Dusk and Other Stories (17 page)

They were leveling the floor of the old Bryant place. Like all of them it had no foundation, it sat on pieces of wood.

“Feller could start right there,” Harry called.

“This one?”

“That’s it.”

Billy slowly wiped the dirt from his eyes again and began to set up the jack. The joists were a few inches above his face.

They ate lunch sitting outside. It was hot, mountain weather.
The sun was dry, the air thin as paper. Harry ate slowly. He had a wrinkled neck and white stubble along his jowl line.

Death was coming for Harry Mies. He would lie emptied, his cheeks rouged, the fine, old man’s ears unhearing. There was no telling the things he knew. He was alone in the far fields of his life. The rain fell on him, he did not move.

There are animals that finally, when the time comes, will not lie down. He was like that. When he kneeled he would get up again slowly. He would rise to one knee, pause, and finally sway to his feet like an old horse.

“Feller in town with all the hair …” he said.

Billy’s fingers made black marks on the bread.

“The hair?”

“What’s he supposed to be?”

“I think a drummer,” Billy said.

“A drummer.”

“He’s with a band.”

“Must be with something,” Harry said.

He unscrewed the cap from a battered thermos and poured what looked like tea. They sat in the quiet of the tall cottonwoods, not even the highest leaves were moving.

They drove to the dump, the sun in the windshield was burning their knees. There was an old cattle gate salvaged from somewhere, some bankrupt ranch. It was open, Harry drove in. They were in a field of junk and garbage on the edge of the creek, a bare field forever smoldering. A black man in overalls appeared from a shack surrounded by bedsprings. He was round-shouldered, heavy as a bull. There was an old, green Chrysler parked on the far side.

“Looking for some pipe, Al,” Harry said.

The man said nothing. He gave a sort of halfhearted signal. Harry had already gone past and turned down an alley of old furniture, stoves, aluminum chairs. There was a sour smell in the air. A few refrigerators, indestructible, had fallen down the bank and were lying half-buried in the stream.

The pipe was all in one place. It was mostly rusted, Billy kicked aimlessly at some sections.

“We can use it,” Harry commented.

They began carrying pieces back to the car and put them on the roof. They drove slowly, the old man’s head tilted back a little. The car swayed in and out of holes. The pipe rolled in the rack.

“Pretty good feller, Al,” Harry said. They were coming to the shack. He lifted his hand as they passed. No one was there.

Billy’s mind was wandering. The ride to town seemed long.

“They give him a lot of trouble,” Harry said. He was watching the road, the empty road which connects all these towns.

“There’s none of that stuff much good out there,” he said. “Sometimes he tries to charge a little for it. People feel like they ought to be able to carry it off for nothing.”

“He didn’t charge you.”

“Me? No, I bring him a little something now and then,” Harry said. “Old Al and me are friends.”

After a while, “Claims to be a free country, I dunno …” he said.

The cowboys at Gerhart’s called him the Swede, but he never went in there. They would see him go by outside, papery skin, dangling arms, the slowness of age as he walked. He may have looked a little Swedish, pale-eyed from those mornings of invincible white, mornings of the great Southwest, black coffee in his cup, the day ahead. The ashtrays on the bar were plastic, the clock had the name of a whiskey printed on its face.

It was five-thirty. Billy walked in.

“There he is.”

He ignored them.

“What’ll it be, then?” Gerhart said.

“Beer.”

On the wall was the stuffed head of a bear with a pair of glasses on its nose and a red plaster tongue. Above it hung an American flag with a sign:
NO DOGS ALLOWED.
Around the middle of the day there were a few people like Wayne Garrich who had the insurance agency,
they wore straw rancher’s hats rolled at the sides. Later there were construction workers in T-shirts and sunglasses, gas company men. It was always crowded after five. The ranch hands sat together at the tables with their legs stretched out. They had belt buckles with a gold-plated steerhead on them.

“Be thirty cents,” Gerhart said. “What’re you up to? Still working for old Harry?”

“Yeah, well …” Billy’s voice wandered.

