Authors: William Gay
Winer folded the money and slid it into the pocket of his jeans. “You? I don’t see that it’s got anything to do with you.”
“Say you don’t? I told you I had plans. Son, I got plans workin in my head ever minute and they don’t all concern you. I got plans for her too.”
“What kind of plans?”
“What they are ain’t nothin to you. I’m just telling you we got to keep things on a business footin here and leave all this personal shit out of it.”
“What kind of plans?”
“Well, I told you it ain’t none of your business. But have you ever really looked at her? I been around a long time and I ain’t seen many that looks like that. And let me tell you, I been around long enough to know they don’t look like that long. Like a peach hangin there on a tree. It’s July and it’s hot and you’re standin there tryin to decide whether to pick it or not. One day it ain’t hardly right and then there’s a minute when it is and then it’s rotten and the yellerjackets is eatin it. You see? I been waitin for this minute and the time’s right now. There’s a world of money to be made and I can’t have anybody muddyin the water. Even you.”
He paused, offering Winer and opportunity to reply. When he did not Hardin said, “Let’s just leave it at that. Let’s just say I’m concerned about her welfare. Hell, I raised her. I knowed her when she was a kid runnin around the yard naked. She’s like a daughter to me. All I’m asking you to do is give me your word you’ll leave her alone. Hell, she ain’t nothin but a kid. You sweettalk her and turn her head and no tellin what’s liable to happen.”
In that moment Winer realized it was impossible to promise anything. Each succeeding moment seemed shaped by the one preceding it. Everything was volatile, in flux, and there was nothing anywhere he could count on. “Don’t hand me that shit,” he said. “You don’t seem to be considering what she thinks. Are you?”
“Do what?”
“You heard me. Don’t hand me that daughter shit, save it for somebody that believes it.”
“Nobody talks to me that way anymore, Winer. I done growed out of puttin up with it. Now me and you…here, you wait a minute.”
Winer was gone. He’d only turned and walked a step or two but he was gone just the same.
There was a chill to the weather that night and after early dark fell Winer laid cedar kindling and built a fire. He made himself a pot of coffee and sat before the fire drinking it and soaking up the heat. He’d put the last of the roofing on that day and his shoulders ached from hauling the rolls of roofing up with a rope. He was halfasleep when Hardin came.
Hardin had been drinking. He was not drunk but Winer could smell whiskey on his breath and his face had a flushed and reckless look.
“Get in here where’s it’s warm. I need to talk to you.”
Winer got in on the passenger side and closed the door with its expensive muted click and leaned his head on the rich upholstery. There was a warm, leathery smell of money about the car.
“Winer, I don’t want me and you to have a fallin out. I think maybe we got off on the wrong foot back there and I think we ort to work it out.”
“I don’t guess there’s anything left to work out. You want me to do something I can’t do and I guess that’s all there is to it.”
“Well, you kind of got me backed into a corner on this thing and you ortnt fuck with a man backed in a corner.”
“If you’re in a corner then it’s a corner you picked yourself. You act like I’m going to mistreat her. I wouldn’t hurt her for the world.”
“Goddamn it, Winer.” By the yellow domelight Hardin’s face looked almost pained. “You’re goin to have to make up your mind. Just what it is you want? Pussy? Winder curtains? A little white house somers with roses climbin on it? I know what you’re thinkin, boy, but believe me, it ain’t like that. And never was. All in God’s world it is is a split. All it is is a hole and over half the people in the world’s got em. And nary a one of em worth dyin over. You shut your eyes or put a sack over their face and you can’t tell one from the other. You believe that?”
“No,” Winer said.
“And on top of that you don’t even know her. I do. I’ve knowed her from the time she was five year old and you wouldn’t know her if you slept with her the rest of your life. You see her but you don’t know her.”
“I know her well enough. You paid me off tonight and we’re even now. Let’s stay that way. You find somebody else to finish your building and I’ll find another place to work.”
“You dipshit fool. You think I couldn’t have found a dozen carpenters better than you? You think for what I been payin you I couldn’t find somebody to build a fuckin honkytonk? Wake up, Winer, you been livin in dream world.”
Winer turned to study Hardin’s asymmetrical face. “Then why did you hire me?”
For a millisecond the eyes were perplexed. “Damned if I know. I reckon deep down I was just fuckin with you.”
“What do you mean?”
“Just let it be. It ain’t got nothin to do with this.”
