Not yet published. The story is eighth (August) in "A Twilight Reel," a collection-in-progress that chronicles a year in the life of a small Appalachian town called Runion.
Grist for the Mill
"I'll bet you yonder man's part of that Witness Protection Plan the government runs, you know?" Pearl shot a sidelong glance at Nell and Betty as the three sat drinking iced tea on Nell's front porch. "I seen a TV movie on it last night."
"Oh, I watched that too," Nell said. "But I fell asleep before the end."
Pearl put a hand to the ropy flesh at her throat.
"Well, I'll tell you what happened. The crooks found out from an informer where the government hid that Londono fellow. Some of them hit men come to get him and shot the neighborhood up good. But he got away with that school teacher, and at the end they was on the run from the government and the crooks too."
The porch slowly filled with heat, and each woman fanned herself with a different section of the local weekly.
Two houses up and across Mill Street, the subject of their morning's conversation walked stoically back and forth, mowing his yard in the midday heat of a Wednesday in the gut of August.
Pearl sipped her tea and narrowed her eyes.
"I reckon that there fellow must've been some gangster or drug dealer, you know?"
"He don't look like either one to me," Betty said.
The other two looked at her.
"I mean, good Lord, he's almost y'all's age." At forty-two Betty was twenty years younger than either of her friends. "And besides, he don't look like a foreigner, and Sanders don't sound like no big crime name I ever heard of. And if you two weren't afraid to get up close, you'd see he's a nice looking man too." She stopped and took a quick swallow of tea.
Pearl heaved a heavy, impatient sigh and turned her gaze back up the street to where Carl Sanders still mowed.
"Honey, they change the name, you know? What kind of protection would it be if they didn't change the name? His name could be anything. And almost anybody looks American these days." She sloshed the ice in her glass. "Why, Betty, that house was up for sale near two year, and hardly nobody never looked at it." She took another sip of tea and fanned herself harder with the section of The Runion Record that contained the obituaries and the legal notices. "I was ready to buy it so's I could rent it out to somebody nice when all of a sudden like he's moving in. It just strikes me wrong, you know? He oughtn't have been allowed."
"Well," Nell said when Pearl stopped to catch her breath. "The other morning, Ruthie came by to take me to the doctor, and when we crossed the bridge over the Big Laurel, that man was standing there in the fog. Ruthie was driving and didn't notice him much, but there he stood in that leather jacket he wears, with a foot on the railing and smoking a cigarette and staring down at the water." She stopped and reached for the beaded pitcher. "More tea?"
When the glasses were filled again and already sweating in the humidity, all three women sipped and fanned.
"You remember how glad we were the day the Tweeds moved out of that house?" Nell said. "So much yelling and loud music and ball playing. I swear I don't know what gets into people."
"Who'd of thought it then that we'd end up with a hardened criminal in place of that bunch?" Pearl said. "At least with them Tweeds, we never had to worry about a shoot-out giving us all the heart attack in the middle of the night. Why, I believe I'd rather have all that fuss going on than a—"
Betty was about to stand up and scream the Ninth Commandment at Pearl when it suddenly did get quiet. Deathly quiet. As if all sound had gone out of the world.
But then Nell's canary whistled through the open living room window, and slowly the world seemed to come to life again. The sprinklers hissed in the Tiptons' yard next door. A telephone rang at either the Nortons' or the Goforths' house across the street. There was even Pearl's labored breathing.
Betty discovered the mock silence had come when Carl Sanders cut off his mower, and the absence of its roar hushed the two women on the porch with her.
The three watched the shirtless man push the silent mower across the yard, pick up the gas can sitting on the walk, and head for the rear of the house.
Just as he stepped out of sight, the sound of a motor revving made Pearl and Nell and Betty turn to look toward town. A long black sedan pulled out of Back Street and started up Mill. It rolled slowly past Pearl's house and then crawled past Nell's porch. The three women fell open-mouthed-speechless at their own reflections in the darkly tinted windows gliding by. It rolled slowly past the Tiptons' where a quick shot of water from the poorly placed sprinkler danced on its shiny darkness with a sound like a distant toy machine gun. The car swayed toward the left-hand side of the street, slowed when it reached the front of Sanders's property, then inched along the entire length of the chain link fence that separated yard from sidewalk. At the end of the lot, the lightless apparition pulled to the curb and stopped, silently blocking the driveway.