“What’s he paying you?”

He was too embarrassed to tell the truth.

“Two fifty an hour,” Billy said.

“Jesus Christ,” Gerhart said. “I pay that for sweeping floors.”

Billy nodded. He had no reply.

Harry took three dollars an hour himself. There were probably people in town would take more, he said, but that was his rate. He’d pour a foundation for that, he said, take three weeks.

There was not one day of rain. The sun laid on their backs like boards.

Harry got the shovel and hoe from the trunk of his car. He was tall, he carried them in one hand. He turned the wheelbarrow right side up, the bags of cement were piled beneath on a piece of plywood. He flushed out the wheelbarrow with the hose. Then he began mixing the first load of concrete: five shovels of gravel, three of sand, one of cement. Occasionally he’d stop and pick out a twig or piece of grass. The sun beat down like flats of tin. Ten thousand days of it down in Texas and all around. He turned the dry mixture over upon itself again and again, finally he began adding water. He added more water, working it in. The color became a rich, river-gray, the smooth face broken by gravel. Billy stood watching.

“Don’t want it too runny,” the old man said. There was always the feeling he might be talking to himself. He laid down the hoe. “Okey-dokey,” he said.

His shoulders were stooped, they had the set of labor in them. He took the handles of the barrow without straightening up.

“I’ll get it,” Billy said, reaching.

“That’s all right,” Harry muttered. His teeth whistled on the “s.”

He wheeled it himself, the surface now smooth and shifting a little from side to side, and set it down with a jolt near the wooden forms he’d built—Billy had dug the trench. Checking them one last time, he tilted the wheelbarrow and the heavy liquid fell from its lip. He scraped it empty and then moved along the trench with his shovel, jabbing to fill the voids. On the second trip he let Billy push the barrow, naked to the waist, the sun roaring down on his shoulders and back, his muscles jumping as he lifted. The next day he let him shovel.

Billy lived near the Catholic church, in a room on the ground floor. It had a metal shower. He slept without sheets, in the morning he drank milk from the carton. He was going out with a girl named Alma who was a waitress at Daly’s. She had legs with hard calves. She didn’t say much, her complaisance drove him crazy, sometimes she was at Gerhart’s with someone else in a haze of voices, the bark of laughter, famous heavyweights behind her tacked on the wall. There were water stains near the ceiling. The door to the men’s room slammed.

They talked about her. They stood at the bar so they could see her by turning a little. She was a girl in a small town. The television had exhibition football coming from Grand Junction. They were thinking of her legs as they watched the game, she was like an animal they wanted. She smoked a lot, Alma, but her teeth were white. She was flat-faced, like a fighter. She would be living in the trailer park, Billy told her. Her kids would eat white bread in big, soft packages from the Woody Creek Store.

“Oh, yeah?”

She didn’t deny it. She looked away. Like an animal, it didn’t matter how pure they were, how beautiful. They went down the
highway in clattering steel trucks, wisps of straw blowing clear as they passed. They were watched by the cold eyes of cowboys. They entered the house of blood, its sudden bone-cleaving blows, its muffled cries. He didn’t spend much money on her—he was saving up. She never mentioned it.

They poured the side of the house that faced Third Street and started along the front. He thought of her in the sunlight that was browning his arms. He lifted the heavy barrow and became strong everywhere, like a tightened cable. When they finished in the evening, Harry washed off everything with the hose, he put the shovel and hoe in the trunk of his car. He sat on the front seat with the door open. He smiled to himself. He lifted his cap and smoothed his hair.

“Say,” he said. There was something he wanted to tell. He looked at the ground. “Ever been West?”

It was a story of California in the thirties. There was a whole bunch of them going from town to town, looking for work. One day they came to a place, he forgot the name, and went into some little restaurant. You could get a whole meal for thirty cents in those days, but when they came to pay the check, the owner told them it would cost a dollar fifty each. If they didn’t like it, he said, there was the state police just down the street. Afterward Harry walked over to the barbershop—he looked like that musician, he had so much hair. The barber put the sheet around him. Haircut, Harry told him. Then, hey, wait a minute, how much will it be? The barber had the scissors in his hand. I see you been eating over to the Greek’s, he said.

