“I don't understand how people can treat children like that,” she said.
He let out a big sigh and turned his face toward the pasture. The cows had all gone down behind the barn.
“I don't know either. They'd be better off adopted than where they were.”
“And how would that happen?”
“The court has to rule that they're unfit parents. I'd have to testify. It ain't easy to get em took away from the parents but I can talk to the judge.”
“You going to?”
“Yeah. I got to.”
She sat there rocking for a bit. He watched her. He'd caught her crying
one time earlier, when she was dressing them in their new clothes and having to look at their bodies. They still didn't have any shoes but he could find some for them somewhere.
“Did you know those people?”
“Naw. I'd seen somebody down there fishing before by that car. They live back up around Old Union somewhere. I'm gonna take him out to their house sometime, maybe tomorrow or the next day. I want to see what it looks like so I'll have a little information before I go in front of the judge. I need to know what I'm talking about.”
He got off the railing and stood up. She got out of her chair slowly.
“Are you ready?” she said.
“I guess so. I'll take em on down to the jail and meet those people. We've got some papers to sign. I got to tell the mother and daddy what's going on.”
She went into the house ahead of him and was talking to the children while he picked up his hat and got his keys. He stood there waiting for them. Mary herded them toward the front door with her hands on their shoulders and he went out behind them and got them into the car. He let them both sit in the front seat. She leaned in the window and he saw her trying not to cry.
“Y'all come back and see me sometime,” she said. They didn't say if they would or not. They didn't say anything. They looked at her and then they looked at him.
“I'll see you later, Mama,” Bobby said, and he pulled out. They were quiet in the seat beside him. He turned the scanner up and let them listen to that. He found some gum in the glove box and they each got a piece of that. He smoked a cigarette and drove slowly and asked them if they liked to fish. They began talking to him a little. After a bit he pulled his headlights on. And after a bit the children moved closer to him on the seat and began to hold on to him and tell him of the wonders they had seen.
Virgil was sitting on the front porch working on one of his reels, an old Zebco 33 on a taped-up Eagle Claw rod that he'd owned for twenty years. He'd pulled the handle off and had been squirting some sewing machine oil behind the shaft to try and get it to work a little smoother. The line was strung out between his knees and the front face of the reel was lying on the porch when he heard the car coming down the road.
The Redbone puppy raised his head from his front paws beside him as the crunching of the gravel got louder. The blue Buick was slowing down and then it seemed to make a quick decision and pulled into the yard. Mary drew up beside the porch with the driver's side closest to him. He stopped what he was doing and put the rod and the reel down. She was smiling a shy smile and she asked him if he wanted to take a little ride. He got up for his cigarettes and then went down the steps to the car.
There was a place on the back side of her land. A
POSTED
sign that guarded a wire gap that stayed chained and locked. It was dark enough to use the headlights to guide them through the sunken woods' road littered with leaves that whispered under the tires. At the top of a small hill she pulled into a clearing where the trees were spread out a little and there
was room enough to see the sky. She shut off the lights and the motor and they got out. She opened the trunk for him and he got out the quilt.
In near full dark he stood holding her and opened the buttons of her dress to find her naked beneath it as always in the past. He knelt in the pooled fabric of her dress at her feet and kissed her stomach while she held his head in her hands. Tree frogs were singing and through the trees the faint flare of fireflies moved slowly in the air. And she lowered herself to him with the moon beginning to come up through the trees. It hung there for a long time, soft rays shining down among the leaves.
When the dust she'd left had settled over the road, he eased back into his chair and the puppy came over. He petted him. The puppy whined and nuzzled deeper into his hand. The sound of the crickets came back, lulling him in the cooling evening air and taking him back to the last time he had made love to her, in the dark of a hot summer night, beneath that old oak tree, in 1941.
David was in his little chair rocking and watching the television while she ironed some clothes in the front room. She saw the headlights pull into the yard out past the curtains and she set the iron down and turned it off. All the doors were locked and she went to the window and looked out, saw the big star on the side and saw him cut the headlights off.
