State of Grace (12 page)

Father is right. Treatment is of little value except to prolong the illness.

Ruttkin kneels beside me. He has missed great swatches of his face in shaving. He hands me his bottle of 7-Up, trying to be friends. I accept it and tilt the neck deep into my mouth, trying to drool in it as much as possible. I would love to give him a bad disease. Hepatitis would be nice, but I’ve never had it myself, and anyone can see that such a sickness would be outlandish for him. I’m sure he’s very clean, never puts his fingers in his mouth and drinks only beer. His distant end lies smugly on his face. In fifty years, he’ll fall asleep behind the filigreed flamingo on the door of a concrete cottage and be buried two days later. He moves at a comfy pace toward death for he knows that he has time to satisfy his needs. God will send him niggers and the discovery of unnatural acts. Each day as deputy brings its own rewards.

He says, “You don’t have to stay here any longer. I’ll take
you home.” He goes into the men’s room and returns with a square of paper toweling. I hate him so much, I think I am going to be sick. It smells chloroformed.
Cloaca
, my dirty mind says. God only knows where Ruttkin found the toweling. Perhaps he is trying to kill me. I think of my friend, Corinthian Brown. It was only for a moment that I thought he was the black man, taken from the bus. This proves how tired I am, how wearying and confusing this continual watching and seeing and translating become. Corinthian does not travel. He has no pretty clothes. He wears shower clogs and the baggy gray khaki of the world’s inmates. All night he works and he spends the days in the gutted cars of Al Glick’s Junk Yard. He waits for beatings, I think, but no beatings come. Even the terrible Glick does not acknowledge him.

Tourists might notice him and exclaim, but the junk yard is off the highway and there would be no reason for them to be there. When I first saw him, he was sitting in the carcass of an elegant Buick convertible with a burnt-out engine. The Buick’s canvas top was down and Corinthian sat in the sun, eating an apple and reading
Billy Budd
. Yes. He sat in the back seat as though he were being transported somewhere, his arms bare and scruffy in the sun, still as a giant discarded doll. The heat was extraordinary, coming in waves of rubber and battery acid. The sun bounced exotically off the metal and chrome. And no one noticed. Not the terrible behemoth Glick nor Grady who was looking only for a speedometer cable nor the half-breed shepherds who patrolled the junky pasturage. No one but me noticed Corinthian, my friend.

If the deputies have ever seen Corinthian, they have relegated him to the invisible. Corinthian could never be arrested. He would accept punishment gladly but it is not his to receive. You can see how confused I am, to have thought that the drunken victim beaten here was Corinthian.

Ruttkin says, “I’ll take you home. Back to …,” he takes
a piece of paper from his pocket, “…  the sorority house. If you hadn’t of been walking away from the scene of the accident like you was, if you hadn’t have told me …,” he hesitates, looking for the right word, not wanting to be indiscreet, for he likes me now, he pities me and feels friendly, for I have been quiet this night, and then patient and finally crying, all the right things … “that thing, that shaggy-dog story about you not being in the wreck, about you being in another car, I never would of had to bring you here at all. It was suspicious, you know, you leaving your boy friend there and all.”

I don’t know what he’s talking about. He is going to take me home, not back to the trailer, to the mobile home that never moves, but to the sorority house. No one knows about the trailer. No one has seen it except for the hunters tramping after turkey or pigs.

“That’s right,” Ruttkin says, “don’t cry no more.” I am looking at him wonderingly. He is going to take me back to the sorority house. It is incredible. I am going backward, the returning has begun. “C’mon,” he says. And I stand up and step again on the paper bag that I thought held our bottle of wine. I pat my eyes and press my hair against the sides of my head like any girl and follow Ruttkin to the elevator. The picture of the Governor hangs inside. He looks the same as he did before. He has half-mad eyes and a space between his teeth.

We are back in the Ford, traveling across town toward the college campus. Ruttkin turns off the sheriff’s radio. He is off duty. After he drops me off, he is going home. He says, “You know when I was called to the phone back there, after we corrected that problem with the nigger?” I am shivering. The night has turned cold and I can’t find the handle on the door to roll up the window. “You know the time? Well that was the hospital and I’m a new daddy.” He slurs the word hospital. I don’t care. How can words hurt me now?
There are too many goddamn words in this world. As for the hospital, I have never even been inside one.

