A Piece of My Heart Page 13

  “You’d think that’d teach you something,” Robard said quietly. “Though I’m afraid nobody ever took me serious in their life.”

  15

  Mr. Lamb sat brooding at the head of a short deal table, scowling at Landrieu through the kitchen door and fingering a glass of whiskey. The screen porch gave directly into a small dark kitchen that smelled like crowder peas boiled in molasses. The colored man was inside frowning at various flickering portholes on a large wood cook stove, exchanging pots and skillets rapidly and keeping an eye on Mr. Lamb, who sat lowering over his whiskey. Farther on the length of the house through a pair of open clear-paned gallery doors was a large pine-floor sitting room with a high hearth fireplace, beside which Mrs. Lamb was seated manipulating the knobs on a big silver radio, staring at the lighted dials as though she were seeing the horizon of a faraway country behind each tiny window.

  Mr. Lamb’s eyes snapped up and a smile cracked on his face. He had put on a red flannel shirt with sleeves that came down over his hands and a hand-painted picture of a mallard duck about to land on each collar point. He had buttoned on a pair of red and yellow striped suspenders and combed his straggly hair wet against his head, so that he looked like the guest of honor at a birthday party.

  The instant impression the old man gave was that he had shrunk to half the size he had seemed an hour before. His face was sunken at the temples and his eyes looked fragile and sallow.

  “Sit down, for God’s sake,” the old man said loudly toward the kitchen. “Bring two more glasses in here, T.V.A.”

  Mrs. Lamb frowned up from her radio knobs and gave them both a disapproving look. She was a big woman with scarlet hair, a large expandable mouth, and dusky skin she accentuated with dark lipstick, which made her look Latin and obstinate. He tried to smile at her through the gallery door, Mrs. Lamb was listening to Eddie Arnold sing “Cattle Call,” and a large queenly smile froze over her big mouth as if she were reliving a moment when the tune had expressed some unexpressible felicity. He wondered vaguely if she wasn’t some old doxy Mr. Lamb had corralled someplace and kept out on the island to amuse him, and for whom he had provided the gigantic radio to help her maintain audio contact with the rest of the world.

  The colored man, who was now wearing a white porter’s tunic with “Illinois Central Railroad” stitched on the pocket and several gold hatches glorifying each cuff, appeared from the kitchen with two cut-glass tumblers, set them on the table, and removed himself out of sight back to the pantry.

  Mr. Lamb picked a quart bottle of Wild Turkey off the floor and set it down decisively in front of Robard. “Mrs. Lamb makes me keep my whiskey under the sink,” he complained, smirking and ducking his head as if anticipating a lick.

  “With the other abrasives,” Mrs. Lamb interjected from the opposite end of the house.

  “She won’t tolerate having it on the table, either,” the old man said, still smirking.

  Robard poured out some whiskey in his glass and set the bottle across the table. He poured a nice line in his own glass and set the bottle on the floor beside Mr. Lamb’s foot.

  “That’s good,” Mr. Lamb said, satisfied with everyone’s glass including his own, which was half full. “I think we ought to all of us get drunk.”

  The colored man snickered in the kitchen.

  “That’s Mark’s only toast,” Mrs. Lamb said. He felt she was aiming her remark directly at him.

  “Ma’am?” he said.

  She smiled at him regally and turned down the radio. “‘Let’s all get drunk’ is the only toast Mark knows.”

  Mr. Lamb’s face brightened. He swiveled around in his chair and gave her the benefit, and took a generous drink of whiskey.

  “Mrs. Lamb is a dear, gentle woman,” the old man said to the two of them, his face red and his little eyes humid with the whiskey. He smacked his lips distastefully as though he’d just drunk piss. “I’ve had her for fifty years, and we’ve never had an argument. I wish she’d come in here,” he said, shouting over his own voice.

  “I wish you’d let me listen to my program,” she said irritably.

  “I’d like you to meet these two gentlemen, Mr. Hewes and Mr. Newel. Mr. Newel is your granddaughter’s spark, ain’t you?” he said.