There was a switch for the porch lights beside the door and she turned it on, unlocked the door, and stepped out holding the screen door open. He was reaching back to get something out of the car and she sat down in a chair to wait on him.
“I'm runnin late,” he said, and she could see something in his hand. He came up the steps and sat down in the chair next to her, holding the gun in both hands.
“What am I supposed to do with that?” she said.
“Use it if you have to.”
“I don't know how to use it.”
“I'm gonna show you.”
He took it from the holster; to her it was an ugly thing, short and deathly. He made her take it and hold it.
“This is a double-action revolver,” he said. “That means you don't have to cock it. All you got to do is point it and squeeze the trigger.”
She looked at the thing. It was very heavy to her. She couldn't imagine using it on anybody or what it would do to a person.
“What is it?” she said.
“It's a .44 magnum.”
She turned it over in her hands. Through the side of the cylinder she could see the ends of the brass cartridges nestled snugly in their chambers.
“I'm scared of it, Bobby. And David in the house, where am I going to put it?”
He reached over and took it back and slid it into the holster, put the strap behind the hammer, and snapped it down. Then he put it back in her lap.
“Put it somewhere you know he can't get to it. Might be better if you don't even let him see it so he don't know it's in the house. If you've got a shoe box or something, put it up high on a shelf in your closet. Keep it in one place. That way if you need it you'll always know where it is. Like if you wake up in the middle of the night or something. You hear me?”
She rubbed her hand over the holster.
“All right,” she said. “Have you seen him?”
“No. Have you?”
She shook her lead a little. “No.”
The bugs had started coming into the light and some of them had landed on the porch and were crawling over it. Bobby put his foot out and crushed one with his boot. A thin dry crackling.
“How's David?” he said.
“He's okay.”
“He said anything about it?”
“Not much. I had to leave him with Miss Henderson today and I had to work late. I fixed his supper and he's been watching TV. He's all right.”
That seemed to satisfy Bobby.
“Well,” he said, and he got up. “I guess I better get on. It's been a long day.”
She sat holding the gun and looking up at him.
“Why don't you come on in? I can fix you a cup of coffee.”
There was something in the way he watched her that made her afraid a little. They both heard the car coming and turned their heads as it slowly went by. There under the bright light on the front porch they watched it go by in plain sight and saw his car and saw for a brief moment Glen looking out at them and then flipping a cigarette butt into her driveway. The car neither sped up nor slowed down, just kept traveling at the same rate on down the road and out of sight.
She didn't say anything. He didn't either. He just ran down the steps and got into his car and cranked it and pulled away.
He was thinking of the little sand road just beyond the next hill and he kept his eyes on the rearview mirror for as long as he could see the straight part of the road behind him. Once over the hill he sped up and then spun the car into the side road and rocketed down through a gully of dust and gravel and sailed up the next hill and powered it into a sliding drift that took him around the next curve and his only hope was that he wouldn't meet anybody at that speed. At the T in the road he took the right turn and shifted into second and kicked hard down on the gas and wound it up tight, dropped it back into third and looked back for Bobby. He took the old car fast up the patched blacktop past rusted fences and a crumbling barn, black cows on green grass, into the woods that began there and into a vast cavern of trees and hanging grapevines, the headlights boring a tunnel that he followed. He stuck one hand out the window and waved at nothing.
“Adios, motherfucker,” he said.
Late that night in her bed she held David close and stroked his sleeping head. It was hot with the window down and she could feel a thin film of sticky moisture in the folds of skin at her throat. She rubbed at it with the web of her hand and looked at the dark ceiling. A small fan was casting waves of humid air over the single sheet that covered them. David had been asleep for over an hour but tonight it wouldn't come to her. Not now. Not with it this hot.
She got her arm from around him and eased out of the bed. He didn't stir. She covered him back up with the sheet and went across the floor, her bare feet padding softly, out the bedroom door and down the short hall to the kitchen. There were some little Cokes in the icebox and she opened one and went out to the living room where she'd left her cigarettes, turned on the lamp, and sat down in the chair that faced the television. She didn't turn it on.
