The Talk-Funny Girl (22 page)

“Those the cathedrals,” I said. He kept his brown eyes fixed on me, as if waiting for me to say more. “My friend and me do a work with stone. We’re making of one.”

Unlike most people I spoke to for the first time, the attendant seemed to have little trouble understanding me. He didn’t squint or shake his head. He didn’t correct me.

“Whereabouts?”

When I told him the name of the town, he slanted his head to one side as if he didn’t know it. “Let me see those hands,” he said. “Tell if you’re fibbing.”

“I don’t to fib.” I took two steps closer and held out my hands, palms up, and the man took them in his long fingers and studied the calluses and scratched skin. After a minute he squeezed the hands gently and let go. “God bless you then,” he said. “Make a good one.”

“We could.”

“I bet you could. Make one as beautiful as you are.”

I felt my face grow warm, but I resisted the urge to look at my feet, the way I might have done in school. “You go in of the museum?” I asked him.

“Sometimes I do.”

I nodded, watching him, aware of the flickering screen behind him, the darkness of his skin, and then of Sands’s familiar footsteps.

“Thank you,” I said to the man.

“What for, young lady?”

I turned away from him without answering and went to the truck.

W
e ate in a restaurant where the tables had cloths on them, and cloth napkins, and the waitress tried very hard not to look at my sweatshirt and boots. It didn’t matter to me so much then. I was used to it, for one thing, and, for another, my mind kept looping back to the drawings in the museum. Every time that happened I felt the peculiar cleanness inside me again, as if all the world’s evil had been conquered by sheets of off-white paper in neat frames. I knew the bad things were still there, but if I concentrated on the drawings, it seemed, for a little while at least, that the power had been sucked out of them. Sands didn’t say much at first. He seemed comfortable in the restaurant. He didn’t look around to see how the other people were dressed and how they were sitting and eating. After asking me if I liked spaghetti with tomato sauce, he ordered for both of us and then sat staring out the window at the street, as if his mind was also being pulled back to the museum. I wondered if we could go back for another little while, and if I should ask him, but I was starting to worry about the time by then, and when I would get home, and what I’d say if my parents asked where I’d been.

“You look a little like to Aunt Elaine,” I told him.

“Makes sense.”

“We would be cousins for each other now,” I said. The thought—strange and amusing—had just occurred to me.

But Sands quickly shook his head. “No. Not by blood,” he said, as if the idea bothered him. “Your mother and Elaine aren’t real sisters. Your mother was already a year or two years old when she moved in with Elaine’s dad.”

I went quiet again, worried I’d said something wrong. When we were finished eating and Sands was drinking a second cup of coffee, and I was sipping slowly from my glass of Coke, he handed something across the table in a paper bag. “A small present,” he said.

I held it in two hands. I could feel that a woman at the closest table had turned to look at us. The object in the paper bag was heavy, and I set it down on the table where my plate had been and I couldn’t raise my eyes.

“You can take it out of the bag, you know, Laney.”

“I know of it.”

The top edges of the paper bag had been rolled together. I unrolled them, reached inside, and took out a large book, absolutely new and undamaged. On the hard, shiny cover was a photograph of an enormous church, and, inside, the pages were as clean and shiny as ice on a pond, with photographs and drawings of the same churches we’d seen in the museum, and some others that hadn’t been there. When I had looked at a few of the pages, I tucked my chin down against the top of my chest so Sands couldn’t see my eyes.

“I had a feeling you liked the drawings we saw,” he said after a few seconds, and I heard the note of shyness there again, the unsureness that seemed to hover around him whenever he wasn’t actually working with his hands.

It let me raise my eyes, at least, though I couldn’t speak.

“This book has some of the great cathedrals of Europe in it, and a little bit about all of them, about the people who designed and built them, the construction techniques, all that.”

I was glad the waitress chose that moment to come and bring the check. Sands took money from his pocket, counted it, set it on the check, and looked at me again. “Like it?”

