Authors: William Gay
“Why are you lookin at me like that?”
“I ain’t.”
“You look halfcrazy when you do that. You was always doin that.”
The cigarette burned his fingers and he looked at it in wonder. He dropped it, smudged it with a boot into the worn and patternless linoleum. He arose. “Well. I guess I better get on. I just thought I’d see how ye was.”
“This is how I am.”
Although he had stood up to go he made no further move to do so. She was watching him. “That thing weighs nigh two hundred pounds,” he said. “I wish you luck with it.”
“There was anything to you you’d help me put it up. It’s settin right out there where you put it last spring.”
“Yeah,” he said, trying to get a focus on last spring, a definition of it. Spring seemed years ago.
“You help me get it in the back door and I’ll get it the rest of the way myself.”
“I bet it’ll be cold tonight. I may need it myself.” For a fey moment he thought of the heater set up by the riverbank, himself housed only by the walls of the world, the elements. “A few minutes ago you called me crazy,” he told her. “I may be but I ain’t crazy enough yet to put a heatin stove for some other son of a bitch to warm by.”
“It wouldn’t hurt you to help me. It wouldn’t cost you a dime.”
“I made you my best deal. You come back to me and we’ll go to town and get some grocers and I’ll put it up and build a big fire in it.”
“Forget it. Cecil can put it up when he gets back.”
He took a deep breath. “All right then. I’ll tell you what I will do. You give me a little and I’ll put the damned thing up for you.”
“You are crazy.”
“What could it hurt? Ain’t Cecil in Memphis? Ain’t we married?”
“Just in name only.”
“That’s close enough for me,” Motormouth said. He crossed the room, stood beside her. The top of her head did not even reach his shoulder. She did not move away. He knew suddenly with a shock of exultation that she was going to do it.
She undressed at the foot of the bed. He kicked his boots off, shucked out of his slacks and lay watching her. She unhooked her brassiere. A strap secured by a safety pin made her more vulnerable, less remote. She slid out of her skirt, it pooled at her feet. She began to roll down her panties, looked up, and saw him watching her. She flounced her hair back from her forehead and pushed her underwear down defiantly, her eyes hard and fierce. “Get your eyes full,” she told him. He stared at the cool, rounded flesh of her belly, the snarled rustcolored pubic hair. In the cold air gooseflesh crept up the ivory of her thighs, her nipples hardened and elongated.
When he inserted himself into her her face did not change, nor when he began to move inside her. He labored above her as if inch by inch he would force his entire body into her, merge with her, become her, he sweated in the juncture of her body while she lay abstracted, lost in the pattern of the ceiling wallpaper, and he knew she had defeated him once again. Her pale flesh looked pristine, unused. He thought of the countless times he had lain in her arms, that Blalock had lain inside her, that she had lain down with faceless names that were just taunts she had flung a him. Yet none of them had hurt or marked or even touched her. She was unused.
“Why did you quit? Are you done?”
He hadn’t known he had. “I was just thinkin,” he said. He commenced again halfheartedly.
She laughed deep in her throat. “You never could think and do this at the same time,” she said.
She had dragged it almost to the smokehouse door, its legs leaving skidding indentations in the rough flooring. He stood looking down at it. It looked ungodly heavy. She watched him from the kitchen door, buttoning her blouse. He squatted in the earth by the door, studying it. Figuring the easiest way to move it. He could not remember how he had gotten it there in the first place.
He looked up. The sun was nearing its zenith but the light had a thin faraway quality to it, the red orb stingy and remote, and it seemed to him that it was speeding away from him, the earth settling incrementally into some age seized in ice. Baring branches rustled softly, told sweet ageold secrets he’d never know. He was thinking about Blalock. He could see him opening the door of the stove, throwing a stick of wood in, stirring the roiling coals with a poker. Settling back in the armchair, sighing, feet clocked aloft to the warmth of the heater, now opening his farm magazine.
“Piss on you,” he told the stove.
He started toward his car.