  “Her friend,” he said, letting the whiskey drain through his throat.

  “Friend, then. He says he’s her friend. Haw. I wish you’d come to be introduced.”

  She glared at her husband and almost simultaneously smiled at him and Robard and turned up her radio to hear the last straining notes of “Cattle Call.”

  “I bought Mrs. Lamb that radio ten Christmases ago,” Mr. Lamb said gloomily, bracketing his hands beside his glass. “We don’t have a phone, and she used to get lonesome with just men around, drinking and telling lies. So I bought her that there we’re all listening to, and now I can’t prise her loose. She’ll start listening to the Memphis police calls in a minute. She hears the god-damnedest things. I don’t know what goes on in Memphis—everybody’s raping and killing and robbing everybody else. I used to know it when Crump was mayor, and none of that went on.”

  “That’s not true,” he said, his throat becoming anesthetized with the whiskey. “It was just good business to keep quiet about

  “The hell it’s not,” Mr. Lamb snapped. “I say it is.” The old man scowled at him and thickened his brows, his spectacles catching light in directions. “What’d you say you was, a lawyer?”

  “Yes sir.”

  “You talk like a goddamned lawyer, don’t he, Hewes?”

  “I don’t know nothing about lawyers,” Robard said, paring his thumb down the ridge of his jaw and staring back coolly.

  “Neither does he,” Mr. Lamb said, and smirked. “He just talks like he does. I used to go to the King Cotton Hotel every October for the Ole Miss and Arkansas game, and there was never a bit of unpleasantry took place. Memphis was a wonderful city, and I’ve been in it more times than you’ve pissed your britches.”

  “May be,” he said.

  “Is he nuts?” the old man said, looking at Robard.

  Robard shook his head uncomprehendingly.

  “Shit,” the old man said. “I don’t need nobody to tell me nothin.” He drank off the last ounce of whiskey and scrutinized the kitchen door. “What the hell, T.V.A. Have you took up your residence in our dinner?”

  “I can’t cook it no faster than the stove,” the Negro replied, and stuck his head around the door sill and gave the old man a hateful look.

  Mr. Lamb picked up the bottle, awarded himself another portion of whiskey, and set the bottle on the floor. “A lawyer.” He snorted as though it put him in mind of a dirty joke.

  “Almost,” he said.

  The old man eyed him belligerently. “Well, almost, what the hell do you know about the law? I’m a stupid old asshole, don’t know nothing about anything. Me and Hewes is just alike. We’re ignorant as two coons.”

  He measured some whiskey, took a breath, and looked Mr. Lamb in the face. “I guess the law has always been a good alternative to strangling everybody’s youngest son,” he said.

  “Any nitwit knows that,” Mr. Lamb snorted. “That’s not the law. That’s Moses, for goddamned sake. If you want to read the Bible, go sit on the privy. I’ve got a copy on the wall with a piece of twine, so you won’t haul it off. I know the Bible, by God.”

  He let another tiny drop of whiskey slide by his tongue and looked placidly into the old man’s face, which seemed to him to have sunk nearer the tabletop, as if the old man were on his knees.

  “What else do you know, moron? You ain’t told me nothin I didn’t already know myself,” the old man said.

  Mrs. Lamb all at once sat around and gave the antenna on her radio a severe twisting. The radio responded by broadcasting a fine, high-pitched crackling noise that sounded like cellophane being crumpled up in somebody’s fist. Two short bursts of an unintelligible male voice were followed by more crackling, and then another man’s v
oice, then more static.

  “Shit!” the old man boomed, gyrating so he could see backward. “Can’t you find something else than that? Isn’t that just the goddamned Clarksdale taxicab?”

  “I’m looking for the police,” she said, unperturbed, frowning at the little lighted dials and twisting a fat chrome knob back and forth without making any noticeable improvement. “They aren’t on the air. I can’t account for it.”