"My God, it's them," Pearl whispered.
Betty heard the whir of a small motor. Then she saw Carl Sanders come around the near back corner of his house with a weed trimmer and begin to clean along the foundation under his bedroom window, working toward the front of the house.
She thought the noise might wake George, who was still sleeping off his graveyard watch at Haywood Milling Company. The bedroom of their house was just across another stretch of chain link fence that separated the two properties, within twenty feet of Carl Sanders and his buzzing weed trimmer. She pictured George's eyes snapping open, his lips immediately bunching and paling with anger, his puffy face reddening. Then she realized the air-conditioner in their bedroom window was set on HIGH, and George wouldn't hear a thing.
She turned her attention back to Carl Sanders and saw that by the time he got to the section under the den he would be in full view of the watchers waiting in that car. She wanted to run to him, screaming and waving her arms. But she sat like Pearl and Nell—frozen.
Just at the moment she dreaded but felt powerless to stop—Carl Sanders trimming serenely under the den window, out in the open and unprotected—the black sedan lurched forward with a squeal of rubber and quickly disappeared around the elbow curve that marked the end of the neighborhood.
* * *
Later, in the sweating darkness, Pearl lay listening for the gunplay she was sure would eventually begin at the old Tweed place and spread here to her room.
Betty'll see one of these nights, she thought.
She suddenly missed Bill, missed the restless heaviness of him that had for almost two decades driven her crazy and made her slap him in his sleep. Whenever she worked herself into tense moments like this, she wished she hadn't run him off all those years ago.
In the living room next door, Nell sat asleep in Don's recliner. She still had her own on the other side of the telephone table, but she felt closer to him in his. The snowy blur of Channel 13 reflected off her glasses, and its dead-air hiss filled the room. Her knitting lay in her lap. The muscles in her neck and legs and fingers twitched from time to time as she dreamed that Don stood on the porch, wearing a leather jacket and banging on the storm door with the butt of a pistol.
One house up and across the street, Betty shuddered and gasped under the weight and thrust of Carl Sanders.
* * *
Betty's husband, George Oakley, worked as the night watchman at Haywood Milling Company, thirty-five miles away in Asheville. He had been with the mill forty years, spending the first fifteen slowly working his way up to the next fifteen that he spent as manager of the eleven-to-seven graveyard shift. Then, ten years ago, cutbacks had to be made, and his shift became the first thing to go. The company offered him a position as night watchman, and, considering his pension there and his prospects elsewhere, he accepted. He was given five roomy uniforms and a gun. As the years passed, constant cleaning kept the gun looking new, but he and the uniforms slowly fell apart.
Betty did what she could for him. She cooked his meals and mended his threadbare uniforms. She replaced all the buttons that popped off as his belly grew big and round with the inactivity of sitting all night, coming home and eating, and going straight to bed. She cooked for him and sewed for him and watched as the belt of his pants, carrying the holster and the heavy gun that as far as she knew had never been fired, sank lower and lower to make room for that belly.
She had been seventeen when she met him. He was thirty-six. She worked that summer in the concession booth at Stackhouse Park. George captained the Southern Missionary Church's softball team. It was 1968, and most of the boys Betty had dreamed of marrying had either married somebody else or gone to Vietnam. George was a live wire on the softball field and everywhere else around the park. He was slim then, slim and tan and handsome, always in jeans and a tight white sleeveless t-shirt.
At some point, he started talking to her between games. Then between innings. Soon he was waving to her from his position at second base and winking at her when he walked up to bat.
She had plans to go to college in the fall, but that summer she fell in love with George and forgot them.
