The Long Home

1

The girl had black hair as coarse and glossy as a well-kept horse’s mane and it was cropped straight across below her shoulders as it if had been sheared. The first few days after school started Winer would see he come out and await the schoolbus, her books clutched against her breasts, her face self-absorbed and touched with a kind of sullen insolence, staring down the road the way the bus would come. Then after a few days she didn’t come out of the house when the bus blew its horn. The bus turned and paused momentarily a few mornings and then it didn’t come anymore.

These warm days of Indian summer she used to bring out on old metal lunge chair and sit on the sunny side of the house and watch them work. Winer, looking up from the pile of corners and tees he was nailing together or the blocking he was cutting with a handsaw, would see her sitting with calm indifference, her fingers laced across her stomach, watching the progress of the work not as if it interested her very much but as it if were just something to watch, a motion, like a cat watching anything that moves.

She would sit with a kind of studied unawareness of her spread legs, the glimpses they stole of her white thighs. Her eyes were halfshut beneath the weight of her long lashes and she might have been asleep but she was not.

“She’s got a case on one of us,” Gobel Lipscomb told him. “And somehow I just don’t believe it’s you.” Lipscomb was the carpenter. He took to working shirtless so she could watch the play of muscles in his sunbrowned back, to ordering Winer around more. He used to drop his tape or hammer and stoop floorward for it and pause staring upward at the juncture of her thighs and he’d straighten with a look on his face near pain. “Black drawers,” he would say. “Godadmighty damn. Black drawers.”

Hardin’s business seemed to keep him pretty well occupied but sometimes on slow days he would come out and sit beside the girl and watch. Once he laid his hand on her knee and said something to her and glanced toward Lipscomb and laughed and she smiled a small smile and said nothing. When Hardin was about, Lipscomb found a higher gear in his nailing arm and seemed unaware of anything that transpired beyond the maze of partition walls he was erecting.

Carrying a beachtowel the girl came out of the trees above the abyss. Her bathing suit was wet and her black hair plastered seallike and glossy to her head. She passed the building where they worked without glancing toward them and walked on toward the house, her hips rolling like something meshing on ball bearings.

Lipscomb was suddenly frozen, the hammer frozen in midstroke as it if had come up against some invisible barrier. Even the jaws that were perpetually kneading tobacco were still. He stood for a moment and then with great deliberation he laid his hammer aside.

“If that ain’t a invite then I don’t know one,” he said. “Here goes nothin.”

He stood before the bedroom window with his hands shading the sundrenched glass.

“Hey,” Winer called.

Lipscomb might not have heard him. He didn’t turn. Stood leaning back to the sun staring into the room. Whatever he saw there seemed to have rendered him immobile as stone.

“Hey, Lipscomb,” Winer called again.

When Lipscomb turned he threw a hand to his eyes as if struck blind or perhaps paradoxically illuminated by divine revelation and he staggered across the yard. “Oh, Lord,” he said. “Oh Lord.” He wiped his brow and flung off imaginary beads of perspiration. He crossed the yard in great rolling seafarer’s strides and thrust his pelvis forward spasmodically, his hands and hips miming masturbation of an enormous phallus. His tongue lolled, his eyes rolled in his head.

“How high a fever you run with the fits?” Hardin asked him. Hardin leaning against the corner of the house smoking a cigarette. “You reckon I ought to send that boy after Ratcliff?”

Lipscomb ran a hand through his sandy hair. He seemed tonguetied. His face was so engorged with blood it looked swollen. “There ain’t nothin wrong with me,” he finally said.

“The hell there’s not,” Hardin told him.

Winer fell very busy. He knew intuitively that he had never seen a man so close to dying. His hand counting the nails in his nail apron. One, two, three, his busy fingers counted.

Hardin didn’t say anything to Lipscomb all day. He just got in the black Packard and left. At lunch they ate leaning against the wall they’d erected. “You see that bastard, how he looked at me?” Lipscomb asked. “If looks killed I’d be lookin at the underside of a casketlid right this minute. I’ve about decided he’s got the hots for that little gal hisself.”

Winer didn’t reply. He drank cold coffee from a pint fruitjar and ate his sandwich and thought about the way Hardin had looked at Lipscomb. Winer did not anticipate ever being looked at by anyone in just that way.

“Hell, he looks like one of these killdees,” Lipscomb said. “And they aint nothin to him but legs and pocketbook.” He studied his own thickly muscled forearms, his big hands. He seemed to draw comfort from them. “He fucks with me I’ll fold him up like a rule and stick him in my pocket,” he said. “Or else come upside his head with a clawhammer.”

Winer judged he’d about decided Hardin wasn’t going to say anything.

A few minutes before four they heard the Packard drive up and the door slam to, then Hardin came around the corner of the house. He stood there for a time watching them.

“Lipscomb, you want to step around here a minute? I need a word with you.”

“Here it comes,” Lipscomb said in a low voice. He slid his hammer into the strap on the leg of his overalls.

Winer went on nailing a wall together. He kept waiting for threats, blows, the sound of violence. All he could hear when he paused in his nailing was the murmur of the brook, doves mourning softly from the hollow.

Lipscomb was gone only a few minutes. When he came back his face was red all the way down into the collar of his blue chambray shirt and he was not pleased. He had an old plywood toolbox with a length of rope knotted through each end of for a handle. He began gathering his tools up and slinging them into the box.

“Get you shit gathered up,” he told Winer. “We’re draggin up.”

“What?”

“We’re quittin, by God. We’re goin to the house.”

“We, hell,” Winer said. “I didn’t know we came in a set like salt and pepper shakers.”

Lipscomb straightened with a square in his hand. He looked as if he’d just as soon take it out on Winer as not.

“What are you, some kind of Goddamned scab?”

“I’ll make up my own mind when to go the house. You never hired me.”

“Why, you snotty little bastard. I ought to just slap the hell out of you.”

“Why don’t you just fold me up like you did Hardin?”

“By God, I believe I will.” He took a step toward Winer but Winer held the hammer and he did not retreat under Lipscomb’s tentative advance, just stood with an almost sleepy look in his eyes. Lipscomb dropped his hands and stood staring at him, his eyes fierce and malignant. “You little backstabbin shitass. You set this whole mess up, didn’t you? Now you think you got the job and the girl too. All you had to do was holler, but hell no.”

“Why, hellfire,” Winer said. “I called you twice but you was so busy making a damn fool out of yourself you couldn’t be bothered.”

“Ahh, the hell with you and him both,” Lipscomb said, turning away. He laid the square in the box and took up the box by its rope handles. He started toward the door. “I’d like to stay and see the mess you’ll make out of things. You couldn’t build a fuckin chicken coop if you had a book to go by.”

After a while Hardin came out and climbed onto the subfloor. He sat on a box of nails watching Winer work. He had a slim cigar clamped in his jaw. He wore expensivelooking gabardine slacks and a yellow shirt. He began paring his nails with a bonehandled knife.

“Well, I had to let ye runnin mate go,” he said. “I couldn’t afford union scale for winderpeepin.”

Winer went on working.

“Hold up a minute. You ain’t gettin paid by the nail nohow.”

Winer ceased and stood waiting.

“Ain’t you worked past quittin time anyhow?”

“I don’t know. I don’t have a watch, we used his. Besides, I wasn’t sure what you wanted.”

“I told you what I wanted when I hired you. I want a honkytonk built. Can you do it?”

“Well, I can do most of it. There’s some things it’s hard for one man to do, like puttin up the joists and rafters. And I can’t raise the walls and plumb them by myself.”

“That’s all I wanted to hear you say. You measure em and nail em together and I’ll grab a handful of these highbinders I’m always waistdeep in and we’ll raise em for you. You run into anything requires more than two hands, just holler. All right?”

“I’ll give it a try.”

“Shore you will. You can do it. Ain’t you goin to ast me about the money?”

“What about it?”

“About how much I was payin him. I’m payin it to you now, you’re the architect and the carpenter and the hired help too. You fuck up we’ll know who to blame it on.”

Winer grinned.

“Come on and I’ll run you home. Can’t have my builder walkin to work totin his tools. Folks’ll be talkin about me.”

Winer was still wonderstruck. I am rich, he thought. I am a wealthy man.

Lately Winer’s mother had taken to cleaning herself up more and doing her hair. She seemed always to have on a clean dress and there was something foreign about her. Winer realized for the first time how much she had let herself go down through the years. She was not pretty but had she been less dour and practical she would have qualified as plain.

He noticed tiretracks even before she got the pans.

“Had company today?”

“No. A salesman stopped by.”

“A salesman? Selling what?”

“Sellin pots and pans,” she said irritably as if there were no other kind of salesman, as if he was interrogating her.

A week later she had the pans. He saw them when he came in from Hardin’s, a great motley collection of them, coppercolored, gleaming, skillets and cookers and spatulas and doubleboilers and seemingly a pan for every purpose the mind of man could devise.

“Great God,” he said.

“What?”

“Where’d you get all that stuff?”

“I bought em.”

“Bought em? Why?”

“Because I wanted em is why. I always wanted me a set of cookers like that.”

He was a little awed by them. “Well.” He paused. “What’d they cost?”

“Never you mind what they cost. It won’t be a nickel of your pocket.”

He took his razor and mirror and a bar of soap down to the branch. Beyond the barn it curved and there was a hole of water deep enough to swim in. He washed and shaved and came back out of the woods and onto the stoop and she was awaiting him. Apparently their conversation was not yet over.

She laid a hand on his arm. “I got a friend,” she said. “Sells them pots and pans.”

He thought, a friend, not understanding at first. Then he saw in her sallow face some commingling of shame and pride, the eyes imbued simultaneously with humility and stubbornness, and he thought, she means a man. He didn’t know what to say though her face expected something, she looked as if she were ashamed of whatever it was she was doing but had no plans to stop.

“I think you’d like him, Nathan. He wants to see you.”

“Well. Sure.” He was looking all about. “Where is he?”

“He’s supposed to be here next Friday,” she said. Not “He’ll be here Friday,” Winer noticed, not yet with sureness or even confidence, she was uncertain of her hold on him, or did not believe it yet.

Monday he was there long before worktime planning his day. There was more to know than he had realized and now there was no one to ask. Old questions on the pitch of roofs, the cuts on rafters, troubled him. Yet as the week wore on he discovered an affinity for planes and angles, for the simple rightness of things. His corners formed perfect squares and they stood as plumb as a level could plumb them. There were things he did not know how to do but he found there were several ways to do everything and that even if he took the long way it did not matter if the end result was the same.

He seemed always to work with an audience. With the weather holding fair Hardin’s coterie of convivial drunks used to follow the sun and in the afternoon they’d align themselves on Coke crates or folding chairs or old ladderbacks as spindly and loosejointed as themselves and against the whitewashed concrete blocks of Hardin’s addition they took on the character of a sepia daguerreotype, old felthatted and overalled rogues watching time pass with attentive eyes out of dead faces. Watching anything that life chose to parade before them. There was a great calm about these old men, they seemed to have arrived at some compromise with life long ago and nothing much surprised them anymore.

The young men were mostly furloughed or shellshocked soldiers or over-the-hill sailors far from any seas and they would be inside drinking and trying to get the girl to ride down the road with them. Finally drunk they settled for whatever whore chanced to be in attendance or even Pearl herself should the need be acute.

Winer was comfortable with the old men but he could never become comfortable with the soldiers, there was an air of desperation about them. They acted as if time were the commodity they were shortest on, as if they did not have the leisure to take life as it came but were eternally seeking shortcuts, must twist each moment until it suited their purpose, bend every event to their own amusement. Something had to be happening for them every minute. They were wound too tight, Winer thought. He knew why and he didn’t guess he blamed them but he thought they were wound too tight anyway. They reminded him of a war being fought that had heretofore been just a disembodied voice in a radio and he knew that unless things changed it would not be long before he was fighting it too.

All the soldiers looked alike to Winer and he thought if he ever saw one sober he might think about them differently but around Hardin’s he wasn’t likely to. All the ones he saw were a little drunk and a lot belligerent. They always wanted to fight the sailors but if there were no sailors they’d fight each other.

One afternoon he paused nailing weatherboarding on the walls when a fight erupted inside and boiled out the back door, the old men picking up their jars or jellyglasses or whatever and retreating to more neutral territory. Two soldiers were rolling in the yard and when a stringyheaded blond broke a beerbottle over the topmost one’s head a girl with red hair knocked her down with a two-by-four and fell upon her. Winer, watching their exposed white thighs and rent clothing, ultimately counted eighteen participants and he wondered how they kept up with who was fighting whom and which side they were on.

They fought all over the backyard pulling hair and cursing and falling over one another. Winer swung himself onto the top plate the better not to be mistaken for a participant. Hardin tried to yell them down, then he saw Wymer moved among them like dogs snapping at the heels of milling cattle, first with blackjacks then Hardin slipping on his Sunday knucks and wading in.

When they subsided no one seemed to know what the fight had been about and they all went back inside to discuss it save one soldier sitting crying in the grass with his jaw hanging crazily. He sat there awhile by himself and then he got up and hobbled around the corner like a very old man. Winer went on back to work and after a while the old men came up from the branch laughing and seated themselves again.

Leo Huggins sold throughout a three-country area what he described as waterless cookware. He canvassed the backroads in his old green Studebaker, sitting with housewives on their porches, beseeching, wheedling, his eyes black and glossy with whatever obsession bulged behind them, the present one being that this waterless cookware was the only thing of moment in all the world.

He’d demonstrate it in the comfort of your own home. He’d have you invite the neighbors over and he would go into the kitchen and prepare and serve a meal in these marvelous pans. Many a husband came in hot and sweaty from the sawmill to find his yard clotted with cars and the house full of folks he hadn’t expected. Huggins’s Studebaker likely blocking the driveway. Huggins himself humming busily in the kitchen, his sleeves rolled up, supper on the stove. The wife sitting waiting with mounting apprehension, wondering how she had let herself be talked into this.

So there were times when Huggins had to depart in haste, the meal left halfprepared, the pots and pans abandoned until another day when the husband was once again at work.

“Your mama tell me you a wood butcher.”

“I reckon.”

“I reckon it’s all right if you can make any money at it,” Huggins said, then turned the conversation neatly to himself. “I never could make a livin at public work. Had to do what I could with my brains.”

And your mouth, Winer thought, then immediately decided he wasn’t being fair, that he did not know Huggins well enough to criticize him and was not giving him a chance. Yet he caught himself staring at the big white hands that did not look as if they’d ever done an hour’s labor, the fingers soft and freckled as bleached sausages, the still upturned palms tender and virginal as a baby’s.

Huggins fell to talking about himself. He liked this topic of conversation, figured the rest of the world was afflicted in a like manner. He had come up from nothing in Arkansas, he told Winer and his mother, from folks who never had nothing nor wanted nothing, folks in shotgun shacks with cracks in the floor so you could keep an eye on the chickens, and he figured if he was ever going to be anything he had to do it on his own hook. He had begun by selling fancy overpriced coaloil lamps to the colored folks in the underside of Little Rock, later taking on a line of bibles with Negro Jesuses.

Winer sat only halflistening to this oral history. He had worked hard and his shoulders ached from nailing and he kept yawning. Weariness seemed to have crept up from his ankles and he could still hear and feel the rhythmic swing of the hammer in some dreamlike part of his mind. Amber Rose’s face drifted unbidden into his thoughts and would not leave. Huggins’s car was paid off free and clear, he learned, there was no man in all the world who could claim Huggins owned him a dime. Winer stared across the yard wishing himself elsewhere. The day was waning, the blue timberline across the field already an indecipherable stain, the sedge washed by broad swaths of failing light.

The trio formed a curious tableau on the porch of the unlit house, teacher and disciples perhaps, the boy pretending to listen, the man preaching softly the arcane gospel of himself, speaking so earnestly he might have been imparting hidden knowledge of the workings of the world or spinning a web to draw them into some dadaistic conspiracy. The woman sat in her chair, still, unrocking, hands momentarily stayed from their darning. Her eyes were downcast to her lap, the yellow lids slick and veined with a delicate blue tracery of capillaries. She seemed rapt, transfixed, and Winer realized that he did not know her, felt a brief and bitter stab of regret that he had never tried to learn her. She was less real to him than the yellowing daguerreotypes of other strangers in her own picturebox.

Hardin had square, boxlike hands with thick fingers and he kept the nail cut straight across almost into the quick. The nails were hornlike and scrupulously clean. He was forever paring them when he spoke with Winer.

“Where did you get that knife?”

“Lord. son, I don’t know. I had it I guess ten or twelve year.”

“Let me see it a minute.”

Hardin handed him the knife handle first.

The grips were bone the color of oxblood. CASE, the trademark said. Winer sat for a time holding it. “This is my father’s knife,” he said.

“Seems like I did find it somewheres.”

A small, irregular W was filed into the base of the blade the way all tools were marked but Winer would have known it anyway. The knife was an integral part of the memory of his father, the knife and the black slouch hat and the cold, remote way the eyes had of looking at the world. But they had never looked at Winer that way. The knife was wound up with the way his father had glanced at him when he started to town or to the field to plow. Winer the child would be hesitant, uncertain whether he should go or stay. “Well are you comin or not?” his father would ask. “You know I can’t get nothin done without you to supervise.”

He smelled the knife.

“What’d you do that for?”

Winer flushed. “I don’t know. He always had a plug of tobacco in the same pocket with the knife. The knife always had crumbled-up chewing tobacco inside it and it always smelled just like old Red Ox twist.”

“I remember where I got that knife now. I hadn’t thought about it in years. It was a holler or two over across your line. Seems like kind of a cedar grove in there, where I reckon he’d been cuttin fencepost. The knife was layin on a sandbar down by a spring in the mouth of the holler. But it was like I said ten or twelve year ago and any smell of chewin tobacco would be long gone.”

“I don’t know why I did that.”

“Your pa lit out, didn’t he?”

“I don’t know what happened to him I never did believe he lit out and I don’t believe it now.”

“Well, folks is funny. I don’t care how close you think you know somebody, you don’t know what wheels is turnin in their head. Course you don’t remember but times was hard for folks back then. Times was tightern a banjo string. Lots of folks was on the road. He might’ve just throwed up his hands and said fuck it and lit out.”

“No.”

“Well. I ain’t tryin to tell you what to think about your own daddy. But seems to me me and you’s a lot alike.”

No, Winer thought, still looking at the knife lying open in his hand. I am not like you. I’ll never be like you. I’m not like Oliver either but both of you want to tell me what do. What to think. Both of you are always sayin, I’m not tryin to tell you, but you’re tellin me just the same. I am like myself. If I am like anybody then I am like him.

“My own daddy cut out on me in February of the year I was eight years old. This was in Cullman, Alabama. I never will forget it, not forget Christmas that year. They always told us Santy Clause and me and my sister used to go out and hunt for reindeer tracks. The ground was froze as hard as rock but we use to hunt anyway. Course they never was much, a apple, and a orange and a handful of penny candy. A few nuts. But this year they wadnt nothin in our socks. I wondered what the hell it was we’d done. I went out where Pa was standin in the yard. He was lookin off down the road though there wadnt nothin to see. Just what you see when you look down a road. After a while Pa noticed us and reached in his pocket and handed me a quarter. ‘Here,’ he said. ‘Git yins some Santy Clause.’ That was when I was eight years old. Before I was nine he was long gone and we was livin with our aunt. She was sleepin with a sectionhand used to take a strop to us just to hear us yell.”

Winer didn’t say anything.

“Life is hard, Winer. You just got to get hard with it. It’s a blackjack game with life dealin and the dealer’s always got the edge. You see? You got to get your own edge. Because by God if you don’t there’ll always be somebody there lyin to you all your life and then handin you a greasy quarter and tellin you to buy some Santy Clause.”

“What’ll you take for this knife? You found it.”

“Hell, take it. You said it belonged to your pa.”

“Well, you’ve had it all these years. Decide what you want for it and hold it out of my pay.”

“Hell, no. If it means somethin to ye, take it on. Seems to me it’s a damn poor substitute for a pa but such as it is you’re welcome to it.”

2

Old woods here and deep. Here the earth was coppercolored with fallen needles and the air had the cool, astringent smell of cedar. An old wagonroad faded out somewhere in the grove then wound away toward home. The piled tops of dead cedars lay bleached and white and indestructible as bone.

He had not been in these woods since he was a child. Time seemed to have stopped here. He halfwaited for the rattle of trace chains, the ring of the axe, the slow turning of wagon wheels against the earth. This used to be an old houseplace, his father had said. The year the tornado came through the storm just picked it up off the foundation rocks and carried it away, no one knew where.

Here an old rusted stovepipe leached from the earth, there the remnants of a washtub, a few handmade bricks. On a level area of diminished brush the foundation stones themselves, profound, ageless, curious Stonehenge aligned to no known star.

