*
Vena went back to take her shower while Caney was shutting down the kitchen and locking up for the night. But when she came out of the bathroom twenty minutes later, he was still in the cafe.
She pulled his bathrobe on over the T-shirt she slept in and went out to find him feeding quarters into the jukebox. The only light in the dining room came from the neon beer sign in the window and the colors reflecting from the old Wurlitzer.
“What’s going on?” she asked.
“I’m just winding down.”
“Want a beer?”
“Sure.” He began punching numbers on the jukebox. “What do you want to hear?”
“Play B seven.”
She opened two beers, took one to Caney, then sat down at a table beside him to drink hers.
“Hand me the salt, will you?”
“Oh, I forgot,” she said, passing the shaker to him, then watching as he sprinkled salt into the neck of the bottle.
“You’re the only person I’ve ever seen do that.”
“I never drank beer before I went to Vietnam. Hated the taste.
But over there . . . Well, I learned that if I salted it, it didn’t taste so bad.”
“Caney, can I ask you something about what happened to you in Vietnam?”
“Okay,” he said, smiling to cover his reluctance.
“When we went riding, you told me about the other guy who fell out of your helicopter. You said he was only a kid.”
“That’s right.”
“Well, I was wondering. How old were you?”
“Seventeen.”
“Then he was no more a kid than you were.”
“But there was a difference,” Caney said. “I knew he was going to die. No way he could survive a fall like that.”
“But you believed you could?”
“I
knew
I would! Knew I was never going to hit the ground because someone . . . or something was going to save me.”
“You mean . . .”
“Like maybe there’d be a net to catch me. I’d been to a circus, saw a woman fall off a high wire into a net. It saved her . . . why couldn’t it save me?
“And if there wasn’t a net, there’d be something else. A plane would fly over and drop me a parachute . . . or I’d land on a cloud.
“The first time I was ever in a plane, I was six, going with my aunt to her brother’s funeral. As the plane started to climb, I got scared. Scared it would crash. But my aunt told me not to worry.
She said planes didn’t crash, they landed on clouds. And I believed her.”
Caney paused as if he were listening for the voice of his aunt to confirm the story, to justify the lie.
“Or maybe, I thought, I’d be rescued by one of those superheroes I believed in. Comic book stuff.
“Once I was wading Sticker Creek, fishing for perch. Got my foot tangled in an old trotline that had floated downstream. Now I wasn’t about to drown. Hell, the water wasn’t more’n a foot deep and I was probably nine, ten years old. But in my imagination, I was tangled in the cables of a ship buried on the bottom of the ocean. I wasn’t scared though, because I knew that just when I couldn’t hold my breath another second, Aquaman would save me.
Aquaman or Daredevil . . . Captain America.”
Caney’s breath quickened as he leaned forward to stare at something only he could see.
“As soon as I felt myself slide out the door of that helicopter, nothing between me and the ground but air, all those things went through my mind. And everything seemed to slow down, like I was falling in slow motion. Plenty of time for a rescue.
“I could feel myself starting to spin, to tumble.” With one hand, Caney made a circular motion above his head. “Dizzy. Afraid I was going to pass out. I spread my arms, cupped my hands as if I could hold the air. Trying to ride the currents.
“I could see the ground getting closer, but I didn’t see any net that would catch me. There was no damned parachute to grab hold of. No Superman coming to save me.”
Caney wiped away a rivulet of sweat threatening his eye.
“So I started looking for the best spot to land . . . something to aim for. A grove of trees, great leafy trees, soft enough to cushion my fall.
“A river. I’d go in feet first, go all the way to the bottom, then push off. Come up, swim to the bank. Stretch out in the mud, lay in the sun.”
When the bottle slipped from his fingers and crashed to the floor, Caney didn’t hear it, didn’t feel the spray of beer across his arm.
“But I don’t have time. I’m too far from the river, too far from the trees.
“Then I see the rice paddy, sun reflecting off it like arrows pointing ‘Here! Here!’
“Water not deep, but maybe . . .”
Words tumbling out now, Caney’s face twisting with the telling.