“You dirty son of a bitch,” she shrieked at the immutability of his back. He had heard it all before and he went on. He wheeled the Chrysler back into the yard and then it leapt forward, spun smoking across the ditch and onto the gravel road. He sped off toward town.
Winer went down the embankment through the cold gray drizzle. The bracken was already wet and by the time he reached the car he was soaked to the thighs and angry. Motormouth had a fire built in the stone grill constructed for campers and a pan set atop it but the fire was guttering in the rain and smoking and heavy smoke bellied bluely away down the riverbank. Winer could hear the soft hiss of rain falling in the river.
He opened the car door and got in. Motormouth sat behind the wheel. He was staring out the rainwashed windshield toward the blurred river as if at some landscape he was hurtling fulltilt toward. Winer slammed the door. “You’re a hell of a lot of trouble,” he said. “You moved. You could have told me where you were movin to.”
“I didn’t know myself. It come on me sudden.”
“All this stuff coming on you sudden is going to put you in the pen or under the ground,” Winer said. “Rape comes on you sudden. Living like a crazyman in an automobile parked in the bushes comes on you sudden. You move but you don’t move good enough. All I had to do was ask at the grocery store. I guess it come on you sudden to tell Patton, just in case anybody wondered where you were or had any warrants to serve or anything.”
“Yeah. Well, hell. I told him to just tell you.”
“Well, you’re a trusting soul. The power of a ten-dollar bill may be lost on you, but it’s not on Blalock or Patton.”
“Is Blalock huntin me sure enough?”
“That’s why I come down here. He’s told it all over town what he’s going to do when he catches you. He says you raped her and beat her and he says he swore out a warrant against you. Likely he’s just blowing about the warrant, but he’s told so many folks he’s going to whip your ass he’s just about bound to do it whether he wants to or not.”
“Do you think he can do it?”
“Has a cat got an ass? Of course he can do it. Hell, he’d make two of you and enough left over to referee.”
“No, I mean that rape stuff. Can he make that stick. You can’t rape your own wife, can ye?”
“I don’t know.”
“I don’t mind gettin a asswhippin, he wouldn’t get no cherry, but thinkin about hard time up at Brushy gives me a chill.”
“I’d have to ask somebody. How about cranking this thing up and turning the heater on? I’m cold all the way to the bone.”
Motormouth cranked the car and it sat idling, vibrating rhythmically. Winer turned the heater on, shuddering at the onrush of cold air, turned it back off. “Does this thing not work?”
“It has to warm up. Ask who?”
“Somebody that knows something about the law. A lawyer, a judge, you know.”
“I know you best keep away from them kind of folks. You’ll have us both in the pen. Anyway, I never raped her and I damn sure never laid a hand on her. I know exactly what’s the matter with him. He’s mad because he had to put up that Goddamned heating stove by hisself.”
“Maybe. Anyway, he’s hunting you.”
“I’m fixin to leave as soon as I get a stake. I’m burnt out on this place anyhow. I’m sick of it. The only place I ever want to see this place is in a rearview mirror.”
He fell into a ruminative silence. Winer turned the heater on, held his hands cupped to the warming fire. “I’m going north,” Motormouth said. “Chicago. That’s a place for a feller like me. I could make it big in a place like Chitown. There ain’t no angles to play in a dump like this. There’s a world of angles in a town that size. That’s what I need.”
“What you need is a keeper,” Winer said. “And about thirty feet of heavy-gauge chain to hold you back by.”
A wan and sourceless light guided his steps off the road and into Oliver’s yard. He had the paper under his coat, for the air was full of moisture, a cold mizzling past mist and not yet rain. It was just past daybreak though there was no sun nor promise of one. He passed through a dull leaden dripping from the trees. Three bedraggled cocks already risen had taken shelter beneath an old white cooktable in Oliver’s frontyard. They watched him walk by disconsolately with eyes like bits of colored glass.