The spring was clotted with leaves. Kneeling there he cleaned them out with his hands, watched the slow swirl of clean water into it, the list of sand and silt. An old one-eyed crayfish pretending invisibility eyed him apprehensively from the clearing water, retreated beneath a stone. A fall wind drove the first leaves from the tree above him, he arose in a drifting storm of them. He drank here, he thought, his eyes scanning the sandbar. Where had the knife been? His father had been fond of the knife, it wasn’t like him to lose it, once he had lost it and searched for it for two entire days before it was found and his father had not been one for repeating mistakes.

Winer dried his hands on the seat of his pants, walked on up the hollow. In its mouth he found wreckage he could not account for. Old rusted five-five gallon drums, purposeless shards of mauled metal. A cornucopia of gallon sorghum buckets. Broken glass jugs. He sat on a stump and stared at the refuse. A story resided here could he but decipher it. A jay scolded and then the woods were still and impenetrable again. He arose. He had never accepted before that his father was dead but he accepted it now.

Winer watched his mother at work, her eyes close to the sewing in her lap. Her lids were veined and near lashless, the skin drawn tight and smooth over her cheekbones. She seemed oblivious to him, to anything save the cloth her needle moved in. Her mouth was pursed slightly in the expression of resigned disapproval with which she viewed the world. She is old, he thought suddenly, though he knew she was not. For a moment something in the calm placidity of the face reminded him of the old men in Long’s store or Hardin’s, the serene face of an old woman looking down on him long ago from the high cab of a cordwood truck and from an Olympus of years, a face quilted and wrinkled by time until its seemed ageless, something found in nature, an old walnut hull found in the woods. Who was she? Aunt, grandmother, surrogate mother? Whoever’s she was, she was never mine.

I am your blood, he thought. Half of me is you and yet I know nothing about you. I fed at your breast and yet I draw more memory and knowledge from a lost pocketknife than all your years have showed me. Than all your reproach has taught me.

And you know. Somewhere behind the placid mask you wear for a face the answer lies. You may not know it but it is there. Somewhere in the vaults of your memory, old stacked and yellowing newsprint. There must have been things said I did not hear, did not understand if I did. Or have you known all these years, I’ve never known your motives or your reasoning. Did you cut his throat while he slept, did a tinker with his pots and pans trouble your dreams even then? Did his forerunner appear to you in a vision long ago, were you just clearing a path for his coming? Or did Pa just walk off down a road, the way you walked off down a road in your head?

“Did Pa ever fool any with whiskey?”

She looked up sharply. “Do what?”

“Did he ever make whiskey? Or sell it?”

“Lord, no. What makes you ask that?”

“I just got to wonderin.”

“Well, I’d like to know what got you to wonderin any such as that. Has that lowdown Hardin been feedin you a mess of lies?”

“No.”

“Your pa never even drank. I never even knowed him to make a drink of whiskey but one time and that was at a dance before we got married. Your pa was funny turned. He kept to hisself and he never had the patience to put up with a bunch of drunks the way you’d have to do to fool with whiskey.”

“You never talked much about him,” he said. “Why is that?”

“He said it all when he pulled that door to behind him,” she told him.

“Did you ever know Pa to make whiskey?”

“Good God, no. Why? Are you thinkin about settin up and runnin Dallas Hardin out of business?”

“No. I just got to wondering.”

“Get you one of these pears,” Oliver said. He had his rocker in the shade of the pear tree and was peeling pears into an old blue enamel washpan. Yellow windfall pears lay all about in the sere grass and yellowjackets crawled all over them in an agony of gluttony. The air was rich and winey with the fragrance of the pears.

“I found an old still back in there where the cedar grove is, over by King’s Branch. I just wondered who put it there.”

“Well, I can’t tell you who it was but I can tell you who it wadnt. Not talkin agin your pa but he was downright intolerant about some things. Now, I don’t mind bootleggin myself, but whiskeymakin was one of the things he was down on, he was a hard worker and whiskeymakin just looked shiftless to him. Though there’s a world of hard work wound up in it as anyone who ever shouldered a hundred-pound sack of sugar through the woods could tell you.”

“Whose would you say it was then?”

“Well, when Dallas Hardin first come to this part of the country and didn’t have the money to buy the law the way he does now he used to make his own stuff stead of haulin in this here bonded like he does. He had a habit of settin up across Hovington’s lines on somebody else in case the revenuers found his rig.”

The old man glanced up and something in Winer’s expression so startled him that it broke his train of thought and he was momentarily confused. For a second he was seeing the father’s eyes in the son’s face, cold, sleepylooking eyes.

“No, now wait a minute,” Oliver said bemusedly as if he were talking to himself. “That ain’t it atall. My mind’s goin in my old age like the rest of me’s done gone. Old man Cater Loveless lived back in there and when that tornado come through it just blowed his house away. Now, he made whiskey, Cater did. That was fore your pa bought the land for the taxes on it.”

“Then it must’ve been Loveless’ still?”

Oliver looked up. The look was gone from the boy’s face. “Likely it was,” he agreed. He went back to peeling pears.

The boy stood up. “Where’s your bucksaw? I thought I’d cut you up that big poplar the creek washed up.”

“Boy, you don’t have to do that. Do you have to be doin somethin ever minute?”

“It won’t take long till cold weather.”

“No, I guess it won’t. It never is anymore. Or warm weather either for that matter. Seems like the older you get the faster the wheel rolls.”

“Where’d you say the saw was?”

“It’s on the crib wall where it always is but I don’t see why you can’t find nothin to do but cut a old man’s wood. When I was your age I was workin twelve hours a day and runnin the women all night. Why ain’t you in town doin that?”

Winer started off toward the barn.

“Unless of course you’ve found somethin a little closer to home.”

Winer stopped and turned and Oliver was grinning down into the pan of cutup pears as if something he saw there amused him. Winer went to the barn.

“You get through we’ll sack you up some pears to take home,” the old man called.

Weekdays were generally slow and nothing Pearl and Wymer couldn’t handle and Hardin had lots of unspecified business to take care of. When he left he told no soul where he was going or when he’d be back, just driving off in the Packard or saddling up the Morgan and riding off up the ridge out of sight into the woods. On the days when Hardin was gone Amber Rose would sit outside and watch Winer. There was something curiously tranquil about her. He never saw her read a book or sew or anything else to occupy her time, she would sit quiet and self-contained and so watchful he came to feel that he could discern the weight of her eyes, could tell the moment her attention fell on him. He remembered her on the schoolbus but she’d never talked then either and she had certainly not looked the way she looked now. He remembered her violet eyes and the coarse black hair but the rest of her had changed. She seemed to have grown up overnight, the way a flower opens up.

He looked up from his homedrawn blueprint and she was standing before him holding a quart jar of peaches in her hands.

“You reckon you can open this? Me nor Mama can’t.”

Winer laid his pencil aside. “I might can.”

She was standing reaching the jar down toward him. When he stood up they were standing very close together and looking down into her face he felt that the air had suddenly become charged with electricity. She met his eyes innocently as if she were unaware of it, perhaps she was. Her hair was parted in the middle so that it fell over both ears and onto she shoulders. Seen closer than he had ever seen it her skin was very clear. He could smell the warm, clean scent of her and the thought of Lipscomb leaning to the sunwashed glass made him dizzy.

“Well, go on and open them if you can. Mama’s waitin on me.”

He unscrewed the ring and handed her the jar. “You’re very strong,” she said, an ironic edge to her voice. She took the jar but made no move to leave. “What are you starin at? Is my face on crooked?”

“I just thought you had the prettiest eyes.”

Her hair smelled like soap and he could see the clean line of her scalp where her hair was parted. The sun bright off the whitewashed wall fell on her face and in its light her eyes looked almost drowsy. He could see the dark down along her jawline, the pale, soft fuzz on her upper lip. The lips looked hot and swollen.

“Well, you can talk. I didn’t know if you could or not. You ought to try it more often.”

“I might if I had someone to talk to,” he said. “No need in telling myself things I already know.” Above the ringing in his ears all his words sounded dull and clumsy.

“Next time I need a can of peaches opened I reckon you can talk to me,” she said. When she smiled her teeth were white and straight. He watched her back through the sun to the house.

In midafternoon she brought out a jar of icewater and then just before quitting time she came out again and set a jar of peaches besides his lunchbox.

“Here,” she said. “Don’t say I never give you nothin.”

Sam Long watched him come up the street from the railroad tracks, a tall young man who seemed heavier through the chest and shoulders every time Long saw him. He passed the window of the grocery store without looking in and went on, a purposeful air of tautness about him as if he were searching for something and knew just where it was hidden. Long went back behind the cash register and took out a ticketbook and studied it and finally laid it aside in a wooden drawer. He lit a short length of cigar stub and waited. A family came in and began to slowly wander the aisles gathering up provisions but Long seemed bemused and abstracted and this time when Winer came by Long went out and stopped him.

Winer waited, a look of friendly curiosity on his face.

“I ain’t seen you in the last few weeks. Got to wonderin about you.”

“Well, I haven’t been getting into town much. I’m working over at Hardin’s and staying pretty busy.”

“That’s what I heard. Hardin payin off by the week, is he?”

“He’s paying me well enough. What was it you wanted anyway?”

“I was wonderin when you could do somethin about what you owe me. Your grocer ticket.”

“What needs to be done? I’ve been sending the money in to you on Saturday just like always.”

“I’m afraid not.”

Winer didn’t reply immediately and Long said, “Come on in here a minute and I’ll show you the tickets.”

“I wouldn’t know any more if I looked than I do now. Somethin’s not right here. I’ve been sendin the money in here every week.”

“Well, for a long time you did. Ever since you was workin for Weiss. You or your mama’d come in and settle up and get your grocers. You always paid off like a clock tickin. Then about a month or so ago your mama started comin here with that Huggins feller sells them pots and pans. She quit payin but she kept on buyin. I didn’t think nothin about it for a while cause you always been good for it.”

Winer didn’t say anything for a while. When he did speak he said, “All right. How much is it?”

“A little over a hundred dollars.”

“How little over?”

“A hundred twenty-three is what it is.”

“Well, you’ll get it, but from now on nobody buys so much as a Co-Cola on my ticket unless I say so. All right?”

“That’s fine with me.”

Huggins was there the following Friday evening rocking gently in the porch swing, a proprietary air about him, claiming squatter’s rights. Winer went on into the house and collected his mirror and razor and soap. He went out the back door and down the path to the spring. He had already bathed and was shaving, kneeling on the bank, when the voice came. He nicked his face with the straight razor when Huggins spoke.

Huggins had made no sound approaching, easing through the brush with a kind of covert stealth, paused standing behind him, framed in the mirror behind Winer’s face. Winer watched a scarlet bead of blood well on his jaw, trickle down his face. He wiped it away and lowered the mirror.

“What do you know, good buddy?”

Winer turned. Huggins stood waiting, arms depending at his sides as if Winer had summoned him and he was waiting patiently to see what was required of him. He stood stooped as if he were composed of some strange material slowly turning liquid, a pear-shaped lump of loathsome jelly gravity was slowly drawing misshapen to each, barely contained by the mismatched clothing he wore, clothing he seemed to have stolen under cover of darkness from random clotheslines.

“What is it? I came up here to take a bath.”

“I know ye did. I just needed to talk to ye a minute and wanted to catch ye by yeself.”

Have you got a couple of dollars till payday? Winer asked himself.

“Reckon you could loan me about five till Wednesday?”

Winer mentally chided himself for underestimating the reach of Huggin’s ambition. He washed the lather of his face and dried it on a towel. He wanted done with Huggins, wanted him gone, he felt constricted and short of breath as if Huggins somehow affected the atmosphere, sucked from it more than his due of oxygen, left it hot and lifeless and barren. He was fumbling out his wallet, thumbing through the money Hardin had paid him. “I guess I can.”

His alacrity took Huggins by surprise. He licked his already wet lips, eyeing the money. “Just let me have ten if you can spare it, good buddy. I’ll catch ye Wednesday.”

Winer paused. “If five’d do a minute ago how did we get up to ten?”

“Well. Five’ll do, I reckon. I’ll get by on it, I guess.”

Winer stood up. He reached Huggins the five-dollar bill, watched him fold it, palm it rapidly, and slide it into his watch-pocket, knew even as he watched that he would see it no more. “You’re going to have to get by on it,” he said. “I’m paying my own grocery ticket this week.”

“Do what?”

“I’ve been meaning all week to ask you about my grocery ticket out at Long’s. I’ve been sending money out there every week and somehow or other I seem to owe him more money all the time. Do you know how a thing like that could be?”

“Lord, no. I guess you better ask Sam Long. His tickets must be messed up.”

“His tickets are all right. Mines are the one messed up. What are you trying to pull on me.”

“You need to talk to your mama.”

“You say talk to Sam Long. Or talk to my mama. I’d about as soon talk to you as anybody I know.”

“I ain’t no bookkeeper.”

“No. You ain’t no bookkeeper. There’s two or three things I can think of that you are but you ain’t no bookkeeper. And I’ll tell you something. I work for my pay. And if you think I’m busting my ass every day so you can drink it up at the poolhall or pay for goddamn pots and pans then you’re living in a dreamworld.”

“You got a good bit of a mouth on ye for a youngen, ain’t ye?”

I’m going to hit him, Winer thought. Then he thought, no, I’d have to touch him.

“Boy, me and you’s goin to have to get somethin straight. Now, you work with me and I’ll work with ye, you make it hard on me and I’ll hand it right back to ye. Your mama thinks a right smart of me and we gettin purty serious. We might be gettin married one of these times, we might just all pick up and go north. Me and you’ll be in the same family then and you know as well as I do that a family ain’t got but one boss.”

“Why Goddamn you.” Winer dropped the razor and mirror, heard the clink of glass breaking on stone. He grasped the collar of Huggin’s shirt, twisted, felt the soft tug of thread breaking, the collar button pulling away. He kept the fabric between his fist and the white, hairless flesh of Huggin’s throat. “I’ll tell you right now,” Winer said. “What you and her do is your business. But it’ll be a cold day in hell when you boss me around.”

Huggins was walking awkwardly backward, trying to get away. He had thought Winer a boy, nothing to contend with, but he had never really looked at him. Now he was seeing the hard brown shoulders, the corded arms, and Winer watched fear rise up in Huggin’s eyes like liquid filling a glass, before it his own twinned image, the tiny faces cold and remote and malevolent, leaning into the back little eyes.

He released his grip and Huggins staggered backward, almost fell when a stone turned beneath his foot. He winced and stood massaging his ankle. “You stuckup little prick,” he said. “You sorry shitass.” He was breathing as if he had run a long way, a harsh, sucking rasp. He buttoned the shirt with what buttons remained and ran a shaking hand through his hair and went shambling back through the brush. When he judged himself safely out of reach he said, “We do get married the first thing I’m doin is puttin your ass on the road.” He went on.

Winer gathered up his gear again. The mirror lay in triangular shards, each reflecting its own blue sky or baring tree, a shattered glass landscape. He waited awhile until he heard the car start up and drive away before he went to the house. When he got there he saw that wherever Huggins had gone his mother had gone too.

3

His father had built the house, a man conscientious of the plumbness of corners, the pitch rafters. All these years had passed and the floorjoists were unsagging, the ceilings level and true. Would that other things had seen fit to endure so well. For the house smelled of waiting, of last year’s winter fires, it seemed to have been constructed solely in anticipation of some moment that had not arrived yet, or passed unnoticed long ago.

He drank a cup of coffee on the doorstep and after a while he went back in and he was surprised that so little time had passed. He turned the radio on. “From WJJD in Chicago,” the radio said. “Here’s Randy Blake with the Suppertime Frolic.” A song began, the scraping of a fiddle. He ascended the ladder into the attic.

When he descended with his toilet articles and a change of clothing in a brown paper bag the radio was singing, “I didn’t hear nobody pray, sweet Jesus, I didn’t hear nobody pray. Whiskey and blood run together, but I didn’t hear nobody pray.” Winer stood clutching the bag, staring about the room. He turned the radio off and went out.

He struck out across the field, following in the wake of the sun. The western sky was mottled red as if the town he moved toward lay in flames. Behind him at the wood’s edge darkness gathered, pursued him stealthily across the field. At its edge he paused uncertainly, sat for a time on a stone. He did not know for sure where he was going or even why he was going there. He laid the bag between his feet and sat with his hands clasped across his knees, staring back the way he had come. “Hellfire,” he said. “It’s my house.” He thought for a moment he might go back but he did not arise from the stone. A dull weight of anger seemed to hold him where he sat.

Dusk drew on, the dark stain of night seeping across the field. The sky turned a washedout lavender, darkened incrementally, a star came out. Another, pinpricks through the tapestry of night. Against the purple heavens the pinewoods turned oblique and foreign, took on the texture of flocked velvet. A chorus of whippoorwills arose, the steady onenote whirr of dryflies. The world of detail was vanishing, all the world he could see merging color and shape, changing, the horizon of trees dimensionless and dark against paler dark like pinchbeck trees stamped from tin.

He got up. He took up the bag and skirting the field followed an old near-lost wagonpath, came out from under the stoic and eyeless gaze of a scarecrow into a cornfield, passed through the stalks with the blades making dry sibilant whispers against his clothing. Faintly beyond the twisted stalks of corn he could see the blacktop highway like a moving river of ink. His faint shadow appeared like a spectral image. He turned and the moon hung poised over the spiked treeline. It was full and clouds shuttled across its remote face. They shifted constantly in the press of some high wind and against the yellow face they were near translucent so that the moon was an amorphous world in turmoil, seas and continents in perpetual flux, forming and reforming in patters eternally random. He came through the last of the corn and down an embankment and onto the blacktop. He went on toward town in silence save the hollow slap of his shoes on the pavement.

The wrecked Buick had been there as long as Winer could remember, a casualty of some forgotten accident. It sat below the tieyard slowly vanishing in a riotous sprouting of honeysuckle and kudzu as if the years had altered its chemistry, made it arable so that in summertime fireorange bells of cowitch bloomed from its quarter panels. He opened the front door against the gentle resistance of honeysuckle, threw the sack onto the floorboard. He closed the door soundlessly, peering across the car toward the lights of the shacks bordering the railroad tracks. Temporary looking, accidental houses hinting some connection with the traintracks, some misbegotten byproducts themselves of the trains coming and going. He walked past the dark bulks of stacked tires onto the street and went on toward town. A cur dog on a length of chain suspended from a clothesline followed him to the ends of its tether, the chain skirling on its clothesline faintly musical. When the line tautened the dog sat on its haunches and watched him go.

In the Snowwhite Cafe he ate two grilled-cheese sandwiches and drank a large glass of milk. He paid and sat for a time listening to the jukebox and the clanging of the pinball machine, watched past his reflection in the glass the near-dark streets where Friday night’s business began to accomplish itself, strolling couples arm in arm, girls bright as justpicked flowers, halfdrunk belligerent men herded homeward by fierce women with bitter persecuted faces.

“Goddamn if it ain’t old Winer,” a jovial voice said. Winer turned to see a broad red face grinning down at him, a face he remembered from school. Chessor’s name was Wendall but no one remembered it anymore. His father nicknamed him Buttcut because he was the first son and his father had said he was as tough as the butt cut off a whiteoak log and the name had stuck. Buttcut had conscientiously lived up to his name. He had been a tackle on the football team and though he had been out of school for two years he still wore the black-and-gold school jacket and seemed to be making a career out of being a former athlete.

“Hey, Buttcut. Sit down.”

Chessor seated himself in the booth across the red formica table. “Boy, where you been keepin yourself? We figured you was dead or off to the wars one.”

“Naw, I’m still around. I’ve been carpentering down at Mormon Springs. Building Hardin’s honkytonk or whatever.”

Chessor turned toward the general area of the counter. “Hey, bring us a Co-Cola,” he called. He turned back to Winer. “You seen old Shoemaker?” When Winer shook his head Chessor said, “I heard he was lookin for you. Tryin to fix up some way for you to graduate or somethin. He had somethin or another lined up for you and then you didn’t come back in the fall. And say you ain’t seen him? I heard he went out and talked to your mama.”

“I don’t know. If he did she never said so.”

“Maybe not then. You ought to be there this year though. They’re drivin old Toby crazy, the seniors is. Just like we done when I was here. Carryin on the old tradition. Nobody even crackin a book, just fuckin off is all.”

A girl in a white lisle uniform set two glasses of Coke and cracked ice on a table. She laid a ticket upside down beside them. “Watch your mouth or you’ll be drinkin these on the sidewalks,” she said. “It’s ladies in here if you didn’t but know it.”

“If you see one holler at me and I’ll tone it down,” Chessor told her.

The girl turned and went toward the front of the restaurant, her left leg bent slightly outward at the knee and the tennis shoe she wore on her left foot hissing softly against the slick waxed tile.

