Story of the Month: The End of the Line

You wouldn’t know it to look at me now, dearie, but I’ve had what they call a checkered past.  I know, I know, nice young girl like yourself wouldn’t be in a dump like this in the middle of the afternoon if it wasn’t raining and blowing so bad outside.  You were right to come in and sit it out.  Can’t keep up like that for long, now can it?  Irish coffee, eh?  That’s a good pick for a day like this.

 

What?  Yeah, I guess you’re right.  It’s not such a bad place.  Only any bar in the middle of the afternoon has a kind of seedy feel to it, you know?  That sour smell, like old stains.  The clammy air.  After dark, bars are more sparkish somehow.

Where you work?  I’m between jobs myself, though being between is beginning to stretch into just being, if you catch my meaning.  I’m getting too old to work regular, anyway.  Waitressing is hard on the legs.  Varicose veins.  My mother had ’em; grandmother, too.  You can’t fight genes.  I do mostly catered affairs now.  It’s a little unreliable, but it suits.

That’s a nice ring you’ve got there.  I never had a rock like that, but I had a husband.  Might still have him, for all I know.  Never did bother to get a divorce.  I would’ve had to find him first.  I think of myself as a widow.  Probably am.  Yes, I’ve got good reason to suspect my husband’s dead.  I had lunch with his murderer once.  I’m sure I did.

 

You heard right.  Murderer.  Won’t hurt to tell you, I suppose, being that it was so long ago and I’ll probably never see you again.  Hell, you don’t even know my name.  It’s Velma.  Ugly, I know.

 

Well, nice of you to say so, but you got to admit it’s old-fashioned.  And country.  My mother was a cracker.

 

A cracker.  You  know—white trash.  That’s what they called us, anyway.  Still do, I guess.  I haven’t been back home in years.  All cracker means from my side of the fence is that we were poor and we lived in a little falling-down house up a dirt road.  Now, what’s trashy about that?  Just because you have nothing doesn’t mean you are nothing.  I know that now.  Of course, when I was a girl, younger than you, I sometimes felt ashamed.  Leastways, I felt I should run away if I got the chance.  Even my mother said that.

Lord, I was pretty then.  I didn’t know how pretty, living like I did with so few other folks around.  I found out fast when I came to the city, though.  I got into modeling right away.  Calendar stuff, you know, but some straight ahead work, too, with that big agency over on Market Street.

 

Yeah, that’s the one.  Fuller figures were the fashion then.  Mine fit the bill, plus I had the face of a schoolgirl.  Men go for that.  They like to think they’re breaking you in.

 

Oh, I wouldn’t leave yet if I was you, honey.  It still looks plenty nasty out there.  One more coffee ought to just do it.  Don’t worry, it’ll let up soon.  Any man would give you a diamond like that will wait.

You know the man I mentioned?  The murderer?  I shouldn’t call him that really; I’ve no proof.  It’s like when people used to call me white trash when they didn’t even know me or what I thought or what I wanted from life.  I don’t want to be one to make assumptions like that.  I’ll just call him my visitor.  That’s all I can be sure of about him.  Anyway, what I was going to say was I sat through a storm with him, too.  And we both came out different at the other end.  Don’t get nervous, though.  You and me, we’re just two ladies passing some time and drying out our shoes.  In a little while, you’ll put on some fresh eyeliner and pick up your briefcase and be out of here home free.  I can see you’re not the impressionable type.

Now me, I was very impressionable in those days.  That’s how I got married.  Charlie was a traveling salesman.  But have no fear, this isn’t going to be one of those farmer’s daughter stories.  He courted me proper.  That is to say, he didn’t paw me or gobble at me like the boys at the high school dances.  He was slick, that Charlie.  Hey, I guess that’s why they call them city slickers.  Never thought of that one before.

Anyway, I say he was slick because he just talked and looked dreamy-like into my eyes until I was the one aching to paw and gobble.  That first kiss, wow!  You young folks today, you don’t know the spice of just kissing.  You get it all mixed up right away with everything else.  Leastways, that’s how it happens in the movies.

 

You’d rather not enlighten me, eh?  That’s okay.  I’m glad to see there’s some modesty left in the world.

You know what Charlie talked about mostly?  Why, the city, that’s what.  The lights of it and the hustle and bustle, the picture shows and people in their finery, the food from all over the world, the noise and heat of it.  When I married Charlie, I thought I’d married the marvelous city he’d spread out before my imagination.  I couldn’t wait to pack my bag.  Only trouble was, Charlie thought he’d married the country.  He was sick of the city.  He bought us a snug little house on the edge of a tiny country town not twenty miles from my home.  He went to the city all week and came to me on weekends.