“It ain’t the first time,” he says, “but it’s like the first time. It’s a boy.” He sets his hand between us on the seat. “I got three boys.” He counts them off on his fingers.

I nod. I would like to ask him if his wife has a problem with caked breasts. I read a cure for it. The cure had something to do with warm pancakes. I think that was what it was, but I may be mistaken so I don’t mention it. I am very hungry. I haven’t eaten in more than twelve hours.

Ruttkin is so proud of himself. Smiling, he shakes his head slowly and chews on his lip. I am bored. I do not even wonder what his wife looks like or how sow-bellied Ruttkin makes love to her, I am so bored. We pass a drive-in movie. An enormous plastic sign on the roadway says

Both of us bend forward to peer at the screen which is momentarily visible. Two women in evening gowns are sitting on a floor throwing letters into a fireplace.

“My wife wanted a little girl,” Ruttkin says, “but I wanted a boy.”

“That’s good,” I say.

“Name of Ronald,” he says. “Already his name is Ronald and he ain’t but half an hour old.”

“Did your wife eat a lot of iodine before she had Ronald?” Ruttkin turns his face toward me and drops his jaw. “Iodine,” he says.

“If she didn’t get enough iodine, Ronald will be a cretin.”

“Oh? Yeah, well,” Ruttkin asks, “where would she be getting this iodine?”

“Fish.” I don’t know why I’ve begun this. If I had the strength, I would punch Ruttkin in the mouth, push him out the door and run over him with his sheriff’s deputy’s car. First and reverse, first and reverse, back and forward. Ironing him.

“Ugh,” he says. “Fish.”

I don’t know why I’ve begun this and try to pretend that I haven’t.

“She may have been eating fish, I don’t know. I work nights and take my meals in town. She should know the right things to do.”

It must be very late. Everything is quiet and there’s very little traffic. The moon is small and high in the sky. On one side of the road is a long deep park and on the other, all-night convenience stores and empty shopping centers. We have almost come to the college. Near here, I remember, is a place that has one million baskets for sale. Another store sells towels and another, sixty-nine different kinds of sandwiches. It does not seem possible that I am being returned to the sorority house, but I realize that it’s my own fault. I want to go back to the trailer and smell the good smell of Grady’s clothes. I would fix the place up for him right away. He’d be pleased. I’d burn the brush that blocks the door, empty the wastebaskets, tidy and clean. I’d let the air come through. I’d wash the blankets and make him a nice breakfast.

Ruttkin is saying, “Iodine is a crazy thing to have to eat.”

I close my eyes and fold my hands across my stomach. I would like to ask him to turn the car around and take me to the trailer, but I can no more ask him this than I can anyone anything. Change is beyond my range. I am in my black and steel diving bell anchored to the bottom of the sea. With
my eyes closed, I can smell the oil heaters burning in distant orange groves. It must be close to freezing. The temperature has fallen by half since Grady and I began tonight. The wind blows coldly in my ear. My throat is sore.

The car slows and turns and stops. I feel that I have to remember all this. I am being kidnapped. I must be able to give instructions to those who will want to come after me. The car moves forward, turns and stops for good. He cuts the engine and opens his door. I do not open my eyes and he does not open my door. I sit in the dark for a moment and then my eyes flap open of their own accord. We are not outside the sorority house but in front of a little store. Everything is bright and clean. Ruttkin walks out with a paper bag.

“This here is milk,” he says, and puts the paper bag in my lap. “When you get to your place, you heat it up and drink some. I seen people in shock before and you don’t want any part of that. You drink this and go to sleep and tomorrow you’ll be all right.” We get back on the highway and almost immediately, off of it again, turning through fancy gates onto a gravel road. It is a small, smug and elegant college.

“He ain’t dead,” Ruttkin snarls, “and you ain’t dead.” He seems to be getting angry again. He accelerates. Gravel spins up from beneath the tires and across the hood.

“You don’t understand,” I say. “I don’t appreciate this.”