“That gimplegged slut,” Buttcut said. “Im goin to have to straighten her ass out.” His face cleared, the old jovial look returned. “Old Toby won’t never make it till graduation time. That son of a bitch’ll be in a asylum long before then. I seen him in the drugstore, you can see it in his eyes. I member when I was in school he had this gray hat he was real proud of. He’d ordered it from somewhere. I got it and cut it up on the bandsaw in woodworkin class, it made the purtiest little gray strips. I took em and hid em in his desk drawer and when he found em he cried like a baby. I swear. I think he’s about three-quarters queer anyway.”

Buttcut looked all about, leaned farther still toward Winer, and lowered his voice. “This year Ann Barnett, she put a rubber on his desk. Put lotion or somethin in it so it looked like a used one. Old Toby come in and started French class and seen it and turned white as a bedsheet. Set there lookin at it with his nose flared out. You know how scared of germs the son of a bitch is, always scared he’s goin to catch somethin. Well. Anyway Ann said everbody was just fallin out of their seats. Toby finally took out his handkerchief and spread it over his hand and picked up his pencil by the point and worried that rubber around till he got the pencil stuck up in it. Then he picked it up and run across the room holdin it way out in front of him and a little off to the side like germs was blowin off of it. He throwed it in the wastebasket and then the pencil and then he throwed in the handkerchief. Never said word one. Went back and set down and went to conjugating French verbs like nothin ever happened.”

Winer sat smiling distractedly and listening, occasionally sipping his Coke. Behind the mask of his eyes he was trying to get a fix on Ann Barnett’s face, to single hers from the throng of faces swarming in his mind, but he could not. All he could recall was blond hair and iriscolored eyes. He could see Toby Witherspoon’s gentle, beleaguered face but all these things Buttcut was telling him sounded strange and foreign, the obscure rites of some race he’d barely heard of or one he’d forsaken long ago. He felt a cold remove from them, set apart, like a spectator never asked to participate, a face pressed against a window of frozen glass.

Buttcut looked at his watch. “You want to go a dollar partners on the pinball machine? I got a date directly but we still got time.”

“I reckon not. All they do is eat my money and leave me broke.”

“Hell, son, you got to know how to make em walk and talk. I’ll do the playin, all you got to do is set back and watch.”

He gave Chessor a dollar and adding one of his own Chessor exchanged them for a roll of nickels. It was an experience to watch Buttcut play pinball. He talked to the machine, cajoled it, swore at it. He caressed it, fondled it, fell upon it with his fists when it did not do his bidding. Leaning across it he coerced the rolling, gleaming balls to the pockets he wanted, his enormous frame thrust across the machine like a lover. Ultimately he beat the machine two hundred forty games and checked them off for twelve dollars. “Walkin and talkin,” he said gleefully, counting six ones onto Winer’s waiting palm.

“I believe I am part of the pinball machine,” he said. “There’s one in the family tree somewhere. I come in and seen one slippin out my mama’s back door. Listen, I got to pick Sue up. You want me to drop you somewhere?”

“No. I’m not going anyplace in particular. I just came out here to kill some time.”

“Find you a girl. You ought to be able to pick one up after the picture show lets out.”

“I may do that.”

“I’ll see you then.”

After Buttcut went out Winer finished his Coke and carried the check to the counter and paid. He went out as well. He stood for a moment uncertainly before the plate glass window of the restaurant and then he went on up the street.

Sam Long was about to close up when Winer got there. The store was bare of customers and even the old men had been rousted from their benches. Winer wondered idly did they have homes, where did they go when the store closed. Long was sweeping about the coalstove with a longhandled broom.

“What can I do for you, Youngblood?”

Winer laid four ten-dollar bills on the counter. “I’ll give you the rest of it next week.”

Long leaned the broom against the counter and came around behind. He began to fumble through dozens of ticketbooks.

“Don’t worry about it, boy. I wadnt dunnin you exactly. I just knowed that Huggins feller and I thought it might be somethin you didn’t know was going on.” He made the deduction from the books and handed Winer a receipt. “I don’t want you feelin hard at me. I always appreciate your business.”

“I don’t feel hard at you,” Winer said. He pocketed the receipt and started toward the door.

“Come back now,” Long called.

It grew cloudy and more chill yet and a small cold rain began to fall, wan mist near opaque in the yellow streetlamps. He walked past the darkened storefronts with their CLOSED signs and sat for a time on a bench in the poolroom. He thought he might see someone he knew or wanted to know but he did not. Outside he stood momentarily beneath the dripping awning then went on down the street. Before de Vries’s cabstand he stood as if he were waiting for something. The thought of going home depressed him but the thought of not going did not cheer him appreciably. He stared out at the wet street and the ritualistic cruising of the cars. Once he recognized Buttcut Chessor and his girlfriend and he lifted a hand but Buttcut did not see him. After a while Motormouth’s trickedout Chrysler drove by then circled the block and passed again. This time it stopped, the springloaded antenna whiplashing soundlessly in its socket.

“Hey, Winer. Seen any women?”

“Just from a distance.”

“What you been doin tonight?”

“Running with the crazy folks,” Winer said.

“Hell, let’s run with a few more. I’ve got a sixpack or three in here with me. I’s just fixin to go out and see these women I know. You want to ride out with me?”

Winer considered his options. “Why not,” he said. He got into the car. “Drive down by the tieyard. I’ve got some stuff in that old Buick I need to pick up.”

Down fabled roads reverting now to woods Winer felt himself imprisoned by the dark beyond the carlights and by the compulsive timbre of Motormouth’s voice, a drone obsessed with spewing out words without regard for truth or even for coherence, as if he must spit out vast quantities of them and rearrange them to his liking, step back, and admire the various patterns he could construct: these old tales of love and betrayal had no truth beyond his retelling of them, for each retelling shaped his past, made him immortal, gave him an infinite number of lives.

They drove through a land in ruin, a sprawling, unkept wood of thousands of acres, land bought by distant companies or folks who’d never seen it. Yet they passed unlit houses and old tilting grocery stories with their rusting gaspumps attendant and it was like driving through a country where civilization had fallen and vanished, where the gods had turned vengeful or perverse so that the denizens had picked up their lives and fled. Old canted oblique shanties built without regard for roads or the uses of them, folks for whom footpaths would serve as well. Dark bulks rising out of the mouths of hollows, trees growing through their outraged roofs. Old stone flues standing blackened and solitary like sentries frozen at their posts waiting for a relief that did not come and did not come. Longdeserted ghostroads, haunts of homeless drunks and haphazard lovers.

“I thought nobody lived here in the Harrikin anymore.”

“They don’t hardly.”

“I can’t say I blame them. How far is it to where these women you know live?”

“I don’t know. Eight or ten mile. Open us up another one of them beers.”

The road worsened until in places Winer only suspected it was a road, faint vestigial imprint of where a road had been, narrowing, choked by the willows lowering upon it and always descending, Hodges riding the brakes and gearing down, until it was a wonder to Winer that folks still survived in so remote an area. They forded nameless shallow streams, wheels spinning on slick limestone, slid lockwheeled on into brackenencroached darkness, darkness multiplied by itself so that you would doubt the ability of light to defray it.

Where the woods fell away the ground leveled out and Winer could see the sky again. The rain had ceased and the clouds had broken up and a weird, otherworldly light from the stars lay on the land. Here buildings clustered together, yet still empty, unlit. They passed great brick furnaces brooding starkly up out of the fields attended by purposeless machinery black and slick with rain, silent. The roads intersected here and the car rattled over a railroad crossing where trains did not cross anymore.

“Right about here,” Motormouth was saying to himself. Past a house indistinguishable to Winer from any of the others the car slowed to a crawl, Motormouth peering across Winer toward a lightless building that looked like an old schoolhouse save the yard was cluttered with the deceased bodies of automobiles so dismembered they appeared autopsied. Motormouth blew the horn one short burst but did not stop. They accelerated and drove around the curve past the house.

“We’ll go down here to the lake and turn. Time we get back she’ll be out by the mailbox and waitin.”

“She? I thought there was more than one of them. Women, you said.”

“Well, yeah, that’s want I meant. Her and her sister.”

Winer had long since stopped believing anything Motormouth said but he did not want to get out here. Wherever here was it was mile from anywhere he had ever been and he had not seen a lighted house, a telephone pole. He guessed wherever he was was better than sleeping, these days he had come to feel that life was spinning past him, leaving him helpless. Sleep only accelerated this feeling of impotence. While he slept the world spun on, changed, situations altered and grew more complex, left him more inadequate to deal with them.

Where they stopped by the lake’s edge there was a pier extending out into the water. Past it under the still sky the water lay motionless as glass. It was a lake of india ink, the dark water tending away to nothingness where lay no shoreline, no horizon, just the blueblack mist above it where his mind constructed miragelike images that were not there. In the night it seemed to go on forever and this to be the point where everything ceased, land’s end, everything beyond this uncharted.

Motormouth lit a cigarette, arced his match into the black expanse of water. “This used to be a good place when I was a kid. Use to be kept up and you could swim in it. Now it’s growed up with some kind of chokeweed and a man’d have to swim with a stick in one hand to beat the cottonmouths off. You see that bluff down there?” He pointed westward along the waterline to where a shapeless bulk reared against the heavens. Jagged slashes of trees serrated its summit and above them hung a wirethin rind of brasscoloured moon. “That’s a old quarry, like a big cave. It used to be the whitecaps’ headquarters, them nightriders used to meet there fore they’d raid somebody. Now it’s road goes in, and a turnaround. Folks parks in there and screws, or used to. I guess they still do. I used to bring the old lady out here fore we got married. It’d be hot, July or August, we’d swim awhile then go back in there. God, it was dark. Black as the ace of spades.” His voice grew rueful, coarsened by the hard edge of the past. “Them was the good old days,” he finished. “Whatever luck I ever had just dried up and blowed away.”

Winer did not immediately reply. He stood silently staring at the dim outline of the bluff within which the whitecaps had met, in his mind he could hear the horses’ hooves click steel on stone, hear the vague, interweaving voices through pillowcase masks. In some curious way he felt pity for Motormouth but at the same time he felt a man was accountable for what he did and he felt a man made his own luck. He thought of Oliver. William Tell Oliver seemed the only person he knew who was at peace with his own past, who was not forever reworking old events, changing them. “You talk like a ninety-year-old man getting ready to die,” he told Motormouth. “All you need is some kind of a change.”

“Let’s change our luck right now,” Motormouth said. “Let’s ease on back up the road.”

He drove a little way past the house and stopped the car. They did not have long to wait. Almost immediately footsteps came up behind the car. Winer turned. In the pale light a heavyset black man was coming alongside the car. He swung a shotgun in his hand as casually as if it were an extension of his arm. “Lord God,” Winer said.

“Hey.” The black man was at the window. He leaned an arm on the roof, peered in. Motormouth leapt wildly in his seat, then appeared frozen, his right hand on the ignition key, his left on the steering wheel. “Hey there,” he said. Winer slid down in his seat and stared down the starlit road, dreaming himself speeding along it, all this forgotten.

“What you whitefolks wantin out here?” Light winked off a gold tooth, the eyes seemed congested with anger. There was no deference in his manner, the hour and the place and sawed-off shotgun seemed to have precluded all need of it.

“We—” Motormouth’s mind reeled far ahead, constructing in one quantum leap an entire scenario, characters, dialogue, events. In that instant of its creation it became truth to him, absolved him of all wrongdoing, all evil intentions, and he became confident of his mission.

“We was a bunch of us foxhuntin down here the other night,” he said easily. “We was runnin several dogs and one of em ain’t come up yet. You ain’t seen a strange one around here, have ye?”

“What kind of a dog was it?” The man’s face was close to Motormouth’s and Winer could smell raw whiskey on his breath. Suddenly the night seemed volatile, unpredictable, events were swirling like liquid, waiting for a pattern to coalesce.

“Big black-and-tan. Had a tore ear and a collar on it said its name was Ridgerunner.”

“I ain’t seen no such dog.”

“Well. It was right up the road there.”

“You sure it wadnt a scrawny old white hound with some yeller up and down its backbone? That’s about as strange a one as I’ve seen tonight.”

Motormouth swallowed visibly. “No. It was a black-and-tan.” He cranked the car and the black man stepped back. “You ain’t seen it I best be gettin on. I’d appreciate if ye’d keep ye eyes open for it.”

“You lookin for a fuckin dogcatcher you in the wrong neighborhood,” the black man said.

“Well. We’ll see ye.”

Winer looked back and the man was standing in the middle of the road watching them go, the gun still slung at his side.

“That uppity black son of a bitch,” Motormouth said. “A little more and I’d’ve had to get out and whup his ass.”

“How much more could there be?” Winer wondered aloud.

He spent the next three days and nights at Motormouth’s house. Monday morning Hodges drove him to Hardin’s and picked him up that afternoon after work. Monday evening they arose from the supper table to see a police cruiser halt in the yard. A deputy got out with a folded white paper in his hand.

“More Goddamned papers,” Motormouth said. “Goddamned divorce papers and peace warrants and now here comes some more. I reckon they must’ve moved her in a desk and chair in that judge’s office so she’d be handy when the notion struck her to swear out somethin. She ever gets caught up I reckon that whole courthouse bunch can just lock up and go to the house.”

They stood in the cool dusk while Garrison read Motormouth this news. It was that he had been evicted. His wife owned this house and she wanted him out of it. She wanted him out yesterday but perhaps today would serve. “Well, Goddamn,” Motormouth kept sayin in put-upon tone. The deputy read on. When he had finished he had Motormouth sign the paper and he handed him a copy and got back in the squad car. “I’ll be back in the mornin to make sure you’re gone,” he warned.

“I never doubted it for a Goddamn minute,” Motormouth told him.

The car drove away. Motormouth sat on the edge of the porch in a deep study of his options. They seemed to grow more limited day by day. “I know where there’s a good place down by the river,” he finally said.

With full dark they went with all they could stuff into or lash onto the Chrysler. Mattresses clotheslined athwart the trunk. A dining table tied atop with legs stiffly extended upward like some arcane beat rigid in death. Trophy of some surrealistic hunt. Refugees. A family of Okies displaced in time as well as location. Like a rolling trashdump they went bumping down a logroad alongside the river to where the spring floodwaters had deposited an almost intact cabin in a grove of trees. The log cabin sat canted against a giant hackberry, its floors perpetually tilted. Damp odors of other times, other folks, who knew who? Doris loves Bobby, the wallpaper said. They set up housekeeping in this crooked house. Luxuries abounded, here were bricks to bring the cots to a semblance of level. That night they could watch the stars through the roof where the shakes were missing. Music from the car radio, old songs of empty beds and thwarted dreams. When the radio was turned off there was just the placating voice of the river.

They were still there Thursday when Bellwether found them. Bellwether came down through the damp beggarlice and blackberry briars with an aggrieved look about him. He stopped by the fire where coffee boiled in a pot and began to pick Spanish nettles from his clothes. His khakis were wet almost to the waist. He hadn’t known about the road, he had come up the bank of the river and he was not happy. It was Winer himself he sought.

“You a hard feller to find.”

“I didn’t know I was lost.”

Winer was alone. Fearing more papers or something that required his presence before an oaken bench Motormouth had faded back into the brush. But Bellwether had not even inquired after him.

“Well, you may not be but your mama thinks you are. She asked me to try and find out where you was.”

“I haven’t broken any laws I know about. And if she wanted to see me I was working right up the road at Hardin’s.”

“There’s nobody accused you of breaking any laws. I told you I was just doin a favor for your mama. She said tell you to come home. She wants to see you about somethin.”

“What?”

“Best I can gather her and Leo Huggins is gettin married. He’s got promises of a job over in Arkansas and you and your mama’s supposed to go with him.”

“Who said so?”

“I just said I’d try and get word to you. What you do is your business.”

“Well. Thanks for telling me anyway.”

“You goin down there I’ll run you by. I told her I’d let her know if I saw you.”

“I’ll just have Motormouth run me down there after a while.”

But he didn’t. It was the weekend before he went and that was a day too late. There wasn’t anyone there at all.

4

Winer and the girl were standing in a corner, hidden from the house by the weatherboarded walls.

“Why would I want to do a thing like that?” she asked him. “I’d be liable to get caught.” She seemed to be teasing him, everything she said had an ironic quality as if she were reserving the right to take back anything she said.

“So what if you did? What is he to you? It looks to me like anybody could slip out of a honkytonk for a few minutes.”

“I can’t.”

“Can’t or won’t?”

“Anyway, why should I have to slip out and meet you in the woods? Why can’t you get a car like anybody else?”

“Well. I got my eye on one. I just wanted to see you.”

“Then I guess that’s your reason.” She smiled. “Have you got one for me?”

He leaned and twisted her face up to him. She didn’t resist. He could feel her hair around his fingers, the delicate bones beneath her ear. She opened her mouth beneath his. Her breath was claim and sweet. She leaned against him. “You know I want to.”

“I’ll know you want to when I see you coming,” he said. His throat and chest felt tight and constricted. He felt as if he were drowning.

“I’ll try,” she said.

He lay on a tabled shelf of limestone and watched the slow, majestic roll of the fall constellations. He realized with something akin to regret that he had no names to affix to them though he’d known them all his life. The stars looked bright and close and earlier an orange harvest moon had cradled up out of the pines so huge he felt he could reach up and touch them. By its light the Mormon Springs branch was frozen motionless and it gleamed like silver, the woods deep and still. It seemed strange to lie here and listen to the sounds of the jukebox filtered up out of the darkness, windbrought and maudlin plaints, but no less real for being maudlin. Once or twice cries of anger or exultation arose and he thought he might go see what prompted them but he did not. He just lay with his coat rolled beneath his head for a pillow and listened to all the sounds of the night, ears attuned for her footfalls.

He wondered what time it was, felt it must be past midnight. The night wore on and he did not hear the jukebox for long periods of time, nor the cries of drunks, and the occasional car he heard seemed to be leaving rather than arriving. A while longer, he thought. He was keyed up and tense as if expecting something to happen in the next few minutes that would alter his life forever.

An owl on the wing shuttled across the moon and after a while he heard it or its brother calling from out of the fabled dark of Mormon Springs. Where dwelt the ghosts of murdered Mormons and their convert wives and some of the men who had come down this hillside so long ago, the slayers slain. He wondered had the face of the country changed, perhaps they passed this upheaval of the earth. Had folks learned from history, from the shifting of the seasons?

She is not coming, he was thinking. At length he rose. It had turned colder and time seemed to be slowing, to be gearing down for the long haul to dawn. He put the jacket on and buttoned it and picked his way through the stark and silver woods. He crossed the stream at its narrowest point and ascended through ironwood and willow until he came out in the field. In the fierce moonlight the field was profoundly still and his squat shadow the only thing in motion, a stygian and perverse version of himself that ran ahead distorting and miming his movements.

He angled around the hill until he could see the house. He sat on a stone hugging himself against the chill and watched like a thief awaiting an opportunity to steal. After an hour or so a bitter core of anger rose in him and he got up to go but then a figure came out of the house and moved almost instantly into the shadows the woods threw and he could barely watch it progress toward the spring.

Winer changed course and moved as silently as he could into the thickening brush. Anticipation intense as prayer seized him. Tree to tree stealthily to the edge of the embankment and after a moment he heard a voice that appeared to be in conversation with itself. A stone rolled beneath his feet and splashed into the water and he was looking down at a soldier urinating into the stream. The soldier looked up blearyeyed toward the source of this disturbance and leapt backward fumbling with his clothing. Moonlight winked off his upturned glasses and he looked pale and frightened as if some younger variation of the grim reaper had been visited upon him or a revenant from some old violence played here long ago.

When Winer did not vanish or leap upon him the soldier steadied himself and staggered back down to the stream. He adjusted his campaign cap. “What outfit you from?” he called to Winer. Winer spat into the listing stream and made no reply save departure.

She came at midmorning and spoke to him but he was cool and distant and disinclined to conversation. “Be mad then,” she told him. She left but he hardly missed her. Winer’s head hurt from lack of sleep and his arms and legs felt heavy and sluggish and were loath to do his bidding.

He made it through the long morning and when he broke for lunch she came back. He hadn’t brought any lunch but he had a jar of coffee and he was drinking that when she stepped up onto the subflooring.

“I can’t stay but a minute and if you’re goin to fight I’ll just go back in.”

“I never sent for you.”

“You sent for me last night, whether you know it or not”

“Yeah. For what good it did.”

“I wasn’t goin to tell you this but the reason I couldn’t come was he made me set with a man.”

“Who did?”

“Hardin. Dallas.”

“He made you, did he. He hold a gun to you?”

“No.”

“I don’t guess he had to.”

“Just shut up. You don’t know anything about anything.”

“I know I sat up all night in the mouth of that holler like a fool holding the sack on a snipehunt. That’s all I know.”

“Well. I couldn’t help it.”

“Sure, you couldn’t. I bet you couldn’t help telling every soldier in there about it too. Well, you better enjoy it because it’s the last laugh you’ll get out on me.”

“Nathan, I really wanted to. I swear to God I did. His eyes were on me every minute.”

“How come he made you sit with a man? Who was it anyway?”