Yellow light flared through a window. Smoke rolled from the old man’s flue and Winer knew he was just up, for the smoke had a blue, greasy look to it and smelled of kerosene. He crossed the porch and knocked on the door and waited, tucking his shoulder in and hugging himself with his arms.
“It ain’t locked,” a voice called.
He opened the door and went into the front room. It was almost as cold inside as out. The old man was crouched before the open stove door cramming newspapers into the orange-red maw of its throat. He turned a harried face up toward Winer. The room reeked of kerosene.
“Boy, I’m about froze to death and I think this thing has gone on a sitdown strike or somethin.” Oliver began to feed the fire long, curled shavings of yellow pine.
“It just turned cold in the night. I went to sleep warm and woke up about four o’clock freezin to death.”
“I looked for a bad winter.”
“I think you found one,” Winer said. He spread his hands for the feeble warmth radiating upward from the heater.
“Is it snowin yet?”
“I believe it’s too cold to snow.”
“We’ll make us some coffee here directly this thing ever decides to burn.” Oliver blew out the lamp and they sat silently in the flickering light of the stove and the spectral gray dawn at the window. The fire caught and the area immediately surrounding the stove began to warm though cold held to the room and it was impossible to sit where the old man’s couch was. Oliver filled a pan with ice and water and set it on to boil. He looked halffrozen. His face looked gray and bloodless and he stamped about trying to get the circulation going in his feet, rubbing his hands together briskly.
“What’re you doin out so early anyway? You ain’t workin in this mess are you?”
“No. I don’t work there anymore.”
“Say you don’t? How come?”
“I quit. I just thought I might go out to town today. I was just waiting to see how it’s going to be.”
“I know how it’s goin to be,” Oliver said bleakly. “By God cold just like it is now clear on through till spring of the year.”
“It’ll warm up again. This is just a cold snap.”
“I don’t look for it to.”
“You got plenty of wood?”
Oliver poured crushed coffeebeans into the boiling water. “I got a world of it but it’s all on the stump,” he said.
“If it don’t get too rough I’ll come over after a while and cut you a load.”
“Ah, no need in that. I can buy me a little jag. I guess you got your own to worry about.”
“I cut some back in the summer when I wasn’t doing anything. Anyway, what I came to see you about was signing this paper for me.” As he spoke Winer was withdrawing the typed note from beneath his jacket and proffering it toward the old man.
Oliver shook his head. “You’ll have to read it to me. What is it?”
“It’s a note to borrow some money. I found a car I wanted down at Kittrel’s carlot and they sent me over to the bank, they have to have a cosigner and the man there said they’d let me have the money if you’ll sign the note.” Winer paused. “You were the only one I could think of who might sign it.”
“Well, well,” the old man said. He took the paper and studied it at arm’s length, peering at the typed hieroglyphs he couldn’t read. He seemed imbued with a curious sense of pride and as the room filled with the fragrance of boiled coffee and the heat from the stove dissipated the chill he grew expansive. He laid the note with care atop the table and taking the pan from the stove filled two earthenware mugs with coffee.
“I hope it ain’t like the paper I signed for Hodges one time,” Oliver said, grinning to himself. He handed Winer a cup of coffee. “There for a few years I kindly took a interest in that boy. I had a idy I might help him a little here and there, kindly straighten him out, but I doubt you could do that with a block and tackle. He come down here one time with a paper he wanted me to sign. He’d answered a advertisement in one of these here farm papers and he was goin to be a salesman, I made my X and two or three weeks later we went out to town to pick up this stuff that come in. Lord God. You never seen the like of junk. It come in on a boxcar at the depot. It was boxes and boxes of stuff, looked like stock for a grocer store. Pie fillin and flavorin and horse liniment and you wouldn’t believe the bottles of sweetsmellin stuff. He had to hire a truck to haul it home in and I don’t reckon he ever sold any of it. They dunned me about it a long time and I used to get letters from this lawyer in Chicago and I finally scraped around and paid it. I don’t know what Hodges finally done with it, I believe he used all that brilliantine himself and he smelled purty high for a year or two and then it all died out.”
