Time Done Been Won't Be No More Read online

  The telephone rang.

  Don’t, she whispered urgently.

  He reached for the phone and she grasped his arm and he jerked it away and the phone tipped off the nightstand. The ringing stopped and he could hear a tinny mechanical voice shrieking at him from the floor. Beth was laughing and wrestling him away from the phone and when he finally had the receiver against his ear he was still inside her and she began to move again.

  Hello?

  I’ve got to have some help over here.

  He didn’t say anything for a time. He listened to the disembodied wheeze of her breathing, the faint pumping of her ruined lungs.

  All right, he said. I’m coming. He laid the phone down.

  Beth was laughing helplessly. She collapsed against his chest, he could feel her taut nipples against his skin, they seemed to burn him. Her hair was all in her face, it smelled of flowers. Me too, she said and went into another burst of laughter. She was moving harder against him. He could feel himself inside her rigid and enormous, feel the slap of her flesh against his own. She had stopped laughing. I dare you to just take it out and go, she said. She rose above him light and graceful as smoke and he could feel her knees clamping his ribcage as if she were riding him, some succubus of the night riding him blind and fulltilt into the dark unknown, face in the wind and yellow hair strung out behind her. When she came she fell against him slack and boneless and he could feel her tiny teeth and her hot breath against his throat like a beast’s.

  The coffin was dark rosewood, an intricate pattern of flowers and vines carved or pressed into it and he couldn’t help thinking it was what she would have grudgingly admitted was a fine piece of furniture. The woman within it on the satin pillow looked miraculously younger, no more than middleaged. As if death had peeled away the years like layers of dead skin. Her cares had fled and the skin relaxed and smoothed itself and her face had regained the primness of the longago schoolteacher. Most of all she just looked not there, absolutely gone, profoundly beyond any cruelty he might do her now or any kindness. From the hard oaken mourner’s bench he watched this face and there were things he might have said to her had things been different but he willed himself to turn to stone inside.

  When the preacher hushed they seemed to be at some pause in the procession of things: he didn’t know what was expected of him but everything seemed preordained, dictated by ceremony. An attendant arose and closed the casket with an air of finality. He withdrew from his pocket a tool and began to tighten the screws that secured the lid. Wildman watched. It seemed to be an ordinary allen wrench. So arcane a use for so mundane a tool. Had its inventor had this purpose in mind? The pallbearers had arisen and taken their stations.

  Following the casket down the aisle of the church Beth circled his waist with an arm as if she’d steady him in his grief and he was struck with a hot flash of annoyance. Did she think he’d fall prostrate and helpless, did she think he’d fly apart like a twodollar clock into a mass of springs and hands awry and useless unsequenced numbers?

  They wound through the gravestones of older residents in this curious neighborhood of the dead toward the summit where raw earth waited. He felt tight and empty inside, his head airy and weightless, he felt as if he might go sailing up into the high thin cirrus. Folding chairs were set about and the green tent awning flapped in a sudden hot gust of summer wind.

  He was working that summer with a construction crew laying bricks, work he’d done in his youth. Money seemed always short and the pay was good here and it supplemented his freelance income. He was five scaffolds up helping place walkboards and Rojo was taking a bucket of mortar off the winch. Rojo said, I’ve got to have some help over here.

  This so startled Wildman that he stepped backward reflexively and there was nowhere to step save space. His heel caught a scaffold brace and tripped him and he was going headfirst and backward down the scaffolding. He grabbed at a brace whipping past but all it did was slow him, wrench his shoulder, half turn him in the air. He slammed into a sheet of plywood that capsized in a shower of dust and dried mortar and splintered brick. The plywood rebounded him onto the ground then slammed down onto him.

  It had all happened in an instant but already he could hear voices, excited cries, running footsteps. He seemed to be slipping toward unconsciousness, black waters lapped at him. Man overboard, Wildman thought. Throw me one of them life preservers.

  He opened his eyes. His vision was blurred. Somewhere some small critical adjustment was made, things came into focus. Colors weren’t right though, everything seemed a dark muddy brown. The first thing he saw was a steeltoed workboot, the side serrated by a jagged sawcut.