Winer got out. Before he closed the car door he said, “I aim to see her. There’s nothing you can do to stop me.”
“Hell, you done been stopped. You was stopped the minute I kicked them comestained blankets out of the stumphole. You was stopped and never even knowed it.”
Deputy Cooper stood at the edge of the porch waiting while Hardin read the paper. Amber Rose was sitting against a porch stanchion with her dress high on her brown thighs. Cooper kept trying not to look. “Pull your dress down,” Hardin said without looking up from the paper. When he had finished it he handed it back to Cooper. “All right. I see what it says. All this whereas and wherefore bullshit. Now, what does it mean?”
“Well. All it is is a summons. It means you got to go to court. There’s goin to be a hearin. He got it up at Franklin. Blalock did. He tried to get Judge Humphries to issue one and course he wouldn’t, he told Blalocl he’d just have to work this deal about the horses out with you. Blalock he throwed a regular fit they said nearly foamin at the mouth and went to Franklin, and seen a circuit judge up there and he wrote one up. It come down this mornin and I brought it on out.”
“I reckon you didn’t have nubo selection. You doin all right, Cooper, and Bellwether ain’t goin to be sheriff always. We might fool around and run you next election they hold.”
“You know I always tried to work with you, Mr. Hardin.”
“Shore you did. But that Bellwether, now…he’s aimin to wake up one of these times out of a job. Or just not wake up at all.”
Hardin sat down in a canebottom rocker, leaned back, closed his eyes. “What’d happen if I just don’t show up at this hearin or whatever?”
“If one of you don’t go then the othern gets a judgement agin him. Like if you don’t show, the judge’ll automatically find for Blalock. He gets them horses back and you don’t get nothin.”
“Goddamn him.”
“I can’t help it. That’s the way it works.”
“I know you can’t. But he ain’t gettin them fuckin horses. If he does it’ll be when I’m dead and gone. All these sons of bitches startin to shove me around, Cooper, and I don’t aim to have it.”
“I don’t blame you about that, Mr. Hardin.” Cooper was turning his cap over and over in his hands, eyeing the door. The girl hadn’t pulled her dress down but cooper was looking everywhere but at her.
On a cold, bright day in late November Winer and Motormouth set out toward Clifton seeking gainful employment. The prospect of working regularly again and the idea of starting a day with a clear purpose and working toward it cheered Winer and he rode along listening bemusedly to the fantasies Motormouth spun for him.
“We’ll get us a little place down here when we get to makin good,” he said. “Buy us some slick clothes. Boy, they got some honkytonks down here so rough you kindly peep in first then sidle through the door real quick. And women? I’s in one down here one time and this old gal, just as I come to the door she come up and grabbed me by the pecker and just led me off.”
Winer said something noncommittal and stared off across the river. The highway was running parallel with the water now and beyond the border of cypress and willow the water was cold and metalliclooking, choppy in the windy sun. Far and away to his right what looked like an island and rising from it some enormous circular structure of gray stone like a silo or lighthouse and past this farther till three great pillars brooding in the mist like pylons for a bridge no longer there. He did not inquire the purpose of any of this lest Motormouth be inspired toward further fabrication, for no one had ever heard Motormouth admit the existence of anything he did not know and he always had an answer for everything even if he had to make it up. Winer watched them vanish like something unknown on a foreign coast and they drove on past used-car lots with their sad pennants fluttering on guywires and past old tilting groceries and barns with their tin roofs advertising Bruton Snuff and Popcola and Groves’ Chill Tonic like fading hieroglyphs scribed by some prior race.
“Some of these old riverrats,” Motormouth mused. “These old boys work the barges and stay out a week or two at a time. You think they ain’t ready when they hit port? They’d as soon cut ye throat with a rusty pocketknife as look at ye. They make Hardin look like a home-ec teacher. You have to be careful you walk soft,” he cautioned Winer. “A boy like you ain’t never been out of the county could get in a lot of trouble around here.”
Coming into Clifton they stopped for breakfast and directions at a place called Mother Leona’s. Winer judged himself safe in any place named Mother Leona’s but he didn’t see her about, after all his eggs and homefries were dished up by a surlylooking man in dirty whites and a chef’s hat cocked on the back of his head.
“We down here lookin for work,” Motormouth volunteered.
“I ain’t hirin today,” the man said.