“I don’t know who he was. Some fat farmer. He’d just come back from sellin his cows or somethin. He was waving his money around and Dallas made me set with him till his money was all gone. I thought he never was goin to pass out.”

“How’d he make you?”

“I don’t know. He just told me I had to.”

“What would he do if you didn’t?”

“I don’t know.” She fell silent.

When she had been a little girl she had tried to think of Hardin as her father. A father was strong and Hardin looked as remorseless and implacable as an Old Testament God, there was no give to him. The man whose blood she’d sprung from was flimsy as a paperdoll father you’d cut from a catalog, a father who when the light was behind him looked curiously transparent. No light shone through Hardin and in a moment of insight she thought he had a similar core of stubbornness in Winer. Somehow you knew without showing him that there was no give to him either.

“You don’t know. How could you not know?”

She was quiet for a time. She remembered the way Hardin had been looking at her for the last year or so, as though he were deciding what to do with her.

“Do you always do what people order you to? What if I’d ordered you to meet me? What would you have done then?”

“Don’t go so fast,” she said. She gave him just a trace of a smile and shrugged. “You’re not quite Dallas Hardin,” she said.

“Have you ever wondered what he’d do?”

Whatever it took, she thought, thinking Hardin was bottomless.

“All this is easy for you to say,” she told him. “You put up your tools every night and go home. I’m already at home. There’s nowhere else for me to go. You don’t know him.”

“I believe I know him about as well as I need to.”

He’d been looking into her eyes and for just an instant something flickered there that was older than he, older than anybody, some knowledge that couldn’t be measured in years.

“You know him better,” she said.

“I know him well enough to know he’s not paying me to shoot the breeze with you. I’ve got to get to work. This has been a long day anyhow.”

“I might could get out on a Sunday. There’s nobody much around here then and Dallas don’t pay me much mind.”

“I’m once a fool,” Winer said. “Twice don’t interest me.”

“I’ll meet you anywhere you say.”

She was studying him and something in her face seemed to alter slightly even as she watched him, somehow giving him the feeling that she had divined some quality in him that he wasn’t even aware of.

He tried to think. His mind was murky and slow, it seemed to be grinding toward an ultimate halt. “All right,” he finally said. “The only place I can think of where nobody can find us is where Weiss used to live. Meet me there Sunday evening.”

Paying his debt to Motormouth, Winer had invited him to stay until he found a permanent residence but Motormouth seemed to have passed beyond the need for shelter and he stayed only three days. He found the walls too confining, the house too stationary to suit him. He was too acclimated to the motion of wheels, the random and accessible distances of the riverbank, the precarious existence that shuttled him from Hardin’s to the river, from de Vries’s cabstand to the highway. Some creature of the night halfdomesticated reverting back to wildness, staying out for longer and longer periods then just not coming back at all.

Then Winer was alone. He put up the winter’s wood and stacked the porch with it. On these first cool evenings he’d build himself a fire and sat before it. He quit worrying and wondering about the future and decided to just let it roll. By lamplight he’d read before the flickering fire and he found the silence not hard to take. He was working hard now trying to beat winter. In bed he would sometimes lie in a halfstupor of weariness before sleep came but he felt that somehow a fair exchange had been made, someone paid him money to endure this exhaustion. I am a carpenter, he thought. He was something, somebody, there was a name he could affix to himself. And there was a routine and an order to these days that endeared them to him, they were long, slow days he would remember in time to come when order and symmetry were things more dreamt than experienced. I am paying my way, he thought, carrying my own weight, and on these last fall days he found something that had always eluded him, a cold solitary peace.

Having finally gotten her alone, Winer was at some loss as to how to proceed. All the clever conversation he had thought of fled, and such shards as he remembered no longer seemed applicable. Her clean profile roiled his mind and he felt opportunity sliding away while he sat with dry mouth and sweaty palms. “How come you quit school?” he finally fell back on asking.

“I just got tired of it. Why did you?”

“I didn’t. I’m goin back next year.”

“I’m not. I wouldn’t set foot inside that schoolhouse for a thousand-dollar bill.”

Below them a car appeared on the winding roadway. She fell silent and watched its passage, studied it until it was lost from sight near Oliver’s house. She turned to Winer. “Did you know that car?”

“Not to speak to,” Winer said.

She arose, smoothed her skirt. “We’re goin to have to go in the house. If anybody sees me up here they’ll tell Dallas.”

“For somebody who can hustle a drunk out of his cattle money and never bat an eye you’re awfully concerned with appearances,” Winer said. But he instantly regretted saying it and arose and held the storm door for her and they passed into the semigloom of the living room. They stood uncertainly looking about then Winer suddenly felt uncomfortable in the abandoned house and he caught her arm and led her through the sliding glass door onto a concrete patio.

“There’s nothin to sit on here,” she complained.

“We can get a blanket or something out of the house if you want to.”

“Why don’t we just stay in there?”

“I just don’t feel right. It’s still Weiss’s house, even if it is up for sale. Besides, it seems like I can hear that old woman breathin in there.”

“That’s silly.”

“I guess so.”

They sat side by side on the edge of the concrete porch with their feet in the uncut grass. Below the long, dark line of the chickenhouses the afternoon sun hung in a sky devoid of clouds.

“This is a real nice place. I guess Mr. Weiss must’ve have been rich.”

“I doubt he was rich. I suppose they lived all right though.”

“It’s the nicest house I was ever in.”

“I got a cousin lives in Ackerman’s Field,” Winer said. “Lives in a house you wouldn’t believe. There’s velvet wallpaper on the walls and all these fancy chandeliers hanging everywhere. And both of them crazy as bessie bugs.”

She sat leaning forward with her arms crossed atop her round knees and imbued with the composed air he had become accustomed to. Studying the pristine lines of her profile he was suddenly struck with a sense of inadequacy, he could not imagine what had brought her here to meet him. She could have had her pick of all of them. Yet there was some inevitability about it, as if it all had been ordained long ago, when he was a child, when she was a child. There seemed to be nothing to say, nor any need for it. She felt it too, for when he touched her she turned toward him as if the touch were something she had been waiting for.

He drew her to him with a kind of constrained urgency until her cheek rested against his shoulder. She remained so for a moment then turned her face up toward him. Her teeth were white against her tanned face. Her eyes looked violet. She closed them when he kissed her, her left hand was a cool and scarcely perceptible weight on the base of his neck, her right hand lay against his stomach.

When he went for the blanket he got a bottle of Weiss’s homemade strawberry wine from beneath the counter and two glasses and before he remembered the power was off turned on the faucet to rinse them. He settled for wiping the dust off with a towel and canting them against the sun through the window. They looked clean. He found the blankets stacked in a bedroom closet. Passing a mirror he fetched up, startled for a moment by his reflection, he and his mirror image were face to face conspiratorially like cothiefs ransacking a house, their arms caught up with plunder. Both their thin faces looked feral and furtive, harried.

Amber Rose lay on his left arm, her dress girdled about her waist. Their eyes were closed and he could feel the red weight of the sun through his eyelids. His right hand lay on her abdomen. The flesh of her stomach was cool and soft. He slid his fingers under the elastic of her panties and downward and when she made no objection downward further until he cupped the mound between her legs, the hair there crisp and curled, laid the weight of a finger where her flesh was cleft when she opened her legs. When he kissed her her mouth tasted like the wine and when he opened his eyes she was watching him. She seemed drained of volition, her face looked vacuous and stricken in the sun. Her dress was unbottoned to the waist and her brassiere unhooked and against the brown skin of her belly her breasts looked white and fragile, flowers unused to the sun. She reached a hand down and placed it over his own, guiding him, her hips a gently increasing pressure against the heel of his hand. The she moved the hand away and he felt it at his zipper. She took his erect penis in her hand and began to masturbate him gently. Even as she did so a part of him that stood observing all this wondered at her dexterity but did not dwell on it at any length. She slid her other hand down and clasped him with both hands. Then without saying anything she released him and hooked her thumbs in the waistband of her underwear and slid it down over her hips. He watched as she raised her hips from the blanket and slid the panties off one leg, then the other. She unbuttoned his pants and pulled them down until he arose and shucked out of them, feeling clumsy and absurd standing here in the heat of the day in his shirttail with her watching and he felt that the woods were full of folks crouched laughing behind the bushes but he couldn’t have stopped if they had been. If Hardin had leapt upon him with a hawkbill knife. He pulled the t-shirt off and when he laid it aside she was reaching up towards him.

“Pull off your dress.”

“Do it for me if you want to.”

She raised her arms and he pulled the dress awkwardly over her head and started to fold it but she said, “No, let it go, it don’t matter.” He lay on her balancing his weight on his elbows. “You won’t break me,” she said. “I’m not made of glass.” He could feel her breasts pooled against his chest, the hot length of his sex where their flesh lay as it fused.

It seemed to him there ought to be something to say but if there was he didn’t know what. For a crazy moment it occurred to him to ask her if she’d rather wait until they were married for in the last quarter hour or so he’d commenced thinking in just such a fashion. But her breath on his throat forestalled him. “Go on,” she said. “I want you to.” He reached down fumbling between them but after a moment she said, “Here. Let me.” He raised enough to permit her hand and she guided him into her.

She was hot and wet and tight and entry was harder than he’d expected and he hesitated, unmoving, glancing down to see if he was hurting her, but her eyes were clenched tightly closed and her hands were tightening on his arms.

“I don’t want to hurt you.”

“It’s all right,” she said. “Go on, I want you to.”

In the slow, breathless moment of penetration he felt that he had wounded her beyond any restitution he had the power to make and he felt that he had thrown his lot with her forevermore, had in some manner inextricably tied their fate. Whether she wanted it so or not.

She made ready to go. They had stayed longer than she meant to and the sun was already burning away the timbered horizon in the west and the first bullbats were dropping plumb and sheer as if they moved in fixed isobars or were in some manner gyroscoped.

“You thought I was a whore, didn’t you?” Her voice through the fabric of her dress was muffled. She pulled the dress down and was arranging her hair, smoothing it backward with both hands.

“No. I never thought that.”

“But you thought I’d done it before.”

“I figured you had.”

“I guess I’ve heard them talk about everything two people can do to each other but I never did any of it. Mama always watched me like a hawk and Dallas, he’s even worse.” She pulled her panties on, her skirt caught up in them and she freed it. He was staring bemusedly at the hair crinkled against the cloth. “Quit looking like that,” she said. “You know I’ve got to go.” She arose. “I always used to have the idea that Dallas was goin to sell me off, you know, like to the highest bidder. A auction. Sacrificin a virgin.” She smiled ruefully. “I guess this is one time he got beat.”

After she had gone he dressed and sat on the edge of the porch with the blanket across his shoulders, for the day had grown chill. Blue dusk lay pooled about the fields. He thought to finish the wine but it had gone flat and treacly. He corked it and set it aside wondering how he had ever tasted summer in it. Without her the world seemed bland and empty. In the silence he imagined he could still hear her voice, some obsession with detail caused him to seek meanings where there were only words. He felt curiously alive, everything before this seemed gray and ambiguous, everything he’d heard garbled and indistinct.

He knew he should be going but here it still seemed to be happening, it was all around him, and some instinct of apprehension told him it might never happen again. It couldn’t be wasted. Every nuance, sensation, had to be absorbed. Dusk drew on and the horizon blurred with the failed sun and at last he arose to go, loath still to leave here for the dark house with its ringing emptiness and the gabled attic with its stacked books wherein he’d mistakenly believed all of his life was told. He went down the highway past the FOR SALE sign and climbed the locked gate and so into the road. He went on listening to the sounds of night as if he had never heard them before. He passed Oliver’s unlit house but the old man was not about and all he heard of life was the goats’ bells tinkling off in the restive dark.

In the last days of Indian summer the light had a hazy look of blue distances to it like a world peered at through smoked glass. It was windy that fall and the air was full of leaves. The wind blew out of the west and they used to take blankets below the chickenhouses where there was a line of cedars for a windbreak and lie beneath a yellow poplar there in the sun. Yellow leaves drifted, clashed gently in a muted world. Sad time of dying, change in the air, who knew what kind. There seemed little permanence to this world, what he saw of it came drifting down through baring limbs and the branches left limned against the blue void looked skeletal and brittle as bone.

Amber Rose would lie drowsing in the sun, an arm thrown across her face. He studied her body almost covertly, the symmetry of her nipples, the dark, enigmatic juncture of her thighs. Parting the kinked black hair with his fingers he leaned and kissed her there, she stirred drowsily against his face. Faint taste of salt, of distant seas. Some other taste, something elemental, primal, shorn of custom. His tongue delineated the complexities of her sex, he raised his face to study the enigma he found there. She seemed fragile and vulnerable, wounded by life at the moment of conception with the ultimate weapon, the means to be wounded again and again, cleft there with the force of a blow.

When she could she would meet him at night. He cached blankets in the hollow at Mormon Springs and wrapped in them he would lie in the lee of the limestone rocks and await her. Dry leaves shoaled in the hollow and he could hear a long way off. It would be warm in the blankets and the night imbued Winer and the girl with a desperate sense of immediacy, or urgency, they lay tired but not sated for they were learning that there were hungers that did not abate.

Laughing she slid down the length of his body and took him into her mouth. The blanket slid away and he could see her dark head at the Y of his body like some spectral succubus feasting while beyond them the trees reared and tossed in the wind and the throb of the jukebox and the cries of the stricken and the drunk came faint and dreamlike like cries from a madhouse in a haunted wood. His hand knotted in her hair and pulled her atop him he could feel her heart hammering against him through her naked breast.

“You used to drive Lipscomb crazy,” he told her once. “He used to find excuses to see up your dress.”

“I know it. I wanted you to look though.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know. I just wanted to make you hard, all right?”

“It’s all right with me,” he said.

Her face was pale and composed in the moonlight. Black curls tousled as if she slept in perpetual storm. His finger traced the delicate line of her jaw.

“Briar Rose,” he said.

“What?”

“I think I’ll call you Briar Rose. I like it better than Amber Rose and besides I like briar roses. They’re sweet and I like the way they smell. And you do look like somebody out of a fairy tale.”

“Like somebody’s wicked stepsister or something?”

“You can be a princess in mine.”

A new, soft world of the senses here she ushered him into. A world of infinite variety he had but heard rumored. On these sweet urgent nights he came to feel he was indeed living out an erotic fairytale, the dark prince who’d stolen the princess from the evil king. And like the protagonists of a fairytale they played out their games in a country of intrigues and secret corners and fierce inclement weather where nothing was what it seemed.

“You look like a man pickin cotton,” Motormouth told him. “Cept you grabbin trouble with both hands and stuffin it in a sack and never once lookin over your shoulder.”

“What you are talking about, Motormouth?”

“Listen at ye. You may not be as slick hardy as you think you are.”

Motormouth sat in Winer’s living room. He crouched on the edge of the sofa with a glass of 7-Up and bootleg whisky in his hand. The drink had the smoky, oily quality of nitroglycerin and he held it carefully as if dropping it might annihilate them both.

“I never was one for parables and hard sayings,” Winer told him. “You got anything I need to hear just say so straight out.”

“You think you’re in tight with him. But when he finds out, and he damn sure will, he will kill your ass and hide you or rig it up so it looks like he killed you in self-defense.”

“I’m still kindly left in the dark.”

“A little bird flew down and lit on my shoulder and whispered in my ear. It said, ‘You better warn little Nathan. He’s buyin trouble by the pound and he’s got about all he can go with.’”

“That little bird, did it have a name?”

“You seen one of these little old birds you seen em all.”

Winer didn’t say anything.

“Hardin wanted her hisself,” Motormouth said.

“You did too,” Winer said. “But you never got her.”

Motormouth arose and stretched. He looked about the room. There was an air of time about it, as if folks had grown old and died here. I BELIEVE IN THE POWER OF THE LIVING GOD, a glittercard above the fireplace said. “I got to get on,” Motormouth said. “Hell. I’m goin to Chicago or Detroit or somewhere. Someplace got some size about it. I’m burnt out on this damn place anyway.”

That was what he said but the only place he quit this night was Winer’s front room.

“This is nothing but trouble,” Winer told her. She lay against him beneath the blanket. “I’ve got to get a car somehow. A way of getting around so we can get away from him.”

Her hair was a soft black cloud against his cheek. She was warm in his arms, he could feel the delicate bones beneath her flesh. She was like some small beast he’d caught in the woods, held too roughly, felt jerking with hammering rabbit’s heart in his hands. He was afraid if he held on to her he’d hurt her but there was no way now he could let her go.

“This is all right,” she said against his throat. “You take everything too serious.”

“It’s better than all right but we’ve still got to get a car. If we had one we could drive into town anytime we wanted.”

She seemed to be thinking over the idea of a car. Then she said, “Or anyplace else we wanted to go.”

“It seems like I have to be with you all the time. When I’m not it’s like I’m drunk or on dope or somethin. I just drag through the day waitin for night to come. Everything else just seems dead.”

She didn’t reply. Everything seemed to be moving her closer to the line she didn’t want to get to. She guessed sooner or later everyone was going to have to know but she’d just as soon it was later. Slipping out would be easier than openly defying Dallas Hardin. Experience had taught her that defying Dallas Hardin was something best done from as great a distance as possible.

Then he went one night and the blankets were gone from the stumphole, the leaves kicked aside. He sat on the stone anyway waiting and the night crept by like something crippled almost past motion until the rind of moon set behind the blurred trees. The jukebox played on and approaching cautiously he could see the oblique yellow light falling through the trees and hear the sounds of merriment but she never came. He sat crouched in the darkness until his mind began to play tricks on him. He could hear feet kicking through the dry leaves, her soft laugh, see her face, conspirator’s finger to her lips. He grew apprehensive and felt something was watching him out of the dark with yellow goat’s eyes but if it was it never said so.

That was on a Sunday night and all the next week he wondered at her composure, at the duplicity flesh seemed capable of. Watching her move serenely across the yard he hardly knew her as the girl who lay against him in the dark, who cried out his name and clung to him as if she were drowning, being sucked downward into a maelstrom of turbulent water. Who whispered nighttime endearments the daylight always stole away from him.

When Hardin paid him off on Friday he said, “Winer, me and you got a pretty good business arrangement goin. You work to suit me and I pay to suit you. And I got other plans for us too, plans got some real money tied up in em.”

Winer didn’t ask when plans or in fact say anything. He had been waiting all week for this and he recognized Hardin’s speech as mere preamble.

“I don’t want to make you mad. But you kindly steppin on my toes here slippin around with that girl and I’m goin to have to put a stop to it. I thought you’d do me straighter than that.”

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.”

5

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.

“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.”

6

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.”

“I damn sure ain’t,” he said. “And never claimed to be.” He came up behind her until their bodies touched and took the mirror from her hand and laid it aside. He embraced her from behind, a hand cupping each breast.

“Quit,” she said, twisting away, but his arms tightened and finally she stood without moving, slack in his arms. His touch appeared to drain her of any will of her own, as if she were absorbing some slowmoving but deadly poison from his body to hers. She was quite still, like some marvelous representation of human flesh lacking any spark to animate. They stood so for a long time.

“Mama’s crazy. She’ll kill you one of these days.”

“I’m like a cat,” Hardin said. “I take a lot of killin.” He kept on massaging her breasts gently.

“I’m a grown woman, Dallas. I can pick up and leave here anytime I want to. And if I’m of a mind to go with Nathan Winer or anybody else I want to, you can’t stop me.”

“I just did,” Hardin said. “And it didn’t hurt a bit, did it?”

He turned her toward him but she twisted her face away. “Quit,” she said. “Quit it, Dallas.”

“You think I don’t know? You think I’m going to let you throw yourself away on some redneck with dirty fingernails and no idy at all what he’d got? Sure I am. The hell I am.”

He released her. He lit a cigarette and stood studying her.

“Throw you a change of clothes in a suitcase,” he told her. “Long as you’re already dressed up we might as well go somewhere.”

“Go where?”

“You’ll see when we get there.”

“You think I’m going anywhere at all with you you’re badly mistaken.”

“Get it packed or you’ll by God go without it.” Hardin turned on his heel and went through the long front room just as Pearl came through the door. She stepped aside to let him pass and then stood there watching Amber Rose and Amber Rose watching her, but neither of them spoke.

Winer smelled strongly of Old Spice and he had something on his hair that plastered it gleaming to the contours of his skull and he had on a new white shirt. One long room of the honkytonk had been sheetrocked though not yet plastered or painted. A bar was aligned against the narrow end of the room and tables and chairs were spaced about the floor. Winer passed through the doorway and into the sounds of Saturday-night merriment as though he were accustomed to it and seated himself at one of the bright new stools at the bar.

“Lord God, Winer,” Wymer said. “You smell like you broke a twenty-dollar bill in the barbershop and had to take the change out in trade.”

Winer gave him a small, tight smile and sat absentmindedly tapping a halfdollar on the bar. “Let me have a Coke, Wymer.”

Wymner set up the bottle but refused the coin. “Pearl’s givin it away tonight,” he said wryly. “Everthing’s on the house.”

