“Good God,” he said. Woodrow was grinning behind the steering wheel. His teeth were splayed out in front but only two or three showed. Virgil crossed his legs on the stump and leaned one wrist on top of the other. “You out mighty early.”
“I ain't been to bed yet. We went huntin last night and I just got in. I lost old Nimrod and I still got Naman in the backseat. Come on and get in, where you headed?”
“I'm just out for my daily exercise,” Virgil said. He got up and stepped across the shallow ditch and walked around behind the car. In passing he looked in at what appeared to be an enormous dead Bluetick stretched out across the backseat, all four legs straight out, huge feet. He opened the door and got in the front seat and rolled the window down.
“Old Naman's plumb give out,” Woodrow said. “He run a coon for three hours straight by the watch. He was still treein his ass off when I finally put the leash on him. Here, get you a drink.”
He held up a half pint of whiskey. Virgil took the bottle and looked at it.
“It's awful early,” he said. “But I reckon I will.”
He twisted the cap off and turned a good drink down his throat. Woodrow cranked the car and pulled it down into low and they crept off.
He got up a little speed, shifted it into second, and left it there. Virgil took one more drink and then capped it and put it on the seat between them.
“You headed the wrong way, Woodrow. I was gonna walk over to the store.”
“I'll run you by there. I'm just out lookin for old Nimrod.
“Where did y'all turn out?”
“Hell.” Woodrow hung his arm out the window and pointed. “Five or six miles from here. I reckon he jumped a deer. He may be in Stone County by now for all I know. I just thought he might be out on the road somewhere. If I can find the son of a bitch I'm gonna sell him.”
“I thought he was a good coon dog.”
“He is when he runs a coon.”
Virgil smoked his cigarette and flipped the ashes down the outside of the door. The car smelled like wet dogs and spilled whiskey.
“I saw your boys yesterday,” Woodrow said. He had the habit of poking the black lens of his eyeglasses once in a while as if to see better. His hammer had tried to drive a nail that glanced off a sunny roof on a summer day. Virgil had seen that gray and vacant eye.
“You did? Where at?”
“They come in Winter's and stayed a little bit. I spoke to em. Is he glad to be out?”
Virgil scratched his leg. He drew on his cigarette and rested his elbow on the window frame.
“I can't tell if he is or not. He's over at the house when I left. I spect he's still pissed off at the whole world. He always was.”
Woodrow steered the car carefully down the sandy road and through curves laned with thick timber, a lush canopy overhead that was a haven for squirrels and birds.
“Did you tell him about his mama?”
“Naw. I was going to but he started in on me about her not having a
headstone. You can't talk to him when he gets like that.”
“What's he gonna do about that youngun?”
“Probably nothin.”
“Let me pull over up here and see if I can hear anything out of old Nimrod. He'll tree a squirrel in the daytime ever once in a while but he's probably asleep or headed back home by now.”
Woodrow eased to a stop in the middle of the road and shut off the car. Virgil took the last drag from his smoke. He let it drop out the window and glanced over his shoulder at the hound on the backseat. There was only the rise and fall of his ribs to mark any life within him. The motor ticked and popped. Virgil leaned his head out the window and listened.
“You ever killed any squirrels with him?”
“A couple. He'll tree possums too. He'll run the livin shit out of a fox.”
The woods were mostly still. There was a weak wind high in the very tops of the oaks and hickories. A crow called once in the distance. A tree frog sang. The sun dappled patterns of light and dark over the hood. There was the barely audible bark of a dog somewhere far off and muted in those wooded hills.
“Damn,” Woodrow said, and leaned back in the seat from where he'd been cupping his ear to the world. He pointed toward the back of the car. “He's back over there on Miss Hattie's place, sounds like. Let me turn this thing around.”
He started the car and drove up to the place where a grassy old logging road met the one they were on. He stopped there and turned around, going back the way they'd come, still moving at a crawl.
