Fay: A Novel

  “All right, then,” he said, and he picked up his cigarettes and lighter and put the towel over his shoulder. He started walking back toward the hotel across the hot concrete and she noted that he didn’t even flinch. After he’d taken ten steps he stopped and turned back to her.

  “Well?” he said. “You coming?”

  “Where we going?”

  “Ride around and look for your ragged-ass family awhile before we go back home I reckon. Come on.”

  He turned away and started walking again and she got up slowly to follow him.

  By noon they had been in the El Camino for over two hours, riding and looking, cruising up and down the hot and baking blacktop roads. He’d bought beer and iced it down in a cheap foam cooler and she had started drinking again herself just because she felt so bad. After the talk at the pool she’d been scared to bring it up about the baby and the trip to the doctor. She couldn’t understand how he had known where she’d gone. She guessed she’d thought that with him sitting there drinking he wouldn’t keep track of the time or would be so drunk by the time she got back that he wouldn’t even care or even know how much time had passed.

  They stopped in someplace in a country community north of town and had plate lunches of vegetables and pork chops and she noticed that he paid no attention to the wary stares of field workers and farmers eating their lunches on stools beside them. He’d been quiet most of the morning and he seemed to be able to drink beer all day without it ever having any effect on him.

  Back in the car he took a brief detour into Marshall County and bought some more beer and pickled eggs and put the beer into the cooler and drove back into Lafayette County.

  They cruised roads she’d never seen before, went past cattle farms and fish ponds and farmhouses set back from the road and crossed over rivers and climbed hills where yellow machines gouged the living trees from the earth. They rode past lush hollows of green timber, the road shaded and looking cool, drove past brackish pools of stagnant water where turtles and moccasins sunned themselves on logs and lily pads grew. Sun-browned boys with fishing poles casting into the black water. She couldn’t think of anything to say to him. They saw nothing of her family.

  When finally the sun had gone over in the sky he pulled off on a side road and got out.

  “You need to go to the woods?” he said, just before he opened the door. She nodded that she did and scooted out, walked up the road and stepped away from it and squatted beneath a tree, feeling the heat in the weeds, watching a patch of blue sky through the needles of towering pine.

  When she had finished and walked back, he was standing beside the El Camino, opening a fresh beer. He looked at her for a moment and then turned the can up to his mouth. He took it down and stood watching a field of cotton below them, the straight rows shimmering out there in the heat.

  “Well,” he said. “I reckon we better head back. If you’re ready.”

  “Yeah,” she said, fighting against letting him see the tears she knew could come. “I reckon I’m ready.”

  “You don’t have to go,” he said.

  She studied his face, the bunched arm and the hand that held the beer and stood there knowing how much she liked those hands on her, and how, at times, she believed herself safe in those arms.

  “I can leave you here and drive off,” he said. “I mean you was walking when you found me. You won’t be no worse off, Fay. Hell,” he said, half to himself. “You might even be better.”

  He turned his head to wait for her answer. And she thought about it only for a second because that was the last thing she wanted, to be alone again and walking. That and the devil you know against the one you don’t. She ducked her head, got into the car, closed the door.

  THE CAR THAT was parked behind his cruiser in the yard was an older model Mercedes, a deeply polished gray. It looked as if someone who had loved the car had taken care of it. And Sam wondered if that was him sitting on the steps.

  All he wanted was to go in the house and get a beer out of the icebox. He checked the plates when he pulled past it to park his pickup: Coahoma County. The Delta. Little towns like Friar’s Point and Bobo. Clarksdale too.

  Some older man, a well-dressed man, lounging there with his forearms on his thighs and his hands holding each other and his tanned and dark-haired shins showing above his good socks from where he’d hitched his slacks to sit down and wait. He hoped he wasn’t a salesman. Son of a bitches came around sometimes when you were trying to go fishing or do some yard work and wanted you to stop everything you were doing and let them sell you something and he just flat never had made time for that and hadn’t ever really worried about hurting their feelings over it. It would probably get to where they’d be eventually selling shit over the phone and would worry the hell out of you like that. But maybe by then they’d come up with something that showed who was calling before you ever picked it up. He hoped whoever it was wasn’t anybody who was kin to Alesandra. His hair was as gray as the car, like steel that had been polished not too brightly.

