Scissors, Paper, Rock Read online

  Elizabeth leans coolly against the International’s concave grille. “I signaled you to cut left. You forgot you were looking in the mirror.”

  “You think I can see through that goddamned rock?”

  She heaves herself away from the truck to shout in his face. “You think you can yell at me like some goddamned mule?”

  They glare at each other in the evening light, until Elizabeth breaks away to pace the length of the truck. “First let’s get this truck out of the ditch. Then we’ll worry about who got us here in the first place.”

  They search out rocks to wedge beneath the back tire. Elizabeth takes the wheel, working the truck back and forth: gas, brake, gas, brake. Dennis shoves rocks under the tire, until Elizabeth feels traction and floors the gas. Belching blue smoke and spitting rocks, the International crawls from the ditch. Startled crows rise from nearby trees, circling over wheat fields in the evening’s blue light, their caws punctuating the explosions from the broken tailpipe.

  Elizabeth backs the truck out the gate and onto the pavement. She slides from the driver’s seat to gather up the blanket. She climbs into the cab, leans over to open the driver’s door. Dennis climbs in. They sit and sit, until Elizabeth spreads her hands.

  “Dennis. I’m sorry. I don’t know—”

  “It’s OK.” He raises one hand, to silence her, she thinks; he slaps his own cheek lightly, a bishop’s confirming tap. “I thought I was waiting for you. Come to find out I’ve just been . . . I don’t know. Waiting.” He guns the truck to life and roars down the road.

  Down the western slope of the Appalachians, into undulant Ohio. The wind tears at the tombstone’s black wrappings. The whip and pop of the plastic and the engine’s unmuffled grind make it easy to avoid talking.

  They are floating down a long grade when Elizabeth turns around to look through the cab window at the tombstone. Streaming ribbons of black plastic, almost naked, it glows an opalescent rose, its edges softened by the setting sun’s light, except for the plaque, whose hard right angles and sharp edges and glittering letters and numbers stand out—and following her own name that long blank, the black hole into which so much of her life has been sucked. “A poor country girl, with no more to sustain her than native wit and a fast-fading beauty, must take care to marry well”—this pearl of wisdom pops into her head and she cannot locate where she first heard it. In some college course in English Lit—maybe Jane Austen? Or maybe she’d heard it from the ditzy drag queen who lived below Raphael’s apartment, whom she’d met when she’d taken her brother’s ashes to San Francisco to scatter on the bay.

  Dennis pulls off to get gas. Elizabeth leaves him at the truck while she pays the bill. In the restroom she cleans her purse of the crumpled tissues, dropping them into the overflowing trash can: a moist bunch of violets, redolent with acetone.

  She is inside only a few minutes, but when she returns Dennis is gone. The International sits pulled off to one side, empty. She peers around the corners of the gas station. Then she crosses to the truck, trying to look as if she might have forgotten something—in case anyone is looking, in case Dennis should catch her in the act. Maybe he is crouched under the dash, pulling her leg? Unlikely, but she opens the door just in case. No Dennis. Even his overnight bag is gone. She searches for the men’s room. She pauses outside its door, then she knocks. “Dennis?” She rattles the door handle. “Dennis!” No answer. She leans against the cinder-block wall, whitewash rubs off on her hair and her blouse but she does not care, she raises pleading hands to the sky.

  Then she hears what he must have heard—the reverberant thud of a basketball against asphalt. She follows the sound through a straggling mass of black-eyed Susans, stepping over a trampled chain-link fence and past Dennis’s overnight bag onto a playground.

  Dennis has joined a kids’ pickup game, changing his loafers for a pair of high-top lace-ups. He is older and taller and rounder than the skinny kids he plays with, but he dances and feints, the kids wave their hands. In the dusky light the scene has no depth, she might be watching a movie: Dennis and the kids are cutouts moving against the flat plane of the court’s asphalt and the blank brick walls of the school it abuts. The basketball is not a sphere but a round circle, a flat dull leather dot traveling from hands to slap the pavement and back to hands.