“I wish he'd just sit down and talk to me some,” Virgil said. He looked at the whiskey on the seat and turned his head away from it. “I reckon he'd rather watch them damn cartoons.”
A big doe bolted from the undergrowth and cleared the road in one
bound, a long flow of bunched muscles sailing over in a gray flash. Woodrow had made to touch the brake but said Damn softly and kept going. They both looked after where the deer had penetrated the solid wall of leaves without a sign but for one single quaking frond.
“I wish I knew what to tell you,” said Woodrow. The car rocked and swayed a little on its bad shocks as he sped up and shifted into third. “Maybe after he stays home for a while he'll appreciate it. You think it did him any good?”
“I doubt it.”
The trees began thinning a little as they went on and in places it looked as if a bomb had been dropped except for the lack of any craters, the land open and catching full sun and dotted with stumps and shattered tree trunks, the tracks of dozers that like some gargantuan beast had devoured the shade. Then the woods closed around them again.
They drove into a deep hollow with a sharp curve and met a pickup right in the bottom of it. Woodrow steered carefully on the very edge of the road, gravel rattling against the underside of the car, rocks flying into the ditches. Virgil looked out and saw a six-foot pit alongside them. It was bone dry and coated with dust, littered with scrubby weeds and pebbles. Up on the banks the remnants of old fences hung on some of the trees. The road was washboarded in places and the car bucked hard when they ran over it, the windows jarring as if they would break in their frames. Virgil looked over his shoulder but it wasn't bothering the sleeping hound.
“How's your puppy?” Woodrow said.
“He's all right. I need to worm him sometime.”
“I got some over at the house I can let you have. If we catch old Nimrod we'll take him and Naman back over to the house and put em up and feed em and I'll let you have some of it.”
“I appreciate it, Woodrow.”
“You in a hurry to get to the store? It ain't much further over here to Miss Hattie's place.”
“I ain't in no hurry.”
They came down out of the hills and rattled along a steep cut that had been graded with mule-drawn equipment back in the thirties and they leveled out in a small creek bottom where cotton was planted. Big patches of it stretched away to stands of trees and the sky opened before them boundless but for those trees, a deep blue where hawks feathered the thermal drifts or rode low over the fence rows or perched on posts holding lengths of barbed wire along the road. They went over a shallow branch by a shoddy bridge floored with timbers that rumbled loosely under the tires of the car.
“Ain't you glad you don't have to pick that cotton?” Woodrow said.
Virgil nodded, watching it, the sun warm on his arm where he rested it on the window frame.
“Yep,” he said.
“Did Glen have to pick any?”
“He ain't said. I guess he had to do whatever they told him. Said he couldn't sleep at night for all the noise.”
They were on a pretty good road now and Woodrow sped up a little, raising a dust cloud behind them. They went a long way across the bottom and Virgil pulled his makings out and rolled another smoke.
“You been up all night?” he said.
“I slept a little right before daylight. I had a fire built to keep the mosquitoes off me and I curled up next to it for a while.”
They started slowing down just before the crossroads and Woodrow came nearly to a stop, glancing both ways before he turned to the right and went on along another short straightaway and climbed a hill. Virgil lit his smoke with the wind flaring the flame. At the top of the hill Woodrow slowed the car, shifted down, and turned onto a side road past
planted pines and a few old abandoned houses. They went across a wooden bridge and through a cattle gap and out into a pasture full of wildflowers that brushed at the sides of the car. He stopped near a line of sweet gums that bordered the creek.
“Let's see what we can hear now,” he said.
Virgil sat with his legs crossed and listened. The wind was delicately wafting the heavy branches of the gums and the leaves shimmered a little, rested, then lifted in brilliance again. A cow bawled up near the barn and they could hear a tractor running somewhere. But no dogs barked.
“I'll be damn,” Woodrow said. “I would have swore he was right in here somewhere. Let's get out and walk down here where we was last night.”
