whose top was cut off. Steam began to rise from the swirling suds.

  I didn’t see Janine, the girl said.

  Oh, she’s here someplace. On the phone probably. Out in the office.

  The girl stood over the sink working in the hot soapy water, her hands in rubber gloves. She began to scour the pots left over from the lunch trade. She came in every weekday after school and washed the pots the morning cook had used and also the plates and cups and silverware and platters from the noon hour. The old leather-faced man who came in to wash the breakfast dishes quit at nine. There were always high stacks waiting for her in the sinks and on the counters. She worked through the afternoon until seven, through supper, and had everything clean and finished to that point, when she’d take a plate of food out into the café and sit at the end of the counter talking to Janine or one of the waitresses and afterward she would go home.

  Now, presently, Janine came into the kitchen in a brown pinafore and a white blouse and looked sharply all around and moved up beside the girl and put her arm around her waist.

  Sugar honey. How’s my girl today?

  Okay.

  The short blocky woman drew back to look at her. Well, you don’t sound okay. What’s wrong here?

  Nothing.

  She leaned close. Is it that time of month?

  No.

  Well, you’re not sick, are you?

  The girl shook her head.

  You take it easy anyhow. You just sit and rest when you need to. Rodney can just wait. She looked at the cook. Is he been bothering you? Goddamn you, Rodney. You bothering this girl?

  What are you talking about? the cook said.

  No, the girl said. It’s not him. It’s not anything.

  He better not. You better not, Janine said to him. Then she turned back to the girl. I’ll can his fat ass. She pinched the girl’s hip. And he knows it, she said.

  Oh? he said. And where’d you get another cook in this pissant place?

  Where I got the last one, the woman said and laughed in pleasure. She pinched the girl again. Would you look at his face, she said. I told him something that time.

  Ike and Bobby.

  When they entered their driveway his pickup wasn’t parked in front of the house. They hadn’t expected him to be there but sometimes he came home early. They crossed the porch and went inside the house. In the dining room they stopped next to the table and lifted their faces ceilingward, listening.

  She’s still in bed, Bobby said.

  She might of come down and gone back, Ike said.

  She might not of too.

  She’s going to hear you, Ike said.

  She can’t hear me. She can’t hear anything from up there. She’s asleep.

  You don’t know if she is. She could be awake.

  Then how come she doesn’t come downstairs? Bobby said.

  Maybe she already did. Maybe she went back up. She has to eat sometime.

  Together they looked at the ceiling as if they could see through it into the dark guest room where the shades were drawn down night and day blocking out the light and all the world, as if they could see her lying motionless in the bed as before, alone and withdrawn into her sad thoughts.

  She should eat with us, Bobby said. If she wants to eat she can eat with us next time if she comes downstairs.

  They went out to the kitchen and poured milk into two glasses and got down storebought glazed cookies from the cupboard and stood at the counter eating, standing close to each other, not talking but eating quietly, single-mindedly, until they were finished and then they drank off the remaining milk and set the glasses in the sink and went back outside again.

  They crossed the drive toward the horse lot and opened the plank gate and passed through. In front of the barn the two horses Elko and Easter, one red, one a dark bay, stood dozing in the warm sun. When the horses heard the boys enter the corral they threw their heads up and watched them warily. Go on, Ike called. Get in the barn. The horses began to step sideways, sidling away. The boys spread out to head them. Here now, Ike said. No you don’t. He ran forward.

  The horses broke into a high-stepping trot, tossing their heads, and broke past the boys, flowing stiff-legged along the fence past the barn, and loped across the corral to the back fence where they wheeled again and eyed the boys, watching them with great interest. The boys stopped at the end of the barn.

  I’ll go get them, Ike said.

  You want me to get them this time?

  No. I will.

  Bobby waited opposite where both halves of the door gaped open. Ike turned the horses back toward him, the horses trotting again now, their heads high up, watching the small boy standing wide-legged ahead of them in the corral dirt. Then he began to flap his arms and to shout. Hey! Hey! He looked very small in the open space of the corral. But at the last moment the two horses veered abruptly and clattered over the high doorsill into the barn, one after the other, and settled down immediately in the stalls. The boys followed them.

  It was cool and dark inside, smelling of hay and manure. The horses stamped in the stalls, blowing into the empty grain boxes built into the corners of the mangers. The boys poured oats into each box and then brushed and saddled the horses while they ate. Then they buckled on the bridles and mounted up and rode out along the railroad tracks going to the west away from town.