  He knows she is there and he shows it, not by any call or signal but in the tone of the shuck-and-jive he patters with the kids, in the fancy moves he makes. In the flair of his ducks and glides, in his fakes and dribbles she sees only their failures (athlete, father, husband; actress, lover, sister), until she brings herself up short with this necessary truth: how much larger are her eyes than her stomach; how much greater what she dreams than what she can ever do.

  Then in one smooth motion he turns and hooks the ball up and back and over his shoulder. In his turning he cuts a full figure. The ball arches up from below his hip, following the perfect arc of his arm and the curl of his fingers, flying up and out of shadow and into the sun’s last light. Suddenly bright orange and very round, it arches to the goal and drops through the hoop without a glance off the backboard or a touch of the hoop’s metal ring. It drops through with that cleanest and most invisible of sounds, broken in its fall and cupped for the shortest second by the net’s narrowed bottom, and in this second, unthinking, Elizabeth fits her fingers to her teeth and jumps into the air, splitting the dusk with the pierce of her whistle.

  Little Deaths

  [1942]

  The sky was paling in the east but it was still dark on the porch of the Perlite farmhouse. Ragged limestone cliffs rose to either side, blocking the winter light from the bottomland, pinched in a fold between two steep ridges. It was cold—Rose Ella Perlite was cold—she’d waited outside for half an hour, rather than sit near the stove with her mother implying “I told you so” with every thrust and jerk of her darning needle. “You said be ready before dawn,” Rose Ella told Tom Hardin when finally he pulled up in his truck.

  “So what’s time to a hog.” He leaned across the seat, opened her door from the inside.

  Not a promising beginning for a first date, but then she couldn’t say she hadn’t been warned—her mother had done nothing but warn these past few days. Without all that warning Rose Ella would most likely have stood him up.

  “Patch,” he said, jerking his head to the rear. She thought this was a command, some obscure man-talk, until she turned around and saw in the truck bed a wire-haired mongrel, somewhat bigger than a breadbox, dirty white except for a black eyespot that gave him the air of a canine pirate. He shot her a look of lascivious familiarity. “That dog knows me from somewhere,” she said.

  Tom Hardin started the truck. “He gets around.”

  He was trapping furs for the high-toned buyers from New York and he’d asked right out on the courthouse square if she wanted to help him run traps. They’d known each other exactly five minutes when he’d asked, she with all of her girlfriends standing right there knowing perfectly well that she was already promised to Camp Junior. Who was more dumb-founded—she when he asked, he when she said yes? Either way here they were, speeding down the winding road, Tom Hardin with one hand on the wheel, the other rooting under the seat.

  He was the first man she’d met who hadn’t fallen all over her. That was partly why she was here; she’d said as much to her mother. Rose Ella was mystified by this phenomenon—these great lunks pursuing her with offers for dates—but she’d come to accept this as her gift, the way some people came by rhythm or perfect pitch or (in the case of Tom Hardin) a smart mouth. It was a gift that until now she’d taken for granted—she’d realized that for the first time this morning, as she’d stood in the cold waiting for this stone, this Tom Hardin.

  Bouncing and jostling over the uneven pavement, Rose Ella considered this: that men fell all over her because unlike most girls she was smart enough not to fall all over them. Certainly it wasn’t because she was flawlessly beautiful. She had these Betty Grable legs, it�
��s true, tapering to the most delicate of ankles, that last summer had scandalized the town when she’d worn a skirtless bathing suit to the river. But her chin was a little weak, and she had the kind of impressively full bust that in small women runs to pudge at the sight of ice cream.

  She’d not much given a damn about men one way or another, so that when one came along who didn’t fall all over her it gave her a chance to prove she was above all this whoop and holler. Anybody with any spirit would rise to that bait—she’d make the same choice tomorrow. For Rose Ella it was the challenge of outwitting herself—Tom Hardin was just the means to that end.

  He pulled a pint from under the seat, pulled the cork from the bottle with his teeth. He raised the bottle. “Us against them. Want a sip?”

  “I don’t drink in the mornings.” She didn’t much drink at all but that was the sort of revelation that might jeopardize a boy’s coming back, and she had been raised not at any costs to jeopardize the boy’s coming back. She was not in this game to jeopardize Tom Hardin’s coming back—she wanted him to come back (already this was her plan) so as then to be able to turn him down.