“Then I see a woman down there in the water. A tiny woman wearing one of those pointed bamboo hats. She’s in water up to her knees.
“And she’s looking at me. Her head’s tilted back, her hand shad-ing her eyes as she watches me coming.
“I call out to her, tell her to wait for me . . .”
Vena watched Caney watching himself fall, his eyes wild as the ground rises to meet him. Suddenly, she jumped up, reaching him in two strides.
“Caney?”
“I can’t be sure she hears me, but . . .”
Vena put her hands on the arms of his chair and leaned into his face as her song, B7, began to play on the jukebox.
“I’m so close I can see a scar just below her eye, a scar that curves toward her temple—”
“Caney!”
“But I’m scared she’ll leave before I get there.”
Vena straddled him, wedged her knees between his thighs and the sides of the chair, leaned into him until his heart was pounding against hers.
“Dance with me, Caney!”
She put her arms around him, pressed her cheek to his and began to move her body to the music as she hummed the tune.
“Dance with me,” she whispered.
He was saved then, just before he hit the water. Caught by the faint warmth of breath on his ear.
“Come on, Caney. Dance.”
Moving stiffly, mechanically, he put his hands on the wheels of the chair but could not turn them.
“Vena,” he said, his voice choked.
“Don’t talk. Just dance.”
“Can’t . . .”
“Sure you can.”
He tried again, turned the wheels tentatively.
“You’re doing fine,” Vena said. “Just fine.”
As he slowly rolled the chair forward, then back, she could feel his breath easing, the tension beginning to drain from his shoulders as he let her sway him to the rhythm of the music.
He gave himself to her then, filled with the wheat smell of her hair as she slipped her cheek into the curve of his neck.
When he began to whisper along with the music, she lifted her head and looked into his face. Wiping tears from his cheeks, she kissed his eyes, then put her lips to his.
When he took his hands from the wheels to encircle her waist, pressing her closer to him, she felt his heat and hardness against her.
And while they kissed again, he waltzed her off the dance floor, the music fading behind them.
V
ENA WASN’T THE FIRST woman Caney had been with since Vietnam, but she was the first in more than three years.
The last had been Naomi Watts, an English teacher at the middle school. Caney didn’t know it then, but their brief and clinical couplings were part of her research for a romance novel she was writing about a beautiful young socialite involved in a passionate love affair with a dispirited paraplegic.
Caney heard several months later she’d sold her book and moved to California to try to peddle it to the movies.
Before Naomi, he’d been visited from time to time by a prosti-tute from Ft. Smith, her phone number passed along to him by a trucker whose pockets were filled with such numbers.
A plain-looking woman named Lou, she had always complained about the long drive required to make a “house call” to the Honk, for which she demanded Caney pay, in addition to her minimum fee of twenty-five dollars, thirty cents a mile for driving expenses.
And she insisted on per diem—a grilled cheese sandwich and onion rings.
But their relationship ended when Caney discovered that Lou was leaving her four-year-old son sleeping in the car while she was inside the Honk conducting business.
There had been one other woman Caney had seen a few times, a former classmate named Linda whose marriage of nine years dis-solved when her husband left her for a teenage girl. Linda, in her bitterness, had turned to drink, the result being that her nights with Caney had become long drunken hours during which she devised fantastic schemes for luring her wayward husband back.
Beyond those dismal involvements, Caney had had only one other encounter, that with a nurse in the VA hospital in Kansas City on the night he arrived there.
She had been making her rounds of the ward he shared with nineteen other men when she’d found him crying. At first, she offered him medication for pain, but she discovered she didn’t have a pill for what he was feeling.
She stood beside him as, sobbing, he talked of all that had died in him in Vietnam—his youth, his legs, his manhood. Then, moving quietly, she had pulled the thin white curtain around his bed, and taken from her pocket a bottle of lotion that smelled of pep-permint.
She began to work the lotion in small, tight circles across his chest, his shoulders, down onto his belly, his skin warming to her touch. Then, when she slid her hand beneath the drawstring of his pajamas, he had tried to look away, but she wouldn’t let him.