“Do what?”

“Hell, yeah. She’s pissed at Hardin about somethin and she’s already give away enough beer and whiskey to give the whole county a hangover.”

“What’s she mad at Hardin about?”

“You’d have to ask them. They don’t tell me their business.” He stood unsteadily, arranged his thin hair with his fingers to cover his bald spot. His small eyes flitted drunkenly about the room as if Hardin might be crouched behind a table watching. “They got me right in the middle,” he complained. “He’s gone off God knows where and all I know for certain is he’s goin to have a shitfit when he does get back. I just may be somewheres else when it happens too…He keeps talkin bout this Mexcan feller he’s bringin up from Memphis. I guess I’m out of a job anyway.”

Winer drank Coke. “How about you go to along with her? I thought you were workin for Hardin.”

“I don’t know who in hell I work for. Right now I’m workin for that 30–06 she throwed on me a while ago.”

“I see,” Winer said though he didn’t. He arose with his bottle. “I’ll see you.”

“You better drink up while it’s free. You won’t never see this again in your lifetime.”

“I got to get on.”

He crossed onto the porch and knocked on the door, the screen rattling loosely on its hinges.

“Who’s there? Get away from that damned door.”

“It’s Nathan Winer. Can I see you a minute?”

“What do you want?”

“I just need to see you a minute.”

After a time he heard her get up heavily and he heard her mumbling to herself or another. The door opened and she stood leaning heavily against the jamb. He could smell the raw-whiskey smell of her and her sweat and the curious volatile smell of her anger.

“What is it?”

“I just wanted Amber Rose,” he said. “We were supposed to go to the show in Ackerman’s Field.”

“Well, she ain’t here, Nathan. She’s gone off to Columbia or somewheres with Dallas.”

“We were supposed to go to the show. She said she wanted to.”

“Dallas didn’t say for sure where they were goin or when they’d be back.” She drank from an upturned bottle. Lowered it and reached it toward Winer. “Get you a little drunk there.”

“I wouldn’t care for any.”

“Here.” She took the Coke bottle from him and filled it to overflowing from the bottle she held. “Come in and set awhile with me. We’ll wait on em together.”

“No, I may wait out in the car awhile. I got me a car.”

“Say you have? That’s real nice, Nathan.”

“We were going to the show in it.”

“Well, I don’t know where she is.”

“If you were guessing what time would you guess they’d be back?”

She pondered a moment. “I’d guess when I seen them comin,” she said.

Sometime in the small hours of the night he sat on Weiss’s couch drinking strawberry wine. He sat in silence with the thin crystal goblet balanced on his knee.

The silence seemed distilled, pure, silence augmenting itself. The walls were listening, the room hushed and waiting. In this silence he seemed receptive to all the world of experience, sensation multiplied by sensation rushed to him as if he were attuned to a vast stream of data bombarding him from every side. He drank from the wineglass and he could taste the musky heat of the berries, feel the weight of the sun, detect the difference between sunshine and shade smell the strawberries and their leaves and the earth, see dry fissured texture of last year’s earth, the serried grasses, the minute but vast life that flourished there. Laughter, conversations he was too weary to listen to funneled into his ears. He had heard all the words anyway, only the progressions had changed. He could hear Hodges’ voice, its halfcocky whine torn between bullying and wheedling, he could hear Amber Rose’s soft ironic voice and smell the clean soap smell of her, hear the rustle of her clothing. He could hear Weiss’s clipped and scornful cadence. The dark oppressed him. This dark house of stopped clocks and forfeit lives and seized machinery. Here in the weary telluric dark past and present intersected seamlessly and he saw how there was no true beginning or end and all things once done were done forever and went spreading outward faint and fainter and that the face of a young girl carried at once within it a bitter worn harridan and past that the satinpillowed death’s head of the grave. He rested his head on the couch arm and he could hear Weiss and his wife talking, hear all their lives flow past him like a highway he could enter and depart at will. He heard her asthmatic wheeze and the shuffle of her bedroom slippers and the click of the little dog’s claws on the tile and he got up. He drained the glass and set it by the couch. He went out into the cold night without looking back.

Cold dreary days now of winter in earnest and every day it seemed to rain. A cold, spiritless rain out of a leaden sky and he used to sit and watch out the weeping glass but there was nothing to see save brittle weeds and the coldlooking dripping woods. Water freezing on the clotheslines, a gleaming strand of suspended ice.

There seemed to be nowhere he wanted to go and no soul in all the world he wanted to talk to. He’d sit by the fire and try to read but the words skittered off the page like playful mice and he thought he’d never seen grayer or longer days.

On this gray, chill Sunday there was an air almost pastoral about Mormon Springs, an air of pause as if time must be given to ponder the events of Saturday night. Or respite to gear up for the week ahead. There was a hush here, a silence that seemed to gather about the pit. Winer kicking through the beerbottles and cigarette packs and the random debris of Saturday night seemed somehow resolute, calm, he seemed to have broached some line he’d never expected to and made a decision he was at peace with.

Sleepy Sunday windows, no one about save a drunk dozing in the backseat of a parked car. No smoke from the flue of Hovington’s house. Winer went on past it and past the bundled bricks and to the unpainted boardwalled honkytonk and went in.

A trio of silent men sat before the hushed jukebox like worshipers at some fallen or discredited shrine and they glanced up as Winer passed and approached the bar and then they looked away. They had the strangely attentive attitude of men listening to music no one else can hear.

Hardin sat on a stool at the bar. An enormous dark man sat on the next stool over and neither of them seemed aware of Winer. Winer stood awkwardly awaiting acknowledgment and he felt dazed and sleeprobbed and he could smell his own nervous sweat. Hardin was drinking some dark liquid from a glass with icecubes in it and when he drained the glass he set it atop the bar with a small liquid rattle of ice and sat staring into its depths as if he read the configurations of his future or someone else’s there and they did not please him.

“What do you want, Winer?”

“I want to talk to you a minute by yourself.”

“Anything you got to say to me can be said right here. I don’t believe you know this feller here. Winer, this is Jiminiz. I brought him up from Memphis to help with my light work. Jiminiz used to bust heads in the meanest whorehouse in Beale Street and I reckon this place is goin to seem like a vacation to him.”

Jiminiz turned a dark, moonshaped face toward Winer but made no further overture and there was no look at all in his eyes. His white shirt was open to the waist and his chest and belly were laced with a scrollwork of old scars. His smooth black hair was shiny with brilliantine. Winer noticed that the collar of the white shirt was soiled. There was an air of violence constrained about him, he was mantled with a flimsy and makeshift indolence.

“Winer used to be a pretty good feller till he got him a little pussy,” Hardin told Jiminiz. “Then he just flew all to pieces. Don’t know who his friends are anymore. Just can’t keep off that old thin ice.”

Jiminz seemed not to have head but after a time he said, “Pussy warps a man’s head worse than codeine ever did.” His voice was mellifluous and touched with a soft Spanish lilt. “I guess next to gettin caught pussy has caused me more trouble than anything else.”

“I want to see you outside,” Winer told Hardin.

“I look just the same in here,” Hardin poured Jack Daniel’s into a glass, sat turning it on the formica, studying the series of interlocking rings the bottom of the cold glass made. “All this old shit keeps buildin up,” he said. “One thing after another. Seems like ever which way I turn I got folks snappin at my heels and worryin me. Well, I ain’t never been one to put things off. I believe if somethin’s bothering you cut it out right at the start. Be done with it and get on to somethin else. Now, me and Jiminiz aims to set some folks straight. So why don’t you just ease out of here?”

“I’m goin to see her.”

“Goddamn it, Winer. Does it have to be spoonfed to you a word at a time? I’ve got money tied up here. I’ve bought her clothes and fed her and by God raised her and now you think you’ll get her off somewhere and get her to thinkin about dishes and baby buggies and such shit and it all goes out the winder. Like hell it does. Folks around her beginnin to think they can shove me this way and that and I reckon I’m goin to have to bang some more heads together. They think I’m mellerin down or somethin. But we’ll see. Now, pick up that long face and that draggy ass and get out of my place. I’m sick of it, do you hear me. You and your money ain’t no good in here.”

“I’ll tell you what, Hardin. Why don’t you put me out?”

“No, you won’t tell me what. You won’t tell me jackshit. I’ll tell you what. I don’t have to put you out. I told you Jiminiz does my light work. He’ll have you out of there so fast all you’ll remember about it is how bad it hurt.”

Winer was watching Jiminiz. The man sat cupping a tiny shotglass of bourbon in his hand. He seemed unaware that he was under discussion. But Winer wasn’t really seeing him, he was seeing the long, slow days of Indian summer, days of dreamy peace, the rafter going up in the heat of the sun, the feel of the icy fruitjar against his face. The ebony fall of her long hair against the whitewashed wall. The way his arms were thickening day by day with the raising of the heavy oak timbers and the smell of the hot green wood curing in the sun. I can do it, he was thinking. The tenseness left him, he stood loose against the bar, light and arrogant on the balls of his feet.

“Take me out, Jiminiz,” he said.

Jiminiz smiled a small, onesided smile. “I don’t work for you,” he said. “The man pays me off on a Friday gives my orders.”

Hardin stood watching Winer and something in the boy’s posture or in his face was evocative and recalled to him another who had snapped at his heels long ago. He knew by the way he was standing what was on his mind and he could see the imprint of the knife through denim and he thought in wonder. The same knife. For a millisecond the past seemed to engulf him, as if old deeds were never done and over with and there were things that must be done in perpetuity. As if he must go on forever taking this selfsame knife away from folks.

“He’ll have a knife,” he said tiredly.

“He won’t use it,” Jiminiz said offhandedly. “I’ve seen a thousand of him.”

“Then take him out,” Hardin said.

Jiminiz drained his shotglass and set it aside. “Easy money,” he said.

Winer waited. When Jiminiz approached him he swung as hard as he could at the calm, dark face. Jiminiz ducked and Winer felt his fist glance off the slick black hair and his momentum carried him sideways. Jiminiz straightened and positioned his feet and though his fist seemed to travel only six or eight inches before it struck Winer’s ribcage, Winer felt his lungs empty in a sharp explosion of pain and he went reeling backward.

The covey of drunks flushed like startled quail when Winer struck the table. It overturned and he fell in a cascade of playing cards and falling glass and the drunks erupted from toppled chairs and developed a simultaneous interest in what lay beyond the door. Winer got up on all fours slowly shaking his head from side to aside like a bear set upon by dogs. He was trying to breathe. His breath whistled eerily in his throat and the room seemed to have tilted to a forty-five-degree angle and poised there, Winer waiting for the furniture to slide sideways and pile up on the left periphery of his vision. Marvelously defying gravity and tilted as well, Jiminiz was crossing the room toward him, his fists cocked. Behind him a tilted Hardin watched as if this were all beyond his interest.

Winer got up clutching a chair and when he threw it Jiminiz just grinned and fended it away onehanded and kept on coming. Winer stiffened and hit Jiminiz in the belly with his right and crossed with his left and a slight shudder ran through Jiminiz and then he hit Winer full in the face.

Lights flickered in Winer’s head and he hit the floor limbernecked with his head slapping the hardwood flooring and they flickered again. Perhaps he dozed for a moment for when he came to himself Jiminiz was standing over him with look of infinite patience on his face. Winer was lying on his back and he rose to his elbows and lay staring out across his prone body. Nothing seemed to have changed. The chairs were still scattered and the table capsized and Hardin still sat on a stool drinking. Winer had fallen in broken glass and his arms were bleeding.

Then Hardin spoke. Winer could hear him though there was a roaring in his ears like far-off water. “Mark him up a little,” Hardin said. “Mess them smooth jaws up. Ever time he looks in a shavin mirror I want him to remember how sweet that pussy was.”

“Then let him get up,” Jiminiz said. “I don’t like hittin a man already down and I don’t like hittin a man already out on his feet and don’t know when he’s whipped.”

“He’ll get up,” Hardin said contemptuously. “You couldn’t keep him down with a fuckin logchain. He ain’t got sense to lay down and quit.”

Winer was trying. It hurt him to move and it hurt to breathe and it hurt to talk. “You better make him kill me,” he said. “Because if I live you won’t. You’re a dead man.”

“I know the words to that old song,” Hardin said. “I’ve heard it often enough.”

“You gettin up or stayin down?” Jiminiz asked.

The price he paid was dear but Winer got up. There was blood welling in his mouth and his eyes had a slick, shiny look like glass. For a few moments he managed to evade Jiminiz but the Mexican moved like a boxer, graceful despite his size, feinting, jabbing through Winer’s flimsy guard at will. Winer sat down hard with his vision darkening and the last thing he saw was the dark bulk of Jiminiz coming on and Jiminiz hit him some more but he had stopped feeling it.

The water had turned red. Winer squeezed the washrag out in it and went back to cleaning his face with the pink cloth, studying his cut in the mirror.

“Who was it done it? Hardin?” Oliver sat straddling a ladderback chair, his dead pipe clutched in his teeth.

“He subcontracted it out to some Mexican.”

“Mexcan?”

“Some bouncer or something brought up here from Memphis.”

“Big feller?”

Winer was gingerly daubing his face with alcohol. “I hope I never see one bigger,” he said. “But it wouldn’t have mattered anyway. I had some idea I was tougher than I turned out to be.”

“I seen you come by the house right slow driving like a drunk man. I knowed you wouldn’t be drunk so I figured I might ort to step up here and see would you live. Do you reckon you will?”

“I expect so.”

“You shore ain’t goin to be much in the purty department for a good long while.”

“I never was anyway.”

“Looks like you may have ye a scar or two to remember that Mexcan by. What’d he whup you with? A stick of stovewood? Or a choppin axe?”

“I think he had a ring on and he sort of twisted his fist when he hit me.”

“Boy, I just don’t know what to say. Goddamn it, there just ain’t nothin to say. You ort to go to the high sheriff. Bellwether’s a fair man, what I hear.”

“Hardin’d just swear I started it. Which I did. He gave me every out there was and I just wouldn’t take them, I had Pa’s old knife and I was going to cut one or both of them. Then he chopped me right good in the ribs and all my intentions just few away.”

“You think you’ll be all right?”

“I hurt too much to think. It must he stove in my ribs or something.”

“Let’s get in ye car and try to make it in to see Ratcliff.”

“I’ll be all right in the morning.”

“Lord God, boy. Now ain’t nothin to the way you’ll feel in the morning. I remember one time I got locked up in Nashville for a public drunk and a pair of the blueboys played around with me for a while. I went to bed feelin purty good and when I got up next day I fell right flat on my face. I hurt in places I didn’t even know I had…Say what did yins have ye falllin out about anyway?”

“We just got into it.”

“Well, whatever it was you ought to swear out a warrant and have him locked up anyway.”

“No. I got an idea or two of my own.”

He made his way through the slack Monday-morning commerce, a felthatted old man in a gray raincoat too big through the shoulders and chest carrying a shoebox tucked tightly under his arm as though he conveyed something of unreckonable value. Whatever his business was it drew him down North Main and left at the General Cafe across toward the courthouse sat on its carpet of winter brown. A flag on a flagpole set in concrete fluttered and snapped in the bitter wind.

Old courthouse sounds and smells and the way his footfalls echoed hollowly in the sepulchral silence brought back other days so strongly he fancied he felt guided hands on an elbow, steel chafing his wrists, heard other harsher footsteps that echoed his own. Days when the wildness lay on him and he bought time by the second and paid for it by the year. “I said I’d never darken these doors,” he told himself. “And I wouldn’t if it wadnt for the boy, if there was any way in God’s world around it.”

He went down the stairs to the basement level and past the library to where the high sheriff’s office was. The door was locked. There was a sign on it. BACK IN FIVE MINUTES, the sign said. There was a bench in the hall by the door and the old man seated himself there with the box in his lap and waited. He waited with the patient forbearance of the old, through some acquired knowledge that sooner or later all things come to pass. Past the concrete stairs that ascended to the level of the courthouse yard he could see a gray square of winter light and the bare branches of trees. He sat idly watching foraging birds flit from tree to tree as if he had never seen such a thing before.

It was an hour before Bellwether came and when he did he had Cooper in tow. He nodded to Oliver and unlocked the door.

“How you makin it, Mr. Oliver?”

“I’m tolerable, I reckon. You need to set your watch.”

“I expect I do. But if I did it’d be the only thing working right around here and just foul everything else up. Did you need to see me about somethin?”

“I wanted to talk to you a few minutes.”

“Come on in here and get you a seat.”

Oliver took off his hat and seated himself in a straightback chair. He cross his legs and hung his hat on a spindly knee and sat cradling the shoebox in his lap. Bellwether glanced at the shoebox a time or two but he didn’t say anything. He poured himself a cup of cold coffee from the unplugged coffeepot and drank and shuddered and sat waiting for Oliver to speak.

At length Oliver cleared his throat. “What I had to say was just for you,” he said. “Not this young feller here.”

Bellwether looked up sharply. “Well, he’s a deputy sheriff in this county. I reckon whatever you had to talk to me about had to do with law enforcement.”

“Yeah, it did,” Oliver said. “That’s why I’d just as soon this feller here didn’t know nothin about it.”

“Anything that pertains to law enforcement in this county is my business,” Cooper said. “Like he told you, I’m a deputy sheriff.”

Oliver arose, put on his hat. “I’ll be gettin on if that’s the way of it,” he said. “Yins may hear it but you won’t hear it from me.”

“Wait a minute, now,” Bellwether said. “Sit down there, Mr. Oliver.” He looked from the old man’s flinty face to Cooper’s and back again. “Is there somethin goin on here I don’t know about or what?”

Cooper shrugged. “If it is it’s news to me.”

“What about it, Mr. Oliver?”

“I’ve said my piece.”

Cooper favored Oliver with a look of perplexed innocence. “What have you got against me, Mr. Oliver? I don’t reckon I ever stepped on your toes, did I? Hell, I don’t even hardly know you.”

“Cooper, you go on over to the General and drink you a cup of coffee. Bring me one when you come back.”

“Why, hellfire. I ain’t done nothin, ain’t actin like I have. If he knows somethin on me let him say so or shut the hell up.”

“Mr. Oliver?”

“It ain’t nothin to me what he does, he don’t work for me. But the man I come to see you about totes this feller in his pocket like a handkerchief. He’s bought and paid for and I don’t like where the money come from.”

“Why, hellfire. A string of Goddamn lies.”

“I seen you drivin out to Hardin’s place last spring. I seen him hand you money and you slip it down your britches pocket and you and him had a regular get-together. The brotherly love was just drippin off yins both. After a while you left and they flew to totin out whiskey like the house was on fire. Time the rest of the laws got there that place was as bare of whiskey as a Baptist footwashin.”

“You Goddamned lyin troublemaker,” Cooper said, rising, his face fiery with rage. “Sheriff, he—”

“Go get that coffee, Cooper.”

Cooper crossed to the door. He opened it and stood for a moment as if undecided what to do. He turned back toward the room. “Damn it, Sheriff,” he said. Then he walked through the doorway and slammed the door behind him.

“If that story’s true you ought to told me long before this, Mr. Oliver.”

“It wadnt nothin to me. That yins lookout. I just come about Hardin and if I’d wanted him to know my business I’d just cut out the middleman and deal with him direct.”

Bellwether didn’t say anything. He took out a pack of Luckies, tipped one out and smelled it reflectively, sat turning it in his fingers studying it as if he’d never come across another quite like it before.

“This other thing though, I ort to have come about it.” Oliver was silent a moment and when he spoke his voice was charged with vehemence. “I knowed yins would work it around and blame it on me or I would’ve done brought it in. God knows I never wanted it on me. But I didn’t want no more time and I didn’t want that boy thinkin it was me killed his pa. I reckon I’d’ve brought it anyway if I hadn’t knowed he’d kill Hardin and throw his own life away.”

Bellwether had arisen. “Here, slow down a little,” he said. He touched the old man’s shoulder. “I can’t follow just whatever it is we’re talkin about here.”

“Course I didn’t care for him killin Hardin cept for messin his ownself up. I think a right smart of that boy.”

“Who are we talkin about here, Mr. Oliver.?”

“Hardin, Hardin,” the old man said impatiently, he seemed to think Bellwether bereft of his senses. “What do you think? Somethin’s got to be done about him. Somebody’s goin to have to waste a cartridge on him and I wish I’d done it myself a long time ago. He’s just using up air other folk could put to good use.”

“Mr. Oliver, have you somethin I can use against Dallas Hardin or is this just some kind of general complaint?”

Oliver set the shoebox on Bellwether’s desk. Bellwether crossed behind the desk and reseated himself in the chair and drew the box toward him, a hand on either end of it. He sat for a moment without opening it.

“There he is,” the old man said. “He’s yourn. I’ve done with it, I wash my hands of it. I’ll let yins worry about it for a while.”

