The Tin Can Tree (13 page)

“No, you’re wrong, James.”

“Well, it’s way past five.”

“Oh, it was nearly two hours ago that he
came
, all right. But it was more recently that he left, because he stayed to have a jam braid.”

“Well—”

“Also a glass of milk. I said, ‘Ansel, we’ve got to get some meat on your bones.’ So did Miss Lucy. She said so too. Ansel said, ‘Oh, Miss Faye, I just don’t know.’ He was feeling sad.”

“What about?” asked James.

“He didn’t say. Well, you know how he is. Some days the world is just too much for him. That’s how he put it. ‘Miss Faye,’ he said, ‘some days the world is just too much for me.’ He told Lucy that too. ‘Miss Lucy,’ he said, ‘some days the—’ ”

“Did he say where he was going?”

“Why, home, I reckon.”

“I have to leave,” James said.

“Oh, now. You only just—”

“I’m sorry, Miss Faye. Come on, Joan.”

He reached the door before Miss Faye could, and he slid the bolts back himself, with Miss Faye’s hands fluttering anxiously above his. Then he shot out on the porch, not even trying to be polite about it. Joan followed, but with her head turned toward the Potters, her
voice drifting back to them as she tried to smooth everything over. “I’m sorry we have to leave this way,” she said, “but I know you see how it is—” and the Potters made thin, sad little sounds to show that they did.

“Just please come back,” Miss Faye told them, and James nodded tiredly and let the door swing shut. The two bolts slid back into place.

When they were outside again James just stood there, trying to think where to begin. Joan didn’t seem worried at all. She said, “I got tobacco gum all over Miss Lucy’s hands.”

“That’s too bad,” James said absently.

“She was staring at her hands all funny-like; that’s how I noticed. Little bits of black were sticking to them.”

James turned around and looked at her. “Will you
listen?
” he told her. “I can’t find Ansel.”

“I’m sorry, James.” She grew serious, and came over to stand beside him. “He’ll come back,” she said.

“I don’t know.”

“He always has before.”

“Well, I just don’t
know,
” James said. He knelt to tie his shoe and then stayed that way, looking down the porch to see who might be coming along the road. No one was in sight. “We don’t know
what
might have happened,” he said.

Joan squatted down beside him and said, “Well, he’s come back every other time, James.”

“You already said that.”

“I just meant—”

“I
know
he comes back. I been through this a hundred times. If I didn’t even go looking for him, he’d
come back. But I can’t be a hundred percent sure of that.”

Down the road came a red hen, strutting importantly, sticking her neck far out as if she were heading someplace definite. As she walked she talked to herself, in little conversational clucks. James and Joan watched after her until she had disappeared.

“Somehow I can’t get what Maisie said off my mind,” James said finally. “How would I feel if just once he went too far? There’d be no one to blame but me, if that happened.”

“Maisie who?” Joan asked.

“Maisie Hammond.”

“Well, if you
did
go after him, you know how it’d be. You ever seen Ansel standing on a street corner waiting for you? He goes somewhere you’d never think to look, James. You go up and down town all night searching for him, waking every drinking man to ask him if he knows, and where does it get you? You always end up right here, waiting for him to decide to come back.”

“I like to think I looked,” James said.

“I know that.” She stood up again, and the cotton smell of her shirt floated past him. “I can see it better than you can,” she told him. “I don’t like him. I can see easier than you how he will always come back.”

“You can’t see.”

“Look,” Joan said. “What’s got into you? Things were getting better for a while. You weren’t fussing over him, and he had almost stopped wandering off. Why have you started acting this way?”

He stared down at her feet, long and dirty in sandals that had molded themselves to the curl of her toes. Her feet made him so angry that he almost didn’t answer
her. But then she looked down at him, with her face worried and unsure, and he said, “I don’t know.”

“Well, there’s got to be some reason.”

“Will you stop asking me that?
You
don’t have a brother.”

“Maybe not,” Joan said, “but there is nothing I like or understand about you going to look for Ansel all the time. If he wanted he could have done a full day’s work today, and been off at a dance right now.”

“No, he couldn’t.”

“Yes, he could. He could be dancing and you and I could be going someplace. We could be doing something. We could be someone besides an old familiar couple that’ll be courting when they’re seventy and the town’s fondest joke. Are you listening?”

“No,” James said.

He got up off his knees and went down the porch steps. Bits of tobacco gum and dust from the floorboards clung to the knees of his pants, but he didn’t brush them off. The sunset glowed red and dull across the roof of the pickup. “Don’t bother fixing supper,” he called.

“I wouldn’t
think
of fixing supper.”

He stopped and looked back at her. She was standing at the edge of the porch now, with her arms folded and her feet planted solidly apart. “I wish you’d wear some real
shoes
once,” he said.

“What?”

“I’m sick of those sandals.”

“Well, I’m sick of everything,” Joan said.

Her voice was flat now, and only sad-sounding. It made him look back at her one more time, but by then she had turned away and was walking down the porch. “Joan?” he said. She went on walking, not answering.
From behind, her folded arms gave her a thin, round-shouldered look, and she stepped in that gentle way she had, with her bare pointed heels rising and falling delicately across the long gray porch.