Smiling, she had leaned close, so close he could feel her moist breath on his face, as, without hurry, her sweet urgings proved to him he was still alive.
But now, Vena Takes Horse had slipped into his life, filling his days and nights with something new, something untouched by Vietnam.
*
The regulars had come to expect Caney’s occasional bouts of moodiness, days and nights when he grew surly or silent, when he had little interest in their stories, when he snapped at them for complaining about their food or stubbing out their cigarettes in the remains of their eggs, when he grumbled about them tying up the phone or spilling coffee on his newspaper.
They had never taken offense, though. Instead they had excused his sudden fits of peevishness because he was one of their own, returned to them with the scar of battle pinned to the breast of a uniform . . . a uniform tailored to fit a body reshaped by war.
But this new Caney had them baffled.
What was happening, they wondered, when he began to laugh at their jokes, when he encouraged their exaggerations about the car deals they’d made and their lies about the feats of coon hounds they’d raised?
Why, they questioned, was he always smiling and when had he started whistling the song that was B7 on the jukebox? And why wasn’t he upset when they tracked in mud and why didn’t he get mad when they complained that the beans were too salty, the liver too dry?
At first, they figured it was the weather. Spring had descended on them almost overnight. Sidewalks were lined with jonquils, yards brightened by flowering tulip trees, the countryside alive with blooming dogwoods.
Some credited Caney’s improved humor to the upturn in his business. The Honk was seldom empty and sometimes so crowded at noon, customers had to wait for tables.
But they never guessed that the changes they were seeing in Caney had anything to do with a woman because they tended to agree with Bilbo, who said, “It’s a shame, but I don’t believe the boy’s equipment is in working order.”
*
When Hamp Rothrock came through the door, Molly O waved him to a table in the corner where their conversation was less likely to be overheard.
“Thanks for coming, Hamp,” she said. “I know you’re busy with the farm since your daddy’s sick.”
“Oh, I’m not that busy. Besides, I had to come into town anyway to go by the feed store.”
Molly O fidgeted with an earring while she tried to decide how to start, but Hamp jumped in and made it easy.
“My mom said she saw Brenda in Doc Warner’s office last week.”
“Yeah, she’s been home for a while now.”
“Is she okay?”
“No, Hamp. To tell you the truth, she’s not doing too good.”
“What is it?” Hamp said, his voice edged with alarm. “What’s wrong with her?”
“Well, she lost the baby.”
“Oh, I’m sure sorry to hear that.”
“She’ll get over it, I suppose. Just going to take her some time.”
“She gonna be here long?”
“I think she might be, but . . .”
“Is her husband with her?” Hamp asked, trying not to sound too interested.
“No, she didn’t get married. That fell through.”
Hamp glanced away, hoping Molly O couldn’t read his expression.
“But I’m worried about her, Hamp. Real worried. She’s okay physically, but she seems so sad. So depressed.”
“Anything I can do?”
“Well, that’s why I called. I was thinking that maybe if you could go by and see her . . .”
“She wants to see me?” he asked, unable to conceal his excitement.
“She might.”
“But she didn’t say she wanted to.”
“She’s not saying much of anything these days, at least not to me. But I think she might talk to you. You’re about the only friend she has left here.”
“You know I’d love to see her.”
“Now, I can’t say just how she’ll react ’cause she’s in such bad shape. Hamp, she has no interest in anything. Not even music.”
“Brenda? I can’t image Brenda without her music.”
“I know. That’s what worries me. But you two used to play together and—”
“Oh, mostly just school stuff. And a few weddings. But we never got any real work except for a couple of dances at the Elks Lodge.”
“You still play the guitar?”
“I play at church now and then.”
“Well, I was thinking that if you took your guitar with you, she might pick a few tunes. Maybe she’d start thinking about writing again.”
“She used to write such great songs. I always knew she was gonna make it. She had so much talent.”
“Hamp, I think you’d be good for Brenda right now. You might be able to bring her out of it.”
“You think it would be okay if I went by this evening?”