A Ford in the River. Charles Rose

the sun haze, the simmering, down-home apathy. Mona chain-smoked, pecked at her hash browns, cracked a soft-boiled egg, let the yolks ooze out. A Greyhound brayed on the plum-colored brick. The coffee tasted like bitter lye, as if it had pooled in the nickel urn for a month. Nobody was slurping a cherry Coke. Mona eyed the cashier’s bow tie. She ground her cigarette into egg yolk.

      “Either you get me some chewing gum or I turn you in to the management.”

      Again the carillon, the chimes. I picked up a fork and a butter knife.

      “Hello! Put me through to Roebuck.” The fork pricked my earlobe. The blade of the knife nuzzled my lower lip. “No, you’re not going to put me on hold. I’m a taxpayer. I won’t stand for it. You put me through and I mean now.”

      A fly was buzzing our eggy plates. I brandished the butter knife, shouting. “You tell Roebuck I don’t have a family. I have Mona. Only Mona.”

      Mona was clenching her fists.

      Mona was curling her big toes. Her feet were propped on the footboard. She was staring out the window. She had taken a Valium willingly in the coffee shop after I bribed her with Chiclets. A police car jarred the plum-colored brick. Temper tantrum, I’d thought of signaling. The all too familiar carillon chimed A Mighty Fortress Is Our Lord. All this before noon.

      We had taken a tour of the town, up Main Street to the surrounding hills, down a side street, left, then left again, down Oak Street toward the funeral home. A cedar tree in the front yard, a hearse in the porte cochere. Viewed from Oak, straight on, the funeral home—with its ivied brick, its rambling porch, its mansard roof—should have resembled a harmless domicile, not a giant hen laying a bloody egg. We sat down on the curb, rested awhile. Big daddy, little Mona smoked cigarettes, courted a vagrancy rap. As I discoursed, Mona rubbernecked.

      “Outside of Xenia, Ohio, there is this data bank. In case of sabotage or malfunction its countless records and dossiers can be shunted off to D.C. My divorces, your abortion, all our sins and errors and our slip-ups are on record, mark my words. The day you ran away from home, your first coke hit, on record. My DUI’s, my frantic lust. They have a data bank in Xenia. For the losers who will go first! For the oddballs, the peeping toms, the stewbums over fifty. Baby our days are numbered.”

      A steady stream of traffic flowed past us, like a funeral procession, pickups, sedans, SUV’s, a decrepit coupe. The jingle of loose fan belts, the whickering slap of corroded plugs mingled with boom boxes. Finally, only birds and maple leaves delineated a breeze soft and silent like a balm.

      “Tell all that shit to Roebuck.” Mona stood up, lit a cigarette. She was skywriting big and little R’s with smoke from her cigarette. The Roebuck I knew, eye patch, oblong noggin, remained hidden from me, like the birds I heard in the foliage.

      “Don’t tell me my days are numbered. Yours are. Always have been.”

      Along with E. A’s, Uncle Dell’s, Aunt Flo’s, Cousin Robert’s. Mine too. Me, her husband. Washed up, replaced by Roebuck. Mona’s dove-gray eyes were turned on me, quietly scanning me up and down. For a nanosecond she was beautiful.

      The Chiclets were on the chiffonier, on one side of an Indian club I had sized up as a delusion. I turned to the open window. A hearse was still in the porte cochere. A cigar butt stuck on the driveway. Mona crooked her big toes. She sat up and turned to the satyr, thumbing Chiclets into its penis. I gripped the neck of an insubstantial Indian club, screwing its head into my left ear.

      “Front desk, please. Long distance. I mean long, the Washington Monument.”

      I heard a seething inside my left fist. I lowered the Indian club, replaced it on the chiffonier. A useless instrument, this telephone. I rummaged through Mona’s loaf-shaped makeup kit. Found the Valium, went to the bathroom. The stain on the basin of the sink took on the shape of a fetus. Running water wouldn’t eradicate it—and wouldn’t drown out Mona’s jubilation.