  “Suit yourself.” He took a long pull. “You spend enough time running traps, you’ll change your mind.”

  “This is the first and last time you’ll catch me running traps,” she said, staring out the window. “And I’m not much given to changing my mind.”

  Tom Hardin recorked the bottle and tossed it in her lap. “I bet you ain’t.”

  On all sides the river was in winter flood. Three days of rain, then the rain had turned to falling ice before giving way to this morning’s gray dawn. The sun was not yet above the knobs but already the half-light caught the ice-rimed branches, filling the trees with light until the meanest of them sparkled.

  They turned into a graveled lane strewn with potholes, the headlights picking out barns and houses, dark gray against the silvering sheet of the sky. “This road goes to Perlite Ford,” Rose Ella said. “My father’s family used to run a mill out there.”

  “That’s right. Best trapping in the county. Never been out there that I hadn’t seen a fox. There’s a whole crew of ’em, practically, as social as foxes ever get, that live near the old mill. ’Course, seeing one and trapping one’s a different matter. But still.” Tom Hardin slammed on the brakes at a culvert, causing the truck’s tail end to sashay a little over the gravel. “County says they’re paving this road, putting in a bridge. That’ll wreck hell with the trapping.”

  They climbed from the truck. Tom Hardin pulled a trap from a large knapsack and set it on the truck’s tailgate. “This,” he said, “is a trap.”

  Rose Ella was still a little shaken from the skid and more than a little angry at waiting a half hour in the cold—she was a Perlite, after all, even if they didn’t have a dime to their name. “Do tell,” she said. “I could have sworn it was a fishing pole.”

  “Good to know you’re not above swearing. You’ll need it before this morning is out.”

  I’ll be damned if I’ll give you the pleasure, Rose Ella thought. A Perlite woman was above that kind of blue-streak swearing, at least in front of a man. Already she was remonstrating with herself for having said yes to this craziness. It was a small town, a small state, and she could tell anyone who bothered asking right now that news of her taking this trip, what she was wearing, what time she’d left, what time she got back—all this, embellished for the sake of dramatic effect, would make its way to Camp Junior at the university.

  And now she was in it—she was here, five miles from home and probably one of her girlfriends was already telegraphing the word to Camp Junior, who stood to inherit money and who was headed for law school and who anybody, most especially her girlfriends, could see was a catch. There was no help for it now but to be as unpleasant as she could be to Tom Hardin—at least then nobody could accuse her of leading him on.

  She ignored the trap to kneel in front of Patch, who had jumped from the truck bed. “Oh, you’re a sweetie,” she said. “Look at those big brown eyes—and that spot around your eye, makes you look dangerous. I’ll bet you’re a knockout with the girls.”

  Tom Hardin made a noise of disgust. “No more than I can help. I want a dog, not a pet.” He laid the trap against the truck bed’s wooden planks and pried open its jaws. “Stick in your thumb. Go on. I just want you to feel the tension. It won’t cut your finger off. I hear that kind of thing all the time. ‘Oh, the poor animals,’ they say. Think about it. If a trap’d cut your finger off it’d cut the mink’s leg off, and if it cut the mink’s leg off it’d run away, and if the mink got away what good would that do? Hmm?”

  “No good at all,” Rose Ella said. “For the mink.”

  Tom Hardin gave her a sharp glance. “If you’re going to get all soapy about cute furry animals, just say so now and you can take the truck back. I’ll run ’em by myself.”

  “Two days ago I had a flock of hens that I’d raised from when they were fuzzy little chicks. Last night we had fried chicken. Does that answer your question?” She took the trap by its chain and struck out down the path, swinging it like a yo-yo.