“They took the wreck to Glick’s yard. You know where that is? North of town?”

“O.K.,” I say. “Yes.” The milk is cold in my lap. My thighs are cold.

“You’ll probably have to pay the towing fee,” Ruttkin says. “Ten bucks it is.”

He pulls in front of a large stucco house, three stories high. It’s faded pink and heavy with turrets and balconies. A rich man’s nightmare, reeling in space. Once it was a mansion, then a bank, museum, church, rest home and dancing studio.
Descending like Dante’s circles. All gone, all failed. Now, at this moment, it is the sorority house.

Ruttkin watches it with great distaste, watching it as though it might start to move toward him and he will have to shoot it. He is puzzled, he is exasperated. The house seems to float, to sway before us, breathing with the bodies of all the sleeping girls.

I am so tired. I concentrate on pulling up the door handle, pushing my feet over the ledge and onto the ground.

“Take the milk,” Ruttkin insists. Childishly, I treat the carton roughly, knocking it against the door. He doesn’t drive away until I am inside the house.

The main hallway is lined with mirrors. A clock ticks and the old house creaks and pings like a cooling engine. The clock is on a mantel in another room, a white and fading face set between the flailing hoofs of two bronze horses. Poor Durousseau. The horses are rendered in perfect detail, pricks, eyelashes, teeth, and the clock, they say, keeps perfect time. I don’t see this but am remembering it. It is as though I have never left that tocking clock which really I have not been familiar with for very long. Grady had a watch with a black face and numbers and hands that shone in the dark. It might be comforting to some … so many nights I watched the watch on Grady’s wrist. When he moved, it wound itself; while he reached for me in sleep, curling his hand between my legs, it fed off Grady. Yes, a succubus. Even when he removed the watch, the mark was there, a broad band of white that the sun hadn’t touched.

The clock tocks. One can even hear it in the kitchen, where I go immediately. The refrigerator is full of remains—fatted, wilted, jellied and iced. Dishes covered with waxed paper and cinched with a rubber band. I quickly remove some and start spooning the contents into my mouth. The food seems harmless enough and bland. I drink Ruttkin’s quart of milk too even though it would not be irrational of me to dump it
down the sink or commit some terrible crime on it … as a gesture.

But I eat and I drink Ruttkin’s milk, for I’ve been taught it’s a sin to waste the food that prolongs life. What with all the starving bodies, I’ve learned to use everything up.

My radio is in its ordered corner beside my bed but someone has been using it. There’s wax on the plugs. I turn it on right away. There is my old chum, my answer man on “Action Line,” with the voice I’ve left him with. He is saying, “I am sorry, we do not accept solicitations. We only take questions offered in good faith and taste.” I cradle the radio to my cheek. There is nothing for me to think about and I’ll tell you, even when I could, I would never think about those woods we’ve left now. I couldn’t understand them and I couldn’t understand the people and the animals that came into them. When Grady was away at school, I spent hours in utter solitude and didn’t learn a thing. At first I was alarmed, but then I realized that it was what I wanted all the time. My life was slowing down. Nothing was feeding it any more. It was draining like a wound and there was a possibility that soon I might experience true freedom.

Indeed, even now I have hopes that my only opportunities will be those I’ll miss. I want to stall my life like a train on a track, perfectly midway, between what has happened and what is happening. First emission, then omission, that’s the key to life and our success can be measured by the purity and bleakness of the bone of our existence. As someone said,
no one is going to kill you
. No, no one’s going to kill you
or even loathe or love you. Though this is not quite true, for we’re told it has happened to some. Not us certainly but to some, people that we know.

Omit, omit and one day you will be down to a funny, white and quite lifeless seed. I see it as a sort of heart of palm myself. In the groceries, they sell them in tins at outrageous prices. In New York restaurants, I hear, they do the same. Actually the stuff is swamp cabbage, easily hacked from an ugly and useless weed that covers the ground of the South, common as pennies. But we’re all game and gullible as tourists in this life. No one is able to tell us anything. The soul is a heart of palm and living is a messy salad with everything in it being similar but less interesting, less necessary as you proceed. The trick is not ignoring this discovery after you’ve made it.
Do not be a polite guest
.