“I’ll pay the note off.”
“I know you will. I was just thinkin about how Hodges looked when he saw all that stuff. All them boxes and him without even a bicycle to haul it on.”
Weather accomplished what Blalock nor anyone else had been able to do. It got Motormouth in motion. He turned up around noon at Winer’s complaining.
“Goddamn, I’m about froze to death,” he told Winer. “You talk about cold. Last night I near about shook myself to death and woke up with the river froze over and the weather says just more of the same. The radio said how the windshield factor was ten below zero.”
“The what?”
“It said the windshield factor was ten below zero and bearable winds.”
“I think it said variable.”
“Variable or bearable, it’s a cold son of a bitch. Are you about ready?”
“Ready? Ready for what?”
“Hellfire. To leave. To go to Chicago like we said. Well, I’m goin. I was goin to sell the Chrysler to Kittrel but I’ll give you first shot at it. You want it?”
They went out into the yard and stood looking at it. A cold drizzle fell and the car gleamed dully. Winer studied it from all angles, imagining what it looked like beneath the array of antennas and lights and coontails.
“I’ll take eight-five dollars in cash and if it ain’t worth two hundred I’ll kiss ye ass. I give twenty dollars for them foglights by theirselves.”
“I guess you know what you want to do.”
“The hell of it is I don’t know whether I do or not. I bet that’s a big place up there. I wanted you to go with me but I reckon you got stars in your eyes.”
Winer took out his wallet. “I’ll give you eighty-five for it if you’ll show me how to drive it. I never drove anything except Weiss’s tractor.”
“Why hell yes, slide your ass in here, son. You’ll be learning from a master.”
Late in the day they drove into town and parked by the bus station and Motormouth went in and got his ticket. He returned with it and they sat awaiting the bus and staring out across the rainwet streets and an unaccustomed silence settled upon Motormouth, a vaguer depression befell him as dusk drew on. At last the bus came and he got out with his cardboard box lashed with staging and strode purposefully toward it and mounted the steps. He turned and raised a hand. The bus door closed behind him with a soft pneumatic hiss. Winer watched the bus out of sight.
Oliver must have already been abed, for he was in his long underwear when he cracked the door and peered out. Winer handed him the banknote.
“You can tear this up. I don’t reckon I need it after all.”
“Well. I heard of a good credit risk but you about the beat of any I ever seen.”
“I never even used it. I bought Motormouth’s car and it was a lot cheaper than the one Kittrel had.”
“Well, where’s Hodges gone off to?”
“His bus ticket said Chicago.”
“Chicago,” Oliver repeated in an awed voice. “Lord God.”
She must have been watching from a window, for as soon as he parked the car the front door opened and she came out onto the porch. Grinning, she came down the steps and approached the car.
“What are you doin with Motormouth Hodges’s car?” she asked.
“It’s mine, I bought it,” he said. He got out and let the door fall to, walked all around the car pointing out its virtues. She wasn’t really looking at the car, stood grinning at him in a curiously maternal way.
“Okay, okay,” she said. “You don’t have to sell it to me.”
“You want to go for a ride.”
“I don’t know. How’d you learn to drive so fast?”
“Motormouth showed me.”
She was laughing. “Oh Lord. I’ll just wait then.”
“He said I was learning from a master.”
“Well. Maybe in that case. I never rode with a master before.”
Mormon Springs fell away and on the way to town he was seized by a feeling of elation, the colors and sounds of this bleak winter day seemed heightened and he was possessed by a rockhard assurance that things were going right. Turning momentarily from the road he glanced at her bright profile against the dreary, rolling countryside and he didn’t see how things could go wrong for anyone who had a girl who looked as pretty as she did: there was a juststruck perfection, she looked new and unused to him, nothing had quite touched her.
“You know what I’d like to do?”
“No, but you can do whatever you want to.”
“I want to eat at the Daridip. I never did that before.”
