The Guest

Chapter One: Four Dollars a Load

The dust came up off the section road like something breathing out.

Josie Prine drove with her elbow on the sill and her hat pushed back and watched the road ahead go soft and brown at the edges, the way it did every afternoon by four o'clock. The tank truck was her father's. It had been her father's for eleven years and hers for two, though the title in the strongbox in the tack room still said Elgin Prine in a clerk's careful hand, and her uncle Ray had the key to the strongbox on a ring he wore on his belt.

Fourteen hundred gallons sloshed behind her head. She could feel it lean when she took the cattle guard at the Ransom fence line, a slow shouldering weight that wanted to keep going after she stopped. Water was the heaviest thing she knew. Heavier than a bale, heavier than a calf, heavier than the two years she had been meaning to leave.

Chalk Springs sat in the crook of the hills the way a coin sits in a dry palm. A feed store, a filling station with one pump, a church with a bell somebody had stolen the clapper out of in 1949, and a row of houses whose gardens had all turned to gravel and grasshoppers. The grasshoppers were the thing you noticed now. Three years of drought had made them bold. They rode the truck. They came off the mesquite in sheets, hit the windshield, and left long yellow smears that turned to grit.

She made three stops. The Hopper place, where old man Hopper's daughter-in-law came out with a dishrag over her shoulder and two crumpled dollars, and Josie let it go at two because the boy was sick. The schoolhouse cistern, which the county paid for in a check that came late every month. And the Tackett cousins on the east end, who had a stock tank they had lined with a tarpaulin and who wanted every drop she had left.

"Rain up by Sonora," said the older Tackett, watching the water go down the hose. "Newspaper says."

"Newspaper says every week."

"Hope keeps a man cheerful."

"Hope keeps him thirsty," Josie said, and coiled the hose.

They all watched her the same way, everyone in town. Not unfriendly. Grateful, mostly, and grateful is a heavy thing too. She was the girl from the place with water. In a county where every well was sucking air and coughing sand, where the Ransom widow's drilling rig sat idle because there was nothing left to drill into, the Prine place still had Pitcher Spring, and Pitcher Spring still ran cold and heavy out of a limestone fissure at the bottom of the sinkhole the family called the Weeping Hole.

Four dollars a load. Ray counted it.

She came home at six with the sun low and mean and the whole west turned the color of a scald. The Prine place lay in a shallow bowl of caliche and cedar: the house, white once; the barn, red once; the bunkhouse; the calf pen; the windmill with its stock tank standing full and still behind the barn like a piece of fallen sky. Beyond that, past the goat pen, the ground dipped and folded and there was the Weeping Hole, thirty feet across, ringed with rock and rusted cable and one cottonwood that had no business being alive.

Ray was on the porch with the cash box open on his knees.

He was sixty-one and built like a fence post that had outlived three fences. He had her father's jaw and none of her father's softness, and he smiled a great deal. That was the thing people got wrong about Ray Prine. They expected a hard man to be sour. Ray was pleasant. Ray remembered your children's names.

"Three loads," he said.

"Two and the county."

"Hopper pay?"

"He paid."

Ray looked at her. He had pale eyes and he could hold them on you a long time without any strain at all.

"Two," she said. "The boy's sick."

"The boy's sick," Ray repeated, agreeable, and wrote something in the little notebook he kept, and Josie felt the same flat hatred she felt every evening at this hour, and put it away, because she had learned to put it away.

Inside, the house was ten degrees hotter than the yard. Bonnie was at the kitchen table with her leg up on a stool, working on a jigsaw puzzle she had done so many times she no longer looked at the picture.

Bonnie was thirteen. She had been eight when the polio came through, and it had taken her left leg down to about two-thirds of what it should have been, so that she walked with a hitch and a little swing that Josie had stopped hearing years ago and heard again now, fresh, every time she was tired. Bonnie had their mother's dark hair and their father's long hands and an unnerving stillness she used like a tool.

"You're late," Bonnie said.

"Tacketts wanted the tank filled."

"Did you go by the drugstore?"

"Closed at five."

"It's always closed at five."

"That's how I know it was closed." Josie pumped the kitchen tap and drank three dippers straight down, warm and mineral and faintly sweet, the way their water always tasted. It came off the spring and up through the casing to the house tank and it was, everyone agreed, the best water in the county. "Where's Sonny?"

