The Stories of Richard Bausch by Richard Bausch Page B

starts and I get some pay.” This is something they will do, too. Quite gladly, and maybe with a bonus of considerably more than they would have paid. It will be another one of their adventures together. Worth the trouble and the expense. And the man’s life will be different; he’ll have a day when he can tell people he found a fifty-dollar bill in his mailbox.
    “I thought he was going to give us the whole store,” says Myra. “Didn’t you?”
    “What’re we gonna do with the statues?” I say.
    “Sell them,” Elvin says. “And buy some food.”
    We come to the sign: Glass Meadow. Lionel makes the turn. It’s a dirt and gravel road, and a column of dust rises behind us. The back of the car is sunk down like the hotrods I’ve coveted at school in the afternoons, and the Madonna with her ugly child in her arms rocks with our motion, as if she’s alive for those few seconds. I’ve got one hand on the rough stone shoulder, trying to steady it. The head is an inch from my ear.
    “What’s she telling you?” Myra asks me.
    “What about food?” Elvin says.
    “Plenty to eat when we get there,” says Myra.
    At the end of the deepest part of the shade is light—an open blue space. We come out of the trees into a wide field dotted with yellow flowers. The cabin is at the other end of the field, looking as though it’s about to sag into the tall weeds that have nearly engulfed it. We pull off the dirt road and into the grass, right up to the porch—briefly I think we’re going to hit it—and when we stop, Lionel turns the engine off and seems to listen. We all watch him. Slowly, almost as if the motion causes him pain, he turns to us and smiles. “Well?” he says. “What’re you all waiting for?”
    We leave the Madonna on the seat and file up onto the porch, which is bleached to a tan in the sun, hot and creaky and rickety, with cobwebs everywhere and signs of rodent infestation. Myra produces the key from the bottom of her purse. She opens the door and walks in, and Lionel steps in behind her. It’s hot, airless, tenebrous: the floor sounds as if the wood might break.
    “Get some windows open,” Myra says. Lionel does this, winding a squeaky crank. He’s got a look on his face, all concentration.
    There’s a ladderlike stair opposite the front door, with silky webs blocking it. The kitchenette contains a small icebox. The door is standing open.
    “Great,” Elvin says. “No food.”
    “That’s no way to talk,” Lionel says, finishing with the window. “We gotta get into the spirit of things.”
    “Oh, for God’s sakes, Lionel,” says Myra from the other side of the room. “That
is
ridiculous.”
    “You said there’d be food up here,” he says.
    “I was wrong.” She starts opening and closing cabinets in the kitchenette.
    “You know you might’ve checked with Betty about the food.”
    “When I came up here with her that time, we didn’t pack food. The place was stocked.”
    “That was three years ago.”
    “Well, I’m just saying there was food here.”
    “There’s no food here now,” Lionel says with emphasis.
    “She and Woody were just here in June.”
    He repeats the phrase. “There’s no food here
now.”
    “I thought there’d be food,” Myra says. “When do you want the divorce?”
    “Today,” he says loudly. “Let’s make a big goddamn ceremony out of the whole goddamn thing and invite a lot of people with food.”
    I take Elvin by the arm, and we step out onto the tumbledown porch. Myra mutters a few unintelligible words, and then we hear the chink of dishes clattering against each other.
    “They’re not your dishes, Myra.” There’s a pause. I turn to see that Elvin has his hands over his ears.
    But Lionel comes to the doorway and speaks quickly to us. “Bring your stuff in from the car if you want.”
    “It’ll keep,” I say. I have no idea where I learned the phrase—it might have been at the Saturday matinees—but in the moment I say it I feel