      “Roebuck. Babe, it’s Mona. Yes, I reversed the charges. Okay, I won’t call you again.” The things she was offering him. Exotic patterns of sex, highs I had never dreamed of. My face in the mirror was a guardian’s face, jowled and haggard, obsolete. The muffled chimes were back, the planing of coffins, the hammering. I gulped a Valium, steadied my hands.

      “Him? He’s nothing. He can never be what you are to me. That’s why he’s trying to trick me.”

      Slowly, I turned off the water.

      I’d had a beer in the hotel bar. I’d put in a long-distance call to Mona’s sister in Richmond, Virginia. I told Sally about my little problem here, brake failure, Mona going bonkers. I told Sally Mona had taken a sleeping pill. Sally put Alex on the phone.

      “Eddie you must be on the sauce.”

      “Get over here as soon as you can.”

      “It’s three hundred miles. Are you out of your mind?”

      I hung up on Alex, why not, what good was he to me? I went out to the lobby and sat down in one of the wing chairs and stared out at the street. I thought of Mona asleep up the stairs in room 411. Several sleeping pills had done the job. I remembered how before she had taken the pills, she had craftily eyed her glass of water.

      In the rouge light outside a girl carrying a loaf shaped makeup kit was standing under the neon. She was ambling across the street, toward the arc lights pooling the courthouse square.

      The night clerk opened the register. With a ball-point he scratched out my signature. I got up, trudged toward the exit. I left the hotel, breathed in noxious particles of neon like bug spray. Then sweet night air. Mona, a distant figure now, in the last of the arc lights, was running. I would follow her to the edge of town, catch up, we would hitch a ride to D.C. We would make D.C. by tomorrow night, find a hotel, any hotel. Crawl into a bed like a diving bell, sleep, drift on, sink deeper.

      She was skipping invisible rope in the headlights of a patrol car. One officer picked up her makeup kit. I had to walk away from Spink Hotel, toward the patrol car, its flashing red and blue lights. What I had done before I would do again. Follow her, try to extricate her. See her as somehow recoverable. Or was I the seen, in a tracking shot still unrolling as the red and blue lights glided farther away, the hotel receding behind me, as I clopped over plum-colored bricks—crying Mona come back to me Mona—toward Roebuck, my Roebuck, his oblong noggin swelling, his one good eye drilled into mine.

Harmonica

      Uncle Walton was still on the telephone. Danny Bledsoe would have to wait awhile before he could talk to his uncle about his car. He had come here right after the accident, to his uncle’s paint and body shop. He wouldn’t take the car to the trailer, not with the front end bashed in. His stepfather, Slade Futral, would be there. Slade had started in on the bourbon by now; he was engrossed in “The Price is Right.” The ladies stroking the new car, the washers and dryers, the console TV’s, that was exciting for Slade, not the mangled metal in the front end of Danny’s car.

      “Just bring me one hundred dollars cash. If you haven’t got it, I’ll settle for sixty. No I’m not going to make it forty. I’m not that generous, Danny.”

      Danny fidgeted in the armchair that had been his father’s, trying to make up his mind if he could get his uncle to come down to fifty. His father would sit in it watching football games, the springs creaking as he reached for a beer. Danny missed seeing his father’s boots, on the carpet beside the footstool. His mother had dumped the footstool. Uncle Walton had gotten the armchair when his mother moved into the trailer with Slade. She wanted new things in the trailer. She had an exercise bike, a little present from Slade Futral. You could stand to lose a few pounds, Lorraine, but his mother never used it. And when Lorraine refused to use it today, when Lorraine refused to get slim and trim, Slade put the exercise bike out with the trash. It sat out for anyone to steal. Slade didn’t know Danny had stolen it, taken it away and pawned it. Put money in my pocket, Slade.

      Uncle