Bellwether opened the shoebox and folded the crinkly tissue aside. He sat staring down at all there was of Nathan Winer. His face didn’t change. He folded the paper gently back over the skull and took up the cigarette he’d laid aside and lit it. He leaned back in the chair and laced his fingers across his stomach.

“Tell me a story, Mr. Oliver,” he said.

7

“I don’t mind buyin a pig in a poke,” Hardin told Cooper. “If I figure I might ever have a use for the poke. But hell, you don’t even know what sort of a poke it is you got.”

“Well. It’s more a feelin than anythin else. I know he told Bellwether somethin about you and I know it was somethin purty serious. He give Bellwether somethin he brought in a shoebox too but I don’t know what it was.”

“Say he did?”

“Yeah. And he wanted me out from there, got right feisty about it and got Bellwether down on my neck. He seen me and you together back in the spring and he seen me take money.”

“Seen it or heard about it?”

“He says he seen it.”

“Yeah. I guess he did at that. I wish I’d a killed that old son of a bitch long ago when I had the chance.”

“Well, what are we goin to do?”

“Do? Hellfire. How do I know what to do if I don’t even know what it is you’re tellin me? All I know is my path and his has wound up a little close to suit me and I believe they’re goin to cross a little later down the line.” * * *

Motormouth took a taxicab from Ackerman’s Field to Winer’s. Through the cab window he studied the cold silver fields and wondered what he’d tell Winer about Chicago. But he didn’t guess it mattered. Chicago had been different than he’d expected, fastmoving folks who were caught up in their own lives and had no time for you. All the time he was there instead of becoming a memory the thought of the wife who had quit him grew stronger. The last week in Chicago while he waited for his last paycheck he stayed in his room and drank and he forgot to eat and finally he began to hear voices. Footsteps approached his door and a fist knocked, but when he opened the door there was no one there. He was sitting on the sofa when his mother said quite clearly, “Clifford.” He did not even open his eyes. His mother was long dead and he knew it could not be her.

On the bus back he had dreamed of his wife but when he awoke he could not call the dream back any easier than he had been able to call the wife. Snowy little towns in Indiana and Missouri had rolled past and he thought he might get off at any one of them and the rest of his life would be different but he had not.

It was the middle of the night when he got there but he woke Winer anyway. He wanted to borrow the Chrysler. He said he only wanted it for a couple of hours. He told Winer that he had a good job in Chicago and that they had given him a paid vacation. Winer didn’t believe paid vacations came that easily even in Chicago but he was halfasleep and for some reason he lent Hodges the car anyway. Perhaps it was because he had never come to think of it as his own, it had always been Motormouth’s. More likely it was because of the curious aura Motormouth projected that Winer did not know what to make of it. Watching Motormouth drive away Winer at the attic window was already having second thoughts but the taillights grew faint down the Mormon Springs road and were gone.

Motormouth drove to the house where his wife and Blalock lived but there was no one home. He thought he might drive off down to Hardin’s and drink a beer while he waited but he was there three days before Hardin decided what to do with him.

These were the days when Hardin felt set upon from every side and Motormouth’s arrival did nothing to cheer him, it was just one more trial to bear, and he felt before this winter was through he would be either gone or as hard and wiry as the ironwoods that clung precariously on the cliffs above the pit.

A state prosecutor had been appointed a man to evaluate such properties of Hardin’s as had been destroyed by the Morgans and he had arrived and gone, a necktied man from Nashville wearing a blue suit and totting up figures in a notebook that he consigned to a briefcase. It didn’t look promising to Hardin. The accountant had stood with his head cocked sideways studying the garden, or lack of one, then looked all about, uncertain of the spot, and just shook his head. The man hadn’t seemed impressed with Hardin’s claim or with Hardin either for that matter. Hardin guessed the man figured Nashville was far enough out of reach or that he planned to die home in bed.

Hardin went out to the pen and watched the stallion lope toward him to nuzzle the sugar cubes he palmed from his coat pocket and something old and unnamable stirred in him, almost an intimation of destiny: he felt an intense nostalgia for himself as he had surely been, he felt that if he could magically be back on Flint Creek where he had grown up, just him and the stallion, then he could attain a measure of peace. Suddenly he felt like an old man reeling down the years of his life and all he saw worth holding on to was the horse: in his vision he saw himself and the Morgan moving like phantoms through the unalterable geography of his youth and he could smell the brittle air of childhood winters, feel the hot weight of the sun, smell the sharecropped cotton holding back the sack he dragged across the sandy red earth. His father’s voice bespoke him out of a dead time and to dispel it he drank from up uptilted halfpint then pocketed it and went back into the house to the fire.

When he went that afternoon to the honkytonk Motormouth was still there. He had been drinking steadily for all the time he’d been here and perhaps before and he seemed to have arrived at some bleak outpost of drunkenness, a strange, ravaged sobriety, and Hardin thought he’d never seen a man so close to death, his own or somebody else’s.

“You want him gone?” Jiminiz asked.

“No,” Hardin said.

“He gets on my nerves. He slept in here again last night too, at that back booth. He was here when I came in this mornin.”

“I know it.”

“Well, I guess you know what you want. You’re the man with the hairy balls.”

“Yes I am,” Hardin agreed.

With his mug of coffee he crossed to the table where Motormouth sat and seated himself across from him. He set the mugs on the formica and lit a cigarette with the gold lighter and breathed out a shifting haze of smoke and watched Motormouth through it.

“I’m goin to give you some advice,” he said after a time. “I’m goin to tell you one time and then I’ll let you be, you can drink yourself to death or put a pistol to your head or just whatever suits you.”

“Hell, I’m all right. I aim to drive off over to the old lady’s here directly and talk to her.”

“No, you don’t. You aim to set here and drink till your liver or pocketbook or my patience just gives completely out that’s what you aim to do.”

“I’m goin to quit this old drinkin soon as I figure out what to do about my wife.”

“You know what your trouble is, Hodges? You let people run over you. You don’t stand up for yourself. Hell, no wonder Blalock’s fuckin your old woman. I guess he figures it’s all right with you. You ain’t never had it out with him, have you?”

“Well, we ain’t never talked about it right out.”

“Talkin don’t settle nothin. You got to let him know where you stand. You just lettin him railroad you, you supportin her all this time and him fuckin her and layin back laughing about it. Tellin it all over the poolhall you raped her.”

“Yeah, he done that all right.”

“And you let him. Where I come from we do things a little different. What it boils down to is the edge. You let him get a foot in the door and never said a word and let him get a edge over you. You got to get one of your own. You get a edge over him and you can lead him around like a lapdog.”

Motormouth was looking more and more skeptical. “Hell, you know Blalock. How overbearin he is.”

“Nobody ain’t goin to just hand you a edge. Like everthing else in this world you got to take it. You take a feller sets hisself up like Blalock and you got to kick the stilts out from under him. You’d be surprised how humble he gets. Back home we’d take a feller like that to see Patsy.”

“You’d do what?”

“Take him to see Patsy, that’s a thing we had back where I come from. You take a feller with his hatsize growed a size or two too big and tell him Patsy wants to see him real bad. Patsy’s a gal got the hots for him, some gal he don’t know but that’s been eyein him. It ain’t no trouble to get him to believe it, I never seen a feller yet wouldn’t believe some gal has the hots for him.

“Then what we’d do is take him out to someplace don’t nobody live and tell him to go to the door and Patsy’d be there waitin on him. He’d be all primed and ready to go, he’d go struttin up to the door like a bantyrooster and we’d have a feller in there with a shotgun waitin on him. He’d jump out hollerin about folks leavin his daughter alone and cut down on him with that scattergun, course we’d have the shell doctored, all the shot out of it and nothin left but powder and cap, but the feller all set for Patsy didn’t know that. He’d get right lightfooted. I’ve seen these old rawboned sawmill hand piss theirselves and run over halfgrown saplins and whatever else got in their way. Eyes rolled back in their heads. That gun wouldn’t hurt em but I’ve seen em hurt theirselves.

“And you know what? They wasn’t ever the same after that. They’d lost their edge. They couldn’t go that extra fraction of a inch no more. Oh, they’d fly off ever now and then and act like they was going to get rough but just when they started to push they’d look at you and know you was seein em running through the bushes with their hands throwed up. They just didn’t have it no more.”

He laid on the table before Motormouth a waxed shotgun shell. It was a deep burgundy red, its end shorn cleanly with a knife. He turned it toward Hodges to show that it was empty. Nothing in it save darkness. “I got a plan for you,” he said. “You want my advice or not?”

Hodges didn’t say anything.

Hardin arose. “Come on,” he said. “I got a thing to show you in the office and I got a plan to lay out for you. I’ve had it workin in my head for a while and I want to see that you think of it.”

Motormouth got up and stood swaying unsteadily a moment, then he followed Hardin across the hardwood flooring toward the back room Hardin referred to as his office.

“Go on and I’ll be in in a minute,” Hardin said. He turned to the bar. Jiminiz was watching him with a face devoid of curiosity.

“See if you can get Blalock on the telephone,” Hardin said. “Tell him I said come get his horses.”

Jiminiz took a thin phonebook from beneath the bar and began to leaf through it, ceased, his forefinger tracing down the list of names.

“When he comes if I ain’t here you go out with Hodges and take four or five of these highbinder with you. Hodges got a trick he aims to play on Blalock.”

Jiminiz nodded, he had the phone off the hook, dialing.

“What I like about you is you never ask me why,” Hardin said. “Why is that, Jiminiz?”

“I’m afraid you’d tell me,” Jiminiz said.

Bright in the winter sun the Morgan came up from the copse of trees when Hardin approached the wire. It paused a few feet from the wire fence and watched him, halfarrogant, halfinquisitive. Its breath steamed in the cold air. “You want to ride around awhile or see us a show here directly?” he asked the horse. He lit a cigarette and returned the lighter to his pocket, feeling as he did so the empty cartridge he had palmed. He withdrew the shell and studied it a moment wondering where he had heard the story he had told Hodges or even if he had heard it at all, if it was just some tale his mind had told them both. He tossed the shell into the sere weeds and stood leaning against the gate smoking. “All right, we’ll ride then,” he said. “We’ll go in a minute. We waiting on a truck right now.”

There was less time than he expected between the cessation of the truck motor and the shot. There was a man’s voice and a shout and he was swinging into the saddle when the explosion came. When it did a tremor coursed through the horse’s withers and its steel shoes did quick little dance on the frozen ground. He kicked its ribs and they went through the gate toward the branch. They crossed the stream and went up the steep slope, the horse laboring on the unsure limestone footing, faster then through the stony sedgefield.

He did not look back until they were on the ridge and when he did he could see the tableau of men gathered about the truck in the winding chert road with the Chrysler fleeing down it in silence. He watched it out of sight. The men looked like animated miniatures, unreal, against the muted winter landscape they milled and moved without purpose about one of their number who had fallen and lay unmoving, a puppet unstrung perhaps, or one who had fled at last the exhortation of a mad puppeteer.

The bentlegged waitress watched Winer across the tall vase of celluloid flowers, across the worn tile of the Snowwhite Cafe, where he sat near the plateglass window watching the street, occasionally sipping from his coffeecup, a menu face up but unread before him. There was a curious air of indecision about her but after a time she seemed to make up her mind. She took up her cigarette from the ashtray and crossed the room.

“What on earth happened to your face? You don’t even look like yourself.”

Winer looked up at her approach then back toward here the street tended away into the darkness near the railroad tracks. “I got in a fight,” he said. “Have you seen Buttcut Chessor around?”

“No I ain’t and I ain’t likely to. He’s barred from here. He come in here the other night and started a fight and they like to tore the place apart. I had him barred.”

“Oh, he was just mad. Ollie Simmons fired him from the sawmill. He’d been cuttin logs and he got into it with the sawyer over somethin. Then he cut a beetree and it was solid at the top and the bottom, the log was, and he plugged the hole in it and carried it to the mill with the other logs. When the sawyer sawed it open they said the bees just boiled out and they like to stung him to death. They fired him.”

“I guess he’s down at the poolhall then.”

“I wouldn’t know. He beat up Ollie and two that tried to stop it and I called the law. They locked him up but I think he’s out. Why you want to waste your time on a crazy thing like him?”

“I just wondered where he was.”

“Wherever he is he ain’t worth botherin about. That other buddy of yours is long gone, ain’t he? Motormouth?”

“So they say.”

“Reckon he really killed that Blalock feller? I heard Hardin had it done.”

“I don’t know. All I know is Blalock’s dead and Motormouth’s gone in my car.”

“You look lonesome tonight.”

“I don’t reckon.”

“Say you don’t reckon? Well, are you lonesome or ain’t you?”

“I’m not lonesome,” Winer said.

“You may be later on,” she said enigmatically.

Buttcut studied Winer’s face by the harsh white glare of the poolroom. “Lord God, son,” he said. “Somebody sure took a strong dislike to your face.”

“That’s what they keep telling me. I got into it with that Mexican that started working down at Hardin’s.”

“Did he whip you?”

“Right down to the ground and then into it.”

“How big is he?”

Winer studied him. “About your size,” he said.

“Well, it ain’t no matter for you then. You ought to know better. I heard there was a killin down there.”

“I reckon. Motormouth was supposed to have shot Blalock, but I don’t know. He came by my house like a bat out of hell and I had a sinking feeling when my car went by. I got a good look at his face and he didn’t look like a man who planned on coming back.”

“He’s crazy but I didn’t think he had the nerve to kill nobody.”

Winer drank from his Coke and studied the pool game in progress. Roy Pace had found a sucker. Roy was paralyzed from the waist down and went in a wheelchair. His head was oversized and pumpkinshaped and there was a peculiar mongoloid cast to his face but he had won a small fortune off traveling salesmen who put great stock in appearances. As Winer watched he wheeled the chair smoothly to the end of the table. He shot from an awkwardlooking open bridge and the tip of his cue trembled with histrionic nervousness but he ran all the small balls then the eight and shook his huge head as if wonderstruck at such beginner’s luck. The sucker shook his head too. “Rack,” he called.

“I don’t no more believe he killed Blalock than nothing. I believe they set him up somehow.”

“I don’t know. He was crazy about his old lady and she was livin with Blalock.”

“Hey, you want to go over the General awhile?”

“I don’t think so.”

Buttcut gestured with his head toward the restroom. “I got a bottle in there. You want a little drink of who shot John?”

“I reckon not.”

“Hell, you don’t want do to nothin. You about as much fun as a Pentecostal preacher. What you are even doin in here?”

“To tell the truth I just couldn’t stay around the house any longer. The walls had started talking to me. I figured I’d leave before I started answering them back.”

They stood for a time before the Strand Theater, waiting for the show to let out, Buttcut’s car parked at the curb should there be ladies needing escorts home or elsewhere. Such ladies seemed few and far between. Overalled farmers with stoic broadshouldered wives. Stairstep children with stunnedlooking eyes still dreamy with Technicolor visions. Country boys fresh off the farm with manure on their brogans and placid, oxenlike looks on their faces.

“Goddamn it,” Buttercut said. “I never seen such a crop of hairyankled men in my life. You’d think with a war bein fought a man might stumble upon a little stray pussy just ever now and then. But hell no.”

Two or three people turned to stare at him but his size and his stance stayed them from comment. Winer grasped his arm.

“Hell, let’s go. We’ll find some women somewhere else.”

“Do you still not want to go to the General?”

“No.” Winer grinned. “We might go down to the Snowwhite.”

“I can’t go down there. They barred me. Said they’d get a peace warrant and lock me up if I went back.”

“I heard you cut a beetree.”

“That lopsided cunt had to call the law. She’s pissed cause I won’t go with her. She’s the same as sicced Ollie Simmons on me. Played up to him and he was goin to kick my ass. That’s the last time that’ll cross his mind. I had him down and he was goin, ‘Let me up, I’ve had enough.’ I said, ‘The hell you say. I’m doin this asswhippin. I’ll let you know when you’ve had enough.’”

“I guess we could go back to the poolhall.”

“We won’t find no women there. Let’s go down to Hardin’s.”

“I’m slow study but I do learn.”

They got back in the car. “I need a drink anyway,” Buttcut said. “I hide my bottle in the restroom. That way if they pick me up they won’t find no bottle on me. They can get me for a public drunk but they can’t prove possession.”

“What’s the difference?”

“About forty dollars.”

The long black Packard sat parked before the poolhall like a waiting limousine. Winer halted a moment looking at it then after a moment followed Buttcut into the glare of light. There were three of them: the girl demure in a white dress sitting at a scarred red table with a fat man in a blue gabardine suit. He was drinking whiskey from a bottle in a brown paper bag and chasing it with beer and the girl was taking delicate sips of Coke through a straw. When she saw Winer her eyes for a moment widened in shock, then she lowered them and fell into a study of her blurred reflection in the worn formica. Winer looked away and studied the fat man’s back, the shape of the wallet outlined through trousers too tight across the hips.

Jiminiz was shooting nineball with Roy Pace. He glanced once at Winer with the corners of his eyes widening, then the eyes flicked away. There was no recognition in his face. He chalked his cue and leaned to the green felt to shoot.

“Let’s get out of here.”

“Hell, no. Ain’t this a public place? That’s him, ain’t it?”

“That’s him. How’d you know?”

“Well, I didn’t expect two Mexicans that size in Ackerman’s Field. I thought you said he was big. That son of a bitch is enormous. Was you fightin over Rose there?”

“That’s what it started about.”

Buttcut studied her serene profile across the length of the bar. “I can’t say I blame you. She batted them long eyelashes a time or two at me I’d go a round myself. Who’s that Goddmamn salesman or whatever with her?”

“I don’t know.”

“I seen her a time or two in here with different fellers. Hardin was usually with her. Say, you look kindly down in the mouth, son. How about a little drink?”

“Why not. I guess I might as well.”

“I’ll go in first and get me one and leave it settin out for you. “ Buttcut was only in the restroom for a moment. He kicked the door open and it slammed against the block wall. He came out gagging and spitting and wiping his mouth on a sleeve. Nobody seemed to notice save Winer. Buttcut picked up Roy Pace’s beer and turned it up and drank and rinsed his mouth and spat. He stood studying such latenight inhabitants as the poolroom held with a black and malignant eye.

“Who’s the son of a bitch that drunk my whiskey and then pissed in the bottle?”

No one answered. Jiminiz leaned and shot gently, the cueball kissing off the three and sinking the four in the corner pocket. He chalked his cue and walked around the table to where the cueball had come to rest near the wall.

“Did you piss in my whiskey?”

Jiminiz studied him with a cold and distant contempt. “No. I didn’t,” he said.

“Leave this man alone, Chessor,” Pace said. “Let him play pool. I’m winnin me a Florida vacation.”

“You done it, Goddamn you,” Chessor told Pace. “You stillborn chickenfucker. It’s just the childish kind of meanness you’d think was funny. If I knowed for sure it was you I’d slap you even sillier than you look.”

“It wasn’t me, Buttcut, honest.” Pace was all bland innocence.

“Well, it was somebody,” Buttcut said. “And me and him is goin around and around just here in a minute?”

“You hold it down back there,” the barkeep called. “Any goin around in here and I’m goin to be on that phone to the law.”

Buttcut paused momentarily. “Somebody pissed in my whiskey,” he said sullenly.

“Well, it wasn’t me,” the barkeep said. “It’s against the law to even have whiskey in here if you didn’t but know it.”

“Tell that to the feller with the paper sack,” Buttcut said. “But I guess he got permission from Hardin.”

The fat man looked up at Buttcut briefly then quickly away. The girl seemed not have heard but Jiminiz froze in midstroke for a second. Then he completed his shot.

Buttcut ordered a beer and sat on the bench beside Winer. They sat silently watching the game progress. Buttcut sipped from the beer then gave it to Winer and ordered another. He seemed possessed by a dull, malevolent anger. Winer finished the beer and drank another, studying the fat man across the length of the room. Every time the man looked up Winer would be watching, and he glanced up often as if he could feel the weight of Winer’s eyes. Roy Pace and Jiminiz seemed almost drunk. Jiminiz was still losing. The fat man looked at his wristwatch a time or two and then he came and said something to Jiminiz but Jiminiz didn’t reply or acknowledge his voice.

Finally, Buttcut spoke. “You ain’t got a hair on your ass if you don’t go talk to her,” he said. “You got to take up for yourself. You let these sons of bitches run over you and it’ll be somebody runnin over you all your life.”

“I tried that. It didn’t work so well.”

“Hellfire. You talked to Hardin. Hardin ain’t even here. Don’t worry about his guard dog. I got him covered.”

“It’s my fight, Buttcut, not yours.”

Buttcut shrugged. “I aim to try him sooner or later anyway. You might as well get a little somethin out of it.”

Winer went with his amber bottle to her table. “Hello, Briar Rose,” he said.

“Do you know this young man?” the fat man asked. When she made no reply he turned to Winer. “All these other tables are unoccupied,” he said. “Perhaps you’d care to sit somewheres else.”

Winer drank beer. The bitter taste of hops at the back of his mouth. “No,” he said. “I like it here all right.”

