The Only Stranger
| 16 min read
The third truck of the morning was Cody Muntz with a load of number eight, and Ruthann had the ticket half written before she saw that the handwriting was not hers.
Her hand was upright and cramped and always had been, since Sister Loretta and the blue tablets. This one leaned hard to the right and put a loop on the bottom of the g. She tore the ticket off, balled it, and wrote it again the way she wrote, and it took her longer than it should have, the way it does when you have to think about a thing you have done ten thousand times.
The scale house was eight feet by ten with a window that slid, a box fan on the file cabinet, and dust on everything in a layer you could write in. Out the window the readout on the pole said 78,240 and then dropped to 78,220 while Cody set his brake. The radio was on the AM station out of Bedford that does obituaries at nine.
"Morning, Miss Ruthann."
"Gate's strung at the second one," she said. "Ronnie's got them chaining it now, so go slow through there or he'll come find you."
Cody had his elbow out the window and a Gatorade bottle in his other hand with a half inch of brown in the bottom of it. He was twenty-four and had a boy already. His hands on the door were wide and short in the fingers, with the thumbnail on the left one grown back ridged from something that had happened to it.
She knew that thumbnail. She knew it the way you know the sound of your own car in the drive.
She held the ticket out and said four words to him, and they were not English, and she heard herself say them the way you hear yourself in a recording.
Cody leaned toward her. "Ma'am?"
"Nothing." Her mouth had gone dry all at once. "Watch the gate."
He took the ticket and looked at it and looked at her and put the truck in gear, and the dust came up off the haul road and stood there in the air for a while after he was gone, because there had not been rain since the eleventh.
It had started six days before, in the chair at Dr. Bhattacharya's, getting a temporary crown. Everyone was going to want it to have been the gas. It had not been the gas, because the gas had worn off in the parking lot and this had not, and it had gotten worse every day since in the way a leak gets worse.
At ten she weighed out a tri-axle and a belly dump and wrote both tickets in her own hand and did not have any trouble. At eleven she ate the sandwich she had brought, ham and a slice of the yellow cheese, and when she looked down she had torn it into pieces and was dropping the pieces into her coffee and eating them off her fingers. She had never done that in her life. Somebody had done it every day for years, standing up, in a cold room, and had been glad to have it.
She wrapped the rest in the bag and put it in the trash under the paper towels so she would not have to look at it, and then she took it out of the trash and set it on the shelf, because throwing food away had gotten hard on Sunday and she had not told anybody that either.
Merle had the culvert file out on the table when she got home, which meant he had been to the county garage again and Prewitt had not come out from behind his desk again.
"Eleven years," he said. "Eleven years I've been telling them that pipe is undersized. Now there's a washout and it's my ditch and my problem and they'd like me to submit a request."
"Submit a request," Ruthann said.
"There's a form." He tapped the file with two fingers. "There's a form, Ruthie."
She got the chops out of the skillet and the applesauce out of the refrigerator and set the table, and she was pouring the milk before she saw she had put down three plates. Merle looked at the third one and then at her.
"Shea coming?"
"I thought she might."
"She's in Bloomington on Tuesdays." He said it the way a man says a fact he is not making anything out of, and he moved the plate to the counter himself and sat down.
She ate about half. At some point she picked up the salt and salted the applesauce, a good shake of it, and set the shaker down and went right on eating. Merle watched her do it. He did not say a word about it, and later he took his bowl to the sink and ate the rest of it standing up with the water running, which she heard and understood and could not do anything about from where she was sitting.
She washed and he dried, because his shoulder does better with the towel.
"Merle."
"Mm."
"Do you ever walk into a house you've never been in and know where the stairs are at?"
"Everybody does that." He put the skillet in the drawer under the stove. "That's a thing they've got a name for. It's French. Shea told me about it, it's from your brain writing it down twice."
"That's it, then."
"That's what she said. There was a whole thing about it." He hung the towel over the oven handle and squared it up, which he does. "Prewitt's got a nephew on the drainage board, did I tell you that? So that's the wall I'm up against there."
