Read Lost Highways (A Valentine Novel) Online
Authors: Curtiss Ann Matlock
She took all these things out to the gravel drive and burnt them in a pile.
“What
are
you doin’?” Charlene asked, coming up to see.
“Leavin’ yesterday behind,” Rainey said, feeding a picture of Robert into the fire. She thought that he would find her actions foolish, but, at last, she did not hear his critical voice.
“Are you goin’ to marry Harry?” Charlene asked.
“I don’t know what’s goin’ to happen with Harry. He just left on the bus.” She added, “He said he’d call.”
She wondered if he would. People so often changed their minds. So often things just fell apart, she thought, looking at the small fire of memories.
Long Stretch of Lonesome
F
rom the minute that she came into the house with her daddy, Rainey began to listen for the phone. Since Harry had departed, Rainey vacillated from believing she would hear from him to believing she had lost her mind to think he would call. And either way, some bit of heart was required of her, and she wasn’t certain she had any to spare. She felt herself getting wound tighter than a spool of thread, and if anyone jerked too hard, she was going to snap in two, a state that was not helped by the emotional turmoil all around her.
Because of Rainey taking the time to burn away her history with men, she and Charlene were late getting their daddy from the hospital, and he was not at all happy about it. The nurse told them he had been dressed and waiting since before breakfast and long before the doctor had formally discharged him.
He grumbled all the way home, saying things like, “I could have had another nap, if I’d known you were goin’ to be late,” and “I’m almost too tired to go now, and it is lunchtime,” and
“I could have called Bill Yearwood to come get me, if I’d known it was goin’ to be so much trouble for you.”
With the last statement, Charlene rather exploded. “Oh, Daddy, Bill Yearwood lost his license last month. He can’t see to drive anymore.”
Rainey thought Charlene needn’t have said that, as it just pointed up their father’s own dependency.
“He still drives, which is more than you do,” their daddy said, surprising Rainey with his sharpness.
“I could, if I wanted to. I keep my license current,” Charlene said in a defensive tone.
Rainey hoped Charlene wouldn’t start crying; she didn’t know what she would do if her sister broke down. If her sister started crying, Daddy might have another heart attack, and even as she thought this, Rainey realized she had to cut off that foolish line of thinking.
She was relieved when Charlene left right after they got Daddy situated on the couch, where he could lie and watch television. Charlene fairly raced away down the porch steps, saying she was going to get her hair done and did not want to be late. Larry Joe would pick her up from the beauty shop.
Then the telephone rang, and Rainey hurried to answer, knowing it was not at all logical to expect the caller to be Harry—who surely wouldn’t be any farther than Wichita Falls—but even so, he might call her.
It was Freddy.
Rainey informed him that things were in hand, and, with a sigh, he said, “Well, I guess you’d better let me talk to him.”
Rainey passed the receiver to their father, who listened for a full minute and then said, “I’m here on the couch, and all I’m gonna do is watch television, if everyone will leave me alone to do so.”
He extended the receiver to Rainey and went to clicking television channels.
“You brought this on yourself, you know,” Freddy said to her and hung up.
Rainey carefully replaced the receiver, wondering how all of their lives could be falling apart, and wishing very much for her mother, actually listening for her mother’s movements in the kitchen.
“I guess it’d be easier all the way around if I’d go to Prairie View Manor,” her daddy said.
Rainey sank into the chair that had been her mother’s favorite. She gazed at her father, who stared at the television. After a minute she asked, “Daddy, do you want to go to Prairie View Manor?”
He didn’t answer, kept his eyes glued on the television.
Rainey set herself to force a conversation, but this intention was interrupted by the doorbell. It was Mildred Covington, the first of a stream of visitors who came in perky and smiling to cheer Daddy. Unfortunately, Daddy resisted cheering and focused completely on the Western Channel, so none of his visitors stayed more than ten minutes.
“Rainey?”
“Harry?” she said in surprise.
“Were you expecting someone else?” He sort of laughed.
“Well, people have been calling to talk to Daddy all day. Are you in Houston already?” It was only three o’clock, she saw by the clock on the oven. And her heart had begun to pound as she thought,
He called
.
“No. I’m in Dallas, at the train station. I only have a couple of minutes.”
Much to her surprise, he went on to tell her that he had continued on the bus because it was so easy, and now he was going to take a train to Houston, because he had met a man on the bus who was doing that, and he thought he would take the opportunity while it presented itself to try the experience.
