Authors: William Gay
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.
“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.”