  He stopped the truck out past the cruiser and saw that towel still back there when he got out. From when he’d wiped down Loretta’s seats. And hell she might show back up sometime. Damn. He could hardly see anything but Grayton’s face. And he kept remembering the words over and over again. The bottom of it. Oh yeah.

  He reached for the towel and got it. It was wet but it wasn’t wet enough to have to wring the water from it. He saw the man starting to stand up and he nodded and shook some dirt from the towel, being careful with his hands. He didn’t need this shit right now and wasn’t going to put up with this shit right now whatever it was.

  He folded the towel, kind of, and the man came down from the steps and waited for him, actually kind of blocking his way, not a big man, probably in his early sixties but still solid with muscle and his eyes a dark brown. And he knew then who he was. Alesandra was all in his face, and the way he moved. Gold rings on his fingers, on his veined heavy hands, what looked like a very expensive watch.

  Sam stopped. There was still twenty feet between them. Had she gotten her temper from him? Old Daddy done found him now. His gun was in the house. Just in case anything happened.

  “I’m Rubin Farris,” the man said. “Are you the cop Alesandra was seeing?”

  “Yes. I am. I’m very sorry about Alesandra.”

  “We’ve done buried her,” he said. “I don’t think I saw you there.”

  “I know how you feel,” Sam said.

  Alesandra’s daddy took two steps closer.

  “Don’t you tell me that. Don’t you tell me how I feel. Cause you don’t know a goddamn thing about how I feel.”

  The shade they stood in was dotted with spots of sun through the leaves. It was cool, even.

  “I had a girl that died,” Sam said. “So I know what it feels like.”

  “Oh yeah?” her daddy said, and Sam saw one tear leak out. He was sniffling, too, he could hear it.

  “Well tell me this. Was she fucking some married cop when she died?”

  Sam dropped the towel and took two steps toward him.

  “She was fifteen years old for your information, mister. Now I know you’re upset.”

  “Did you see her dead?”

  “You mean my daughter?”

  “Yes I mean your daughter.”

  He looked at the ground for a bit. He spoke quietly.

  “Yeah I saw her dead. She was dead when I got to her. She was in a wreck.”

  Alesandra’s daddy wiped at his nose and turned sideways a little. He looked at the house.

  “Well,” he said. He started shaking his head. He seemed to be at a loss for words. He tried to say something several times. Finally he turned back around. “It’s a hell of a thing to have to look at. Ain’t it?”

  Sam looked down at his feet for a few moments. Then he looked her daddy in the eye, and it wasn’t hard to do. He’d probably not lived a perfect life either. But the pain that was in there, that was what was
hard to look at. All that anger was still in there behind it, but an unhealable hole that had been torn out of him was gaping and open for the world to see. And Sam had to stand there and listen to him cry. There wasn’t anything he could do. Just hang his head and listen to it. It went on and on and on and finally began to dry up. He went ahead and lit a cigarette and leaned against the trunk of the cruiser. So they’d buried her. He’d known they would have by now. He’d already known that one time but his thoughts now were jumbled sometimes and things would pass in and out without a lot of order some days. He thought his gun was in the house. Hell he didn’t know where it was. In the bedroom maybe. Maybe it was on the coffee table. There was too much to think about these days.

  “I can’t fight too good today,” Sam said, and he held up his hands. “If you want to wait till later it’ll be okay with me. I was married. I did wrong.”

  Alesandra’s daddy closed his eyes for a second only.

  “It’s not that. That’s part of it. She was fifteen?”

  “Yeah. She’d be nineteen now.”

