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 PLAINSONG
by Kent Haruf
(fiction)
Published by Vintage Books, a division of
Random House, Inc.
Copyright © 1999 by Kent Haruf
(Chapters used with permission of publishers and authors.)
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What brings you here so early? she said.
Crowder wanted to talk to me.
What about?
Russell Beckman.
That little shit. What'd he do now?
Nothing. But he's going to if he wants to get out of American history.
Good luck, she said. She cranked the machine once and looked at the paper. Is that all that's bothering you?
Nothing's bothering me.
Like hell it isn't. I can see something is. She looked into his face, and he looked back without expression and sat smoking. Is it at home? she said.
He didn't answer but shrugged again and smoked.
Then the door opened and a muscular little man in a shortsleeve white shirt came in. Irving Curtis, who taught business. Morning one and all, he said.
He moved up beside Maggie Jones and put his arm around her waist. The top of his head came up to her eyes. He stood up on his toes and whispered
something into her ear. Then he squeezed her hard, drawing her toward him. She removed his hand.
Don't be such an ass, she said. It's too early in the morning. It's only a joke.
And I'm just telling you.
Oh now, he said. He sat down at the table across from Guthrie and lit a cigarette with a silver lighter and snapped it shut and then played with the
lighter on the tabletop. What's the good word? he said.
There isn't any, said Guthrie.
What's wrong with everybody? Irving Curtis said. Jesus. It's the middle of the
week. I come in here feeling good and now look what you've done to me. I'm depressed already and it's not even eight o'clock in the morning.
You could shoot yourself, Guthrie said.
Ho, Curtis said. He laughed. That's better. That's funny. They sat and smoked. Maggie Jones stopped the machine and gathered up her papers. Your turn, she said to Guthrie, and left the room.
Bye-bye, Irving Curtis said.
Guthrie rose and fed the ditto master into the slot on the drum and closed it and cranked the machine once and once more to see how the exam looked.
No shit, though, Curtis said. Just once I'd like to get her in a dark room.
You want to leave her alone, Guthrie said.
No. I mean, think about it.
Guthrie cranked the machine and turned the damp exams out into the tray. There was the sharp smell of spirits. I told you what Gary Rawlson said about her.
You told me, Guthrie said.
Do you believe it?
No. And neither does Rawlson when he hasn't been drinking. When it's in the daylight.
CHAPTER FIVE Victoria Roubideaux.
At noon she came out of the noise and crush at school and walked over to the highway and then up a block to the Gas and Go. In her purse she had three dollars and some change and she wanted to think she could eat
something now and keep it down. Thinking anyway she ought to try.
Approaching the store she passed two high school boys leaning together at
the gas pumps, running fuel into an old blue Ford Mustang. They watched her walk across the blacktop in her short skirt. Once she glanced up at them.
Hey, one of them called. Vicky. How you doing? She looked away and he said something she was unable to hear but it made the other boy laugh. She went on.
When she entered the store a group of high school kids was lined up at the counter, talking and waiting to pay for the cold meat sandwiches they'd taken
from the refrigerated case and also the bags of chips and the plastic cups of pop. She walked back through the aisles, glancing at the labeled cans and the
bright packages on the shelves. Nothing looked good now. She picked up a can of Vienna sausages and examined it and read the label and put it back
thinking how slick they were, how they dripped and ran when you lifted them out. She moved over to the popcorn case. At least that would be a salty
taste. She filled a bag of popcorn and then chose a can of pop from the cooler. She carried these to the front and set them on the counter next to the register.
Alice rang them up, a hard-looking thin woman with a black mole on her cheek. Dollar twelve, she said. Her voice sounded harsh. She watched the girl raise the purse on its strap and open it.
You're looking kind of puny today. You okay, hon?
I'm just tired, the girl said, and set the money on the counter.
You kids. You need to go to bed at night. She scooped the money up and
sorted it into the drawer. And I mean in your own bed.
I do, the girl said.
Sure, Alice said. I know how that is.
The girl moved to the front window of the store past the double glass doors
and stood at the magazine rack, reading about three girls her age who had trouble in California, while she ate the popcorn one kernel at a time and
sipped at the can of pop. More kids came in and bought drinks during the noon hour and went out, calling back and forth, and once a couple of sophomores began to shove each other in the aisle stacked with cans of
motor oil and pork-and-beans until Alice said, You boys can knock that off anytime.
A senior came in and paid for gas. He was a tall blond boy with sunglasses
pushed up on the top of his head. She knew him from first-year biology. On his way out he stopped in the doorway, leaning toward her, holding the door open with his hip. Roubideaux, he said.
She looked at him.
Want a ride?
No.
Just back to school.
No thank you.
Why not?
I don't want to.
Hell then. You had your chance.
He stepped out and the door drew slowly shut behind him. She watched through the plate glass window over the top of the magazine rack as he got
into his red car, revved it up and turned out onto the highway, making a little squeal when he shifted gears. Before the hour was up she went back to school.
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PLAINSONG
By Kent Haruf
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________________________________________________________
 Kent Haruf is the author of two previous novels,
Where You Once Belonged, winner of a Whiting Foundation Award and a citation from the Pen/Hemingway Foundation, and The Tie That Binds. In Plainsong, Mr. Haruf writes of a town and a few
people that are integral to that town's character. His chapters alternate between the experiences of Tom Guthrie, a high school history teacher who is father to two boys, Ike and
Bobby, and husband to a wife who is slipping away from them into a deep depression. There is also a seventeen-year-old high school girl named Victoria Robideaux who, on the first day we meet her, is living with her
mother but will soon find herself on a journey towards a home and all that is implicit in that word. We also meet the brothers McPheron, two elderly cattle
ranchers who live a simple, hardscrabble life where they know no one so well as each other and their livestock and oh, the skies of the Eastern Plains of Holt, Colorado.
Interview with Kent Haruf
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