Free October Light by John Gardner Page B

It was a terrible car, a Chevrolet four-door (she and Horace had had Buicks). But Virginia and her husband were poor, of course. Virginia’s husband Lewis—Lewis Hicks—was shiftless and dull-witted—or at any rate that was Sally Abbott’s opinion, not that she condemned him; it was a free country. He had just a little touch of Indian in him. His great-great-great-great-grandfather had been a Swamp-Yankee. It was well known. Lewis had never gotten past eighth grade and was now just a handyman, a painter of porches, fixer of old pumps, shingler of barn and woodshed roofs, installer of screens and storm-windows, and in the winter, a gluer of old broken pictureframes and caner of chairs. He’d worked for her some, years ago, when she’d sold antiques. The Chevrolet, bluish-gray with brown patches, was a menace: she, for one, refused to ride in it. To take the thing out on the highway should be a criminal act. There were great rusted holes you could put your whole leg through, the front left headlight had been smashed out for months, and the back had been crashed into by a hit-and-run so that they had to hold the trunk shut with electric wire.
    She stood twisting the hankie in her two hands, as if trying to wring it out, wondering what they could be saying so long, James and Virginia. She ought to get that Dickey home to bed; tomorrow was a school-day. Picking up the book, not noticing she was doing it, she went over to the tall narrow door—the door to the hallway, the one James had locked (there were two other doors, the closet door and the one by the foot of the bed that went up to the attic)—to see if she could hear what they were saying. She couldn’t. Even with her good ear pressed to the wood, all she could catch was a faint rumble and vibration in the wood—ordinary chat of the kind you might expect in the middle of the night, her telling him, no doubt, the gossip from her meeting of the Rebekahs, or whatever, him saying just enough to keep her there, the way an old man will when his daughter comes by, and over by the fireplace or on the overstuffed plush couch, little Dickey curled up asleep with his deformed, one-eyed Snoopy.
    In her mind’s eye the old woman could see her niece Virginia as clear as day, all dolled up in rouge and lipstick, artificial black lashes, the stiff, half-dead looking dyed-blonde hair teased high over her head in a wide bouffant, cigarette between her fingers—she was a nervous wreck, and no wonder, growing up with that mad fool James and her poor troubled brother who had killed himself, and then marrying that Lewis!—nails dark red, same color as the lipstick not quite following her lips—there would be lipstick too, lined like a fingerprint, on the filter of her L&M. Virginia was pretty, for a woman of thirty-eight. She luckily hadn’t drawn that long, narrow Page head but, instead, the short, wide one her mother, Ariah, had—James’ wife—and that same double chin. Ginny was a good girl, always had been, just as her poor simple mother had been, one of the Blackmers. You could be certain James Page hadn’t told her yet that he’d gotten drunk on whiskey and chased his own eighty-year-old sister up the stairs with a fireplace log and locked her in the bedroom like a madwoman! Virginia’d have something to say, all right, when she heard about that. And no doubt he was working up to tell her, that old mule. Likely’s not he’d pretend to be proud of it—maybe would be proud of it, you never knew. Anything he did, he’d confess it right away; that was the way he’d been since he was old enough to talk. Thought it proved him honest. She pressed her ear to the door again. They were still blabbing on quietly. She pulled her head away and straightened up, lips compressed, annoyed, absentmindedly slapping the paperback book against the palm of her left hand, thinking again about revenge.
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