  He wiped blood off his forehead. Knifeblades of pain pierced his chest. There was a cut inside his mouth and he spat blood.

  This flying shit is harder than it looks, he said.

  Rojo drove him to the apartment building in a company pickup. Head bandaged, ribs tightly bound with some kind of swathing. He was beginning to hurt all over and the pills hadn’t taken effect. He got out of the truck with some difficulty. He slammed the door and turned and Beth was standing on the wroughtiron stairway.

  Good God, Buddy, she said. What happened to you?

  He tried to fly off, Rojo told her. He was long on ambition but short on persistence. Just flopped his arms a time or two and give up and fell like a rock.

  Good God, she said again. Her face in the white weight of the sun was flat and unreadable.

  I’m all right, I’m all right, Wildman said.

  You don’t look so all right.

  He’s just bunged up some, Rojo said. They x-rayed everything he’s got and none of it’s busted. Ribs stove in a little. He’ll be all right in a day or two. Ain’t everybody can fall five scaffolds and not break nothing.

  Beth had descended the stairway and she was helping Wildman onto the first steps. Hands of gentle solicitude.

  You make it all right? Rojo called.

  I’m all right, Wildman said. He wished he could think of something else to say. Everything he said sounded dull and halfwitted.

  Halfway to the second floor there was a landing.

  You want to sit down here and rest? I’ll bring you a glass of iced tea.

  He didn’t want to say how all right he was. I’m just a little dizzy is all, he said.

  Rest a minute.

  Oh hell. Come on, I’m all right.

  He drank the iced tea on the couch. She sat across from him in an armchair waiting as if an explanation or at least an elaboration of what had happened might be forthcoming but none was. He held the cold glass against his forehead. He closed his eyes. The room seemed to be tilting on an axis, everything poised at the point of sliding across the floor and slamming against the walls.

  What made you fall?

  He opened his eyes. The highvoltage pain pills seemed to be kicking in. She was moving away from him at the speed of light, the chair telescoping backward toward the receding wall. He tried to concentrate.

  Gravity, he finally said.

  When he awoke it was night. He wasn’t on the couch anymore. He was in bed without knowing how he got there and she was reading on a chair by the wall sconce. He watched her. She read on, oblivious to his scrutiny. You won’t keep her, a friend named Avery had told him. You can’t keep her at home. She’s used to being on the wing. One day she’ll be a high fly in the tall weeds and that’ll be all she wrote. Avery had wanted her himself, however, and this could hardly be considered an objective appraisal of the situation. Wildman had caught her on the rebound so quickly it made him dizzy, she had seemed to come with the thousanddollar story, the contract, the new agent, the dreams about the novel.

  She had been with him three years but he had had to work full time at keeping her. He began to think of her as some piece of expensive and highpowered machinery he had bought on time. Some luxurious automobile loaded with options and coated with twenty coats of lacquer but the payments were eating him alive, the payments were enor
mous with a balloon at the end and he had begun to think he couldn’t keep them current. He hadn’t been trying as hard lately, he’d been slacking off, and the threat of repossession hung over his head like a guillotine on a frayed rope. Long a student of nuance he had noticed a difference in her body language when other men glanced at her, a speculative look of distance in her eyes when she studied him. He caught her appraising herself critically in a mirror as if she were evaluating herself, looking for microscopic signs of wear and tear.

  After a while she seemed to feel the cool weight of his eyes and she looked up. She closed the book and laid it aside.

  How do you feel?

  Like death warmed over, he said. My ribs hurt. I can’t take a deep breath. I can’t even breathe God’s own air like everybody else.

  What?

  Nothing.

  You’re acting awfully strange lately.

  Strange in what way?

  Strange in a lot of ways. Half the time you act as if you’re not even here. You don’t talk to me. You talk but it’s like little things you say for your own amusement. You’re off in a little world of your own. You used to act like this sometimes when you were writing but you’re not writing. I don’t understand you anymore.