The fat man had a hand on Rose’s arm. “Well, we’ll leave it to you,” he said.

“I’ve got to talk to you,” Winer told her.

She was shaking her head. “I don’t want to move,” she told the man. She looked as if she might cry.

The fat man was studyin her with calm, level eyes. “What’s goin on here?” he asked. “Is my money not good enough for you or what?”

She was watching Winer but Winer was lost in the deep waters of her eyes, struggling against the seaweed strangling him. “Go away, Nathan,” she said.

“Then you go with me.”

“I can’t. You know I can’t.”

“It’s easy. All you have to do is put one foot in front of the other.”

“I can’t.” She leaned and touched his face. Her forefinger traced the length of a cut. She was crying.

The man turned to Winer in disgust. “I’ve paid her good money,” he said. “Or paid it to Hardin. And I aim to get the benefit of it. Now, I don’t know who you are or what your status is but I suggest you get your ass out of here.”

Buttcut had come up silent as cat. He leaned across the table. “Are you havin words with this young feller here?” His breath was fiery with splo whiskey.

The man turned. “None that concern you.”

“Funny. I was settin way back on that bench over there and I thought I heard you say somethin about him gettin his ass out of here. I reckon you got the deed to this place ridin in your shirt pocket?”

The man didn’t say anything.

“Did I hear that or not?”

“I don’t see how it concerns you.”

“I’ll tell you how it concerns me. You got the look about you of somebody that would drink a man’s whiskey then piss in the bottle and put the lid back on and go off somewheres and snigger about it.”

The fat man just rolled his eyes upward toward the watermarked ceiling as if he’d fallen among fools and looked resigned.

“Ain’t you?”

“I don’t know,” the fat man finally said.

“You keep studyin on it. You keep wonderin if you and that Mexican there can do it but you better walk mighty soft around me. You try me and you’ll go up like a celluloid cat in hell.”

Winer arose. “It’s not worth fightin about,” he said. “If she wants him she can have him. We’ll go somewhere else.”

“Goddamn it, there’s not anywhere else. And nobody’s runnin me anywhere.”

“Then you all can have it,” Winer said. He turned toward Rose’s pale face. “I’m leavin. Are you goin with me or stayin with these folks?”

The girl arose, took her purse from the table. “I’m sorry,” she told the fat man.

The fat man grasped her arm. “The hell you are. I got a forty-acre farm tied up in you already.”

The man in the blue suit was sitting glaring into the girl’s face and Winer was standing over them. Without even knowing he was going to Winer hit the man in the face as hard as he could. The man grunted and a mist of blood sprayed down his shirtfront and he went over backward clawing the air. Winer turned rubbing his knuckles to see the green swinging door explode inward and Jiminiz come through it with his poolcue poised like a baseball bat and to see Buttcut fell man and cuestick with a chair. “They Lord God,” the barkeep cried. Jiminiz bounced off the dopebox and lit rolling and fetched up against the barchairs routing scrambling drinkers and then he was on his knees trying to get his fingers into his brass knuckles. He had them almost on when Buttcut kicked him in the head. The knucks rattled on the dirty tile. Buttcut kicked them away viciously and stood waiting with his fist cocked. “You hell on boys,” he said. “Let’s see how you do with a man.”

Jiminiz was laying against the bar. His mouth was shattered and bleeding. If he had any breath he didn’t waste it. He got up warily ducking outside the perimeter of Buttcut’s arms and flicked his long black hair out of his eyes with an abrupt and arrogant movement of his head. He raised his left fist for a guard and came back in. His eyes were expressionless as black glass. He came boring into Buttcut’s clumsy, flatfooted stance with his head ducked and he swatted away Buttcut’s right and knocked him into the pinball machine. Buttcut wouldn’t fall. He just shook his head in a mildly annoyed sort of way as if flies were bothering him and took a halfstep forward and hit Jiminiz in the face.

The fat man was on his hands and knees trying to get his handkerchief out. Winer was standing over him to see if he tried to help Jiminiz but this was an idea that seemed not to have occurred to him. “A doctor,” he said, looking at his bloody hands. “A doctor.”

There wasn’t any doctor. There was just the frantic barkeep on the phone and a door that looked miles away from the jukebox singing, I have no one to love me except the sailor on the deep blue sea.

When the sirens began Winer was trying to haul Buttcut off Jiminiz. Buttcut was hitting him in the face. “The law’s coming,” Winer said.

“I’ll learn you,” Buttcut said. “Now beg me to quit.” Jiminiz wouldn’t beg.

Jiminiz said, “Fuck you,” through broken teeth.

The law came through the door and didn’t waste any time. Cooper hit Buttcut alongside the head with a slapstick and a pair of highway patrolmen hauled Winer up between them and started for the door. The girl would stay with him. She swung onto his arm. A young hatchetfaced patrolman named Steele turned from Winer momentarily to disengage her, his face turned in profile to Winer was red and freckled, a sharp, intent face. The expression was that of someone immersed in his work, a surgeon perhaps, removing some unwanted growth. It was a curious electric moment. Winer would always remember, the peculiar birdlike feeling of her hand clutching his arm and Steele peeling back one talon at a time, the grip finally lessening. When he struck Steele in the jaw the other patrolman blackjacked Winer and he dropped as if his knees had turned to water.

He sat groggily on the floor. The world darkened then lightened. Intercut with still photographs of the girl’s pale face were random images like sequences in a film improperly spliced: Buttcut holding Cooper aloft by the ankles and upside down and Cooper flailing wildly with the slapstick and cursing Buttcut’s knees. Then Buttcut dropped him and kicked him in the side and stepped across his body into the waiting arms of the highway patrolmen and Winer could hear their labored breathing and after a while Steele say, “He says he’ll come peaceable if we let him ride in the front.”

“Let the big motherfucker drive for all of me,” Cooper said. “I believe he’s tore somethin aloose inside of me.”

The cold air of black night, cold frost on the chrome doortrim. The Packard waiting like a hearse. A hard hand in his back and his cheek on the icy concrete, stars spinning out faint and fainter above the flaring streetlamps. So far, so far.

Then Buttcut’s legs drawing back. Winer’s eyes watching just that, fascinated, the knees coming up in slow motion, the denim tightening over them until you thought it would split, Cooper half-turning, his mouth opening, big brogans kicking out and the windshield exploding in a slow drift of safety glass and the onrush of icy air and the steering wheel clocking as the car slewed against the curb.

8

Bellwether bore the sad tidings to Oliver and sat with his feet cocked on the hearth while the old man digested them in silence save the loud tick of a clock measuring out the moments.

“I asked him was there anybody he wanted let know,” Bellwether said. “He first said no, then he named you.”

“What’s he charged with?”

“Disorderly conduct and assault.”

“What about that Chessor boy?”

“Them two plus public drunkenness. Resistin arrest and assault with intent to commit murder. Destruction of private property, destruction of city property.”

“They Lord God.”

“There may be a few more by now. The returns are still comin in.”

“And you say he whupped that Mexcan feller?”

“I’d say so. He had to have this jaw wired together and he’s got a mouthful of busted-up teeth. He just got generally stove up.”

“What do you reckon Chessor’ll get out of it?”

“He’s good for eleven-twenty-nine anyway.”

The old man arose, turned his back to the heat from the stove. “I’ll tell you what I’m goin to do,” he said. “When his bond is set I aim to go it. I aim to stand good for it, then I’m goin to tell him to ease hisself across the stateline and be gone. What do you think of that?”

“I think you’ll be out some money.”

“In my time I’ve spent more and got less out of it.” Oliver opened the stovelid and spat into the fire. Flickering flames lacquered his brown face with orange. “You ever get anything back on that skeleton?”

“Skull,” Bellwether said. “I was comin to that. Well. It was Winer all right.”

“We knowed that. Have you told that boy yet?”

“No. I’ve got to though. It’s not somethin I’m looking forward to.”

“I wish you’d hold up a day or two. He’ll kill Dallas Hardin and turn twenty-one in Brushy Mountain state pen.”

“No, he won’t. There’s no proof Hardin even shot him. Mr. Oliver.”

“Why, shitfire. You know as well as I’m settin here that Hardin shot him.”

“Knowin ain’t provin. I can know all day long but what a jury’s goin to want to know is how I know.”

“Young Winer ain’t that picky,” Oliver said.

After Bellwether had gone Oliver went to bed but he could not sleep. He lay in the darkness staring at the unseen ceiling. Over the past few days a plan had presented itself for his consideration, little by little, like an image forming on a photographic plate. If I got to do it then this is the only time, he thought. They boy don’t know yet and he’s out of the way in jail. I won’t get this kind of shot at it again. God knows somebody’s got to do it. And it looks like it’s goin to have to be me.

William Tell Oliver went three times to the sheriff’s office before he caught Cooper there with Bellwether. He pushed the door open a little way and Bellwether was arranging papers in a drawer and Cooper was turning at the noise the door made opening with a cup of coffee in his hand. Cooper looked ill used. His face was battered and swollen and he moved with the caution of a man aware of the fragility of each internal organ.

“Lord God,” Oliver said. “What happened to you?”

Cooper just turned away, a sneer deepening further the asymmetry of his discolored face.

Oliver addressed Bellwether. “I paid that boy’s fine,” he said. “But the judge is keepin him till tomorrow mornin anyhow. They ain’t even set bond. They still studyin about it.”

“Well. That’s between you and the judge, Mr. Oliver. I don’t have anything to do with that end of it.”

“I know. That ain’t what I come about.” He leaned on the desk, his hands cupping the rim and supporting his weight. The hands looked dark and gnarled and bewenned and they looked like something carved with infinite patience from knotty walnut.

“I figured when I brought that thing in yins would scout around a little and maybe find somethin out about it. But I reckon not. Yins send it off to Nashville and let em take pictures of it or whatever and doctors look at it through microscopes And it ten year out of the ground it ort to’ve been in and no words said over it and no end in sight. Well, I wanted to stay out of it all I could but I see I can’t. If yins can’t find the straight of it then, I’ll have to tell you the rest of it.”

Bellwether’s eyes were halfclosed and he wore a patient, bemused look. He rested a jaw on a cupped palm. “All right, Mr. Oliver,” he said. “Pull you up a chair and drop the other shoe. You beens settin with it drawed back long enough.”

They sat in the squadcar. Small, cold wind out of the north, a rattle of frozen trees. All was dark save the random orange pulse of Cooper’s cigarette, then Hardin’s gold lighter flared, his broken profile twinned by the glass beyond it, then darkness again and the sudden rasp of his voice.

“What then?”

“The he said about dark both of you got into a Diamond-T truck. Said his goats was out and he was huntin em up that branch-run and kindly keepin out of sight in the brush, listening for their bells. Said he was lookin right at the truck when all at once the inside of it just lit up yeller and he heard a boom and directly you got out draggin Winer toward where that big old pit of a thing is.”

Cooper could see Hardin’s vague dark outline. When Hardin grinned he could see his teeth. “That old son of a bitch,” he said. “That sweet old son of a bitch.” There was something akin to admiration in his voice as if upon coming across his traits encoded idiosyncratically in others he could not help but feel kindly toward their possessors. “Course you know it’s all a pack of lies.”

“Course,” Cooper said automatically.

“You think that old man’s been settin on a piece of information like that for ten years? The shit he has. He’d a done had me in the pen or a pauper, one or the other. Either that or the worms would’ve finished up with him a long time ago.”

“Well, I knowed all along he was lyin.”

“Did you? Somehow I doubt it, Cooper. What you know is what you heard last. When you hear Oliver you know that and then when I talk that’s what you know.”

Cooper didn’t say anything for a moment as if he were marshalling his forces. “I know one thing,” he said. “I know Bellwether’ll be after Humphries till he issues a warrant first thing Monday mornin and he’ll be on your doorstep before the ink’s good and dry on it.”

“Say it comes to trial, Cooper. Just supposin I wasn’t able to prove I was innocent and it all boiled down to my word agin his. What do you think would happen?”

“Well.” Cooper seemed flattered that his judgment was sought, paused to give it added weight. “I’ll tell you just what I think. That old man has lived here in this county all his life and you won’t find a man he lied to. He’s been rough in his day and had his ups and downs but he’d have to have a awful good reason to come up with a tale like that.”

“He’s got it too. That Goddamn Winer boy smartin off right and left. Whoever did kill old man Winer ort to’ve got to him before he went to seed.” He fell silent, studyin the contents of his wallet. “I thought Jiminiz could teach him a lesson but I see I misplaced my trust. Next time it’ll be just me and him and one on each end of a gunbarrel and he won’t get off so light.”

“What do you want me to do?”

“Get me Dr. Sulhaney. Go down to Clifton tonight and tell him I got to see him tomorrow. Not no telephone, tell him I said come. I’ll put that old son of a bitch so far back in the crazyhouse he’ll wish he’d stuck to goats and ginseng.”

“Sulhaney won’t come cheap.”

“He never did. Doctors ain’t cheap, just deputy sheriffs. Get me that old whiteheaded lawyer Hull too. He looks like a damn senator or a preacher or somethin.”

Cooper was watching the pocketbook with the hypnotic eye of a serpent studying a bird. “Hull ain’t cheap neither,” he said. “It’ll cost you a arm and a leg.”

“I can always grow another one,” Hardin said expansively. “I’ve done it before.”

Bitter cold and timber frozen to the heart kept Simmons’ log crew from the woods and drove them to the warmth of Sam Long’s coalstove, clustered before the hearth amongst the ancient Coke-crate idlers. Beyond the redlettered LONG’s on the fogged windows the wind sang hard pellets of hominy snow along the sidewalks, harried children from their dimestore visions, Christmas enshrined out of reach beneath plateglass.

As it was wont to do, the conversation of these malingers had started with Dallas Hardin and it had remained there.

“All right, say he done it,” Sam Long said. “I don’t know if he did or he didn’t but say he did. You think he’ll get day one out of it? Why, hell no. They can’t prove he had a thing in the world to do with it.”

“Who told it?”

“Hell, everbody’s tellin it. You think you can keep a thing like that quiet? The only way’s to find it and squirrel it away the way they say the old man Oliver did. I don’t know who told it first. Teed Niten’s wife works in the registrar’s office and she said that whole courthouse bunch is talkin about it.”

“Well, you’re right about one thing,” Simmons said. “He won’t do no time. But reckon it’s Winer sure enough?”

“That’s what the government dentist record said. He was World War I. It was Winer all right. Winer with a hole in his skull the size of a number three washtub.”

“You remember when Hardin was supposed to’ve shot old man Wildman? Shot him in the road the way you would shoot a dog and claimed self-defense. Wildman’s mama, she seen it but Lord, she was old, must’ve been ninety if she was a day. Fore it was over Hardin got a doctor to swear she was crazy and had drawed it all up in her head. Hardin got her committed to Boliver and I believe she died there in 1935.”

“Yeah,” a man named Pope said. “Hardin went to Ratcliff and tried to get him to sign some papers but Ratcliff just laughed at him. Charged him five dollars for a consultation and told him to go to hell. Two or three mornins later Ratcliff went up the steps to open his office and here was a big brown poke with the top rolled down. He thought at first it was okry or stringbeans or somethin of that sort, it was summer and folks used to pay him with garden stuff or just whatever they had. Then that poke moved. Ratcliff hit it with his walkin stick and out come this big old velvettail rattlesnake. He said he like to had a stroke right there. That’s what he said but he was able to kill it with his stick and drive to Mormon Springs and throw it on Hardin’s porch. That’s what got me about it. Why didn’t Hardin kill him or burn him out? Less he just always knowed who he had his bluff in with and who he didn’t.”

“Bluff, hell,” Long said. “Ask Nathan Winer about his bluff. Senior or junior.”

“That boy’s peculiar,” Simmons said. “Acts like he’s about half-smart.”

“That boy’s all right,” Long said. “If I was Hardin I’d be dreadin him worse than anybody else. Hardin’ll have to kill him to stop him.”

Amidst the longforsaken oddments of scrapiron Oliver found a thin length of steel with two screwholes that when he hacksawed it aligned themselves with the jambs of the front door. He drove nails through the holes across the closed door and then went into the kitchen.

Figuring Hardin for a backdoor man, he set the leatherbottomed ladderback perpendicular to and about six feet inside the kitchen door. He backed off a time or two and eyed it from different angles, repositioned it slightly to his liking. He toenailed the chair to the kitchen floor with eightpenny nails and lashed the Browning shotgun to the back of the chair with pliers clipping the excess neatly and feeling to see was the gun tied securely. He looped a slipknot of staging around the trigger and down through the rungs of the chair and across the torn linoleum to the door and he stood for a time studying it. It presented a complication. The door opened inward. He thought about it then pushed the door, closed it, took up slack in his line, and reknotted the staging. This time there was a dry click when the door was halfopen. Oliver closed the door and recocked the gun and stood studying it. He packed his pipe and lit it with a kitchen match and went outside and came through the kitchen door.

He had thought so. When the hammer fell he was standing aside to come through the opening the way a man comes through a door and the blast might have torn an arm off but Oliver was not hunting arms this night. He went back and retightened the staging once more and this time the click came when the door was open only an inch or so and a man would be fully in front of it. He nodded thoughtfully to himself. It was a neat, workmanlike job.

Oliver was a man of many cautions so he toenailed each window save one to the ledge so that the kitchen door would be the only access. He had an old hammerless Smith and Wesson revolver and he checked the load and slid it down into a jumper pocket and filled a quart fruitjar with coffee. He took down a cardboard box emblazoned with faded flying ducks and took out one of the waxed red cylinders and loaded the gun and cocked it. He raised the kitchen window and set out the hammer and the nails and coffee and as an afterthought a folded blanket and with some difficulty maneuvered himself outside. He nailed the window closed and took up the coffee and blanket and went on to the barn.

Dark was falling and a cold wind out of the north arose but it was warm wrapped in the blanket and bundled down into the hay. He was hoping for a light night, for he’d have to keep watch on the door. The only visitor he expected was Hardin, for he had seen to it that Winer was still in jail, but still he wanted a good view of the back door and plenty of time to warn folks wandering toward his kitchen.

It grew darker till and the world blurred and vanished in blue murk, then a cold December moon cradled up out of the apple orchard and hung like corpse candle over a haunted wood.

It’ll have to be tonight, he thought. Tonight is all we’ve got, me and Hardin. Still, I’ll be here till two or three o’clock in the mornin.

Infrequent cars passed, then about eight or nine o’clock the traffic picked up and he lay watching the Saturday-night revelers and sipping the now cold coffee and wondering what these folks would think if they knew they were calling on a dead man. He stared at the dark rectangle of screendoor in the cold white moonlight and it held for him a peculiar fascination. It looked like the back door to hell.

The curious altered time of three o’clock in the morning. Pearl sat watching Hardin and the girl. Hardin was as near drunk as he ever seemed to get and he kept feeding the girl whiskey and Coke from his glass. She was watching with a sense of apprehension, a sense of things slipping away from her. Hardin leaned to the girl’s ear and whispered something low and then he laughed softly to himself and cupped her breast with a palm. The girl shook her head from side to side. She was tugging at Hardin’s hand. “Quit it,” she said. Hardin released her breast. He put both elbows on the scarred tabletop and studied the girl’s face with an almost clinical detachment. Her eyes looked drowsy and vague, her face had a slack sleeprobbed look.

Finally Pearl said, “That girl ain’t used to drinkin.”

“Then it’s high time she learned.”

“What else you been teachin her? To be a whore?”

“From what I hear she ort to be givin me lessons.”

“I won’t have you messin her up no worse than what you already have.”

“Say you won’t? Live half your life with your legs spread and come on to me like a preacher? Shit. What you want and what you get don’t always make a set,” Hardin said. “But it’s late and I had a hard night and more of one still to go and I don’t need you yammerin at me like a Goddamned watchdog. And you a fine one to talk about drinkin. Stumblin around like a fat sow on your sourmash.”

There was a strange anticipatory air about Hardin, a mood she had come to recognize down through the years, though she had never understood or articulated it, as if he dwelt from time to time in some world where everything was heightened, the sounds clearer, the colors brighter and richer, as if he moved briefly through a world of hallucinatory marvels. As if he were never fully alive save when he was nearing the edge.

A moment of insight touched her. “You aim to kill old man Oliver and burn him out, don’t you?” I heard some of what that law said.”

“You hear ever damn thing that ain’t nothin to you,” Hardin said. “Slippin and spyin around. I think by God you’re goin crazy, and I just may have to put you away too. You gettin a little loose at the lip to suit me. Sullin up and pouting around like your little feelins is hurt. Givin away enough whiskey to float a Goddamn motorboat. If you’d just get your ass in bed it’d suit me fine.”

He turned abruptly toward the girl, seeming by the mere motion of his head to deny Pearl’s very existence. He put his hand on the girl’s left breast.

“You wantin to kill him. You look forward to it.”