I nodded, and saw from his face that it hadn’t been enough of an answer. “Thank you,” I managed to say, but that wasn’t enough either. In his eyes I thought I saw something that hadn’t been there before, as if he was interested in me the way one or two boys at school sometimes showed an interest. It lasted only the smallest second, and I wasn’t really sure it had even actually been there. He was standing up, so I stood up, too, still trying to find something to say that would be equal to what he had done. He’d gotten the kindness into him that Aunt Elaine had, I told myself. She’d given it down to him. The apple fell near to the tree.

I had the book clutched in one hand and the paper bag in the other. We went out the door and along the sidewalk and back to where Sands had parked his truck, and all the way I was trying to think of the words I could speak into that look on his face. When we were sitting in the truck again, when we had our seat belts on, when he was watching in the side mirror and backing up and then getting ready to pull out into traffic, I said, “Thank you for of five hundred times,” and a flicker of a smile went across his face, and I didn’t take it as a sign that he was laughing at me.

Sixteen

S
ands maneuvered the truck out of the tangle of Boston traffic and onto the interstate, and neither of us said a word as he drove north into the hills. By the time we left the big highway and turned onto the far eastern end of Route 112, still more than three-quarters of an hour from my house, I had paged through the book twice, slowly, and read a little about the designs I liked best. A hundred questions had risen up in my thoughts but it was hard to make myself say anything to Sands just then. I was thinking about the expression I might have seen on his face in the restaurant, about the feeling it made in my body, and about the museum, and about Boston, and about his pastor, and about Aunt Elaine, and about how I was going to keep my mother and father from seeing the book and finding out where I’d been. On top of all that, as we drove, it began to seem to me that there was something troubling in Sands’s silence. It made me think he was angry at me, or disappointed, and I didn’t understand what I’d done.

“I’ll drive you home if you want,” he said, and I clearly heard a sour note in his voice.

“No. I like of to walking that road.”

I saw a wrinkle of what appeared to be hurt around his mouth. When we’d gone about halfway from the interstate exit to the corner
of Waldrup Road, he said, “I want,” and then paused a minute, and went on, “I want you to talk with me the way other people talk.” He turned his face to me across the seat for a second, then back at the road.

“Why for what?”

He moved his shoulders up and down. The shyness was on him again, and something else. “Because I know you can. Because I know how smart you are, and talking the way you talk makes you sound like you’re very young, or … slow … that’s all.”

“Why could it matter for at you?”

“I’m just asking you to. I’m not telling you. I’m not saying it will have any effect on working with me. I’m just asking.”

“That’s why you made me going at Boston?”

Sands pushed his foot down hard on the brake and skidded the truck onto the gravel shoulder. The beads on his rearview mirror swung back and forth. He let out a big breath then snapped the key to off and faced me. I could see clearly then, in spite of all his praying and peace talk, that there was a part of him that could hurt a person. I could see it in the way the breath went into and out of his chest, so much like the way my parents breathed when they were upset, but with something else on top of it.

“Look,” he said, not loud but with a lot of force. “Will you let someone be kind to you without always suspecting them of having a bad motivation?”

I just stared at the scar on top of his forearm. “Sure,” I said. The word wobbled in the air as if it had three syllables.

“Everything from giving you the work to driving you home to taking you to Boston you interpret as some kind of strategy to hurt you.”

“Girls have getting hurt,” I said, “around in here.”

“I know that. I have a college friend here, she’s in the state police, she’s working on those cases. I know about them. Everybody does.”

“She’s a she? And on for the state?”

“Yes. She’s part of the team that’s investigating them.”

“She’s … you’re liking her for a girlfriend?”

“No.”

“You don’t at work yell on me.”

“I’m not yelling at you.”

“For the sounds you are.”

“I’m frustrated, that’s all. You have a wall around you. I’m saying you could open a door in the wall and let me at least look in. I’m not going to—”

Sands stopped abruptly and I moved my fingers closer to the seat belt clip, hoping he didn’t see. The eyeglasses were shaking on the bridge of his nose.