“Where’s Hardin at?”
“I don’t know and I don’t care. He can’t stop me if I’m already with you, can he?”
“What’d he say to you about those blankets?”
“Nothin.”
Winer looked at her. He didn’t believe her but he didn’t say so.
“Then I want to go down on Brushy where they buried Daddy. I ain’t been down there since the funeral and I been wantin to go. You reckon we could?”
The grave was an oval of red earth. Wire flowers tilted and twisted askew by fall winds. Cliched sentiments gone weatherbeaten and forgotten, cheap celluloid flowers blatant in their artifice. There was no headstone and a meal marker driven into the earth certified who was there in watermarked type. Thomas Hovington, she read. It was like being famous, she thought, seeing your name in cold print like that. She’d never seen it before.
She knelt and pulled her skirt down over her knees and arranged the tacky remnants of flowers to some semblance of order she carried in her head. Hands gentle to rotted crepepaper leached colorless and limp.
“He never helped me much, but he might’ve if he hadn’t been so sick. I was a kid when they put him in the ground,” she said. “It was just this year but I ain’t a kid no more. I seen the hearse come all new and shiny and they took him out in that box and drive away. ‘Goin back after another one,’ I thought. I had never thought about folks doin that for a livin. I get a little boy I never want him to be one of them.”
An old man and woman were passing among the gravestones. Old gray man in a black suitcoat. Winer watched him. Prospective tenants perhaps, folks just visiting their neighbors. He wanted gone.
She arose. She was crying brokenly. She clung to his arm. “They had to break his back,” she said. “They ought never to have done that.”
He put his arms around her and drew her wet face into the hollow of his throat. He couldn’t think of anything to say.
“You got any money?”
“Sure I got money. Why?”
“Stop here.” She pointed.
He pulled into the empty parking lot. It was the Cozy Court Motel. They sat for a time, his fingers awkwardly drumming on the steering wheel, she was a calm serenity, staring out across the cold-looking pavement toward the numbered doors.
“We’ll play like we’re somebody else,” she said. “Somebody real nice.”
He didn’t say anything. He got out and closed the door and went across the asphalt to where blue neon said the office was.
Later they lay in bed, her back to him, the length of her body against him. The sun was lowering itself in the west and threw the window yellowlit and oblique on the eastern wall. Past her rounded shoulder he watched it slide slowly across the limegreen plaster and he wished there was some way to halt it but there was not.
He stopped the car on the last curve before Hardin’s and cut the switch off and drew her against him.
“We ought not to have drove back here at all. We should have just kept goin.”
“Goin where?”
“I don’t know.”
“Will he hurt you?”
“He never has really.”
“Tell me if he does.”
She looked at him wryly. “Why? What will you do? Kill him? Defend my honor? It’s easy for you. All you have to do is drive out of sight and it’s over for you.”
They sat in silence. He thought of the curious progression of things, the way the ragged edges of one event dovetailed into another like the pieces of a puzzle, no single piece independent of the whole.
“It ought not to have been like this,” he said suddenly.
“What?”
“If any one thing had been different then the rest would have too. We might be married. We might be a thousand miles away.”
She smiled. “We might be dead,” she said. “You want to see everything at once, Nathan. You want it every bit in front of you where you can look at it, make choices. I ain’t like that. I never had a choice to make. I just do what there is to do and then I don’t worry over it. It’s done.”
“All I want right now is for you to never get out that door,” he said.
She leaned and kissed his cheek. Then she got out anyway.
She traced the outline of her lips with a pink lipstick, pressed her lips together to smooth it. She studied her face speculatively in the mirror. Her eyes opened startled when Hardin’s reflection appeared behind hers.
“Think you’re goin somewhere?”
“Nathan Winer’s takin me to the show.”
“No he’s not.”
“Yes he is. Mama’s done said I could go.”
“Mama don’t call the shots around here and ain’t never if memory serves.”
“Well, she calls them with me. You’re not my daddy.”