“No, we lookin for where they load the ties. We heard they was hirin.”
“That’d be down by the docks.”
“I guess so. We ain’t never done it but we’ll shore give her a whirl. We hard workers.”
“You don’t have to sell me,” the man said, lowering a basket of sliced potatoes into poppin grease. “I don’t do the hirin for that neither.”
Winer broke a biscuit open and paused suddenly with his butterladen knife. A perfectly intact candlefly, wings spread for flight, was seized in the snowy dough like an artifact from broken stone. He sat for a time studying it like an archaeologist pondering its significance or how it came to be there so halt in flight and at length he laid his bread and knife side.
Motormouth pushed his empty plate back, chewed, and swallowed. He drank coffee. “Where’s these here docks at?” he asked.
The counterman turned from the spitting grill as if he might inspect these outlanders more closely. “They generally always down by the river,” he said at length.
A mountain of crossties guided them to where the work progressed. Men were unjamming the ties with tiepicks and dragging them to where other workers loaded them onto a system of chutes that slid them to yet another crew in the hull of the barge. They stood for a time watching the men work, admiring the smooth efficiency with which the workers hefted the ties from the dock, the riverward giving his end of the two a small, neat spin just so onto the chute and the near one pushing with the same force each time and the tie gliding smoothly down the oiled chute to slam against the bulkhead of the barge. “Hell, they ain’t nothin to it,” Moormouth said. “Look at the way them fellers goes about it. Reckon who you ask?”
Winer didn’t reply. He was studying the ties. They were nine-by-twelve green oak he judged to be ten or twelve feet long and they had a distinctly heavy look about them despite the deceptive ease with which they were slung onto the chutes.
They approached the river. The barge rocked in the cold gray water, a wind out of the north behind them blew scraps of paper past them and aloft over the river like dirty stringless kites. Nameless birds foraged the choppy waters and beyond them the river’s farther shore looked blurred and unreal and no less bleak and drear than this one.
The barge was secured by hawsers tied to bits on the dock and it rocked against its cushion of old cartires strung together. Two men in the aft of the boat took the ties as they came off the chute and aligned them in stacks. The chutes seemed always to have a tie coming off, a tie sliding, another one being loaded on. An almost hypnotic ritual of economic motion. The workers were big men, heavily muscled even in this cold wind off the river they worked in their shirtsleeves.
“There’s a feller now we can ask,” Motormouth said.
A man wearing a yellow hardhat and carrying a clipboard was striding toward them across the pier. He had opened his mouth to speak when a cry from the barge gave him pause and he turned to see who had called out.
Winer had seen it. A tie cocked sideways and jammed the chute and a huge black man reached an expert hand to free it just as the next tie slammed into it with a loud thock. He stared for a moment in amazement at his hand from which the four fingers were severed at the second joint. Blood welled than ran down his arm into his sleeve and he sat down heavily in the water sloshing in the hull of the barge. “Goddman it,” the man in the yellow hard hat said. He laid the clipboard on the dock and his hardhat atop to hold the papers in the wind and swung down a rope ladder into the barge. The black man was leaning up against the bulkhead with his hand clutched between his knees. His eyes were closed and his face ashen and it wore an expression of stoic forbearance.
Winer and Motormouth stood uncertainly for a moment. The two men on the upper end of the chutes had ceased loading and now they hunkered and took out tobacco and began rolling cigarettes. “Course we don’t have to rush into nothin,” Motormouth said. He had taken a tentative step or two away from the river and toward the stores and cafes in town. “I guess we could study about it awhile.”
“Yeah, we could,” Winer said. “We could study about it a good long while.”
He’d sleep cold now and in the mornings find on the glass and metal of the Chrysler a rimpled rime of frost. Lying on his back Motormouth would stare upward a time into the ratty upholstery and then unfold himself, his distorted reflection in rustpocked chrome mocking him, a jerky caricature. The wind along the river these chill mornings would clash softly in the sere stalks of weeds, he’d hear it gently scuttling dislodged leaves against the car. Through the frosted glass there was little of the world he could see yet more of it than he wanted. He was peering into a world locked in the soft cold seize of ice.
Such mornings as these brought the bitter memories of winters past and he fell to thinking of walls and ceilings and flues. Of a porch ricked with seasoned wood and the smell of smoke sucked along the ridges. Of the soft length of her laid against him on December mornings. The way her hair looked in the morning, tousled as if she’d fallen asleep in a storm.