  “I can’t either,” he said, “but I want you to turn it off before I come adjust it my own way.”

  She snapped the radio off and rocked back in her chair and stared impassively at the unlighted box. All there was to hear now was the sound of whatever was frying on the stove and T.V.A. scuffling his feet.

  “All right,” Mr. Lamb said, looming forward again, his eyes red and unsteady. “What else?”

  “The law of inches,” he said. “That has to do with the crime of sodomy.”

  Mr. Lamb’s face became quickly ashen.

  “It states that penile and oral copulation between two men, or between a man and a woman, is absolutely out.” He paid the old man an arrogating look. “But oral copulation between two women is not a crime due to the lack of the penetration of the sexual organ. . . .”

  “That’s all I care to hear about it,” the old man said, rearing up in his chair and pounding his hard little fist on the table, glaring at everything at once. “That’s against nature, by God.”

  “In ancient church law men were stoned to death for doing it,” he said. “But women only got whipped, which is a serious inequity. What’s sauce for the goose, so to say, ought to be good for the gander. I’m sure you agree.”

  “The hell,” the old man fumed. “This is my table, I’ll decide what I agree with. T.V.A., bring in the goddamn food or I’ll come out there and put you in the pan and we’ll all eat better.”

  Landrieu instantly emerged with a crock platter of braised squirrels, several bowls containing new potatoes, peas, and okra, a gravy boat, and an amber pitcher of tea. Mr. Lamb grimly contemplated the food’s arrival as if he were searching out some petty delinquency he could hold everyone but himself responsible for. Mrs. Lamb arrived and sat at the opposite end of the table, while they all stood. Landrieu came back with four glasses of ice, then watched while Mrs. Lamb scrutinized the table and slowly nodded, whereupon Landrieu disappeared promptly back into the kitchen.

  “Where do you come from?” Mrs. Lamb said, redirecting conversation toward Robard.

  He watched Robard with pleasure. Robard set down his fork, allowed himself time to swallow, then sat thinking about some possible answer. Mrs. Lamb smelled like spoiled lilacs.

  “Hewes ain’t a talker,” Mr. Lamb spurted with his mouth filled up with peas and potatoes. “This one is, though,” motioning with his fork.

  “From Cane Hill, Arkansas,” Robard said, and looked around suspiciously.

  “What’d he say,” Mr. Lamb shouted. “This side is my bad ear.” He gave his ear a good whack and turned his working ear toward the conversation.

  “If you wouldn’t pound your ear like that, Mark, you’d hear better,” Mrs. Lamb said.

  “The sound’s out of it,” the old man said, and looked perplexed. “We had a cyclone two years ago, blew off two of Gaspareau’s little shotgun houses. Blowed so hard I had to crawl up under the Willys to keep from blowing away. And when it was over the sound was gone out of this ear.” He pointed at his ear as something he would never fathom.

  “I believe,” Mrs. Lamb said authoritatively, loading peas on her plate, “Mark poked things in his ear all his life until he ruined it. There’s no reason a strong wind should make you deaf.”

  “Unless it does, goddamn it.” Mr. Lamb frowned and clattered his teeth. “You and Newel ought to sit together in church.”

  T.V.A. appeared, collected the whiskey glasses, and carted them away to the kitchen.

  “You know what?” Mr. Lamb said, leaning up over his food.

  “No,” he said, watching the old man seethe.

  “In Arkansas, over there”—Mr. Lamb gestured with his thumb—“to get to be a lawyer, you know what you got to do?”

  “No,” he said, spooning sugar into his tea glass, and watching it sift down among the ice cubes.

  A grin stole over the old man’s rubbery mouth and he pulled closer to the table, as if to enlist a privacy between the two of them. “They make you spend two days in the in-sane asylum before they let you join. Haw haw haw.” The old man’s mouth split open, his face reddened up until his eyes dampened, and he had to take up the edge of his napkin to dry them. “Didn’t you know that?”

  He took a bite of the squirrel and chewed it. “Why do they do that?” he said.