  She was a good fifty yards from the truck before she realized Tom Hardin and Patch had crossed the road to the other side of the culvert. She retraced her steps and stood above him as he climbed down the bank and onto the creekbed slate. “Culverts are best for trapping mink,” he said patiently, as if she’d been following attentively all along. “They stick to the water and when they get to a culvert you can bet they ain’t going to go up and over it. Animals do things by habit, they’ll always do it the same way, you just size up the situation and figure out what that way is and then set your trap to take advantage of it.” He picked up a fallen branch the thickness of her wrist and snapped off one end. “This could come in handy.” He swung the stick like a baseball bat. “You get something you want that’s still kicking, you come up behind him, whack him over the head, that’s it, he’s dead. Never knows what hit him. You carry a gun in your pack in case you need it, but this is better—this way you get a clean pelt, no bullet holes, no cuts or blood.”

  She watched Tom Hardin and Patch nosing about the culvert. Men, she thought. Arrogant sons of bitches, full of nothing but themselves and the only reason to choose one over another was if he had good looks, or money, or a way to get her where she wanted to go, which was as far away from this burg as the high road ran—preferably west, preferably to California, preferably to Hollywood. Camp Junior qualified for two out of three of these male requirements, and if he weren’t much in the looks department she shared her mother’s opinion that a law degree went far toward improving a man’s appearance. As for Tom Hardin, he wasn’t bad-looking, she granted him that—his thick hair bristled as if maybe he and Patch shared some blood inheritance, but at least it wasn’t going to thin out and disappear like Camp Junior’s. Tom Hardin had a sureness of foot and a strength—the memory came, unbidden and unwanted, of the ease with which he broke that stick, and some buried part of her swelled and turned over like a lake. “Nothing but trouble down that road,” her mother had told her only yesterday. “‘A poor girl from the country, with only her wits and a fast-fading beauty to sustain her, must watch out to marry well.’ That’s my grandmother talking,” Rose Ella’s mother had said, “not thirty years off an English boat and bad enough married to know what she was talking about.”

  Not that Rose Ella’s mother had married well—she’d married a Perlite, and however they might be the oldest family in the county and honest as dirt they’d lost most of their money just in time to put what little was left into stocks right before the big crash. Marrying poor was not in the cards for her; this Rose Ella had sworn to herself before and she repeated it now.

  Tom Hardin bent to the blue-black slate. His boots cracked the thin ice around the water’s edge and squelched in the mud. He held up a sprung trap. “Something could’ve sprung it. Or it could’ve sprung itself. That happens.” He reset the trap and climbed th
e bank.

  They moved down the trail until Patch leapt ahead, splashed through the creek, dashed up the far bank. He ran back and forth on the other side, barking to raise the dead. Tom Hardin disappeared over the creek bank’s edge.

  From the lip of the bank Rose Ella peered down. In the creek’s center a thin, dark shape floated under the surface. Tom Hardin gave a low, sharp whistle—Patch bounded over the slate, broke the crust of ice with his paws to seize the mink in his mouth and drag it to within Tom Hardin’s reach. “Hot damn!” Tom Hardin cried. He took the mink from Patch, pried open the trap jaws and waved the stiff body in the air. “Easy money come home! Here, hold this while I reset the trap.” He tossed the mink at her.

  He lectured as he went about the task. “This is a drowning set. A mink’ll go straight for the water once he’s in trouble. He’ll do it every time. So you figure out the most direct path to the water. Maybe you find a little trough.” With the toe of his boot he scraped a groove in the creekbed. “Or if you’re real smart maybe you make a little trough. You set your trap at the trough’s end, then tie it to a wire that’s weighted down in the creek. When the mink gets caught in the trap he’ll drag it to the water, but then he gets tangled in the wire and the weight of the trap drowns him. A few minutes and you got the cleanest pelt there is, not so much as a scratch.”

  She hefted the mink in her hand. She nearly dropped it, it was so light. Her thumb and forefinger fit around the thickest parts of its slick, black body. Its sharp teeth were bared in a frozen snarl and its dark eyes stared wide.

  In her imagination she had connected somehow Tom Hardin’s invitation to run traps with dropping a hint about what a nice present something made of fur would make for a girl. That was stupid, she was smarter than that, but then it wasn’t as if this was the first time she’d done things she’d been smart enough to know not to do. “What makes you think I want to hear all this about trapping?” she demanded, irritated with her own weakness.