"Barn. He's got a new hat."

"God help us."

"He wants you to see it."

"God help me."

Bonnie fitted a piece of sky into a piece of sky. "Josie. Rudy didn't come in for supper."

"He's probably in town."

"He said he'd play cards with me." Bonnie's voice did not change but her hand stopped. "He said Tuesday."

"It's Tuesday."

"I know it's Tuesday."

Rudy Tackett was the hired man, a lean, weather-cracked forty-year-old with three fingers on his left hand and a good singing voice, and he had worked the Prine place for six years, and he did not miss cards with Bonnie. He had taught her poker and then had to teach her not to bet, because she was better at it than any of them.

"I'll look in on him," Josie said.

She went out through the screen door into the last of the light. The bunkhouse was a low shed with two cots, and it smelled of tobacco and boot leather and the ghost of ten summers of other men. Rudy's cot was made. His hat was gone off the nail. But under the cot, side by side, toes out, were his boots.

Josie stood a long moment looking at those boots.

A man walks off a job, he wears his boots. That was not a suspicion or a feeling. That was arithmetic.

Behind the barn the windmill turned over once, twice, groaning, and then quit, and in the quiet Josie heard the water in the stock tank move.

Just once. A small slap against the iron rim, like something had shifted its weight.

She did not go and look. She told herself later that this was the last ordinary decision she ever made — that after that night there were no more ordinary decisions, only the other kind — and she was not entirely wrong.

At supper Ray said grace, and the grace was long, and the four of them ate cold beef and cornbread with the windows open and the moths battering the screens. Sonny sat across from Josie in the new hat. Her cousin was twenty-eight and had a soft, hopeful, unfinished face; Ray's only son, Ray's chief disappointment, and a man who talked when he was frightened.

He talked all through supper.

"Rudy drew his pay," Ray said, when Josie brought it up. He wiped his plate with the last of the cornbread. "Wanted to get down to Del Rio while the road's still open. Said the drought's got him beat."

"When did he draw it?"

"This afternoon, while you were in town."

"He left his boots."

Sonny's fork stopped.

Ray chewed. "Then he left his boots."

"He walked to Del Rio without boots."

"Maybe he had another pair." Ray smiled at her. It was a wide, warm, comfortable smile, and it went nowhere near his eyes, and Josie understood in that moment — the way you understand weather — that her uncle was lying, and that he did not much care whether she knew.

"Sonny," she said. "Did you see Rudy today?"

Sonny looked at his father. Then at the tablecloth. "I was fixing the loading chute," he said. "All day. I was at the chute."

Bonnie set her glass down. In the sudden little silence she said, in a bright voice that made the hair rise on Josie's arms: "He said Tuesday."

Nobody answered her. Out behind the barn the windmill ground half a turn and stopped.

Josie went to bed at ten and lay on top of the sheet in the heat with the window open, listening to the house tick and cool, and to the far-off, dry, endless sawing of insects, and she thought about boots and about four dollars a load and about the bus schedule out of Chalk Springs, which she knew by heart, which she had known by heart for two years.

San Angelo. Fort Worth. After that anywhere.

She had come home in the fall of 1952 to bury her father and had meant to stay a month. Elgin Prine had been found face-down in six inches of standing water in a dry stock tank, which the county had written up as a heart attack, and Josie had stood in the churchyard with a thirteen-dollar hat on and a job waiting for her in Fort Worth and a sister of eleven with a bad leg and no mother, and the month had turned into two years the way water turns into steam — quietly, completely, and without asking.

Ray held the deed. That was the shape of it. Elgin's will had put the land in Ray's hands "in trust for my daughters" with a clause that gave Ray the say-so until Bonnie was of age, and Ray had the truck title and the keys to the pump house and the cash box, and a lawyer in town who did his thinking for four dollars an hour, and a shotgun by the door.

Josie was twenty-four. She had a hundred and eighteen dollars sewn into the lining of a coat she did not need in a Texas summer.

She was almost asleep when Rudy Tackett called her name.

She knew the voice at once. That was the thing she came back to, afterward, over and over: she knew it at once, the flat West Texas drawl with the smile in it, the little upward hook at the end of a word.