She did not know what to say to this. His inclination to embrace new activities was both impressive and daunting. She wondered if she was some sort of new and novel experience Harry was trying out. She guessed their relationship was that for each of them. She wished him a good time.
“It’ll be late when I get to Houston. Will it be okay to call you?”
“There’s no need. You’ll be tired.” This was what she thought she should say…not be too demanding, when she really wanted to reach through the phone and pull him back to her. She felt her control was nothing short of spectacular.
“I want to call you, Rainey,” he said with some urgency. “I want to hear your voice.”
“I like hearing your voice, too,” she said, giving way. “Call when you get to Houston, no matter what time. The phone never wakes Daddy.”
The phone rang, waking her.
“I just walked into my apartment,” Harry said.
“You did?” Then, “And you called me first thing?”
“I did go to the bathroom first.” He chuckled. “Did I wake you?”
“I had just dozed off.” She was trying to come to herself so that she wouldn’t say something she regretted.
“Were you waiting for my call?”
“Well, sort of.” She had the phone on the bed with her, afraid that in her exhaustion she would not hear it.
“That’s good news.”
“Is it?”
“Rainey, I’m crazy about you. I have plans for us, and I’m goin’ to make you believe it.”
“I can’t seem to have any plans.”
“I know, but you will. I’m beat, and I know you must’ve had
a hell of a day there, with getting your father home. Get some rest. I’ll call tomorrow night, and we’ll really talk.”
“Okay…. Harry?”
“Yes?”
“I’m awfully crazy about you, too.”
The next afternoon, after her father had made the comment that he might as well go on to Prairie View Manor about three more times, Rainey plopped herself down in front of him and requested that he explain himself.
“Do you want to go to Prairie View?” she asked, to prod him into speaking. This was a new father before her, one who looked and acted very much like a child.
“I don’t like bein’ dependent on my children,” he said at last. “I might as well get to the inevitable.”
“Do you think that is inevitable…and is that what you want?”
“Who gets what they want in this world? I’m a widower, I didn’t want that.”
“We don’t get everything, but we don’t have to jump in front of a train, either,” Rainey said.
“If I wasn’t here, you’d be free to go off with your fella.”
“Oh, Daddy, I don’t want to go anywhere. And I guess Harry and I are still findin’ out if he’s my fella.”
He gazed at her.
“Daddy, you have never been sick, and so you are letting this bit of heart trouble take wild proportions. Yes, it is serious, but, Daddy, lots of men younger than you have heart trouble and go on to live many, many active years. You are not sick. You will be on your feet in three more days and take up a walkin’ program, like the doctor wants. You’ll be drivin’ back down to the sale barn and doin’ anything else you want. This thing now is about like Freddy having his gall bladder out.
“I’m here because I want to be, Daddy. And I guess you
needin’ me came at a good time. It gave me a reason for bein’ here. I can’t go away with Harry until I’m certain it’s for real. Maybe I can’t ever go. I don’t know, I’m so messed up about men. Maybe I can never trust him, or maybe him bein’ from Houston will make it impossible for us. This is my home. Even if you move off to Prairie View, I can’t leave here, not right now. Freddy would have to come haul me out. I just need to be home right now, Daddy, and you needin’ my services makes it easier.”
Her father accepted all this with several nods and then told her to go make him a sandwich. When she brought it to him, she noticed he sat up straighter. After his sandwich, he asked her to bring the phone so he could call Bill Yearwood to come over and watch a Dale Robertson western. Bill had once done a little horse business with Dale Robertson, and he liked to call him Dale.
While the men watched the movie, Rainey busied herself in the kitchen, making three kinds of burritos and elaborate Spanish rice and sopapillas, the batter made from scratch. She had never cooked much Mexican food beyond tacos, but Harry had said Mexican food was his favorite. She decided she should make an effort, in case their relationship did work out.
She had, she thought as she cooked, begun to at least get a glimmer of an image of herself and Harry together on a more permanent basis, and she tried to practice this sort of planning as she cooked. The one stumbling block she kept bumping against was the fact—all burnt pictures aside—that she had been married twice and failed twice. Fear of another failure held her tight.
When she blurted this out to Charlene, who stopped in to show her new hairstyle, Charlene said, “Well, why don’t you look at it this way—you’ve been divorced twice, so if you have to get divorced again, it’ll be a snap. You already know all the steps.”
Harry telephoned every night for a week, and they spoke for over an hour each time, telling every minute of their days.
