Zigzagging Down a Wild Trail by Bobbie Ann Mason Page A

someday, and she had imagined decorating it with country-kitchen antique-style milk jugs and egg baskets and calico-print chickens. When she married him, she felt exhilarated at each new purchase. But their furniture was cheap, and it wore down at about the same rate as their marriage, faster than the payment schedules. Now she thought about the way he used to sit in front of the TV, a gun in his lap. He would be taking it apart, putting it back together, as if it needed exercise to remain operable. She remembered him caressing the barrel, loving on it as one would fondle a baby. Night after night, Peyton sat watching TV with one of his guns astride his lap—dismantling and reassembling it, concentrating hard.
    Peyton had roared into her life. She was seventeen and he was twenty-four. He seemed mysterious, as if his pockets were loaded with taboos, like candy treats. She fell for him because he was a stud—wearing studs and black leather and frenzied hair and a pair of motorcycle boots that could stomp her heart into submission. He was comfortable in his body, with a cock of the head that implied a secret, superior knowledge—his crotch still warm from the heat of his Harley. The way he moved—casual, unhurried, luxuriating in his muscularity—called to her, like an evangelist inviting her to come forward and get her soul saved. She didn’t know he was a drug dealer. He quit for her sake, he told her later, but she soon decided she had married too young, a mistake that delineated her life as clearly as an arranged marriage in a remote culture. When she began working nights, she felt relieved that she wouldn’t have to watch the revenge thrillers he had begun renting. Then he drifted into trouble, back into dealing. It was so easy, he told her, he couldn’t stay away from it. It beckoned him, like a lighthouse. “You never saw a lighthouse in your life,” Liz pointed out.
    Now the telephone rang again. She picked popcorn hulls out of her teeth. In a commercial, a farmer was walking with his dog in a field of soybeans. The fields were green and pretty, edged with mist. The video whizzed through scenes of the man’s life—his marriage, the birth of a baby, then his daughter’s wedding, with her wedding dress whirling among the bushy plants. The commercial was for a weed killer for no-till soybeans. It made farm life look rich and grand and satisfying. But it also made a life span seem as short as a season’s crop.
    In the morning, as she stepped out of the shower, she heard the telephone ringing and almost burst into tears, thinking of Peyton’s mother, who always looked fresh as a daisy—however fresh that was. Daisies actually smelled like vomit. The telephone stopped ringing.
    At the shopping center, the bus was packed with senior citizens and several lone eccentrics Liz recognized from earlier trips. She found a seat near the rear of the bus and shoved her tote bag on the floor against the wall. She was dressed in her new wide-legged shorts, with a tight tank-top and a loose poppy-print shirt. In her bag was a fleece throw, in case she got cold on the bus.
    Suddenly Peyton slid into the seat beside her, startling her. He had tracked her down with his bad news. Waves of goose bumps rippled across her skin.
    â€œWhere were you?” he asked. “I was at the hospital all night.”
    â€œIs she all right?”
    â€œShe’s still in a coma.”
    She sat quietly as he told her about the nightmarish night at the hospital and the doctors’ cryptic, noncommittal comments. His hard shoulder pressed against her. His plaid shirt was fresh, but his jeans had twin rips above the knees. He was wearing the jeans with the Confederate flag patch on the right thigh.
    â€œWhat do you think you’re doing, Liz?” he asked. “Your mama said you needed to be with me. She told me you were going to Tunica to blow your paycheck.” He slapped her