The weekends were fine, as far as they went.  We spent them in bed mostly.  Charlie could make me feel like the homecoming queen with the whole football team turning handstands to see which one could pleasure me the best.  I spent every Monday putting salve on my sheet burns.

I hope I’m not embarrassing you.  Of course I’m not—you’re a modern girl, it’s written all over you.  That diamond’s not for nothing, now is it?

 

Sorry, didn’t mean to offend.  You’ll let me finish my story, won’t you?  I’d feel unhappy if you didn’t, like if you was to interrupt a condemned man during his last meal.

 

Thanks, I appreciate it.

Well, those weekdays alone when Charlie was away, they were bad.  Boring and lonely.  No one could call me white trash any more, with my new house and store-bought dresses and furniture out of the best catalogs, but the satisfaction in all that wore down quick.  Soon the weekends didn’t seem so grand either.  Charlie didn’t want to talk about the city like he used to.  He wanted to forget the city.  That’s what I was there for, he said.  Roll over and give us a smile, he said.  I’m all you need, he said.  Feel this and this, Velma, and this, he said, and you’ll see I’m all you need.

My body wouldn’t let me nag at Charlie about moving to the city.  My body always went wherever Charlie wanted to take it.  You’re like a cat in heat, he said, and he meant it as a compliment.  But my mind started to wander.  And though my body kept at its work, it wasn’t having so much fun after a while because my mind just wasn’t there.  And you know something?  Charlie never even noticed.  That’s why I couldn’t feel guilty about anything that happened later.

We went on for a year, maybe a little longer.  Then my visitor arrived.  I was reading a magazine one Friday afternoon, and for some reason I got up to look out the window.  It was too early to watch for Charlie, and I wasn’t wishing him home anyway because we’d been arguing so much lately.  But something called me to that window.  I bent apart two slats of the venetian blinds and looked out to the lawn, and there was this man hunkered down behind the hedges next to the garage, like a kid playing hide-and-seek.  That was my favorite game when I was little.  I wonder if kids still play it.  Probably not.  Too busy with video games.

 

No, I wasn’t scared.  It was the boredom, I guess.  Any break in routine was welcome.  And remember, times were safer then, especially out in the sticks.  Or they seemed safer, which is just as good.

 

Do?  Why, I opened the kitchen door and called him in.  This was in February.  It was damn cold out there, and the sky was looking like snow.  And him without a jacket.  Just dungarees and a blue work shirt.  Of course, as soon as he came in, I saw it was a uniform.  The state prison was on the other side of the valley from us, not ten miles away.

 

Naw, I wasn’t scared even then.  He looked so sweet in the face, and he wasn’t more than a boy.  I found out later he was two years younger than me.  My uncle and my brother both spent some time in jail.  My uncle for bootlegging whiskey and my brother for stealing a car, so I knew prisoners could be just regular people that have been unlucky.  I thought my visitor was that kind of prisoner.  I never could come to believe what the sheriff told me later.  Not in my deepest heart.  To this day, I wish that boy well.

 

What’d he say?  Why, not much at first.  There was no need to say he was from the prison; he knew his clothes said it.  He was actually kind of shy.  That’s what set me even more at my ease, I think.  He was so shy and so worried, like a rabbit cornered by a hound, that it made me feel important, like I had that mean old hound on a tight leash and could jerk it away from him and set him free.

I gave him some soup and toast.  We talked about the weather, like strangers do.  The weather, for its part, obliged by giving us something to talk about.  A northeast wind came up, and it commenced to snow those big, wet flakes like you know will go on for hours and mound up into deep drifts.  I told him how me and my brother used to sled down the hill behind our house on trays he’d swiped from the school cafeteria.  He got broody then and mumbled something about his lousy childhood.

I opened a fresh bag of Oreos for him, even though there were still some left at the bottom of another bag.  It was silly, but I wanted to give him something special to make up for his having never gone sledding as a kid.

We sat on in the kitchen eating cookies and watching the snow.  It kept getting darker, but I didn’t turn on a light.  He wouldn’t tell me his name, but he did tell me some more about himself, like how his dad, a pastor, had beat him all the time, both for things he’d done and for things he might have been thinking about doing, just for good measure.  He talked about getting away to some big city where he could fade into the crowd, maybe get a job as a mechanic.  He wondered could I give him a ride.  Two towns over was a bus.  The end of the line.