  He’d die and go to hell right here before he said anything about Alesandra shooting at Fay that day because it would hurt her daddy. All done water washed under the bridge and the bridge washed out too. Too much old shit to worry about and the only thing to worry about was just getting through with everything whatever it amounted to and just get on the road and go look for her, I’m headed to Biloxi, that’s what she’d said first time he ever laid eyes on her.

  “They told me about your wife,” Mr. Farris said. “I’ve got a new wife now. She’s young. I traded in my old wife for her. That’s what Alesandra said. They never did get along. Alesandra was already grown. She was already wild. She was wild when she was sixteen.”

  “You want to come in?” Sam said.

  “You’ve lost three people close to you. I’ve only lost one. They had your picture in the paper. From the fire.”

  “I didn’t see it,” Sam said. “I didn’t want to.”

  The birds were calling out there in the trees. He could hear something going down the road out by the highway.

  “Are you in trouble over all this? Are you going to lose your job over it?”

  Sam walked a little closer. He took a drag on his cigarette and blew the smoke out.

  “I don’t know, Mr. Farris. I don’t know what’s going to happen now.”

  “Would you tell me something if I asked you?”

  “Yessir. I guess. If I could.”

  “Would you be honest with me, though? Would you tell me the truth?”

  “Yessir. Yes. I will.”

  “She wasn’t a bad girl, was she? I know she ran around and drank. But she wasn’t mean, was she? She never did hurt anybody or try to hurt anybody, did she?”

  “No sir,” he said, and something got thick in his throat. “She wasn’t a bad girl. She didn’t hurt anybody that I know of. And I’m awful sorry that she’s dead. It’s hard to talk about this with you.”

  He waited a few moments.

  “You could come in if you want to. I could fix you a cup of coffee or something. I was just about to have a beer. I had to go see my boss this morning.”

  “I’ve got to get on,” he said, and he looked at his watch. “I’ve got business in New York this afternoon.” He turned as if he were going to leave. “You can’t stop living unless you just do it all at once.”

  Sam didn’t have an answer for that. He watched him walk around the back of the shiny car and stop by the trunk. He flicked at something on the paint with one finger, then looked at his finger.

  “I came over here to try to knock the hell out of you. Or make you tell me who could have killed her. It just don’t make sense, you know?”

  “Yeah. I know.”

  “And the cops won’t tell you anything. Just found in a boat dead. Shot in the face two times. But you couldn’t tell it on her in the casket.”

  Sam took a few more steps toward the house.

  “You want to come in?”

  Her daddy walked on around the rear fender and up to the door and stopped there. He put his fingers on the handle. Just about to pull on it and go on. Get on to whatever he had that was so damn important he had to take care of so far away.

  “I heard there was some business about a girl. Another girl. A younger girl.”

  “Sounds like you’ve been talking to some people.”

  “I’ve talked to everybody I can. I’m going to talk to everybody I can. All the way up to the governor if that’s what it takes to find out who killed my baby. Wouldn’t you?”

  “I guess so,” Sam said.

  “You should, too,” he said, and opened the door. “If she meant anything to you at all. She did mean something to you, didn’t she?”

  Sam didn’t say anything.

  “Well didn’t she?”

  “Yes. She did.”

  There was more he wanted to say. It was easy to see that he was a man who was used to being listened to.

  “I hope so. I hope you didn’t get her killed over something you were doing. Because it’s going to come out whatever it is. And if it does, and I hear about it …”

  Sam flipped his cigarette butt away and walked on closer to the house, and stopped when he was right across the car from him.

  “There’s no need in threatening me, Mr. Farris. There ain’t a damn thing you can scare me with. You ain’t got a damn thing. Nothing.”

  And in a way that was a relief itself. There was nobody who was going to stop him from going on in the house and getting a cold beer out of the icebox. That was going to be such a small and uncomplicated thing, a thing that would feel a little good. The only thing that mattered was to find Fay.

