The Stories of Richard Bausch by Richard Bausch Page A

road, and look back down the mountain. There’s a cut in the side of the farthest bluff, in the shape of a giant human ear. It makes me feel as though we should whisper.
    “They don’t have any money,” he says.
    “Maybe they’re gonna rob the place.”
    He says nothing for a beat or two. Then we laugh. It is my conviction that seldom has anyone else on this earth ever laughed in precisely that way, with precisely that amount of ironic agreement and rue.
    Myra comes out of the shop and bends to pick up the angel. She makes her way across to the car and sets it down, opens the trunk, and with a great deal of effort, lays it in. Lionel hasn’t come out of the shop yet. She turns and waits, leaning on the open trunk, as if she were propping the lid up with one hand. “Honey?” she calls.
    Lionel comes to the doorway and waves at her.
    Elvin and I walk down to her. She glances at us over her smooth shoulder and smiles. “Where’ve you two been?”
    “I’m hungry,” Elvin tells her.
    We watch as she closes the trunk and then crosses the lot, makes a little leap up onto the stoop, and with her hands set to block light on either side of her face, peers through the screen in the door. Then she strolls back out to the little gray crowd of statues.
    We watch her decide on another one, a deer bending to drink or graze. She picks this one up and starts toward us.
    “We don’t have any money,” Elvin says. “I don’t know what she thinks she’s doing. I heard Lionel talking last night. There’s not a penny. We cameup here to get away from being served something. ‘They can’t serve them to us if we’re in Glass Meadow.’ That’s what he said.”
    The proprietor comes out of the shop with Lionel, and together they walk out to the statues, Lionel protesting all the way. Myra reaches us with the deer and opens the trunk again. Elvin and I get into the back as she struggles to get the deer into the trunk with the angel. Coming toward us, with a statue of a Madonna and child, are Lionel and the proprietor, a man we can see now has tattoos on his forearms and bright red hair. Myra has got the deer packed, and she closes the trunk, then turns to face them. “I guess we can put it in back with the boys,” she says.
    Elvin and I look at each other.
    “Okay, boys,” Myra says, “scootch over.” She opens the door, and the two men step up with their burden. The Madonna looks like Doris Day, and the baby has the face of an old glutton. They get the thing on the seat, and then the men shake hands. Myra closes the door and says, “I don’t know how to thank you.”
    “Think nothing of it,” the man says in a voice out of the deep South. He smiles at her, and there is a sorrowful light in his eyes. Myra has that effect on men. But this time, the sorrow I see is for other reasons.
    “What’re we gonna do with these?” Elvin says.
    Myra waves and smiles at the man as Lionel starts the car. “Thank you,” Myra says. “And God bless you.”
    We pull out of the lot, and they start laughing.
    “I couldn’t believe he went for it,” Lionel says.
    “A sweetie,” says Myra. “A tenderhearted man, I could see it in his eyes.” She lights a cigarette and hands it to him. They look at each other and laugh.
    “What did you do?” I say.
    “I had him going,” Lionel says. “Didn’t I?”
    Myra looks at me. “Your father told that nice man I only had a year to live,” she says. Then she addresses Lionel. “Did you cry?”
    “I did,” Lionel says. “Just a touch.”
    “Poor man felt so sorry he gave us the statues,” Myra says. “Wasn’t that sweet?”
    If this were fiction, I might be tempted to say here that as she sits laughing about the kind man who believes she has a year to live, Myra is indeed only a year away from the end of her life. But it wouldn’t be true.
    “We’ll come back and put some money in his mailbox,” Lionel says, glancing at me in the rearview mirror. “Soon as the new job