“You think I’m going to hurt you, don’t you?”

“Not anymore for a while until just now I didn’t.”

“You even think I could be the man who’s abducting young women, and everything about me is a trick to get you to trust me.”

“In school they told he was to do it that way.”

“In school they said he does it that way.”

I nodded.

“Say it the right way.”

I quietly pushed the button on the seat belt so that it came free.

“And what, Laney? You’re going to walk home from here because I asked you to speak right?”

“I could of.”

“I know you could. I just can’t really believe you think I could hurt you. Or anyone else. That I’m like that.”

“Until now I wouldn’t have anymore.… And you’re part of black.”

“Meaning what?”

“At in school they said about the man was black who did.”

“Who said?”

“Other of kids.”

“My friend doesn’t think so. She said it’s somebody who lives here,
who knows the way people act here, knows who they trust. Which places and roads are quiet at which times of the day. And no black people live here. Almost none.”

“That part you’re right.”

“You really think I’d hurt you?”

“Yelling like this is. Mad like this is so.”

“You don’t ever get mad? You don’t ever yell at anyone?”

I shook my head.

“Really?”

I shook my head again.

“I’m sorry then.” Sands closed his eyes and opened them. “I’m just frustrated. I can tell you’re smart by the way you work, by the way you looked at the drawings and the book. And when you talk to me like that, it’s a kind of pushing away.”

“Yelling is a kind of.”

“All right. I’m sorry. Put your seat belt back on, I’ll drive you home, or to the store. I’m sorry.”

He waited a minute, looking straight ahead, and then he pulled the truck back onto the highway. At the corner of Waldrup Road, just when I worried he’d turn right, into the rutted dirt, and try to take me home, Sands pulled the truck onto the shoulder again and turned off the engine. “Look, I’m sorry,” he said for the fourth or fifth time. “I spoiled a good day. I apologize. I’m like that sometimes. The anger comes up in me for no good reason.”

“Doesn’t matter,” I said.

“It matters, sure it matters. You got treated a hundred times worse than me and you’re not yelling at anyone.”

“I’m forgot it,” I said. “The getting of mad.”

“Good. I wish I could. It will haunt me all the way home, and then I’ll remember it for weeks. I’m sorry.”

I started to tell him I would try to speak differently if it pleased him, but it would have been a lie, and I knew it. He was watching me in the new way. I thought, for one second, that he was going to lean across
the seat of the cab and try to kiss me, and I wanted him to do that but I couldn’t say so. After a few seconds I said, “Thank you,” the way I always did, and then, getting out, “Can I still take for the book with me?”

“Of course you can take it. It’s a gift, I told you. And I’m paying you for the day, I told you that, too. I’ll see you on Monday, same as always. And I’m sorry I got upset.”

“Okay and all,” I said. I closed the truck door and started walking. I went a hundred steps down Waldrup Road before I heard his truck drive off.

Seventeen

I
walked down the road holding the book in the paper bag against my right hip, so that if anyone was standing in our yard they wouldn’t see it. Even before I turned into the driveway I could hear my father shouting inside the house, and though I couldn’t make out the words, I knew from the high-pitched tone that it was no kind of ordinary trouble. Between me and the house stood one of the twenty or so stacks of cordwood that cluttered the yard. It was as high as my shoulders and as long as two cars together. I folded the end of the paper bag around the book, then set it down against the bottom of the stack of wood, on the road side, so no one could see it from the house.

Before I had taken three more steps I saw my mother hurry out of the house, leaving the door and the screen open. My father’s voice came bouncing across the front steps after her. It seemed to go high in the air around the yard, the words like red balloons with spikes on them. “Make on a living for it!” was one of the things I heard.

My mother came across the dirt with her shoulders rounded and her cigarette held down against the side of her old jeans, a woman turning her back on a smoky fire. “What you hiding there, you Majie?” she said, but without much interest.