Round Rock - Michelle Huneven [4]
If he’d been boring Miss Bright-Eyed Milkmaid, she didn’t show it. She touched his arm. Her face spewed light. Her eyes urged him on. Had he pounced? He had a vague sense of pulling her to him, scrubbing his beard against her incandescent cheeks, stuffing his tongue into her tiny mouth. Yet he couldn’t say for sure if he was remembering this or just imagining it.
He finished his cigarette, then stood up so fast his eyesight exploded into sparks of wormy light. He put one hand on the bedstead and waited for the air to clear.
Back downstairs, Lewis shook his head at Bobby. “Can’t do it,” he said. He resumed his seat on the ugly plaid couch. He kept thinking there were bugs on him, that a line of ants was crawling up his neck and into his hair, but he couldn’t catch a one. After a while, Bobby came over and said that there was a man who might take Lewis in his halfway house. He was lucky, Bobby said, because normally there was a waiting list for this drunk farm, as he called it, but he’d just found out there were a couple of empty beds. How did that sound to Lewis—a month in the country on a sliding scale?
ABOUT the time Lewis was staggering down the old schoolhouse stairs, Red Ray was trying to coax Frank Jamieson into the cab of his ’46 Ford pickup. Frank was more interested in the sky, which was full of fast-moving horsetail clouds. Frank, it occurred to Red, was looking more and more like Walt Whitman every day: surging gray beard, disheveled, hoary, vaguely vagrant. Unlike Whitman, Frank always had a cigarette in his mouth. Also, Frank never spoke; he hadn’t said a word to anybody in eleven and a half years.
“C’mon, you old sacka corn.” Red had his arm around Frank’s shoulders and was attempting to steer him over to the truck’s open door. “Upsa-daisy, into the cab.”
Frank was too big to move when he didn’t feel like it. Even though Red probably matched him pound for pound—they both weighed in at over 230—Frank had a lower center of gravity and a way of turning his weight into concrete.
“Come on, Franky,” said Red.
Frank raised his right hand, index finger extended, and touched the unlit tip of his cigarette.
“I’ll light the damn thing,” Red said, “if you get in the truck.”
He next tried sitting in the truck as an example to Frank. Closing the driver’s-side door, Red grasped the steering wheel resolutely. “Bus is leaving,” he called, turning the key and gunning the engine. He was parked behind the Blue House, the old Victorian mansion that served as Round Rock’s dormitory. Behind the mansion were orange groves, Washington navels. Plump, ripe, the oranges spun amid dark leaves like spheres of light.
Red lit a Pall Mall for himself, then extended the lighter toward Frank. Frank pointed to the tip of his cigarette.
“Jesus Christ on a crutch,” said Red.
Red used to take Frank with him everywhere—on his morning rounds, to AA meetings, on supply runs, to the Old Bastards Club—but since the farm lost its secretary a few months ago, Red couldn’t take the time. Under the best circumstances, Frank was never what anyone would call Johnny-on-the-spot. Before any outing, he had to be taken to the bathroom, combed, supplied with cigarettes and Life Savers and various other prized items without which he became quite agitated. Red felt bad about neglecting him, but only up to a point, because now, whenever he did try to include him in activities, Frank pulled this kind of stunt, turned into this inert life form.
It wasn’t as if Frank didn’t want to get out and about: he’d run away from the farm twice