He laughed a little, almost shyly. He glanced at Billy, his long teeth showed. They were his own. Billy was buttoning his shirt.

It was hot in the evening. The hottest summer in years, everyone said, the hottest ever. At Gerhart’s they stood around in big, dusty shoes.

“Shit, it’s hot,” they told each other.

“Can’t get much hotter.”

“What’ll it be, then?” Gerhart would ask. His idiot son was rinsing glasses.

“Beer.”

“Hot enough for you?” Gerhart said as he served it.

They stood at the bar, their arms covered with dust. Across the street was the movie house. Up toward the pass, the sand and gravel pit. There was ranching all around, a macadam plant, men like Wayne Garrich who hardly spoke at all, the bitterness had penetrated to the bone. They were deliberate, their habits were polished smooth. They looked out through the big, storelike windows.

“There’s Billy.”

“Yeah, that’s him.”

“Well, what do you think?” They laid out phrases in low voices, like bets. Their arms were big as firewood on the bar. “Is he going to it or coming from it?”

The foundation was finished at the beginning of September. There was a little sand where the pile had been, a few specks of gravel. The nights were already cold, the first emptiness of winter, not a light on in town. The trees seemed silent, subdued. They would begin to turn suddenly, the big ones going last.

Harry died about three in the morning. He had been leaning on the cart in the supermarket, behind the stacks, struggling for breath. He tried to drink some tea. He sat in his chair. He was between sleep and waking, the kitchen light was on. Suddenly he felt a terrible, a bursting pain. His mouth fell open, his lips were dry.

He left very little, a few clothes, the Chevrolet filled with tools. Everything seemed lifeless and drab. The handle of his hammer was smooth. He had worked all over, built ships in Galveston during the war. There were photographs when he was twenty, the same hooked nose, the hard, country face. He looked like a pharaoh there
in the funeral home. They had folded his hands. His cheeks were sunken, his eyelids like paper.

Billy Amstel went to Mexico in a car he and Alma bought for a hundred dollars. They agreed to share expenses. The sun polished the windshield in which they sat going southward. They told each other stories of their life.

A
BOUT THE
A
UTHOR

J
AMES
S
ALTER
is the author of the novels
Light Years, A Sport and a Pastime, Solo Faces, The Arm of Flesh
(revised as
Cassada)
, and
The Hunters;
the memoirs
Gods of Tin
and
Burning the Days;
and the collection
Last Night
. He lives in Colorado and on Long Island.

T
HE
M
ODERN
L
IBRARY
E
DITORIAL
B
OARD

Maya Angelou
•
A. S. Byatt
•
Caleb Carr
•
Christopher Cerf
•
Harold Evans
•
Charles Frazier
•
Vartan Gregorian
•
Jessica Hagedorn
•
Richard Howard
•
Charles Johnson
•
Jon Krakauer
•
Edmund Morris
•
Azar Nafisi
•
Joyce Carol Oates
•
Elaine Pagels
•
John Richardson
•
Salman Rushdie
•
Oliver Sacks
•
Carolyn See
•
Gore Vidal

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

2010 Modern Library Edition

Copyright © 1988 by James Salter
Introduction copyright © 2010 by Philip Gourevitch

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Modern Library, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York. Originally published by North Point Press, San Francisco, in 1988.

Grateful acknowledgment is made to
The Paris Review
, where “Am Strande von Tanger,” “The Cinema,” “Via Negativa,” and “The Destruction of the Goetheanum” first appeared; to
Grand Street
, for the publication of “Lost Sons,” “Akhilno,” and “Twenty Minutes”; to
Esquire
for “Foreign Shores,” “Dusk,” and “American Express”; and to
The Carolina Quarterly
, for the publication of “Dirt.”

MODERN LIBRARY and the TORCHBEARER Design are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.