Now, one of the most countrified things about me was that at that time I still hadn’t learned how to drive.  Plus, Charlie had the car.  But I assured my visitor that I’d get Charlie to take him to the bus.

Let’s get you some clothes, I said, and I took him into the bedroom.  I opened the closet and pulled out one of Charlie’s plaid flannel shirts and a heavy sweater I’d given him for Christmas that he never wore.

The visitor took off his prison shirt and I rolled it in a ball and stuffed it in the wastebasket next to Charlie’s desk.

He had no hair on his chest, which was real different from Charlie, who was almost furry.  Now, I loved the feel of Charlie’s fur moving against my skin, but that boy’s smooth chest set my curiosity to sing.  I saw by his slim hips that Charlie’s pants would never do, so I turned to my dresser and was digging around in a lower drawer of my things to find a loose pair of corduroy slacks I knew were in there somewhere.

 

Yes, you’re right to raise your eyebrows, missy.  That boy come up behind me just as easy as hot butterscotch slides down vanilla ice cream, and before I could even straighten up all the way, he had both his hands full and the rest of him ready for business.

I won’t go into detail because I see you’re looking for the door again, but let me just say that I was surprised but I wasn’t ungrateful.  We didn’t even move away from the dresser for that first one, we were so much of the same mind.  We opened our clothes, and I took him with us both still facing the mirror.  I tell you, it was amazing the changes that washed through my features.  I hardly recognized myself.

 

Sure, Charlie got home.  But not for a couple more hours.   I’d tidied up by then, and we were at the kitchen table again, like two lambs, when Charlie come in.  I gave him a long, wet kiss and pushed my bones against him hard, you know, and I could just feel both men throwing heat at me and each one being embarrassed to do it in front of the other.  Then I served Charlie some soup in the same bowl the visitor used.  Didn’t wash it first, neither.

 

Oh, I told him he was my cousin, down on his luck and needing a ride to the bus.  Wasn’t so far from the truth.  He didn’t say anything about the sweater.  That’s how I knew for sure he hadn’t ever liked it, no matter what he’d said when he opened the box.

I didn’t feel like I was deceiving him, really.  Charlie would never have understood about the prison, not having come from around there.  He had different ideas about law and crime.  He didn’t know what it was to always want and never get and to have your betters decide what little you were good for before you could hardly even talk.  I knew that deep down Charlie didn’t really care to know about such things, so you might say I was following his own wishes.

So, Charlie took him to the bus.  The snow had stopped.  I wanted him to wait ’til morning, but seems like neither of them felt too comfortable with us three spending the night under one roof.  I was nervous on that myself, but I hungered after it all the same.

Like my brother’s old hound who favored coyotes.  Every once in a while he’d go out hunting a bitch, be gone all night, come back in the morning torn up and bloodied.  Still, he’d go out again when the fever struck him.  Romance is like that.

 

That’s right—romance.  I only had but that one my whole life, but one’s all you need to be an expert on it.  There’s nothing neat and sensible about romance.

 

What?  No, never did see him again.  Charlie neither.  When he didn’t get back by the next night, I called the sheriff, mostly to keep on the right side of the law.  Can’t say I missed Charlie much, though that first night alone, I felt mighty scared, jumping at every least sound, and in the country there’s always sounds in the night.

Sheriff figured Charlie had run off on me.  Though he didn’t see, he said, how a man could find complaint with a woman like me by the fireside.  I tried to look flattered and sorrowful at the same time.

The sheriff patted my shoulder and sucked in his breath like he was getting ready to dive underwater.  We got a runaway convict somewhere, he said.  He’s probably well away from this area by now, he said, but I’ll drive by the next few nights just so’s you’ll feel safe.   You leave on the porch light, he said, should you want me to stop in.

I nodded and made a weak little smile, like I was too filled up to talk.  He liked that.  Gave a big, old grin like a man on his way to the Thanksgiving table, and hitched his pants up over his beer gut.  Don’t you worry now, he said on his way to the door, things will work out.

I left town three days later.

 

Well, sure, that’s okay.  I’ll be leaving, myself, in a bit.  Nice talking to you, too.

 

Hey, barkeep, one more glass of port here.

No, I didn’t know her.  She was just looking to come in out of the rain.  You know how it is with strangers.  They can get you going sometimes.

 

“The End of the Line” was published in the journal Women’s Words, Maynard, MA, 1997.