Now he had become a quiet man. The only time she heard much out of him was when he watched sports. With an arsenal of remote controls—one for the VCR, one for the television, and one for the satellite dish—he would lie on the couch in his underwear, watching every sports program he could find, drinking glass after glass of the pineapple juice he thought would help him lose weight. He watched baseball, football, and basketball in season. He watched golf, racing, tennis, and boxing. Every Saturday he watched, between these other sports, countless wrestling shows from all over the world. When his man or his team was winning, George would suddenly bolt upright and say, "Godamighty! Did you see that?" But not to Betty, just to himself. When things went badly for his favorites, he would pick up the heavy wooden magazine rack sitting at the end of his couch and pound it on the floor. "Godamighty damn!" Then he would stomp off to the kitchen for more juice. The only sport he watched in peace, besides golf perhaps, was fishing. Sundays Betty would come home from church and find him up, sleepily watching some country boy's fishing lesson to pass the time until baseball or football or basketball came on.
* * *
She awoke with a start when George was suddenly standing over her. She glanced at his side of the bed. The pillow was empty and smooth with no depression or telltale hairs, and the covers were pulled up as if her solitary sleep were all that had disturbed them. She drew a deep breath and squinted against the early light that fell in lines through the blinds.
This grillwork of brightness and shadow spread across the bed and rose to bend around George's thighs and straining zipper, his pistol and that belly. Beyond the dust-bright shafts George's face hung dark and unreadable.
"Are you home early?" she asked, the words rounded by a yawn and strained by stretching.
"Why, hell no!" George's face bent into the bars of light and came alive with anger. "Godamighty, woman, it's damn eight o'clock already. I need my breakfast and my bed."
"Oh!" Betty threw off the covers and swung her feet quickly to the floor. But then her momentum faltered, and she sat frozen the bed's edge.
She was naked.
The air in the room tensed and locked like a muscle cramping.
She sat with her back toward him, her face in her hands, peeping down through her fingers at her body. Although George didn't say anything, she could feel his angry eyes on her.
"It was so hot last night," she said at last. "Don't you think it was awfully hot?" Answered with silence, she tried to divert his attention. "Oh, George, I am so sorry. I must've stayed up way too late." She jumped to her feet and slung on her robe. "What do you wan—"
"Biscuits and gravy, tenderloin, eggs over well, coffee and pineapple juice."
Two minutes later, she had the coffee perking, juice and a glass waiting on the counter, and tenderloin thawing in the microwave. She stood over her end of the table and mixed flour with butter and milk for the biscuits.
George, already stripped to his underwear, leaned against the frame of the door leading from the kitchen to the living room, now watching Betty work, now watching a satellite sports channel.
She strewed flour over a section of the table top.
"Was everything quiet at the mill last night?" she asked without looking up as she dumped the lump of biscuit dough onto the floured surface.
"Yeah, too quiet, I reckon," he said.
"What do you mean by that?" She looked up at him now but didn't stop working the dough with the rolling pin.
"Something's going on down there." He walked to his end of the table and sat down, leaving the television blaring baseball scores from the night before and the schedule of upcoming games.
Betty finished cutting the biscuits and put them in the oven. She filled two cups with coffee and gave one to George. Then she took the thawed tenderloin from the microwave and dropped it into the waiting frying pan.
The first loud sizzling and popping subsided to a bubbling hiss of hot grease. The yellow and white kitchen began to fill with the blended aroma of coffee, frying tenderloin, and baking biscuits.
She stood quiet and let the food ready itself a little without her help. Staring out the window into the back yard, she wondered if Carl was awake yet. He'd fallen asleep with her, she knew that much. She remembered looking at the clock at a quarter past five, and he was still there, breathing heavily beside her. She'd set the alarm for half past six, but either he turned it off or she didn't hear it. She shuddered, picturing him slipping out the back just as George barged in the front. Suddenly her attention snapped back to the last words George had said.
"Something like what?"
"What?"
"You said, 'Something's going on down there.' Something like what?"
"Oh hell, I don't know. There was just a strange feeling about the place. Offices locked that usually ain't. Lights left on in the storage rooms. Some of the machinery looked like it hadn't been used much yesterday."
"Are there a lot of folks on vacation or something?"