  Her daddy must have seen that what he said was true. He got in the car and shut the door and started the engine. He slipped on some Ray-Bans and glanced up.

  “I just wish I knew what happened,” he said. “Even knowing my daughter was going to bed with a married state trooper is not as bad as not knowing that.”

  He turned the wheel and his head and backed up, then made a neat turnaround and pulled out of there, winding up through the pines on the other side of the growing grass on the sides of the drive. Sam watched the gray paint until it was up the hill and gone. He stood there until he heard nothing else.

  He looked up. It was getting hotter now and inside the house it would be cool. He’d just go in there and get him a beer. That was all he had to do. He could have another one after that if he needed it. He went up the steps, knowing that son of a bitch McCollum had told him where he lived. He was like a goddamn pit bull, he wasn’t going to stop. And by God he might be made to. He could be. If he had to be.

  And then all that fell away from him. He was sorry for his mistakes but he was tired of being sorry for them. He didn’t want but one thing. Besides that cold beer.

  HE DROVE FAST and didn’t speak much to her. It seemed to her that whatever good thing they might have once had a chance at having was fading away in a hurry. She stayed on her side of the seat and after a while it was as if she wasn’t even in there at all. She had decided that tonight she would leave, would lie awake until he slept or went somewhere or did something, and she would pack her suitcase and leave walking again, try to head back north. She could have been away from him already. All she would have had to do was just walk away from the Holiday Inn and keep walking. Even if she hadn’t caught a ride, in a night’s time she could have walked back to Sam’s, curled up on his steps, waited for him to come in. But that wasn’t what she’d done and now she was in the Chevy with him again and each minute that passed just put more and more miles between them.

  At first the radio station had been clear and strong, but as they went deeper south it had started to fade and she had messed with the knob, trying to retune it to something else, but after a few minutes of whining and squealing from the radio he had reached over and snapped it off.

  She knew she’d never see her family again now. The
y had gone on somewhere, to some other place on down the road, and there was no telling where that place was. Maybe it was just as well. There probably wasn’t anything she could do for them and she knew there was nothing that they could do for her. But still she felt the loss of them. And now she would always wonder whatever had become of them.

  Sam would have understood and she would have been able to talk to him about it, if he’d been the one who had driven her out there to see that empty place. This man just kept his eyes straight ahead and watched the road, sipped at his beer, lit one cigarette after another, drove in silence. She didn’t know what she’d done that pissed him off so bad.

  They had been driving for over an hour now, and she was going to have to go to the bathroom again before long. She started watching the roadside signs that told the distance to towns on ahead. There were always gas stations at those turnoffs. They always had bathrooms. She didn’t want to make him any madder, but when the time came she’d have to say something.

  She thought about trying to be nice to him, see if she could get him to soften up. But glancing at him sideways she didn’t like the look on his face and was reluctant to say anything.

  The traffic wasn’t bad along this stretch of the highway and Aaron passed everything he came up behind. Once in a great while she saw state troopers across the median, going the other way, but if he gave any notice to them he didn’t show it by letting off the gas any. She wondered what his hurry was. Right before they’d left the hotel she had come out of the bathroom and had seen him on the phone, but she couldn’t tell who he was talking to and he had ended his conversation quickly.

  A blue sign advertised a roadside rest stop up ahead but on the bottom of the sign were the words NO RESTROOMS.

  After a few more miles they passed the rest stop and she could see a lot of trucks and cars pulled over. When they got to the other end of it, trucks were entering the highway, and Aaron had to move over for them. She glanced over at the speedometer. He was doing nearly eighty and she knew the pistol was back under the seat and wondered what he’d do if some cop pulled him over for speeding. She knew they could search cars if they had a reason to. Sam had told her that much. He’d told her a lot of things, and one of them was that it was illegal to have a gun hidden in your vehicle. He’d said that was called carrying a concealed weapon. He’d said you could get sent to the pen for that.