Walking Dunes by Sandra Scofield Read Free Book Online

you, Wanda June. You pay attention to your own dinner and you can have pop later on.” Benke gave David a dirty look.
    The girl ate. It was a slow business, but she ate some of the macaroni and a few bites of carrots. She drank the Coke. While she ate, David talked quietly, telling her about his drive into Basin today from the west. “I couldn’t believe how hot I got. I hope this heat breaks. Think how it’ll feel, sitting at a desk all day. Though I’m glad school is starting. It’s my last year, and I want to get on with it.” He touched her arm where it was red. “I bet you burn if you stay out long. You have really fair skin.”
    Sissy put her spoon down in the applesauce, turned her head slightly to look at him, and smiled. Big tears were oozing out of her eyes and sliding down her cheeks. He cleared away her tray and asked her if she would like to play cards. She watched but didn’t say anything. “Do you know how to play gin rummy?” he asked. She shook her head no. He felt relieved; there was something he could do. He moved her away from the clot of patients in the middle of the day room, some of whom were beginning to quarrel about where to sit, or about dessert, or what television show to watch. There was a side table where he laid out the cards and began explaining to Sissy how the game worked.
    She hugged herself. “I can’t.”
    â€œOh sure,” he said. “Anybody can learn to play this.” He gathered up the cards and made a big show of shuffling them.
    â€œCan’t go,” she said, a little louder.
    â€œGo where?”
    â€œThere.”
    â€œI hope you won’t have to then,” he said, and dealt the cards. For the next half hour he played both their hands, talking all the time. She watched. The patients calmed down. A few visitors came and went.
    Marge came and said, “I’ve got your meds, Sissy.” Sissy didn’t look back as Marge pushed her down the hall. David found some checkers and a board and looked around. One old man looked at him hopefully, and David found a place where they could play. The old man was very happy to play checkers, and very attentive. He told David that his father had died while playing a game in a checkers tournament in Lawton, Oklahoma, forty years ago. “Died happy,” he said. David wondered whose idea it was for him to be on this ward. He didn’t seem any more out of it than most people. David could not help wondering about his own father at sixty or seventy. Now Saul played checkers and chess with his barber and a clerk from the men’s store where he did alterations. At least once a week he played pinochle with the junk dealer, Chasen. Sometimes the four of them got together for poker. Who would play with Saul when he went off the deep end? He did not plan to be around to see it, but it was painful to consider. It seemed inevitable. He was afraid for his parents. They did not eat well, or sleep well, and they did not take care of one another.
    At ten his mother called him to her desk to drink a cup of tea. “The highway patrol picked her up. Sissy. She was bloody, carrying a dead rabbit.” She lit a cigarette and inhaled deeply.
    â€œThat must have been a sight.” He thought this was going to sound a little fantastic. He wondered about the cop in the fancy sunglasses, how he had handled the girl after David drove on. Had he put her in the back, behind the mesh barrier, like some old drunk? Had he tried to be gentle? He wished he had not abandoned the scene so readily. He could imagine himself in the patrol car with her, comforting her, soothing her, on the ride into Basin. What had he been afraid of? Maybe of the cop, the cop’s car. It was one thing to imagine his arm around the girl—and she had been skittish as a rabbit, herself, hardly asking for solicitude in that moment of encounter in the brush—and quite another to imagine himself