"Damn if I know. I don't see nobody no more except for the cleaners and a few of the early shift boys."
When the tenderloin and biscuits and gravy were ready, Betty fixed George's plate and set it in front of him, refilled his coffee and juice, and told him she was going to dress and go for a walk.
* * *
Forty-five minutes later she returned to the house to find the bedroom door shut and the television still blaring. On the end table beside the couch sat an open box of cereal and half a bowl of yellowed milk. She went into the kitchen and found George's breakfast plate sitting just as she'd served it to him, except that now two raw eggs lay broken in the middle of it. With guilt weighing on her as palpably as Carl's tanned body had in the sweltering middle of the night, she released a tremulous sigh and washed the dishes.
* * *
"I wonder where Betty is," Nell said. "I saw her out walking earlier."
"Well," Pearl said, "if she comes by, I hope she's not near jumpy as she was yesterday."
"Yes, she did seem on edge, didn't she?" Nell sipped her iced tea and nibbled on a saltine cracker. "Actually, I feel a little jittery myself this morning after the way I dreamed last night. Such crazy dreams of Don and guns."
"I tell you, it's that Sanders fellow doing that to us, you know? I thought of Bill last night for the first time in I don't know when. I reckon I just wanted somebody there with me, you know? Just in case something was to happen."
"Oh, imagine how Betty must feel, living right next door to the man. And George always gone or sleeping." She reached and touched Pearl's forearm with the cool dry fingers of her left hand. "Pearl, I think if she doesn't make it over this morning, I'll go over there later and tell her that she can stay the night at my house anytime she wants to."
"I was thinking the same thing." Pearl looked up the street through the slow motion of Nell's newspaper fan. "You seen Sanders today?"
"Oh, that's what I was sitting here trying to remember to tell you," Nell said. "I fell asleep in my chair last night and didn't wake up until a little before six this morning." She quieted her voice and leaned toward Pearl. "Well. I stepped out on the porch to get some of the cool air and pick up the Asheville paper, and I saw that man come out to get his own paper."
"Gets up early, does he?"
"I suppose so, but there was something about seeing him that struck me as mighty odd."
"For heaven's sake, Nell, spit it out."
"Well, when I saw him it was still pretty dark, and he was coming from out back of his place. He walked right up between Betty's house and his. He just had his pants on, but he was carrying his shirt and shoes. Then after he got his paper, he went back in the front door. Don't you think that's odd?"
Pearl took a long sip of tea and didn't answer.
* * *
When the plates and cups and pans were stacked in the drainer and covered with a clean cloth, Betty sat down at the table instead of going across Mill Street to Nell's. She thought she'd better stay home until she felt less shaky. So she sat as still as she could and avoided looking toward her laundry room window and the view it offered of Carl's house.
Under the influence of Pearl's anger and fear, she'd watched him from the day he moved in. She watched for the first morning movements beyond the gossamer curtains of his bedroom. She watched him throw back his head and laugh at the television late at night. He was a tall man, easily over six feet, she guessed. He was not thin, but he carried his weight as if comfortable with it. Not like George, whose heaviness looked abnormal, waddling and suffocating. And George was so pale. Carl worked outdoors a lot, wearing only a baseball cap and cut off jeans. His skin was so deeply tanned she thought his hair was snow white until the day she saw him wearing a white cap and knew his hair was a light gray. He wore one thick gold chain around his neck and no rings.
There was something strange about him, though she could not put her finger on it for a long time. One day she was watching him go from room to room in his house while she stood in the kitchen and talked to Nell on the telephone. They were in the middle of planning for the church bake sale when it hit her. The strange thing about Carl Sanders was that he never talked on the telephone. In the six weeks since he'd moved in, she never heard or saw him say one word to anybody over the telephone. She never heard his telephone ring, even though it had been a hot summer and the windows in both her house and his were open day and night. Knowing how talk with her friends helped fill her life, she was overwhelmed with a sudden sense of how lonely he must be. She could not answer when Nell asked why she was crying.