They walked and walked, Woodrow cupping his hand around his mouth once in a while and hooting for the dog. It was pretty there along the creek and Virgil could see a distant herd of black cows resting under a clump of oaks in the middle of the pasture. They stopped after a bit and squatted on the ground. Woodrow called the dog but there was just the wind blowing to answer.
“Well damn,” he said. “I hate to go off and leave him. I know that was him. Hell, he may be headed home by now.”
“That's a pretty good walk.”
“Main thing I'm scared of is somebody'll pick him up or he'll get run over by a car.”
Virgil got up and walked over to the nearest tree and started taking a leak. He tried to read something carved into the tree but time had rendered it into a mottled scar in the bark. It took him a long time to finish and only when he was sure he was through did he tuck it back inside and zip his trousers. It always took longer now than it used to.
“You havin trouble with your prostrate gland again, Virgil?”
“Yeah. I reckon I need to go back to the doctor and let him stick his
finger up my ass again.”
He walked back over to Woodrow and Woodrow stood up.
“Ain't no need to wait around on him. If he ain't back by this afternoon I'll ride over here again and check on him. Come on and I'll run you by the store and then I guess I'll go home and get some sleep.”
They turned around in the pasture and drove back up to the blacktop road and turned right. At the top of the next hill they passed the church and its yard full of cars and trucks. Virgil saw Jewel's car there parked under a big tree and a small pang of longing to see the boy went through him. Maybe before too much longer. There was still a good bit of water in the river. The catfish were hard to catch when it was this hot but he thought he knew where there might be some bream biting. If nothing else just an afternoon on the riverbank with the boy. The two of them together, he liked that, liked answering his questions except when they were about Glen.
Went over there and fucked her
. He kept looking out the window long after the church had gone past.
“What you shakin your head about Virgil?”
“Aw hell. Just that boy. I just feel real bad about him. He's a good little old boy.”
“He loves to fish, don't he?”
“Yep.”
They were back in the hills now and more houses appeared and there were mailboxes by the road and fenced yards and barns and field equipment in sheds, the post office, and finally the store. Woodrow pulled in and parked. The dog in the backseat raised his head, maybe thinking he was home. They got out and slammed the doors. Some folks were sitting around the storefront on crates and drink boxes, empty cotton poison cans.
“Let me get old Naman out,” Woodrow said. “He may need to use the bathroom.”
He opened the back door and found a leash on the floorboard and
snapped the catch into a big ring on the dog's collar and let him out. The hound was large even for his breed. He leaned his hips back and opened his mouth and lowered the front half of his body and stretched in the sunshine.
“Come on, Naman.”
Woodrow walked him around the side of the store and the dog raised his leg over the air compressor, looking around sleepily.
“That's a big dog,” somebody said. Virgil turned to see who had spoken. The voice sounded familiar.
It was a boy about eighteen, barefooted with blue jeans and a T-shirt.
“Yeah, he is,” Virgil said. He couldn't figure out who the boy was. “How's it goin?”
“Pretty good, Mr. Virgil, how you?”
The name still wouldn't come to him and then he remembered a smaller version of him in shorts, trying not to cry, a fishing lure hung in his hand.
“Tommy Babb,” he said. “I like to not recognized you, boy. Where you been?”
The boy smiled then and leaned back against the wall. Virgil hadn't seen him in years and his short body was now packed with muscle. He used to see him on the river bridge fishing all the time, his bicycle leaning against the rail. He'd always wave to Virgil when he went by.
“I'm in the army now,” he said. “I just come home on leave. How's old Puppy these days?”
Virgil wouldn't have thought the boy was old enough to be in the army. It didn't seem possible that this child could be a soldier.
“He's all right, I guess. Got three kids. He works for the county now.”
Virgil stood there for a moment and then he bent over and pulled up a Coke case and sat down. “How long you been in the army?”
“About six months. I'm through with all my schools. They're gonna
ship me out before long so I thought I'd come home for a while. See Daddy and them. You remember when you took that lure out of my hand?”
Virgil nodded. It was a day long ago. “That was pretty bad, wasn't it?”