The cigarettes were on the table there and she shook one loose from the pack and lit it with a match and then blew the match out, dropped it into the ashtray. It was very quiet with David asleep. He was growing up fast and he didn't understand about the things grown people did. He didn't understand why his daddy didn't live with them and it was hard for her to make him see why. Virgil had been good to spend time with
him and she was grateful for that. David always came back happy from their little fishing trips.
The cat came out of the bedroom, hugging the wall, rubbing against a chair and the lamp. It stopped and stood whipping the tip of its tail, watching her. Then it walked across the floor and jumped up on the couch and stretched out.
She knew it was cool out on the porch. She got up and went over to the front door and unlocked it, pulled it open so that maybe a little air would come in through the screen door. A slight breeze was weaving through the ferns that were hanging on the front porch. There was no sound coming from the bedroom. She went back and got her Coke and picked up her cigarettes and went out, holding the screen door and not letting it slam behind her.
The floorboards were cool on her feet. She sat in a dark chair on the dark porch and looked out at the road shining under the moonlight. Out there beyond the fence the trees stood humped in black and silver tones. Clouds were drifting over the face of the moon. It felt like it used to when she slept on the screened-in porch at her father's house. He'd been gone a long time now and she barely remembered him. The red ember of her cigarette brightened and glowed when she put it to her mouth and drew on it. She could hear the smoke whistling out of her lungs when she exhaled. She could hear the slow crunching of gravel under tires, almost like somebody walking but louder than that. And then she saw that a car was creeping down the road above her house, the lights off, moving just barely above an idle. She stubbed the cigarette out quickly on the leg of the chair and sat perfectly still. Maybe it was darker under the overhang of the porch roof where she sat. The car came on not moving any faster than a person could walk, maybe not that fast. She began to hear the sound of the motor. The car slowed and it looked like Glen's. It stopped in front of the house and sat there. A match flared
inside the car, a face was briefly lit. And then a hand came out the window and an arm hung down the side of the car. The hand moved the cigarette back and forth to the face. Somebody watching her as she watched him.
The wind picked up a little and wafted the leaves of the ferns up and down. They rocked a bit in their pots, turning and swinging on their chains.
And then the car started moving again. The hand that held the cigarette still trailed down the side of the door. It went away as slowly as it had come, not hurrying, not making very much noise at all. She sat there and watched it. It went on down the road and she couldn't hear it for very long, thought maybe it might have stopped. But then down the road some distance she couldn't judge, through the trees a pair of lights came on and the car picked up speed and ran away through the night, a fading roar in the vastness of the land lying around her that died away in gradually diminishing bits of sound until there was nothing left to hear but the quiet of the darkness and the crickets still speaking out there in the wet grass.
She got up, grabbed her cigarettes, and locked herself back inside the house. She turned off the light in the living room and when she went back to the bedroom she reached high into the closet and found the handgun in its cardboard shoe box and put it under the mattress, a hard lump she could feel beneath her for a long time until finally worry and weariness closed in, took over, conspired together to take her to a land of dreams where dark things moved and shadows rustled.
He lay there alone in his black bed in the blackness of the house with the dark walls around him. The wind was blowing a little and the weak moonlight made shapes and forms that roamed up and down the torn wallpaper when the leaves on the trees in the yard moved and swayed. He'd stripped the bloody sheets off and they lay piled in a pale white bundle in one corner. There was just the rough ticking of the mattress against his skin, a loose button that dug into his ribs if he turned the wrong way. He'd had neither drink nor the comfort of another's hand. Just the endless roaming over the roads and the ceaseless cigarettes and the music that he was already tired of hearing. And how many nights had he lain like this already? In the saw and whine of a thousand sleeping throats he'd imagined a world different, a better place than the one that had been his for so long, as if stepping out those iron gates would free more than his physical body and allow him to regain some sort of balance, quell his anger, drive away the bad memories, make possible all the things he wished could be. But he saw now that it wasn't going to be like that. He'd been gone too long.