She shook her head and tried to think of George—of the day they bought this house and the first feast she prepared in it; of visits to Shiloh and Appomattox and Kitty Hawk; of drives to Atlanta once or twice every summer to watch the Braves play a Sunday doubleheader; of Saturday nights at ringside in Asheville, watching Johnny Weaver wrestle; of Friday mornings she remembered when George would come home from the mill and wake her with kisses and caresses and make love to her before he slid his folded paycheck between her breasts and fell asleep. But these few thoughts still held him young—the wiry, smiling softball captain of those summer days in Stackhouse Park.
"What are you going to do now, Betty Boop?" she said and stood up.
The morning's cooking, badly as it turned out, had put her in the mood for more. She'd always loved to cook, and she was good at it. And once she got started, it always took her mind away.
"A feast for one for lunch," she said.
She decided on chicken cordon bleu, scalloped potatoes, fresh green beans, and homemade bread with garlic butter. It would be only for herself, but she would make enough for two. George could have the leftovers if he wanted.
In the garden the dew was quickly drying in the hot morning sun. She passed through the three short rows of late beans, pulling from the vines only those that seemed at that moment perfect and dropping them into the large pockets of her red apron. She stopped every few steps and stood breathing, smelling the dry clodded dirt beneath her feet, the ripe green tangle of the garden, and the fresh clipped grass of Carl's yard.
"Good morning," he called from behind her.
She turned and smiled.
"Good morning, yourself," she said.
"That garden looks awfully healthy for this hot weather," he said.
Their conversation across the fence was as simple and neighborly and innocent as the first time they'd spoken almost three weeks before. That day, too, they'd talked about the garden and the heat. That night, after she'd taken the supper leftovers out to her little compost heap at the end of the bean rows, she left on the light that lit the back of the house. And Carl had knocked on the back door nearly at the same moment George left the driveway on his way to work. They didn't seek her bed that night, nor any night over the next three before the weekend. They sat at opposite ends of the kitchen table and drank coffee and talked until after two o'clock in the morning—not about themselves, but just about the day as some couples do in the evening. It was the next week, after George's Saturday and Sunday on the couch with the television blaring, that her neighbor had come back, had moved his chair around to the corner of the table, had sat at her elbow.
Now, for the first time, he came in daylight, just as she laid two place settings for the feast that had changed from hers to theirs.
"You're sure it's all right?" he said as he set down the pitcher of tea she'd asked him to get from the refrigerator.
"Yes," she said. "It's all right. He has the air conditioner going full blast in there. He doesn't even get up to go to the bathroom." She smiled and sat down in her place. "He has a jar by the bed, and all he does is roll over to the edge to do his business."
"He must be accurate."
Betty laughed.
"No, he's not that accurate, not now nor even when he used the toilet. He picks up the jar and holds it to himself."
Carl seemed to think about that a moment, and then he pulled out the chair at the opposite end of the table and sat down.
They ate.
She heard no knock. Nor did she hear the door open. She didn't know the women were in the house until she heard Nell's "Whoo-oo?" as she and Pearl passed through the living room.
Betty thought she would sputter and choke, wondering, even as she pictured herself doing so, if Carl knew the Heimlich maneuver. But when the two women were suddenly in the kitchen with them, she didn't choke. Her face flushed, but she only wiped her mouth with her napkin and smiled.
"Come to lunch, girls," she said.
"Yes, come to lunch," Carl echoed. He'd risen in the calm quick way an older gentleman automatically rises at the sudden presence of ladies he doesn't know. He stepped toward them and a little to the side. "I think we left enough."
Pearl and Nell, dumb and staring, attempted an open-mouthed retreat, but their rumps jammed in the doorway.
Nell recovered first.
"We weren't expecting—" she started and then stopped.
"No, we just come over—" Pearl followed and then stopped too.
"Come in, come in," Betty said and stood up. "We were just finishing."
The two women still stood wedged in the doorway.
"Pearl Roberts, Nell Freeman," Betty said, walking toward them now, "this is my neighbor, Carl Sanders."