A
t night, when everyone was in bed, the house seemed to belong to one family instead of three. The separate sleeping-sounds mingled and penetrated through all the thin walls, and by now James could identify each sound exactly and where it came from. He knew Miss Faye’s snore, as curlicued and lacy as she herself was, and the loud, honking sound that Mr. Pike made. He knew Miss Lucy’s rat-a-tat on the walls, first on Mr. Pike’s wall when the snoring grew too noisy and then on his own wall if he talked in his sleep. He thought it must be a thimble she tapped with. Because there was a big room’s width between his end of the house and the Pikes’ end, he wasn’t sure of the softer sounds there—Simon’s snoring, for instance, or Mrs. Pike’s. And he had always wondered if Joan snored. But he had heard Janie Rose’s nightmares often enough. They came through loud and clear, drifting up from the open window of her tacked-on bedroom downstairs. “
That’s
not something you should be doing,” she would say reasonably. And then, “Daddy, would you come
quick?
” and the floundering thuds across the floor as Mr. Pike began groping his way toward her voice in the dark. But if Simon talked in his sleep, he must have talked quietly. All James heard of him was in the morning,
when they tried to wake him and he bellowed out, “Oh,
fine
, I’ll be right there! I already got my socks on. Ain’t this some day?”—yet all the while sound asleep, and just trying to fool people. Sometimes Mr. Pike shouted too. He would have too many beers on a Saturday night and throw all the pillows out the window. “Ninety-nine point two percent of all the people in the southern
states
die of smothering,” he would roar to the night, and then Miss Lucy would rap on the wall. Miss Lucy never slept at all; James was convinced of that. She spent her time policing the area. On nights when Ansel was restless, when he tossed around on his old wooden bed across the room from James (he wouldn’t sleep in the other bedroom, for fear of waking alone and finding his feet numb), and when he kept calling, “James, how long has this night been going
on?
” Miss Lucy would tap very gently and ask if Ansel wanted her hot water bottle. “No, ma’am,” James always said, and Miss Lucy would go back to her quiet, patient pacing. Sometimes James had a great urge to go see what she was wearing. He pictured her in a twenty-pound quilted robe with lead weights at the bottom, like the ones sewn into curtains, because it dragged so loudly across the floor at every step she took. But once he had had a horrible nightmare, right after eating two pizzas. He had shouted out, “My
God!
” and awakened shaking, with the terrible sound of his own shout still ringing in his ears. Then Miss Lucy had tapped and called, “Why,
it’s
going to be all right,” and the horror vanished. He had lain back down, feeling comforted and at home, and now it never annoyed him to hear Miss Lucy’s bathrobe dragging.

In the Potters’ bedroom the clock struck four, whirring and choking before each clang. James lay tensed,
counting the strokes, although he already knew how many there would be. He had slept only in patches all night, and even in his dreams he was searching streets full of people for the thin stooped figure of his brother. In the last dream it had been a year ago—that time they had called from ten miles away to tell him Ansel had been run over, but neglected to add it was only a bicycle that had done it. After that he couldn’t sleep at all. He thought of all the things that had happened to Ansel in the past, the really serious things, and all the things that might be happening to him tonight. When the clock had stopped whirring he found that he was frowning into the darkness so hard that the muscles of his forehead hurt. Then, as if that clock had been some sort of musical introduction, a faraway voice began singing outside:

James sat up and pulled back the curtain. Outside it was pitch black, with a handful of small stars scattered like sand across the blue-black sky. The trees beyond the field were only hulking dark shapes, and not one light glimmered from the town behind them.

He climbed out of bed and untwisted the legs of his pajamas. At his bedroom wall there was one sharp tap, questioning (he had learned to read Miss Lucy’s thimble language), and he called, “It’s all right, Miss Lucy.” She resumed her pacing again, with her robe
trailing her footsteps like a murmuring companion. James shot out of his room, still buttoning his pajama top, and went downstairs in the dark. The voice was nearer now.

The front door was open but the screen was hooked shut. James pushed the hook up, jabbing his finger, and swung the screen door open. Then he walked across the porch barefoot, with the cold rough grain of the wooden floorboards stinging the soles of his feet. Around his ankles the cuffs of his pajamas fluttered and ballooned and nearly tripped him (they were Ansel’s, and too long); he bent to roll them up. Then he descended the steps, scowling into the dark as he tried to see. He was halfway down the path before he stopped, more by sensing someone in front of him than by seeing him. Ahead of him was a long tall shape, swaying gently, smelling of bourbon. The voice was so close now that James could feel its breath.

His reedy roice was piercing, but the thinness of it made it seem still far away. James stepped closer. “Ansel,” he said.

“Ansel,” James said again.

“I’m singing, please.”

“Come on in.”

He took Ansel by the arm. It was stone cold; he could feel the bone underneath. When he pulled Ansel toward the porch Ansel came, but lifelessly and with the shadow that was his face still averted. “People keep asking you in nowadays,” he told the dark. “They got a thing about it.”

“Careful,” said James. “We’re coming to the steps.”

“The
Potters
downright
lock
you in. Slide little bits of machinery around. You mind if I finish my song?”

“I certainly do.”

“I might just finish it anyway. Where you taking me, James?”

“
In,
” said James, and half lifted him up the first step. Ansel was as limp as a rag doll. His limpness made James realize suddenly how angry he was at Ansel, after all this worrying and waiting; instead of guiding him so carefully, he felt like giving him a good shove into the house and having done with it. “Get on in,” he said, and took his hand away from Ansel’s arm. Ansel gave him a deep lopsided blow and entered first.

“Certainly nice of you to ask me,” he told James. “Certainly are a
hospitable
man.”

“If you’re hungry, Ansel—”

“I’m starved.”

“Cook up some eggs,” said James, and began making his way across the dark living room toward the stairs. Behind him Ansel said, “
Hey
, now—” but James paid no attention. The way he felt, he couldn’t even make a cup of coffee for Ansel; he had been worrying for too long, and all he wanted now was sleep. Already
he was unbuttoning the tops of his pajamas, preparing to go back to his bed.