He went out to the garage after and she heard the compressor come on and then the little engine of something turning over four or five times and catching, and running rough, and then evening out. He had a Briggs he had been fooling with since Easter that a man in Orleans was going to give him sixty dollars for.
Ruthann sat in the chair by the front window with the light off. Across the road the Hendricks' security light was on the pole and the moths were at it, and beyond that the field had been cut and the round bales sat out there where the baler had quit and left them.
She had been married to him thirty-one years in April. She knew the smell of the back of his neck. She knew he would not ask her again about the plate or the salt, not because he had not noticed, but because he had decided sometime around 1998 that the way to hold onto a person is to leave a certain amount of them alone.
The compressor kicked on out in the garage and ran and shut off. She got up and turned the porch light on for him, which he did not need and had never once asked for, and then she went to bed.
Nobody had been anybody.
That was the part she could not get anyone to understand later, on the two occasions she tried. There were no queens in it. There was a great deal of carrying. She had carried water up a bank in a place where the water was brown and warm at the top of the day, and she had carried a child on her hip through a market in a city she could not name and would know instantly by its smell. She had cut sod. She had broken rock, which she noticed and did not make anything out of, because everybody has broken rock.
She had been a man eleven or twelve times. It was not the strange part. The strange part was how little difference it made to the inside of the day, which was still weather and food and whether the person across the room was going to start in on you.
She tried to count them the first night she could not sleep. She got to sixty-three and then found she was counting the same one twice under two names and quit. Some of them were nine days long. One of them was nine days long and she had all nine of them, and the whole of it was being held and being cold and one particular sound that she was sure was a door.
She remembered dying about as often as she remembered anything else, and it was almost never like the television. Mostly it was a fever, or it was a slow thing in the belly over a winter with people talking in the next room about the price of something. Twice it was fast. One of the fast ones was a horse and the horse had not meant anything by it.
And after, every single time, the forgetting. That was the piece she had not expected to get back, because you would think forgetting is the one thing that does not leave a mark. It had a shape to it. It came on like the moment your foot finds the last stair when you thought there was one more, and everything you had spent a life carrying went out of you in about the time it takes to set a glass down, and it did not hurt, and it was a relief. Everybody gets that. She had gotten it two hundred and some times and she was not getting it now.
The people were the worst of it, or the best, she had not decided.
Reba Sipes at the credit union had been her husband's sister in a cold country and they had gone eleven years without speaking over a chimney they shared and a dispute about the flue. Reba still had the face for it. She said hon and slid the receipt under the glass and Ruthann took the receipt and drove home shaking.
Curt from Bickel Propane, who brings a calendar every December and puts it on the hook by the back door himself because he knows where the hook is, had held her under the water in a millrace until she stopped, some four hundred years ago, over a thing she could no longer remember the cause of. Curt has a bad hip and a granddaughter with a scholarship. He is one of the nicest men in the county. Both of those are true and she has to live in a county with him.
Shea called Thursday about a tire.
"They want two hundred and ten dollars, Mom, for one tire, and it's not even the brand that was on it."
"Get the two hundred and ten dollar one."
"That's what Dad said." A pause with a television behind it. "You sound funny."
"I've got the crown in. It doesn't sit right."
"You want me to come out Sunday?"
She did want that, and she also did not, because when she thought about Shea now she got the other thing along with it, the wall they had shared once with a stove on either side of it, and how the woman on the other side of that wall had been a person Ruthann had not liked and had gone on not liking for the better part of thirty years. And now she had fed her, and taught her to drive, and sat up with her the year she was sick.
"Sunday's fine," Ruthann said. "Bring the dog if you want."
Ronnie Tapp came to the scale house Friday and stood in the door with his hard hat in his hand, which he only does when he has something to say that he would rather mail.
"Cody Muntz."
"What about him."
"He says you spoke to him in Spanish or something. And that you called him a name that wasn't his, twice." Ronnie turned the hat around by the brim. "He's twenty-four, Ruthann. He got worked up about it. His wife called Bernice, and then Bernice called me, and I've got to be able to say I talked to you."