* * *
Pearl and Nell jellied off the front porch and scurried diagonally across Betty's front yard. They stayed close together, almost arm in arm, across the street and onto the sidewalk in front of Nell's house. There they parted without breaking stride or saying a word to each other, but Pearl's telephone began to ring before she'd yet struggled halfway up her front steps.
"Oh, I thought I might die right soon as he shook my hand," Nell said when the other lifted the receiver from its wall cradle in her kitchen.
"He's got something on her," Pearl said. "Don't you think she looked strained in the face?"
They talked for almost two and a half hours, each in a kitchen chair, in kitchens that were only some twenty feet apart. The first few minutes they tried to decide what they might have done differently, what they must do now. Then they settled into reliving their visit, going over every movement and glance and word of the meeting, every shudder of their hearts, every detail of the nearly empty plates and bowls and glasses. Each new angle they took to recount events and observations was ended with "and George sleeping right in the next room" from one or the other of them.
They finally stopped talking and hung up without deciding on anything apart from not calling the Sheriff's Department. Then each moved nervously around her own kitchen, preparing a small supper that could be ready and on a tray before the television in time for Oprah Winfrey, the five o'clock news from Asheville, and the game shows.
* * *
That night after she saw George out the front door and then welcomed Carl in the back, Betty made blackberry waffles.
They'd talked while she cooked, Carl helping in whatever way she would let him, but now they sat side by side at the table, eating and murmuring their sounds of pleasure over the waffles smothered in butter and a pecan praline syrup she'd been given last Christmas by a woman she saw at the beauty shop every Friday morning.
At last Betty got up to refill their coffees. She leaned over his shoulder to pick up his cup and stopped with her hand on the saucer and the coffee pot poised above his head.
"Pearl and Nell think you're some kind of fugitive being hid by the government."
Carl looked up at her, bowed and laughed silently, and looked at her again.
"You aren't, are you?" she said and smiled and poured the coffee.
He cleared his throat and stood up, gathered the dirty dishes from the table and carried them to the sink. He turned on the hot water tap and held his fingers under the stream, waiting. When the water began to warm, he plugged the drain and opened the cabinet under the sink and brought out the golden dish washing liquid.
He could feel her watching his back, could picture how she stood beside the table—an arm crossed over her breasts, the fresh cup of coffee raised halfway to her lips. He could hear what she might say next—"I don't know a thing about you"—so clearly in his mind that he suddenly couldn't be sure that she hadn't actually said it.
He turned off the water.
"I grew up in Chicago," he said and looked at the double reflection of his face in the window above the sink. "Mount Prospect, really. But I spent most of my adult life in Atlanta. That's where Paula was from. I went to Emory and met her there. We eventually got married, even though her parents didn't cotton to her marrying a Yankee. I guess giving them grandchildren would've softened them up, but it was always just the two of us." He slowly wiped at a plate hidden beneath the suds. "We drove through these mountains every autumn for thirty-two years. Runion seemed so quaint and untouched. Atlanta was growing up around our ears. We'd made plans and saved for a move to this area when we finished work." He heard her sit down. "After Paula died, I worked hard for another five years and took early retirement. My parents were long dead already, and because I traveled so much with work, I had no close friends anywhere to speak of. So I came here like we'd planned. That's really all there is to it. Thirty-seven years of work. Thirty-two of marriage. No children. No pets." He fell silent.
Betty crossed to the light switch. She turned it off and came to him at the sink.
He leaned down into her arms. Then he straightened and pulled her to his chest with his wet, sudsy hands.
They stood in the darkness like that and watched his house, waiting for the electric timers to turn off the lamp and the television in his front room.
* * *
When the sports segment of the eleven o'clock news came on at eleven-twenty, Pearl turned off the television and all her lights, picked up her cordless telephone, and stepped onto her porch. She dialed Nell's number and let it ring until her neighbor woke up and answered in a confused voice.
"Turn off your TV and bring your phone out on the porch," Pearl said. "Don't turn the outside light on."
Nell wrapped a shawl around her shoulders and did as she was told, even though she'd been dreaming that dream again and feared meeting Don at the front door with his pistol and his leather jacket.