  “Shit!” the old man said. “Cause they figure it’ll do ’em good, I reckon. They must think you all need it or they wouldn’t do it.”

  Mrs. Lamb looked painfully at Mr. Lamb. “The bar examination is given in the lunatics’ asylum in Little Rock,” she said quietly.

  “With all them monkeys outside screamin and ravin like nature intended them to,” Mr. Lamb gloated. “It ought to be a law that every lawyer spends a year in the in-sane asylum before starting, just to be on the safe side. What do you think about that, Newel?”

  “I think it’d be a good idea,” he said. “We’d be able to let some of the sane people out then and start putting the crazy ones in there where they belong.”

  The old man smiled roguishly. “I think me and Newel have finally reached agreement on somethin,” he said, and scrutinized everyone to see if they agreed. “Where’d you say you was from, Hewes?” he said.

  “Arkansas,” Robard said deliberately.

  “Hewes is my trespass man,” Mr. Lamb said to Mrs. Lamb, who promptly regarded Robard skeptically. “He ain’t a murderer, either,” he said. “We found that out.”

  Robard gave Mr. Lamb a rum look.

  “Hewes, now listen here,” Mr. Lamb commenced, leaning back in his chair until the struts popped and the chair gave evidence that it might just fly apart. “All you got to do is get in your jeep and drive the roads that’s on this island. It don’t make no difference which ones you take, or where you start, just so you watch where you’re going and don’t shoot nobody, or let anybody shoot you, or let none of them sons of bitches from over there slip over here and shoot my turkeys. All them roads eventually comes right back here.”

  Robard kept his eyes fastened on his plate, watching everyone out the corners as if he didn’t like taking orders in front of people. “All right,” he said.

  “Though if you can get a clear shot at old Gaspareau you might ought to take it.” Mr. Lamb’s eyes flashed. “Mrs. Lamb would never stop thanking you enough.”

  “That’s fine, Mark,” Mrs. Lamb said. “We all appreciate Mr. Gaspareau’s service.”

  “Mrs. Lamb wouldn’t mind having a short season on Gaspareaus, if the Game and Fish would let her do it.” Mr. Lamb quaked silently.

  He tried to feature what style of vileness Gaspareau might have committed to pass him to the dark end of Mrs. Lamb’s affection. It seemed, though, like almost any one of Gaspareau’s private habits might have antagonized her, though it also seemed like Mr. Lamb could probably match Gaspareau habit for habit.

  “I’ll acquaint you to whoever comes in here with my permission,” Mr. Lamb continued authoritatively, “so you won’t be running them off. Otherwise, if you hear an outboard, go where you hear it, cause it’ll be some of them shitasses slippin in over here to get ’em a turkey without me knowing it. Do you know where the river is?”

  Robard skinnied his eyes until his face looked like a razor. “No,” he said, fingering the haft of his dinner knife.

  “That way,” the old man said loudly, jabbing his left arm toward the back of the house and the other side of the island from where they had come in. “If anybody comes, outside of Gaspareau and one of them murderers of his, they’ll come from the river. That’s where I want you to spend half your
time.”

  “All right,” Robard said.

  Mrs. Lamb finished her plate and rang a tiny table bell, and T.V.A. created a fierce racket getting on his feet and out of the kitchen. He appeared in the doorway, a napkin in his collar and his mouth full of squirrel, some of which was still marooned in the corner of his lip. He gave the table a half-vexed look, though neither Mr. Lamb nor Mrs. Lamb noticed. He picked up Mrs. Lamb’s plate and handed it back inside the kitchen.

  “See them maps?” the old man said, marshaling everyone’s attention toward the wall behind him and leaning arrogantly back into his chair.

  Everyone, excluding Mrs. Lamb, stared dully at two maps nailed to the wall board. One was a grayed-in aerial photo of a giant blurred teardrop mass, with the round lobe of the drop crimped inward. The other was a cartographer’s job, displaying a section of the river opposite the town of Elaine, showing the river running straight as a plumb line past the site of the town, represented by two concentric red circles on the map, but without designating any esker of land or earthwork that might represent the island. The river carried straight by Elaine without a jog one way or the other. The map was drawn by the Army Corps of Engineers, whose little colophon sat at the right-hand lower corner.