  Victoria Roubideaux.

  The evening wasn’t cold yet when the girl left the café. But the air was turning sharp, with a fall feeling of loneliness coming. Something unaccountable pending in the ai
r.

  She went out of the downtown, crossing the tracks and on toward home in the growing dark. The big globes had already shuddered on at the street corners, their blue lights shining now in flat pools on the sidewalks and pavement, and at the front of the houses the porch lights had come on, lifted above the closed doors. She turned into the meager street passing the low houses and arrived at her own. The house appeared unnaturally dark and silent.

  She tried the door but it was locked. Mama? she said. She knocked once. Mama?

  She stood up on her toes and peered inside through the narrow window set into the door. There was a faint light toward the back of the house. A single unshaded bulb burning in the little hall between the two bedrooms.

  Mama. Let me in now. Do you hear me?

  She clutched at the doorknob, pulling and twisting it, and she knocked on the window, rattling the hard little pane, but the door stayed locked. Then inside the house the dim hall light went out.

  Mama. Don’t. Please.

  She clung to the door.

  What are you doing? I’m sorry, Mama. Please. Can’t you hear me?

  She rattled the door. She leaned her head against it. The wood felt cold, hard, she felt tired now, all at once worn out. There was something like panic coming.

  Mama. Don’t do this.

  She looked all around. Houses and bare trees. She slid down onto the porch in the cold, lapsing back against the chill boards of the housefront. She seemed to fade away, to drift and wander in a kind of daze of sorrow and disbelief. She sobbed a little. She stared out at the silent trees and the dark street and the houses across the street where people were moving about reasonably in the bright rooms beyond the windows, and she looked up at the movement in the trees when the wind sighed. She sat, staring out, not moving.

  Later she came out of that.

  Okay, Mama, she said. You don’t have to worry. I’m gone.

  Slowly a car went by in the street. The people inside looked at her, a man and a woman, their heads turned in her direction.

  She pushed up from the porch and pulled her thin jacket tighter around her, over her thin body, her girl’s chest, and walked away from the house toward town.

  It was full dark now and it had turned off cold. The streets were almost empty. Once a dog came barking out at her from behind a house and she held out her hand to him. The dog stood back and barked, his mouth shutting and opening as though operated by a spring hinge. Here, she said. He came forward suspiciously and sniffed her hand, but as soon as she moved he began to bark again. Behind them in the house the front lights went on. A man appeared in the door and yelled Goddamn it, you get in here! and the dog turned and trotted toward the house and stopped and barked again and went inside.

  She moved on. She crossed the tracks once more. Ahead at Second Street the traffic light blinked from red to green to yellow, unmindful of the hour, blinking over the black, almost empty pavement. She passed the shadowy stores and looked in the window of the café where the tables were arranged all quiet and neat in rows and the Pepsi light on the back wall shone on the orderly stacks of clean glasses set out ready on the counter. She walked up Main to the highway and crossed it and passed the Gas and Go, the untended fuel pumps and the bright lights overhead, the attendant inside reading a magazine at the counter, and turned at the corner and came to a frame house three blocks from school where she knew Maggie Jones lived.

  She knocked at the door and stood blankly waiting. She was unconscious of any thoughts at all. After some time the yellow porch light came on over her head.

  When Maggie Jones opened the door she was in her bathrobe and her black hair was already disheveled from sleep. Her face looked plainer than it had during the day, less dramatic without makeup, a little puffy. The robe she wore wasn’t fastened or buttoned but had swung open in front when she had unlocked the door, revealing a soft yellow nightgown.

  Victoria? Is that you?

  Mrs. Jones. Could I talk to you? the girl said.

  Well honey, yes. What’s wrong?

  The girl entered the house. They passed through the front room and Maggie took up a throw blanket from the couch and draped it around the girl’s shoulders. Then for an hour they sat at the table in the kitchen in the silence of night, talking and drinking hot tea, while all around them the neighbors slept and breathed in and out and dreamed in their beds.

  The girl sat at the table warming her hands on the tea cup. Gradually she had begun to tell about the boyfriend. About the nights in the backseat of his car parked out on a dirt road five miles north of town where the road stopped at an old fallen-in homestead house, where there was an old gray barn and broken windmill and the few low trees were dark against the dark sky and where the night wind came in through the open car windows smelling of sage and summer grass. And the love then. She told very briefly about that. The scent of him close up, his aftershave, the feel of his hands and the urgency of what they did, then the quiet talking for a little while afterward sometimes. And always afterward, the ride home.