They stood in the darkness of their porches and watched George lumber across the yard to his car and leave at eleven-twenty-five. They saw the door that he hadn't closed close behind him and then the lights go out in the living room.
Pearl whispered into the receiver.
"The lights are still on in Sanders's front room."
"Betty's kitchen light is on too," Nell whispered.
They each took chairs and watched.
"Pearl?" Nell called across the darkened space of yard between them.
"Quiet!" Pearl hissed and held up her handset, pointing at it with exaggerated motions.
"Pearl?" Nell whispered into her telephone. "What are we doing?"
"We're just watching, you know?" After a moment she added, "Tonight's Matlock got me to suspecting something."
"Oh, I saw that—" Nell started and then suddenly fell silent and looked through the darkness at her friend on the other porch. At last she said into the receiver, "Honestly, Pearl, you don't think—" and stopped again.
"Yeah, I do think," Pearl snapped.
"Oh, Pearl." Nell shook her head and after a few more minutes of sitting in the quiet darkness she said she had to go to the bathroom. She turned off her telephone and went inside her house and didn't come back out.
Pearl kept watch, hardly noticing Nell's defection.
After what seemed a long time, the light in Carl Sanders's front room went dark.
She listened, thinking she might hear something—the jangling rattle of a chain link fence being climbed over, or perhaps the bang of a back screen door slipping out of a desire-shaken hand.
She nodded and roused and nodded again. Dreaming, she rose lightly from the rocking chair and triple-locked her front door and went to bed. But still she sat on her porch in the tepid August night, her cordless telephone in her lap, her hands gripping the arms of the rocker, her fleshy chins stacked upon her breast.
No longer watching. No longer listening. Dreaming that she lay sleeping in her bed. Dreaming that as she lay sleeping in her bed, she dreamed she stood naked in Betty's kitchen before a Carl Sanders that looked like her long gone Bill. But she knew it wasn't Bill. She knew it was the stranger, and it scared her that she wasn't afraid.
No longer watching. No longer listening. Dreaming that she lay sleeping in her bed dreaming herself naked with Carl Sanders in Betty's kitchen, she didn't see the lights of the car that came around the elbow curve and rolled down Mill Street, didn't hear its motor humming clearly in the still and heavy night. She didn't see it stop at the curb and then darken, didn't hear its motor die and the door open and close when the man got out.
But she heard the shot. Or what she thought was a shot. It was hard to tell the way the sharp pop echoed among the Mill Street houses and the near hills and her fleeing dreams. In one motion her chins unfolded from her breast and her eyes saw Betty's house ablaze with light and her hands found the telephone in her lap. She rocked forward and pushed herself up with her right hand as the thumb of her left found the preset 911 button.
* * *
Fifteen minutes later, she stood at the front of the small crowd in Betty's yard and held Nell's hand. She squinted against the lights that glared from the picture window and the open door and from the bulb on the ceiling of the porch. She swayed a little in her weakness and fear and the dizzying swirl of blue and red lights from the two patrol cars and the rescue squad vehicle.
She could see Sheriff Greene, Deputy Boyce, and two paramedics inside. Sheriff and deputy moved in and out of Betty and George's bedroom, in and out of the kitchen. The paramedics stood in the living room and smoked.
She hadn't seen Betty or George. She knew George was in the house because she'd watched him leave for work and now his car sat at the curb behind her.
Nor had she seen Carl Sanders. Except in her mind's eye. She pictured the bedroom spattered with blood, pictured Betty and him lying on the stripped bed, them naked, contorted, bloodied, and still. She pictured George sitting in the kitchen, his elbows on the table, his head held in his hands, his hair fallen over his chubby fingers in thin oily strands. She pictured the gun lying in a plastic freezer bag on the table's other end, its deadly blackness stark against the yellow tabletop. She'd seen it all on television a thousand times.
Deputy Boyce came out of the kitchen, passed the bedroom door, and stepped out to the lip of the porch.
"Where's Betty, Deputy?" Pearl called. "Is she dead?"
The lawman didn't answer.
"Is she dying?" Pearl said. "Is she gone too far to get her off to the hospital?"