Hardin didn’t reply. His yellow eyes were halfclosed. He stroked Amber Rose’s breast, massaged it gently with a slow, circular motion of his palm. She raised her eyes to his but she didn’t resist. Hardin’s motions were slow and deliberate, like motions seen underwater. Her face looked young and very pretty and suddenly Hardin saw past the young woman’s face to the features of the child he had seen long ago throwing rocks at Thomas Hovington’s chickens and he thought for a moment on the curious circuitry of things but he did not dwell on it.

“What’s the matter with her? What did you give her?”

“I ain’t give her nothin yet but I may here in a minute if I can get your fat ass out of the room long enough.”

“You can get it further than that,” Pearl said. “I’ve stood all I can stand. It’s took me long enough but I’ve got a bait of you. I’m buyin me a bus ticket as long as my arm and I’m ridin till it’s used up and that’s where I’m gettin off. And I’m takin Rose with me.”

“The hell you are.”

“She’s my daughter and I’m takin her.”

“Daughter, hell. Sows don’t have daughters. They have pigs and them pigs grow up to be other sows.”

“I always done what you said no matter how dirty you done me. All I ever asked was you to leave Rose alone. You promised me you would.”

“Then I guess I lied,” Hardin said. He arose, stood for a moment leaning unsteadily against the table. He looked at the gold wristwatch. “But I reckon she’ll keep. I got things to do.”

He crossed the room and went through the bedroom door. When he came back he was carrying the rifle slung under his arm and he went out into the night.

About what he guessed was four o’clock in the morning Oliver saw the Packard go up the road toward town and he arose in confusion. He’d expected Hardin on foot, but there was no mistaking the Packard’s taillights. He was waiting for it to stop but it did not stop. He was still watching the fleeing taillights when the shotgun fired and he leapt and spilled cold coffee down his shirtfront but he didn’t feel it. He felt a surging of adrenaline sing in his blood and there as a metallic taste like canker in the back of his mouth. He went scrambling awkwardly down the ladder.

Oliver came up the steps to the back porch in a sort of stumbling lope. His breath was coming hard and ragged. There was an enormous hole in the screendoor. The center brace, shotriddled, hung by a shard of screen wire. He looked all about the porch, puzzled. What the hell now, he thought. Could he have made it in before the gun went off? No way in hell, he told himself. He felt a momentary stab of superstitious fear: Was the son of a bitch real, was he flesh and blood? All there was beyond the exploded screen was darkness.

Inside he struck a match on his thumbnail, unglobed the lamp, conscious of the smell of cordite, of other smells, a coarse odor of raw whiskey, an almost animal smell of perspiration, then the room filled up with yellow coaloil-smelling light. At length Oliver turned.

Hardin was hunkered against the far wall. He had the 30–30 cradled between his knees, barrel drawn up against his chest. The yellow goat’s eyes were not blank, the old man saw, still holding the lampglobe, but worse than blank, like nothing, like holes poked in a mockup face through which you could catch a glimpse of a sere and lifeless yellow landscape.

“I seen that done once before,” Hardin said. “All the same you’re a slick old bastard. But a man comes up on a house with the front door barred and the windows nailed shut it kindly give him a peculiar feelin when he sees the back door standin wide open. And a feller goes through another man’s door straight on in the middle of the night is tryin to get in good with the undertaker.”

“How’d you—”

“I poked it back with a stick and it’s a damn good thing I did. What you ort t’ve done was to’ve stretched you a string across the door about ankle high and tied it to the trigger. That way I’d ’ve pushed the door back with a stick then eased on in thinkin I had it made and you’d’ve had kindly an unpleasant surprise for me. As it is you’ve kindly shit your nest, ain’t you?”

Oliver’s mouth tasted dry. “What I ort to have done was to laid out in the brush and shot you in the back a long time ago.”

Hardin got up. “Well, you didn’t,” he said. He sounded amused, almost jovial, as if his nearness to death had made him more alive. “You didn’t and you won’t because your ass is mine now. You tried to kill me and it didn’t come off and the way I see it that’s the first lick. The next one’s mine. That the way it looks to you?”

“The first lick come a long time ago.”

“This is between me and you.”

“No. The truth is it ain’t. At one time it might’ve been but you can’t let well enough alone. You have to try to drag that boy into the same river of shit you swim in and when he won’t you hire him halfkilled. You can’t even do it yourself.”

Oliver globed the lamp and the room brightened perceptibly. He could feel the reassuring weight of the pistol dragging down his jumper pocket and he shifted his balance and turned that side slightly away from Hardin toward the window.

“I reckon you get to do the talkin,” he said. “You got all the high cards.”

“Yes I have,” Hardin agreed. “And I’m about to lay out my hand. I been slackin off, easin up, givin all you cocksuckers too much rope. I ort to’ve klled young Winer instead of tryin to teach him a lesson. But once a fool ain’t always a fool. I’ll put him where his daddy sleeps when I finish with you.”

He turned a wrist toward better light, glanced at the time. “I’m just tryin to figure if I got to do this quick or I got time to play with you a little. You been needlin me pretty steady here lately and I’d like to sort of even the score. But I see I ain’t. I reckon I’ll have to content myself with this.”

He abruptly crossed the floor in two or three strides and hit Oliver savagely alongside the neck with his fist. The old man went sideways in crazy, teetering steps, then his knees unhinged and he fell against the wall and slid down. Bitter hot bile rose in his throat and he thought for a moment he was going to vomit but he fought it down. He had fallen on the gun and his hip hurt but there was an almost exquisite pleasure to this pain.

Hardin had approached and stood spraddlelegged over him. “You all right?” he asked with mock concern.

“I’ve done somethin to my hip,” the old man said thickly. “I may have broken it.”

“Likely you have,” Hardin agreed. “A old man’s bones is brittle. I’ll fix you up with Dr. Feelgood here directly and you won’t feel a thing.”

Oliver shifted his position and rubbed his hip. He was wondering how good the light was, how drunk Hardin was, how sure he was of himself. He slid his hand into the jumper pocket. When he clasped the cold bone grip of the pistol it was like shaking hands with an old friend.

“Help me up,” he said.

“You don’t need up. You’ve wound up what string you had and this is where you was when it played out.”

“Help me up so I can lean agin the wall. I don’t want to die on my back like a snake you rocked to death.”

“All right,” Hardin said expansively. “Even if you was a snake I believe I’ve about pulled your teeth.”

He tilted the rifle against the wall and Oliver lifted his left hand toward Hardin and Hardin grasped it. Oliver fired the first shot through the denim and the concussion was enormous in the small room, showering them with splinters and flakes of flourpaste and dead spiders. Even at this range the shot was high and slammed into the loft and he withdrew the piece and fired again. Hardin’s face was slack with wonder. He’d thrown up a hand as if he might bat away the bullets with flesh and bone and two fingers disappeared in a pink mist of blood and bonemeal. He was still clasping Oliver’s hand. When he finally hit Hardin in the chest Hardin was abruptly jerked from his grip like some lost soul to floodwaters. “Oh let me,” he was saying when the fourth bullet struck him but Oliver never found out what he wanted. Hardin got up even with the dark hole charred in his face and then he fell heavily back.

The cold winter constellations spun on, even paler with the advent of dawn. It was very cold and the night seemed absolutely still. With the passing hours a gray, lusterless light began to suffuse the world. In the east a pale band of paler gray paled further still. Shapes began to accrue from out of shadow and here a star winked out and was no more. Another, the stars were folding. Far in the east and the last one burned like a point of white fire and vanished and rose slowly and washed the bare blue trees. The world gleamed in its shroud of frost. A mist crept down from the pit and hung there shifting bluely in the wan light.

After a time out of the sound of creaking leather and jangling metal an old stifflegged man appeared leading a horse. The breaths of man and horse plumed in the bitter air like smoke. A rope was knotted into the tracechains and what kept the rope tautened was a man dragged splaylegged across the frozen whorls of earth. The old man did not so much as glance at the house. Man and horse and the curious burden vanished alike in the thick brush shrouding the pit spectral and revenantial and insubstantial as something that might never have been. They were in there for some time, then only the old man and the horse came back out and went back the way they had come.

At length a yellow dog came stealthily up out of the woods and watched the house before approaching it warily. It paced the perimeter of the yard and paused and lay on its belly watching the house as if it expected someone to come out and stone it away. When no one did it arose boldly and crossed to the rear of the house and began to forage in the garbage can by the back stoop. The can tilted, fell, rattled on the frozen ground. After it fed the dog raised its head scenting the air and its hackles rose uneasily and it moved covertly toward the bordering woods and vanished into them.

9

Early Sunday morning the jailer unlocked the door to the bullpen and motioned to Winer. “The governor called,” he said. “Your pardon come through at the last minute.”

“What about me?” Chessor wanted to know.

“They just left word to let Winer out. They ain’t set your bond yet and I doubt they’s a man in the county can go it when they do.”

“Well, hellfire.”

The town locked in Sunday quietude, a city under siege. He walked on listening to his footfalls, his discolored reflection pacing him in storefront glass like a maltreated familiar. De Vries’s cabstand was the only place open and it was here that Winer heard the news.

“Where did you hear that?”

“Hell, it’s all over town. I heard it so much I don’t even remember where I first heard it.”

“And they know it’s Pa?”

“What I heard they ain’t no doubt about it and now they sayin old man Oliver seen it done and kept quiet all these years. They say Bellwhether’s gone after a warrant now. Murder one, and I hope the son of a bitch gets the electric chair.”

“Does Hardin know?”

“If he don’t he’s the only one. I seen that black Packard go through about daylight. He may be a lost ball in the high weeds.”

“Somebody’s givin me a runaround.”

“Well, it’s not me,” de Vries said. “I’ll tell you anything I can.”

“Where’s he at then?”

“Who? Bellwether?”

“Hellfire. My pa. What’d they do with him?”

“Well, it was just a skull was all. What I heard they sent it off to them scientists. I guess to see who it was and all. I reckon Bellwether and Oliver was waitin to see for sure it was him before they told you about it.”

“Sent it off,” Winer said in wonder. He turned and opened the door and went through it.

“Hey, I thought you wanted a cab,” de Vries called but Winer had already gone from sight.

Winer walked down to the Snowwhite and cornered there and went through an alley past the garbagestrewn back doors of merchants and exited by the General Cafe. He seemed unaware of where he was and such Sunday faces as he met he did not acknowledge. He crossed the street against the light and went on across the bare courthouse yard and up the wide steps to the double door. It was locked. He descended the steps and went around to the side. He peered through the darkened glass to an invisible interior. He pushed against them but these doors were locked as well. He sat on the concrete stairs to wait. A cold wind sang off the stone coping and bore scraps of dirty paper before it. He had no coat and after a time he began to shiver and he got up. The temperature was falling.

The house when he found it was guarded by two stone lions but theirs was a fallen grandeur. Their whitewashed flesh peeled away in great slashes of plaster and they watched this transgressor with a blind ferocity, their eyes impacted with grime. Winer passed between them down a worn path of faded brick leached into the earth to the wooden doorsteps. The house was a nondescript white frame needing a coat of paint. A knocker mounted in a gargoyle’s face hinted the same dubious parentage as the stone lions. He knocked and waited.

He had turned away to go when the door opened.

“Yes?”

He approached the door. He was facing a young woman a few years older than himself. She stood waiting, smoothed a wing of brown hair back from her brow. She had a plain, honest face, her eyes were a soft brown, he thought the way a fawn’s eyes must look: there was a curious quality of vulnerability about them, as if they ever sought out the thing that would hurt her.

“I was just looking for Sheriff Bellwether.”

“I’m sorry, he’s not here right now. Is there any way I could help you?”

“Do you know here he is?”

“He left for Franklin early this morning to see Judge Larkin. I’m not sure when he’ll be back.”

“Well.”

“Will you come in? Is it something important you wanted to see him about?”

“I just wanted to see him a minute.”

Something he was not aware of in his face touched her, for she stood aside and opened the door wider. “Come on in,” she said. “I was just about to have a cup of coffee. Would you care for a cup?”

“I need to be getting on,” Winer said but he stepped into the room. She brought him black, steaming coffee in a thin china cup and he drank it sitting awkwardly on the edge of the sofa. He looked about the austere room. There was a makeshift quality about it but it was very clean. A young Bellwether tinted pink watched from a gilt oval frame on the wall, an overseas cap tilted rakishly over his right eyebrow. The woman looked up from her sewing and Winer was watching her.

“Did he say what he wanted to see Franklin judge about?”

“I’m sorry, he didn’t.” She smiled. “My husband keeps his business to himself.”

He set the halfful cup aside. “Thank you for the coffee,” he said. “I’ll be getting on.”

“He’ll be back after a while. You could leave a message with me. I’ll see he gets it.”

“No,” Winer said, getting up. “I’ll leave it somewhere else.”

She looked at him strangely with her tremulous brown eyes and he knew she’d misunderstood him. “It’s just something I can’t talk about,” he said. “Thank you for the coffee.” He turned and went on out the door. She made to call to him but thought better of it.

He went down the walk to the edge of the street and paused by the blind lions. He rested a moment on a stone shoulder so cold it might have been cast from ice. Displaced beast from climes to the north, strange twilit sunless worlds.

An old grief that should have long ago been allayed by time abruptly twisted in him like a knife. A grief ten years gone, by now the debris of time should have buried it. Ten years. Ten years who knew where and all the spoken words of denunciation. A bitter redemption touched him, a sense of faith fulfilled, but there was no satisfaction in being right, he would gladly have been proven wrong could events be altered. He turned with blurred vision and went on up the street. She watched from a window. When he was out of sight the curtain fell to.

Along about midmorning a taxicab arrived at Hardin’s. It stopped in the yard, idling white puffs of exhaust into the cold air, and Jiminiz got out. He moved stiffly as if his joints did not function properly. His face was swollen and discolored. He slammed the door to and stood studying the unsmoking chimney of the house bemusedly. The driver got out as well. The driver was a wizened, ferretfaced man with quick black eyes that darted uneasily about the yard. He wore a leather changepurse on his belt and he made change for the bill Jiminiz gave him. He got back into the idling car and turned it and went back the way he had come.

Jiminiz went around back to the long beerjoint and was there only a minute or two before he came back and mounted the porch. He knocked at the front door, waited. He leaned against the doorjamb smoking and when knocking harder brought no response he turned the knob and went in.

Directly he came back out. He went across the yard again to the rear and paused by the litter of papers and cans on the earth studying the frozen ground. Something seemed to catch his eye, for he leaned forward hands on knees then straightened and went toward the pit and vanished into the bracken.

He was running awkwardly when he came out of the brush. He ran on to the hardpan of the road and slowed to a fast walk. A hundred feet or so down the road he halted and stood still and seemed to be listening to some far-off sound. He looked down the red road. He looked back toward the bleak, still house and studied the slatecolored sky. Nameless winter birds foraged the ruined garden and watched him with hard agate eyes. They took wing and flew patternlessly above him. He went back to the house and went in leaving the door ajar. He came out carrying a nickleplated pistol in his right hand and a cigarbox in his left. He paused a moment on the stoop. He pocketed the pistol and opened the cigar box. It was full of money. He began to count it, leafing hurriedly through it, then he gave it up and went back onto the road. This time he didn’t look back.

The day drew on. It had not warmed as the day progressed nor had the frost melted. The sun grew more remote and obscure. At its zenith it was no more than an orb of heatless light above the glade. A bank of pale clouds arose in the west and ascended the heavens and beyond them the sky looked dark and threatening. A wind arose. It teased such dead leaves as remained on the trees and sang eerily in the loose tin on the barn. The stallion whinnied from the barnlot and came pacing down the length of barbed-wire fence, its hooves ringing on mire frozen hard as stone. The day grew darker yet. The sun vanished. The wind carried chill on its knife edge and a few pellets of sleet rattled on the tin like birdshot. The sleet fell and lay unmelting in the stony whorls of ice, a wind from the pit blew scraps of paper like dirty snow.

When Winer came he came walking. He came the shortcut across the field and down the branch to the house. He crossed the yard without caution as if he were impervious now to anything the world could do to him. He crossed the porch and pounded on the door and waited. Knocked again. He paused and stood uncertainly. Leaned to a curtained window and shading his eyes peered in, saw only his sepia reflection in opaque glass.

He turned, a gangling figure graceless in the stiff wind. He went down the steps and echoing Jiminiz’s movements or moving in patterns preordained he went around the house and through the strewn garbage and pounded on the back door. No one came. He stood before the raw wood honkytonk with its red brick grouped in banded bundles awaiting a mason who’d never come and he tried the door but it was locked. He walked back to where the Packard was always parked and ran a hand through his wild hair like a cartoon figure miming perplexity and leaned to the frozen ground as if he might divine how long the car had been gone and its destination.

He climbed back onto the porch and tried the door. It opened. He peered into the cloistered dark but some old restraint engendered by his upbringing stayed him from trespass and he pulled the door to with a curious air of finality.

He sat on the stoop a time though he did not expect anyone to return. The sleet had not ceased and it had begun to spit snow. He sat wrapping his knees with his arms and it began to snow harder, the snow intensifying first the border of the far field and obscuring the treeline with a curtain of billowing white. He seemed ill at ease and uncertain as to where he should be and what he should be doing and at length the cold brought him off the steps and into the yard. He went off into the snow turning up his collar against the wind.

At dusk the yellow cur came up from the branch-run and prowled through the garbage without finding anything and it sniffed the air with disquiet and lay down on the earth. The earth was powdered with a thin sheath of white but it was fine, dry snow and it lay in eternally drifting windrows. As dusk drew on the square of yellow light the bedroom window threw deepened and the dog approached and stood in it as if it fostered warmth. It seemed to snow harder when the light fell. At last the dog turned with its tail curled between its legs and followed the scent back to the pit.

Winer had been gone with no luggage save the weight of his father’s knife against his leg and no destination save the memory of Amber Rose saying, “Natchez, Mississippi,” for six months when William Tell Oliver found the first jar of money.

All that spring he had watched the scavengers arriving, a seemingly unending stream of them prowling Hovington’s place, tearing up the floorboards, ripping loose the weatherboarding in splintered shards, prying out the brick beneath the flue until at last it toppled in a rain of mud and broken bricks and soot, all these greedy folk doing more work than they’d ever done before, loath to leave even at night lest another find Hardin’s fortune so that at night he could see their lanterns flitting like fireflies about the glade, flashlights in random isobars of yellow light appearing and disappearing like spirit lights in old ghost tales of his youth or warnings prophesying direr events yet to be.

Silhouetted black and motionless against the sun he watched from the ridge like some strange outrider of life, watcher rather than participant, some ungainly prophet from olden times, leaned on his stick watching with bemused arrogance the turmoil of lesser mortals and it came to him one day that old mad Lyle Hodges had been digging not in the wrong place but at the wrong time, through some peculiar quirk in time he had been digging feverishly and obsessively for fruitjars that would not even be buried for another fifty years.

Checking on a patch of twoprong ginseng growing in the shade of an enormous beech he was struck by an aberration of the land here, some subtle difference in a country he had known all his life. Stooping to where the contour of the slope was altered, he dug with the point of his handcarved stick, knelt at last to withdraw with amused contempt a halfgallon jar of Hardin’s money, heavy with coin, the greasy, wadded bills, strange summer provender laid by for harder times than these.

By the last of August he had found four others. He stored them at first in the pantry behind the old jars of canned goods, ancient cans of muscadine jelly long gone to burgundy sugar. He grew uneasy and pried up floorboards in different rooms, scooped out black loam, consigned the jars to the earth once more. He was a man of a thousand small cautions so he drove a steel stake beside each jar. “If the house burns and I don’t all I’ll have to do is kick through the ashes,” he told himself.

For it’s young Winer’s money, he thought, it is money owed him for a wrong done long ago.

He waited and the year drew on into a hot, dry summer and the empty road baked whitely in the sun. The scavengers didn’t come anymore and tales began to arise about Hovington’s place. It was told cursed, haunted, a barren patch of earth forever luckless. One night a group of boys torched the house and then the honkytonk and the old man watched the hot red glare, the parks cascading upward in the updraft from the pit. The next day he walked gingerly through the hot ashes and the scorched brush to the lip of the abyss. Felt its cool fetid breath. Now there was only the pit, timeless, enigmatic, profoundly alien.

Time passed and he began to feel that Winer wasn’t coming back. At last he began to think him dead. He knew that the world was wide in its turning and it was fraught with dark alleyways and pastoral footpaths down which peril lurked with a patience rivaling that of the very old.

I never needed nobody anyway, he told himself. Nary one of them, then or now, and at last he was touched with a cold and solitary peace.

For he had the white road baking hot in the noonday sun, the wavering blue treeline, the fierce, sudden violence of summer storms. At night the moon tracked its accustomed course and the timeless whippoorwills tolled from the dark and they might have been the selfsame whippoorwills that called to him in his youth.

That’s all that matters, he told himself with a spare and bitter comfort. Those were the things that time did not take away from you. They were the only things that lasted.

Also by William Gay in e-book from M P Publishing Twilight