  I don’t know, he said.

  You don’t know what?

  I don’t know what you’re talking about. I apologize for all my shortcomings. My ribs do hurt though.

  You want to go out and eat? It’s early yet.

  No. I don’t feel like it and anyway I’m not hungry.

  Go back to sleep then, she said. She took up the book and opened it. She sat as if she was reading but he didn’t think she was. He closed his eyes.

  After a while he opened them and she was watching him. This shit is beginning to get on my nerves, she said.

  I don’t know that I’m crazy about it myself, Wildman said.

  The next morning he sat on the sunlit balcony wearing dark glasses and watching the comings and goings of the apartment building. Across the parking lot a yellow moving van was backed up to an apartment and two men were wrestling an enormous green sofa into its belly. Folks brought out boxes, cartons, a woman carried a lamp.

  So many comings and goings, folks moving in, folks moving out. There seemed little permanence left to the world. Families split and regrouped. People threw up their hands and carried their lives back to ground zero and began again. People were perpetually changing jobs, changing partners, changing lives.

  His head throbbed dully. He chewed two Excedrin and swallowed them, hot sour aftertaste in the back of his mouth. The rental van pulled onto the highway, headed toward the interstate. Log trucks passed in a blue haze of diesel smoke, concrete trucks, mixer spinning slowly. They were cutting all the timber, paving the world with concrete.

  Beth, he called.

  She came to the door and halfopened it, he could see her, warpedlooking through the glass.

  What is it?

  You want to drive out to the farm?

  The farm? What on earth for?

  Just to look around a little. Anyway it’s mine now. Ours.

  Ours? You can have my part of it. That place gives me the shivers. Like something walking over my grave.

  All it needs is a little work.

  All it needs is a hold dug beside it and a bulldozer to push it off in the hole and somebody to throw in the dirt. That’s what it needs.

  Well. Such as it is it’s mine. I thought I might clean up a little. Pack up some of her things. I don’t know what I’m going to do with all that stuff.

  Dig a bigger hole, Beth said.

  I need to pick up some magazines anyhow. Is there anything I can get for you?

  Nothing you can find in a 7-11, she said. She paused. He was halfway down the wroughtiron stairway when she said, You’re even beginning to look like her.

  He didn’t turn.

  Buddy, she called.

  He halted. What?

  She was silent a time. Nothing, she finally said. He went on.

  He sat in a welter of cardboard cartons and strewn memorabilia. It was hopeless. There was just so much of it. The room seemed time’s attic, its dump heap. Finally he gave up. The old woman saturated the very walls, her spirit was not going to be exorcised by a few cardboard boxes, she was not going to be dispossessed.

  She had seemed intent on absorbing him, secreting some sort of subtle chemical that was digesting him, making him part of her. Eating him alive. Every move he made came under her critical scrutiny.

  That Luna girl is no good for you, she had told him once in his junior year.

  Well. I think she is. That’s for me to decide.

  I knew her whole family. There wasn’t anything to any of them. None of them ever amounted to a hill of beans. She’s in some of my classes. She lets the boys look up her dress.

  He hadn’t known what to say to that and so had said nothing at all. He figured it’d all blow over. But she had gone over there. She had a talk with Mrs. Luna and the next time he had gone calling he was left cooling his heels on the porch fifteen minutes before Mrs. Luna even opened the door and he was turned away with polite and distant firmness.

  Lynell had never spoken to him again but he had seen her whispering once to another girl and both of them were looking at him and he wondered what was being said. He never found out what his grandmother and Mrs. Luna had discussed and on some level he didn’t want to know.

  And yet.

  She’d nursed him through all the childhood diseases, mumps and whooping cough and measles, stood between him and fire and plague and biting dogs. She sheltered him from the world.

  Which at the first opportunity he’d escaped into with a vengeance, feeling that if she was so down on it it couldn’t be all bad.

