Nancy Culpepper by Bobbie Ann Mason Page A

doesn’t want to buy a whole new wiper. He needs to get a tune-up, but he forgot to bring the coupon he clipped from the newspaper for a free one. He tries to calculate whether he would come out ahead if he went instead to that filling station offering the free case of Coke with a tune-up. But he doesn’t have time to fool with the car today anyway. Impatiently, he drives back to the hospital, the radio blasting out rock-and-roll. The music fits the urgency of his life. The music seems to organize all the noises of public places into something he can tolerate. The rhythm of driving blends with the music on the radio and the beat in his nervous system. Before the children were born, he and Lila used to go dancing at little places out in the country that people called “nigger juke joints.” They went to one across the country line where they could get beer. Lila never liked beer, but she loved to dance. He can imagine her long legs now, flashing white in the dark of the dance floor. He remembers a saxophone player and a blues singer as good as Joe Williams. The real music is always hidden somewhere, off in the country, back in his head, in his memory. There are occasional echoes of that raunchy old music he always loved in some of the rock songs on the radio.
    At the hospital, he is forced to park in the last row. “Midnight Rambler” by the Rolling Stones comes on the radio then, and he sits there and listens until it is finished. His family is busting out at the seams—like the music. He can’t keep track of what they are up to. When a plane crash is on the news, he’s afraid Nancy was on the plane. And Cat’s life is a mess. She married too young, and her husband had big ideas he couldn’t follow through on. He managed a hardware store, then opened his own waterbed outlet, but it failed. Spence told Cat the day Dan leased the store that waterbeds were filled with snake oil, not water, and she was mad at him for a long time for saying that. Lila tried to talk Cat into staying with Dan, but Spence is glad she got rid of him. Lila worries about Cat and the kids alone at night, with no man around the house, but Lila isn’t afraid to go gallivanting around the world herself.
    When Spence’s mother died a few years ago, they were free to travel. By then, they had sold off the cows and weren’t tied down on the farm. Spence told Lila he was going to send her around the world. She begged him to go too, but he refused to go traveling with a bunch of old people, yammering about their ailments. “I ain’t that old,” he protested.
    “But we couldn’t light out by ourselves,” she said. “We’d get knocked in the head and robbed. We’d get lost. On these tours, they take care of you.”
    He was afraid for her to go off, but he wanted her to have the chance. Her first trip was to Hawaii, and at home alone he imagined her out on the Pacific, in a cruise boat that stopped at Pearl Harbor. When she came home from Hawaii, she brought a certificate for a hula-dancing course (three lessons) and some ceramic pineapples. “Did you get scared?” he asked. “Not a bit,” she said. “I slept good, had the biggest time of my life.” The airplane, she said, was big enough to play ball in. On her second trip, a bus tour out to the Badlands, she brought him a toy rabbit with antlers—a jackelope. It was a joke present, but she wouldn’t admit it, insisting she saw a jackelope cross the highway. After that, she went on two more trips, and when relatives commented snidely about how his wife was running around on him and spending all his money, it made him furious. He told them, “She took care of my mother for ten years, and she deserves to get out and have fun. If she wants to go to the moon, I’ll let her. I don’t care how much it costs.”
    While she was away in Hawaii, his memories of the Pacific grew louder, more insistent. The sounds of the antiaircraft guns echoed and reverberated below deck, where he was an