  “See anything queer?” the old man snorted.

  Robard cradled his chin in his hand.

  “What about you, smart aleck?” Mr. Lamb said. “You don’t see nothin queer, do you?”

  “Nothing except this island doesn’t exist on the map where the aerial picture shows.”

  The old man looked at him venomously and went on as if he hadn’t heard. “This island ain’t on the goddamned engineers’ map,” he boasted, a rakish smile organizing his old wrinkled face. Mrs. Lamb rose demurely and went off into the sitting room and took a seat by her radio. She sat a moment staring at the fire in the stone fireplace, then switched on the cold tubes. Mr. Lamb looked at her strangely, changed his expression and went on with what he was dying to say. “Them goddamned Army bastards think they’re so smart going around noodling with everything, building a dam in every ditch with an ounce of water in it till you have to ask the sons of bitches for water to take a bath in. Well, I fixed them, by God.” His eyes snapped wildly back between the two of them, waiting for one to ask the question, but nobody said anything. “I was down there on the river one day must’ve been ten years ago, nosing around down there not doing anything in particular, when I seen this couple of big fat does go up over a little knoll and head for the river, and I went in after them cause I wanted to see what it was they was going to do over there. So I commenced running up over the hill—that’s back when I could plant one foot in front of the other one without falling on my face—and right away real quick I heard this boom-boom-boom out where the deers had run. And I hit the goddamned dirt, because you can’t never tell what might be going on over there. And I laid there for a minute or two, and didn’t hear nothing else, no shooting nor yellin nor nothin. And I just kindly eased up the hill there till I could see down to the river, and here was these two jokers in a motorboat about to touch bank. They had the motor hauled up and was poling in on the slack water. One of them was holding two rifles—two of them stubby little Army guns—and the other was poling the boat with a long-handle paddle. Both of them was Army guys, I could see that, because they had uniform jackets on, the ignorant sons of bitches. And of course right there on the bank was them two does, dead as hammers, shot right through the neck, though they had shot one twict. And I could see just exactly what was going on, and quick as they stepped out of the boat and got ahold of a deer each, I come roaring over the hill with my deer rifle, got them both for trespassing, hunting deer from a boat, hunting deer with an unauthorized gun, hunting without a license, shooting illegal deer, shooting another illegal deer, and hunting out of season. I had them sons of bitches dead to it, too, cause they started shitting pickles as quick as I listed off their offenses. Both of them was majors, had their uniforms on, so it might have been a whole long list of other crimes, too, that could’ve been added on to the ones I knew. So I lawed the bastards. I told them they was on their way to jail, and the shitasses turned white as paste and started looking at one another like they was trying to figure some way to appease me, and one of them said was there anything they could do to get me to let them loose without turning them over to the sheriff? And I said, ‘Well, I don’t know.’ Turns out that they were down there from Memphis, doing the float work for drawing up a new map of the river, cause the Corps of Engineers keeps a check on the river since there ain’t no war to keep ’em busy building. And when they asked me if they couldn’t do me some kind of favor to make up for all them crimes they’d committed right in my presence, I said, ‘Hell, yes. You can erase this island off your damn map, and make it hard to find for anybody who ain’t supposed to be looking.’ And those sorry bastards said sure they’d do it, since it didn’t make no difference to a asshole bunch like the Corps of Engineers what went on the map and what got left off, since they’re all so goddamned crooked they have to wind themselves into bed every evening anyway, and half of them are on the take from the state in the first place. So that’s how come we come to be off that map. And that’s how come it ain’t easy to find this place, cause that’s the way I like it. When I come over here I don’t want a bunch of nitwits running all over the place shooting up the country and killing my deer and turkeys and whatever else I got out here.”