"No, she ain't dying, Miss Pearl," Deputy Boyce said. "You calm yourself now. She'll be all right."
Disappointed, Pearl stopped squinting and swaying and imagining. She heaved a heavy sigh.
"Y'all go on home now," the deputy said. "Don't none of you look like you could lose out on any beauty rest."
"What is it?" Jesse Goforth said. "What's happened in there?"
The deputy stood still another moment, as if considering whether or not to answer.
"It's George Oakley," he said and without another word turned and walked back into the house, closing the door behind him.
* * *
Three weeks later, Pearl and Nell sat on Nell's front porch, each with a section of the weekly newspaper opened and spread on her lap, each with the last of the summer's beans piled in the center crease to be strung and broken. Every couple of minutes a handful of bean pieces clattered into the bottom of the metal bucket on the floor between them.
"Betty sure raised up a fine patch of late beans," Pearl said.
"Did you watch Oprah yesterday?" Nell asked.
"I had a mind to, but my nap went long."
"There were two men on the show, and each of them had along their wife and their homosexual lover with them." Nell tossed another handful of broken beans into the bucket and took a sip of tea. "I swear I don't know where they find people like that." She picked up a few beans from her lap and began stringing and breaking them and then stopped. "Do you suppose they hire actors for such shows?"
"I used to wonder," Pearl said. "But I reckon the world is full of more low living than a person can think about, you know?"
This time the long black sedan passed in front of them without their noticing, and the snapping didn't stop until they realized the car had. They looked up and saw it sitting in the driveway of Betty's house.
A young man in a dark suit got out of the passenger side as the trunk popped open. He took out a red, white, and blue sign, attached a smaller white sign to the top of it, and started across the yard. On the other side of the walk that led to the front door, he tamped the sign into the ground with his foot. Then, looking at the house, he returned to the car and got in. The unseen driver backed out of the driveway, and the sedan rolled past them again, its blackness gleaming in the mid-morning sunlight.
The two women on the porch watched until it turned left on Main and disappeared.
The snapping seemed louder when it resumed.
"Them fancy Asheville realtors'll sell Mill Street out from under us before long," Pearl said after a minute.
"It's a nice house," Nell said. "No reason for it to sit there empty." She tossed a handful of broken beans into the bucket. "Betty always was a good housekeeper, at least. And a good cook too, of course."
Pearl said nothing.
"But her cooking was too rich, good as it was. I think that was what brought on George's problems with his weight and his heart."
Pearl still said nothing.
Nell again stopped breaking beans.
"Do you think he caught them?" she said.
"What?"
"Do you think George caught them? Her and that man."
Pearl took a deep breath and blew it out through her nose.
"I reckon he must have, you know?" she said. "Else why was the gun in his hand when his heart give out? He weren't the kind to go and shoot himself on account of the mill tossing him off like they done. Why, he'd have took up residence on that couch with all them gadgets first thing next morning and shuffled Betty off to work at Whitson's Green Grocer or somewhere."
Nell sighed and started breaking beans again.
"I swear I don't know what gets into people."
"Why, Nell, I see what happened to Betty happen to folks on the TV all the time. It's strange as a dream, I'll warrant you, but I reckon I can sort of understand it, you know?"
"Well, I can't now nor ever will." After a few sharp snaps Nell threw another handful of broken beans into the bucket and looked again at the house. "I wonder who'll buy it," she said. "Wouldn't it be something if it was some young couple with a baby? It's been a good while since Mill Street had a baby on it."
Pearl looked past the new red, white, and blue sign in Betty's yard to the matching sign that had been in Carl Sanders's yard since the day of George's funeral.
For several long moments the snapping of the beans and the whistling of Nell's canary were the only sounds.
"I'll declare them signs make me want to get on the stick and buy the old Tweed place there," Pearl said. "I'd still like to rent it out to somebody nice." She dropped a handful of broken beans into the bucket. "Somebody local, you know?"
Michael Cody / PO Box 70279 / Johnson City, TN 37614 / michael.cody@comcast.net / codym@etsu.edu