"You've talked to me."
"Is there anything going on."
Out on the pad the loader was working the number two pile and the beeper went every time he backed. She thought about the shape of the true answer and what it would do to this man, who had put her on the schedule the year Merle's knee went and had never once mentioned it after.
"I've had a rough couple weeks with a tooth," she said. "I've not been sleeping."
"You want some time? You've got the days."
"I don't want the days."
"All right." He put the hat back on. "I've got to write it down. It's not a write-up, it's a note. There's a difference in the book but I'll be honest with you, they go in the same folder." He knocked twice on the door frame going out, which was his apology, and she took it.
The slow hour at a quarry is between two and three, after the morning contractors and before the county trucks come for the winter stockpile. The window was open and the fan was going and she had the tickets squared and the totals run and nothing to do.
So she went and looked for Merle.
She had figured out by then how it worked, more or less, and it was not thinking. Thinking got her nowhere. It came by objects. She could take a thing in her hand, or even the idea of a thing, and it would open like a drawer. A wooden spoon burned black on one edge. The smell of tar. A rope with a splice in it. Each one had a room around it and people in the room, and the people had faces, and she had gotten so she could go through them like she went through the ticket book at the end of a shift, front to back, not reading, just checking.
She started with hands, since that was how Cody had come. Then voices. Then the particular way a person stands in a doorway when they are not sure they are welcome, which is the way Merle stood in her mother's kitchen in 1993 with a coffee can of walnuts he had picked up off the road because he had not known what to bring.
He was not in any of it. She went through it twice. She went through the cold country and the market city and the nine days and the man who cut sod and the one where she was old, which was rare, and the two hundred and some others going back until they got thin and dark and mostly weather. Every other person she had ever loved was in there somewhere, wearing a different face, owing her money, holding her under. Reba was in there. Curt was in there. The woman at the license branch was in there twice.
Merle was not in there once.
She got up out of the chair. The scale readout said 0 and then said 0 and then a Peterbilt came up the haul road and put 61,400 on it, and Ruthann was outside the scale house standing in the white dust with the ticket book in her hand, and the driver waited, and after a while he tapped the horn, one short one, the polite kind, and she went back in and wrote his ticket.
The garage light was on when she got home and the door was up. Merle had the Briggs on the bench with the shroud off and the tank drained into a coffee can, and the radio out there was on the other station, the one that plays swap shop at six.
"It's running rich," he said, without looking up. "I've had it apart twice. He wants it Sunday."
Ruthann set her purse on the chest freezer. She stood at the end of the bench for a minute, out of the light.
"Show me how you do that."
Now he looked up. "How I do what."
"That. The bowl and whatever's in it."
"It's a float." He wiped his hands on the rag that lives on the vise. "There's nothing to it, Ruthie, it's a bowl and a float and a little needle. It's not anything."
"Show me anyway."
He looked at her about two seconds longer than a man usually looks at his wife, and whatever he decided he kept to himself. He moved the parts tray over and swept a place clear with the side of his arm and got the other stool down off the nail.
"Sit there, you're in my light."
He put the carburetor in front of her and turned it so the bowl was toward her and put the screwdriver in her hand and told her to go easy, that the gasket was the last one he had. She got the screw out. He held the bowl and let it come down slow so the gas would not go on the floor, and it went in the can, and the smell of it came up between them.
"Now that's your float," he said. "It rides up on the fuel and it pushes the needle into the seat and it shuts the fuel off. That's the whole trick. When they run rich it's generally the needle, or the float's got a hole and it's took on gas and it can't ride."
"How do you know which."
"You shake it." He took it and shook it next to his ear, and then he handed it to her and she shook it next to hers, and there was nothing moving in it.
"So it's the needle."
"So it's the needle." He tipped the bowl and worked it out with his thumbnail and put it down in her palm, a little brass thing with a rubber tip on the point of it, no bigger than a match head. His hand was warm off the light and it stayed under hers a second longer than it needed to.
"Don't lose that," he said. "They don't make it anymore."