Rainey would be waiting in the privacy of her bedroom and snatch the phone immediately, as if to snatch Harry and pull him into the room with her. She would also listen carefully for an extension being lifted, as one time her father tried to listen in. When she caught the click on the line, he said, “Sorry, I just wanted to make a call.”
“At eleven o’clock at night, Daddy?”
“Yes. Let me know when the phone is free.”
She poured out to Harry her concern about her father’s unusual and often brooding behavior. “He keeps saying that maybe he should go to Prairie View Manor, so that I will tell him he does not need to think that way.”
“A lot of this is grief work,” Harry told her. “He’s mourning the loss of your mother and the change in a way of life he’s known for so long, and he’s also mourning the loss of his physical vitality. He’s got a lot of confusing false guilt and anger to get through.”
Harry always managed to make her feel better. She tried to find encouraging things to say about his own father’s behavior, but could not come up with anything very helpful. What could she say about a father who continued to refuse to speak to his son, all because the son’s views were different from his own? And then there was Harry’s mother, who consented to have lunch with him but wanted the meeting kept secret from her husband, fearing the repercussions.
Rainey thought that Harry had better get his psychiatry training done as soon as possible, because his family needed his services as much as did her own.
Harry always ended their conversations with, “I love you, Rainey.” Her response was, “I do you, too,” or “I miss you.” She knew this was unsatisfactory to him, but he did not, as he had when he’d left her, ask her to say the words he longed to hear. He was waiting for her to be ready, in her own time, and she was trying so hard to get to that time.
In the Meantime
“R
ainey?”
At his surprised tone, she suddenly felt very vulnerable. The thought flashed across her mind that he could have a woman with him.
She said, “I thought that it was time I paid for a call. Did I catch you at a bad time?”
“No. No…I just got out of the shower, but it’s okay. I’m really glad you called.” Now his voice sounded pleased, and pleasure swept her. “I went to work today,” he said.
“You did?”
“Yep…my brother put in a word for me, and I got a position filling in at a clinic for a doctor who decided he needed some time off. He got shot, actually.”
To her inquiry about this rather odd pronouncement, Harry explained that he would be filling in at a hospital clinic for low-income patients. The doctor he was replacing had been an unfortunate victim of a domestic disturbance that had taken place
at the clinic; he’d been shot and had since been very reluctant to return to work. He was at this moment readying himself for a Caribbean cruise and contemplating turning his hobby of photography into a career. Harry had casually known this man for a couple of years and said he was quite a good photographer, had had pictures published in travel magazines.
“It may not be widely recognized, but doctors quitting being doctors is not uncommon,” he added.
She asked about his brother’s help in getting him the position and what his father felt about this.
“My brother simply let the head of the clinic know I was available,” he said. “And quietly, so that my father will never know.”
Still, Rainey thought this was good of the brother, and she could tell that Harry appreciated it. And yes, it was the same brother he had described as having wanted at heart to be a veterinarian.
He went on to fill her in on a few of his cases, a number of the type he had not encountered before on a large basis, and the patients he thought could more benefit from psychiatric help than from the medication he could prescribe. In his way, Rainey knew, he did his best in the emotional area, too.
He asked about her day, and she told him that her father had walked twice around the house. “I told him if he would do that, I’d drive him over to the sale barn to have lunch at the café. Everyone was glad to see him, and he had a great time.”
“Rainey, I miss you.”
“I miss you, too, terribly.” She gripped the telephone and paced, hardly knowing she was doing so.
“If I were there, you know what I would do?”
“What would you do?”
He told her in intimate detail, making her inordinately aware of every part of her body.
“Oh, Harry, I cannot stand this,” she said and hung up, her face on fire, her heart and body longing for him.
The phone rang beneath her hand.
At her answer, Harry said very seriously, “I’m crazy in love with you, Rainey.”
“I you, too,” she said.
She was out at the corral, grooming Lulu, when her father walked out and extended an envelope. “You got a letter from Harry.”
“Really?” She took the envelope and looked at the handwriting. It was the first time, she realized, that she had seen Harry’s handwriting…yes, it was his address. Her father walked on back to the house, and she opened the envelope.
Dear Rainey,
I’m doing duty at the clinic—did I tell you we are open until nine at night? Part of the hospital. Right now it’s quiet, and it’s a weeknight, so things aren’t so bad. On weekends, though, we often get stab wounds or things of that nature. Earlier this evening I had a guy in here with an arm broken in a fight. He told me he used to be a professional bull rider and had had many broken bones. The X ray of his arm proved him out. I would have liked to have talked with him about the love of danger that drove him, but we were a little backed up at that time. He said he knew your cousin Leanne. Tough guy, works as a bouncer in a club right now.
