38
Larry Watson
“Did you feel anything?” Roy asks abruptly. “You know, like when we were kids. You said you could feel it when Kenny Wertz nailed me with a fastball. Did you feel anything last night?”
“I—no. No, I didn’t feel anything.”
“Good,” says Roy. “I wouldn’t want you to. Not this.” His eyelids flutter and close.
Their mother whispers to Dean, “He kind of comes and goes.” She adds, “While you’re here I’ll go grab a cup of coffee.”
Mrs. Linderman lumbers across the room. When she gets to the door, she turns and looks back at her sons. Not even in the hours after their birth, when they lay swaddled in the nursery on the floor below, could one boy be confused for the other. “Dean’s the sad-eyed one,” the doctor and nurses had said, to which the boys’ father replied, “What the hell does a baby have to be sad about?”
In another moment Roy’s eyes open, and he looks up at his brother with an expression that is, for an instant, clouded with incomprehension. “She’s gone?” he asks Dean.
“She went for coffee.”
“She’s wearing me out, man. Every minute it’s ‘How are you doing?’ ‘Feeling better?’ I think she’s worried I’ll die if she doesn’t keep checking. But I’ll probably be getting into a private room, thanks to her. And no extra charge.”
“She probably walked up and down the hall looking for empty rooms.”
“That’s exactly what she did.”
“Look,” says Dean, “do you want me to drive up there and do something about the truck? Have it towed somewhere? You said it’s totaled, but maybe something can be salvaged? Scrap maybe?”
“Fuck it,” Roy says. “Leave it. Let it rot.”
“Wrecks don’t rot.”
“Rust then. I don’t give a shit.” His eyes droop closed, and within an instant he’s asleep again, his breaths chuffing in and out past those swollen lips still traced with thin dark lines of blood.
Somewhere on the floor a bell rings, a chime that is doubtless a call of distress or complaint. Dean steps closer to the bed. Just beneath the sharp, pungent smells of bleach and antiseptic is a faint fetid odor
The Lives of Edie Pritchard
39
like rotting vegetables. Dean touches his brother’s hand, its tendons relaxed, its veins like mapped routes leading . . . where? Roy wears a ring commemorating their high school and graduating class, a thick, heavy circle of engraved metal and polished stone. A sentimental adornment on the finger of a man who professes to be free of sentiment. To the heart of course. That’s where the map leads. To the heart.
Sundays are usually busy times at the Seventh Avenue Laundromat, but today Edie has the business and its machines all to herself. Though the front and back doors and all the windows are open, no cooling air moves through the screens. The laundromat is stifling, and though its heat is fragrant, scented with soaps and fabric soften-ers, it is heat nonetheless, like a heavy blanket that can’t be thrown off.
The last load is drying now, and while those sheets and towels twine and separate in their slow-motion swirl, Edie folds and stacks Dean’s and her clothes on the long white table. Dean’s underwear is frayed and yellowing. Her own slips and brassieres look gray. The stitching on the patch on one of the short-sleeved shirts Dean wears on the job has come undone and is in danger of falling off. Edie presses down on the embroidery—Cheyenne Sporting Goods—as if the pressure of her finger is enough to secure the patch. She’ll have to sew it on. Again.
And a cuff on one of the two pairs of Dean’s cotton work pants has come unstitched, and Edie will have to tack that down too. Two socks are without their mates. Edie closes her eyes and lowers her head as if nothing could be more dispiriting than one black sock and one brown sock. Then she comes to the only garments left to be folded, the powder blue shorts and the white sleeveless blouse she wore to Bentrock.
The stains did not wash out. Dirt, where she sat down on the prairie next to Roy. Blood. Did she cradle his bleeding head to her chest?
She must have. And she must have allowed his head to rest on her lap. These stains—great, faded wine-colored blotches shaped like unmapped continents—will never come out.
She carries the shorts and the blouse to the back of the laundromat and drops them into a trash can.
40
Larry Watson
“Must be nice.”
Edie turns around. Janice Twilly carries a wicker laundry basket, and her two daughters follow her—the older one, no more than five or six, toting a baby in diapers.
“Hi, Janice,” says Edie.
Janice nods in the direction of the trash. “Was that something that’d fit me?” she asks. The women are close to the same size, though Janice Twilly’s body looks as though it’s been put to harder use than Edie’s.
“That’s not something you’d want. I couldn’t get the stains out.”
Janice barks out a laugh. “You think some little stains would bother me?” She puts down her basket and heads for the bin. She takes out the blouse and holds it aloft.
“Jesus,” says Janice. “Is this—?”
Edie nods.
Janice examines Edie carefully, looking perhaps for the wounds that might have produced this quantity of blood.
Janice takes Edie’s shorts out of the trash as well. “Jesus,” she says again. “Did you put anything on these before you washed them?”
“I didn’t.”
Janice shakes her head. “That’ll just set the stains, you know.”
“I suppose.”
“My mom uses baking soda and vinegar. That’ll take out damn near anything.” She drapes the blouse and the shorts over the edge of the trash bin, where she can continue to appraise them.
The baby begins to whimper, and Janice says to her older daughter, “Put her over on the table. And check her diaper.”
The child obeys without question. “She’s dry,” she says to her mother.
“But is she stinky?”
The older girl shakes her head no.
Janice reaches into her laundry basket and extracts a pack of Old Golds. She lights one and says, “I hear Roy Linderman was in a bad accident.”
“Where did you hear that?”
Janice exhales a stream of smoke. “My brother-in-law takes the X-ray pictures at the hospital.”
The Lives of Edie Pritchard
41
“Then you know all about it.”
Janice glances in the direction of her daughters and lowers her voice. “I heard you was with him.”
“You heard wrong.”
Janice’s forehead wrinkles with disappointment. “Roy isn’t yours?”
“I’m married to Dean if that’s what you’re asking.”
“Shit. I know they ain’t identical, but I could never keep them two straight.”
Edie stacks her folded laundry into a basket, and Janice begins to unload hers, the top layer of bright pinks, blues, and yellows of children’s clothing giving way to the mud and steel colors of the garments of working adults.
“Go get the diaper pail,” Janice commands her older daughter.