  Yes, Maggie said. But who was he?

  A boy.

  Of course, honey. But who exactly?

  I don’t want to say, the girl said. He’s not going to want it anyhow. He won’t claim it. He’s not that kind.

  What do you mean?

  He’s not the fathering kind.

  But he ought to at least take some responsibility, Maggie said.

  He’s from another town, the girl said. I don’t think you would know him, Mrs. Jones. He’s older. He’s a boy out of school.

  How did you meet him?

  The girl looked around the clean room. Dishes were set to dry in the draining rack on the counter, and there was an assemblage of white enameled cannisters ranged in a neat row under the shining cupboards. She drew up the blanket about her shoulders.

  We met at a dance last summer, she said. I was sitting by the door and he came up and asked me to dance. He was good-looking too. When he came up to me I told him, I don’t even know you. He said, What’s there to know? Well, who are you? I said. What does that matter? he said. That don’t matter. I’m just somebody that’s requesting you to step out on the floor here and take a dance. He talked that way sometimes. So I told him, All right then. Let’s see if you can dance, whoever you are since you won’t tell me your name. I stood up and he took my hand and led me out on the floor. He was even taller than I thought he was. That’s when it started. That’s how.

  Because he was a good dancer, Maggie said.

  Yes. But you don’t understand, the girl said. He was nice. He was nice to me. He would tell me things.

  Would he?

  Yes. He told me things.

  Like what for instance?

  Like once he said I had beautiful eyes. He said my eyes were like black diamonds lit up on a starry night.

  They are, honey.

  But nobody ever told me.

  No, Maggie said. They never do. She looked out through the doorway into the other room. She lifted her tea cup and drank from it and set it down. Go on, she said. Do you want to tell the rest?

  After that I began to meet him in the park, the girl said. That’s where he’d pick me up. Across from the grain elevators. I’d get in his car and we’d go over to Shattuck’s on the highway and get something to eat, a hamburger or something, and then we’d drive around out in the country for an hour with the windows rolled down and we’d talk and he’d say funny things and the radio would be tuned in to Denver, and all the time the night air would be coming in. And afterward, after a while, we’d always drive to that old homestead place and stop. He said it belonged to us.

  But he never came to your house to pick you up?

  No.

  Didn’t you want him to?

  The girl shook her head. Not with Mama there. I told him not to.

  I see, Maggie said. Go on.

  There’s not much more to tell, the girl said. After school started at the end of August we still went out a couple times m
ore. But something happened. I don’t know what. He didn’t say anything. He didn’t give me any warning. He just stopped picking me up. One day he didn’t come for me anymore.

  You don’t know why?

  No.

  Do you know where he is now?

  Not for sure, the girl said. He was talking about going to Denver. He knew somebody in Denver.

  Maggie Jones studied her for a time. The girl looked tired and sad, the blanket wrapped about her shoulders as though she were some survivor of a train wreck or flood, the sad remnant from some disaster that had passed through and done its damage and gone on. Maggie stood up and collected their cups and emptied the remains of tea into the kitchen sink. She stood at the counter looking at the girl.

  But honey, she said, talking a little heatedly now. For God’s sake. Did you not know any better?

  About what?

  Well, did you not use any protection at all?

  Yes, the girl said. He did. But it broke on him a couple of times. At least he said it did. He told me that. Afterward when I got home I used hot salt water. But it didn’t do any good.

  What do you mean you used hot salt water?

  I squirted it inside myself.

  Didn’t that burn?

  Yes.

  I see. And now you want to keep it.

  The girl looked at her quickly, startled.

  Because you don’t have to, Maggie said. I’ll go with you and help you speak to a doctor. If that’s what you want.

  The girl turned away from the table and faced the window. The glass reflected the room back on itself. Beyond were the neighbors’ dark houses.

  I want to keep it, she said, still facing out, speaking softly, steadily.

  You’re certain?

  Yes, she said. She turned back. Her eyes appeared very large and dark, unblinking.

  But if you change your mind.

  I know.

  All right, Maggie said. I think we better get you to bed.

  The girl rose from the kitchen table. Thank you, Mrs. Jones, she said. I want to thank you for being so kind to me. I didn’t know what else I was going to do.