It’s beginning to look like I won’t be able to get into a psychiatry residency until after the first of the year. I think my father may have something to do with it. My younger brother hinted this is the case but won’t say straight out.
He tried to put the situation in a positive light, saying that at least he would have more time to come up to see her that winter, but Rainey knew he had to be sorely disappointed. He told of a bird on his windowsill, there at dark, which seemed rather odd, and described in great detail how the bird peered at him and he peered back, until it flew away. He signed the letter, “Harry, who loves you.”
Rainey looked for a long moment at those words. Then she hurried to finish with Lulu and went back to the house, found her mother’s fine linen stationery and a flowing blue pen, and sat at the kitchen table to write.
Dear Harry,
I know it is a disappointment to you not to get going right away on your psychiatry studies, but the clinic does seem to be providing a certain amount of experience in the area of the human psyche. You seem to be finding some satisfaction and even fascination with the work.
On my end, this afternoon, when I went in to get Daddy a bottle of aspirins, Mr. Blaine about fell all over himself offering me my old job back with a two-dollar raise. When I accepted, he requested that I start right away, so I did and worked for a couple of hours. I was very gratified by how many of our customers said they had missed me.
For the next couple of weeks, I won’t go in until around ten each morning and work no later than three, because I need to keep an eye on Daddy and get him in the habit of walking. He walked up and down the block today, and Roscoe walks right with him. I think he seems happier. He wasn’t bothered at all about Mildred Covington now keeping company with Charlie Blevins, a recent widower. I think he might have been relieved.
You would not believe how big Roscoe is suddenly getting. He weighed in at seventy-five pounds at the vet’s the other day.
She thought for a minute and signed, “Love, Rainey.” It seemed a standard ending and not any type of solid commitment.
For some minutes she continued to sit there and wonder why she should be afraid of admitting in writing that she loved Harry.
“I’m calling from a pay phone at the 7-Eleven,” Harry told her. “My phone is dead, and I didn’t want you to try and not be able to get me. Did you get my letter from Wednesday?”
“Yes, and I got my phone bill in the same mail.”
He chuckled and said his had come, too. “The clinic isn’t in the high-paying category, and all the other doctors there want to know how I drive a Porsche. I told them I just had to take a loan against it to pay my phone bills to my girl.”
Rainey felt a warm flush at the term
my girl
. “We’d better get off the phone right now,” she said, getting a little worried. She didn’t want to make things hard on him. “You’ll need your money for when you go back to school.”
“No, it’s okay. Really,” Harry said quickly. “I’m using one of those prepaid cards. I’m covered for thirty minutes…well, twenty-five now. How’s your father and everything going there?”
“Daddy’s doin’ real good. I tell you that in the letter I sent right back to you, and I guess you didn’t get it yet. There isn’t any need for me to tell all that I wrote you, or you won’t need to get the letter.”
“Then tell me what you didn’t say in the letter. I want to hear your voice,” he said in a warm husky tone.
She imagined him bending his head and speaking very intently into the phone, and her heartbeat picked up tempo.
“I think about you a lot, Rainey.”
“I think about you, too.”
“Well, that’s getting somewhere,” he said.
Dear Harry,
Leanne came yesterday. She broke up with Clay and is going to stay here with me and Daddy for a little while. But she is no longer pregnant. I was heart-broken to hear this. I’ve been so busy with Daddy and going to work again that I haven’t thought much of it, but in the back of my mind, I guess I still hoped for her baby.
She says she lost the baby in a fall from her horse. I don’t think it is my business to question her, but I do wonder if she had an abortion, or if perhaps Clay beat her up. She has a number of bruises on her back. Clay drove by our house already. Daddy was sitting on the porch, and he now takes his rifle out there, to give Clay something to think about, he says. Freddy, of course, is fit to be tied over this, and I know it is rather outlandish behavior, but Daddy is getting such a kick out of it. He seems much invigorated with the thought of shooting someone. I thought it might be a good way to get out his anger—not to actually shoot Clay, but to feel aggressive.
And when Bill Yearwood came for supper this evening (I think he’s about to take up residence here, too), he fell in love with Leanne. Leanne doesn’t believe me, because Bill is eighty-five, but I said he is still a man, and he fell immediately. He can’t hear her, is probably why he fell in love with her.