He drove past the house. It looked still and empty and he had no expectation of seeing her yet there she was, standing before the smokehouse door peering in, a sweater pulled about her shoulders. He slowed, looked all about. He could see no one else. No car or sign of one. He stopped. A core of something near fear lay in the pit of his stomach, anticipation and dread ran in his veins like oil and water.
It was cold in the front room as well, colder than in the spare light of the sun a musty chill of unused rooms and closed doors. A jumble of stovepipes littered the floor, a film of soot and ashes dusted the linoleum. He sighted up the flue, saw only the gunmetal sameness of the sky, half a bird’s nest perched precariously on a loosened brick. He was standing in the middle of the floor rubbing his hands together and looking about when she came through the kitchen door. She paused on the threshold and stood watching him.
“You get out of here. You got no business here.”
“Just checkin ye out,” he said. “Come back have ye?”
“Yes, I’ve come back but not to you. It’s my house, you know. Daddy gave it to me.”
“Daddy’s welcome to it,” Motorouth said. He took out a cigarette and lit it. He stood shifting his weight from one to the other of his thin legs as if torn between going and staying whether she wanted him to or not. The wind off the stretch of field rippled the tin of the roof and sang softly across the flue. A loose pane of glass tinkled in its sash like a chime. “Turnin cold, aint it?”
“It does most ever year about this time.”
“I look for a bad winter this year.”
“I never knowed of a good one. You still ain’t said what you’re doin here. You know I got papers say you ain’t allowed here.”
“I don’t want much of nothin. I was just drivin by and I happened to think of all them carparts I got in the smokehouse. I wouldn’t want nothin to happen to em.”
“Then get em and go.”
“I will in a minute. Say, are you think about movin back in here sure enough?”
“What’s it to you?”
“Just makin conversation.”
“Make it another place, with somebody else.”
“Are you movin back in here?”
“What if I am?”
“Nothin.” He paused. “By yourself?”
“No.”
“Oh, Blalock too, huh. Is there not enough room in that big old house of his?”
“I told you what we do is our business.”
“You’re still married to me.”
“I won’t be in a few days.”
He thought he might fare better if he changed the subject. “What was you doin peepin in the smokehouse?”
“I was fixin to put up the stove. It’s cold.”
“Lord, you can’t move that heavy old thing. It’s castiron. Why don’t Blalock put it up for ye? That ain’t no woman’s job.”
“He ain’t here. He took off a load of cattle to Memphis or somewheres.”
“Get Clyde to do it then.”
“Him and Cecil got into it. That’s why we’re comin up here. They got into it over me.”
“Well, ain’t you the belle of the ball.”
She didn’t say anything.
“And say Cecil ain’t here?”
“Didn’t I just get through sayin so?”
Hr crossed the room and balanced himself on the arm of the sofa, glanced about for an ashtray and finding none tipped off ashes into the cuff of his trousers. She had not moved, stood watching him reflectively from the door. “Don’t make yourself at home,” she told him. “You don’t be here long enough for that.” But there was no vehemence or urgency to her voice, she sounded almost abstracted, as if other things occupied her mind. She crossed her arms, shook back her long hair from her forehead, he watched the smooth, milky flesh of her throat.
“Maybe we could try it again,” he said. His voice sounded strange to him, a dry croak.
She just shook her head. “There is no way in hell,” she told him. “I am to have Cecil and there won’t nothin stand in my way.”
“Cecil’s rollin towards Memphis,” he said. His mouth felt as though it had dust in it. The wing of red hair fell across her brow again, she blew it away in a curious gesture he had seen a thousand times. The past twisted in him like a knife, sharp as broken glass. Old words of endearment he need not have said tasted bitter and dry as ashes. The thought of Blalock long gone, Memphis seemed thousands of miles away and drifting in the mists of some lost continent. The wind sucked through the cracks by the windows and told him of a world gone vacant, no one left save these two. He thought of his hands on her throat, of his weight bearing down on her, forcing her legs apart with a knee, sliding himself into her. Dark and nameless specters bore their visions through his mind. He thought of her supine in a shallow grave, her green eyes and the sullen pout of her mouth impacted with earth, the cones of her breasts hard and white as ivory, ice crystals frozen in the red hair under her belly. The rains of winter seeping into her flesh, the seeds of spring sprouting in the cavities of her body.