  He sat on the sunward side of the porch in an old lounge chair, eyes closed behind the dark glasses. He didn’t have to see anyway, it was all burnt into memory. Eastward lay thick timber she’d never allowed cut, a deep primeval tangle of cypress and liveoak, from this distance lush and romantic as a nineteenth century painting. He’d wandered there as a child, alone but not lonely, spent whole days dreaming there, watched her from the rim of the wood as she walked across the stubbled field, her clothing pale and spectral in the waning day. You Buddy, she’d call. You get yourself over here. It’s suppertime.

  When he returned to the apartment complex dusk had already begun to deepen and the western sky beyond the angular brick skyline was mottled red as blood. The first thing he noticed was that the canary yellow Mustang he’d bought Beth was gone. He gathered up the magazines and went up the stairs. Somehow he knew what he was going to find.

  She was gone. Not only Beth but every vestige of Beth, her clothes and personal possessions, even the book she’d been reading. She was gone as completely as if she had never been, and for a dizzy moment he wondered if she had. If he’d ever smelled her hair, kissed her bruisedlooking mouth. She was gone like a high fly in the tall weeds, like a bird on the wing, and search as he might there was nothing to prove she had ever been, not so much as a lipsticked cigarette butt, or a snarl of blonde hair curled like a sleeping newt in the bathroom drain.

  In his dream he was a child being led down a winding country road. It was early morning and he could feel the dew on his bare feet and the grasses and weeds were damp. They went by grazing cows and deep woods that still held night at their center, he could see slashes of it through the trees. The hand clasping his own child’s hand was gentle, the way was long but he did not tire. A hawk flew from the roadside with a flurry of wings and he glanced to the side and saw that there was no one beside him. A hand bewenned (not a word) and agespotted still clutched his own and he could feel the delicate tubelike bones beneath the slack skin, feel a wedding band on the ring finger and glancing up he saw that the disembodied arm tended upward, and upward, a thin wasted arm in lavender brocade that stretched to infinity, to high thin clouds that ultimately obscured it.

  The ringing pho
ne woke him. Beth? he thought, but the voice in his ear was harsh and preemptory, curiously mechanical, like something electronic imitating a voice. It said, I’ve got to have some help over here.

  He felt numb, cold as ice. Who is this? he asked. Is this your idea of a joke? Yet in some curious cobwebbed corner of his mind there was a part of him that was waiting for just such a phone call, had been for days. He exhaled, he’d breathed deeper than he meant to, the sudden pain made him gasp. But some release had been negotiated, some delicate border had been broached, he was already feeling about for his shoes.

  He drove through the cool summer night, everyone asleep, the highway his alone. At home with the night now, at peace. When he left the blacktop the lowering trees beckoned him into the tunnel of darkness like a vaguely erotic promise. And it was like a road that wound down through time.

  Beyond the blurred cedars the farmhouse sat foursquare in the moonlight, its tin roof gleaming wetly with dew, its windows enigmatic and dark. Steeply gabled, its high eaves rose in black and silver shadows, its ornate oldfashioned tin cornicing somehow stately and dignified. A bisected tin sun was set high in the eaves, tin rays fanning upward, you hardly ever saw Victorian trim like this anymore.

  He went up the brick walk to the wraparound porch, the silence was enormous, the house seemed to be listening to some sound that hadn’t reached him yet. He felt for his keys. When the door was unlocked it opened silently inward on oiled hinges and he stepped into the darkness. Hot stifling darkness with compounded smells, jasmine, Vick’s Vaporub, time itself. From the kitchen the refrigerator hummed, somewhere a clock ticked with a firm strong heartbeat. He turned on the light and the first thing he looked for was the telephone. It was cradled and when he took it up all there was to hear was a dialtone.

  He sat in the bentwood rocker. He lit a cigarette. She had been lying on her left side before the rocker, about where his feet were now. Beside the rocker was a table where he’d restacked the copies of National Geographic, the goldrimmed bifocals. Even after all that time she had still been breathing shallowly and he had squatted there with the phone in his hand watching her. Her breath was a thin panting, like a dying kitten he remembered from childhood. Finally she had exhaled and just never took another breath.