Leanne wants me to go to a barrel racing futurity
with her this weekend, and I think I will. I find I miss the barrel racing more than I had thought I would. What would a psychiatrist have to say about that?
I have been thinking lately that maybe instead of trying to see your father in person, you should write him a letter, or call him on the phone. I do better with Charlene on the phone, and I sent her a sister card the other day, so she sent me one back.
I will call you Sunday. I want to hear your voice.
With love, Rainey
P.S. I taught Roscoe to sit and shake hands, and Daddy is working on getting him to bring the paper. He’s lying at my feet now.
Dear Rainey,
I suppose I could try to write my father. It may be best to wait a few weeks for him to cool off, though, because my brother Malcolm—the brother who should have been a veterinarian—just took a position at a small hospital down in Mexico. An out-of-the-way place with no notoriety at all. Really, I think he’s going there to escape his life here. His wife refuses to go, and Dad is furious, of course, at this defection on the part of another of his sons.
I think I may have had something to do with this, and I feel a little guilty, but I guess a little proud, too. Malc has come over here a couple of times to talk to me, and I did write him a letter and tell him he needed to do what was right for him. I guess since I’ve been writing you, I sort of started getting in the habit of writing notes to people. And my patient reports are a lot more thorough—one of the secretaries praised me for this. In the case of my
brother, though, my mother called it inciting to ruin, or words to that effect.
I saw this woman today with the same color hair you have, and I almost called out to her. It made me want to see you so much.
Have a good ride this weekend. I wish I was there to watch.
Harry, who is still crazy in love with you.
Dear Harry,
I’m sorry I missed your phone call this evening. That scrub filly we got at the barrel race in Ardmore coliced. I had the vet out but felt called upon to help. The vet thought I had lost my mind when I laid hands on her and prayed over her. Maybe you will think I am crazy, too, but my mother and I had success with that method several times in the past, and I felt compelled. The filly did get better almost immediately, even if the vet says it was all his medicine.
I am certainly glad that filly pulled through, because Jojo was over here, right there watching and in tears. She already loves that filly and is making quite a little horse-woman. Her father could be proud; unfortunately, she won’t have much to do with him. She’s already gotten the filly saddled. I’ll probably let her get on it next week. That filly is something for her to focus on right now. She can feel the tension between Charlene and Joey and knows things are precarious. Tonight is the second night she has slept with me. She looks like an angel there in my bed.
I tried to call you back, but I guess you’ve gone out. I wonder if you can see the evening star there in Houston the way I can. Daddy says we’re going to have a
hard winter because of the way the sky looks to him—hard, he says. I guess winters in Houston aren’t much, are they?
I pray you are over your cold.
And guess who warned us the filly was in trouble? Roscoe. He ran back and forth from the house to the corral, like Lassie on television.
With much love, Rainey
Dear Harry,
I just now tried to call—you’ll hear my message. I think I missed getting a letter. What do you mean about driving a Mustang now? What happened to your Porsche? And did you mean you are getting into the psychiatric program after all? I went down and had Grady Snow look around the post office, but he says if the letter was lost, it was not by anyone at his post office.
Well, Jojo is staying over here more than at home now, because she ran away when Charlene and Joey had a fight. And Daddy asked Bill Yearwood to move in with us. He might as well, as he’s over here all the time anyway. But Leanne is gone. I told you I thought Leanne was speaking secretly to Clay on the phone. Well, she went back with him while she was down at the women’s rodeo in Fort Worth. He probably promised her he would never hit her again and all sorts of fantasies like that. I didn’t know she could be so stupid, but she says she loves him and owes him her faith. Bill Yearwood is heartbroken. He’s hardly eaten all day.
I guess when you come up here in a couple of weeks we’ll have to rent a motel room up in Lawton if we want to have any romance. It is the weekend after this one that
you are coming, isn’t it? Let me know for sure and I’ll take that Friday off of work.
I miss you, Harry, and when I read that you are coming, I cried.
All my love, Rainey
Bill Yearwood hollered at her, “Rainey, that Harry is on the phone.” Then he yelled into the phone, “She’s cookin’. She’ll be here in a minute.” Rainey thought with some alarm that Bill might have ruined Harry’s hearing.
Rainey hurriedly wiped her hands and picked up the receiver in the kitchen. “Harry? I’m sorry about Bill’s yelling. Is your ear okay?”
“I held the receiver away from my ear, but it’s still sort of ringing.”