"Josie. Come here now."

It came from behind the barn.

She sat up. Her feet found the floor. The night had cooled off enough to raise a sweat on her, and she was aware of every hair on her body.

"Josie. Come here now."

Same words. Same rhythm exactly, note for note, as if it had been stamped out of tin.

"Josie. Come here now."

She took the lantern off the porch nail and lit it and went out barefoot across the yard, and the ground was still warm, and the moon was three days off full and gave everything a hard silver edge. She went along the side of the barn with her hand on the boards. The voice stopped when she came around the corner.

The stock tank stood under the windmill, twelve feet across, iron, brimming. Full to the lip. Josie had watched Sonny shut the valve at noon with it two feet down. Now it was full, and the surface of it was so still it looked like a solid thing, a great dark coin lying on the ground with the moon in the middle of it.

"Rudy?" she said.

Her own voice sounded thin and stupid in all that space.

The water did not move.

She held the lantern out over it. The light did not go far in. Two feet, maybe. Below that the water was green-black and went down into itself. The tank was four feet deep. She knew that. She had scrubbed it out with a broom in April. Four feet deep, and yet the lantern light hit nothing at all, no bottom, no bright coin of tin, nothing but that soft dark going down and down.

Josie's throat closed. She stepped back.

And she saw the handprints on the rim.

They were wet. They were fresh enough to be running, three of them along the iron edge, water beaded and sliding out of them and down the tank's flank. They were human hands. That was the first thing. Four fingers and a thumb, a palm, the crease of a wrist. But they were too long. Not big — long. As if every finger had one joint more than a finger has any business having, and the last joint had folded flat along the rim, gripping, the way a tree frog grips.

She counted, because she could not help it. Four joints on the fingers. Three on the thumb.

Behind her, at the level of her hip, the water said one word.

"Josie."

Not Rudy's voice this time. Not any voice she could put a name to — a wet, soft, delighted little sound, like somebody trying out a word they had only ever seen written down.

She did not run. Later that seemed important to her. She backed away with the lantern up and her heels finding the ground behind her, twenty feet, thirty, and the tank sat full and quiet in the moonlight, and nothing came out of it, and when she reached the corner of the barn she turned and walked fast, and by the porch she was running.

She woke Sonny by shaking him. He came up out of sleep with his hands in front of his face and said, "I didn't — " and then, "Josie?"

"There's somebody at the tank."

His face in the lamplight went a color she had never seen on a living man.

"Don't," he said.

"Sonny —"

"Don't go out there. Don't go out there tonight." He had hold of her wrist. He was strong; she always forgot that. "Josie, listen to me. Go in the house and shut the door and don't put your hand in any water till the sun's up. Promise me."

"What is it?"

"Promise me."

"What is it, Sonny?"

And her cousin, who was twenty-eight years old and six feet tall, began to cry, quietly, with his mouth shut, the way a child cries who has learned that noise makes it worse.

In the morning the rim of the tank was dry. Josie went out at first light and found the iron already warm, and no prints, and the water down two feet where it belonged, and the bottom of the tank plainly visible with a drowned grasshopper and a nail lying on it.

Ray was at the pump house with a wrench.

"Rudy Tackett's dead," she said.

"Rudy Tackett's in Del Rio."

"His boots are under his cot."

Ray set down the wrench. He straightened up and looked out over the goat pen at the low place where the Weeping Hole was, and he stood like that a while, and when he turned back to her his face was almost kind.

"Girl," he said, "you've got a hundred and eighteen dollars in that coat and a bus timetable in your Bible. You want to go, go. Nobody's stopping you."

Her skin went cold in the heat.

"But you leave Bonnie," Ray said. "She's mine till she's eighteen. That's the paper. And she can't drive a truck." He picked up the wrench again. "So the question ain't whether Rudy Tackett's boots are under his cot. The question is whether you're a woman who leaves her sister. And I already know the answer, and so do you, so let's the both of us quit pretending, and I'll take that as settled, and you'll take a load to town at nine."

She took a load to town at nine.

All the way in, with the dust rolling behind her and the grasshoppers hitting the glass, she heard it under the engine noise, the way you hear a hymn you hate.

Josie. Come here now.

Same words. Same rhythm. Stamped out of tin.