The Orchard Keeper (1965) (4 page)

He smoked continuously, cranking in the windshield to light a fresh cigarette from the old stub and studying in the glare of their union his shadowed muzzle in orange relief on the glass, watching the point of light fade when he exhaled and climb slowly up the dark mirror like a sun risen inexplicably by night as he turned the glass out again to let in the damp rush of air, the retired butt curving past the cowl to be swept away in a swift red arc. At Blairsville he filled up with gas and did not stop again after that. Out across the flats he could see the moon on the river curling under the black fall of the mountain, plating the riffles in chainwork,
hordes of luminous snakes racing upriver over the sounding rocks. The air came cool and damp under the windscreen.

He reached Atlanta some time after midnight but did not go into town. He pulled in at a roadhouse just short of the city limits and sat in the car for a few minutes flexing his eyelids. There were three or four other cars parked in front, dimly lustrous in the neon ambience.

He passed through a fanfall of moths under the yellow doorlight and inside. Above the heads of the dancers he could see himself hollow-eyed and sinister in the bar mirror and it occurred to him that he was ungodly tired. He skirted along the high booths lining the walls and got to the bar where he ordered and drank straight four shots of whiskey. He began to feel better. He was sitting with the fifth drink before him when sounds of breaking glass issued from the dance floor and he turned to see two men circling warily with clenched bottles. A huge figure hulked up from the end of the bar and shuffling out through the gathering spectators seized the combatants one in each hand by the belts and turkey-walked them out the door, them stepping high, unprotesting, their bottles dangling idly.

Whooee! see them turkeys trot, a man down the bar called out. The bouncer came back down the floor wearily, not smiling, faded again into the shadows. Sylder tossed off the drink, watched the blur of faces for a few minutes, not even high on the liquor, just feeling waves of fatigue roll from him. He didn’t even think he was mad any more. A few minutes later he left, wondering vaguely as he stepped into the air again why he had come here and where he thought he was going. Louisiana or anywhere else, his job had gone off the market December fifth 1933.

He walked out in the quiet darkness, across the gravel, limping just a little on the bad ground. He got to the car and opened the door.

By the phosphorous glow, more like an emanation from the man’s face than from the domelight, Sylder froze, his hand batting at the air stirred by the outflung door. The face stared at him with an expression bland and meaningless and Sylder groped for some, not cause or explanation, but mere association with rational experience by which he could comprehend a man sitting in his car as if conjured there simultaneously with the flick of light by the very act of opening the door.

The mouth stretched across the lower face in a slow cheesy rictus, a voice said: You goin t’wards Knoxville?

—A strained octave above normal, the pitch of supplication.

Sylder’s hand found the door and he expelled a long breath. What in the Goddamn hell you doin in my car, he croaked. Something loathsome about the seated figure kept him from reaching for it violently, as a man might not reach for bird-droppings on his shoulder.

The mouth, still open, said: I seen your plates, Blount County—that’s where I’m from, Maryville. I figured you might be goin thataway. I need a ride bad … ’m a sick man. The tone cloying, eyes dropped to Sylder’s belt as if addressing his stomach. It was not presentiment that warned Sylder to get shed of his guest but a profound and unshakable knowledge of the presence of evil, of being for a certainty called upon to defend at least his property from the man already installed beneath his steering wheel.

You’re sick all right, Sylder said. Scoot your ass out of there.

Thanks, old buddy, the man said, sliding across the seat to the far door without apparent use of any locomotor
appendages but like something on runners tilted downhill. There he sat.

Sylder leaned his head wearily against the roof of the car. He knew the man had not misunderstood him.

I knowed you wouldn’t turn down nobody from home, the voice said. You from Maryville? I live right near there, comin from Floridy …

Sylder lowered himself into the car, the hackles on his neck rising. He looked at the man. I would have to put you out with my hands, he said silently, and he could not touch him. He slipped the key into the switch and started the motor. He felt a terrific need to be clean.

Shore is a nice autymobile, the man was admiring.

Swinging the little coupe through the rutted drive and out onto the paving he thought: He’ll be a talker, this bastard. He’ll have plenty to say.

In immediate corroboration the man began. This sure will help me out, old buddy. You know it sure is hard to get a ride nights.

Morning, Sylder muttered under the vehement shift to second.

—specially not much traffic and what they is folks won’t hardly pick you up even …

Ah, Sylder thought, shouldn’t have thrown that shift. He could see the knee out of the corner of his eye, cocked back on the seat, the man sitting half sidewise watching him.

—My mother been real bad sick too, she …

Sylder’s hand moved in stealth from wheel to shiftlever, poised birdlike. The hand on the speedometer climbed with the hum of the motor.

—doctor’s bills is higher’n …

His left foot dropped the clutch. Now. Under his
cupped palm the gearshift shot down viciously, quivered where a moment before the man’s knee had been.

—so I shore do preciate it … The man went on, droning, his legs now crossed with an air of homey comfort, slightly rocking.

Sylder hung his elbow over the doorsill and leaned his ear to the rush of wind, the pockety rhythm of the open exhaust and the black road slishing oily under the wheels, trying to lose the voice.

No cars passed. He drove in almost a trance, the unending and inescapable voice sucking him into some kind of oblivion, some faltering of the senses preparatory to … what? He sat up a little. The man had not taken his eyes from him, and yet never looked directly at him.

You bastard, Sylder thought. It began to seem to him that he had driven clear to Atlanta for the sole purpose of picking up this man and driving him back to Maryville. His back hurt. I must be crazy, he said to himself, reaching in his pockets for cigarettes. This son of a bitch will have me crazy anyway. He jiggled one from the pack, spun it leisurely between thumb and forefinger to his lips. He had the pack in his other hand then riding the top of the steering wheel. I’ll bet I don’t make it, he wagered, don’t reach it. His right hand having delivered the cigarette to his mouth was creeping slowly for the pack to put it away. It was halfway up the steering wheel when the voice, suddenly clear, hopeful, said:

Say, wonder could I get one of them from ye … (leaning forward, already reaching) … I run out a while back and ain’t …

Sylder chuckled and straight-armed the pack at him. Sure, he said. Help yourself. He waited a few seconds,
listening to the paper rustle, the man getting the cigarette. He could feel him hesitate, the eyes turn on him. Then the package came back.

Thanks, old buddy, the man said.

Sylder waited. The man didn’t say anything more. Waiting too. Sylder produced the matches with painful deliberation. Catching up his knee to the underside of the wheel he steered that way and with studied slowness fumbled a match from the box and struck it. Shielding the flame with his hands he lit the cigarette, then dropped the dying match over his elbow into the slipstream boring past the open windwing and took the wheel once more, exhaling luxuriously and repocketing the matches. He waited.

Say, old buddy, I wonder if I could get a … why thanks, thank ye.

The match scratched and popped. Sylder meditated in the windshield the face of the man cast in orange and black above the spurt of flame like the downlidded face of some copper ikon, a mask, not ambiguous or inscrutable but merely discountenanced of meaning, expression. In the flickery second in which Sylder’s glance went to the road and back the man’s eyes raised to regard him in the glass, so that when Sylder looked back they faced each other over the cup of light like enemy chieftains across a council fire for just that instant before the man’s lips pursed, carplike, still holding the cigarette, and sucked away the flame.

They smoked, the heat of the night air moving over them heavy as syrup. In the dark glass where the road poured down their cigarettes rose and fell like distant semaphores above the soft green dawn of the dashlights.

He stopped at Gainesville for gas which he didn’t need and went into the men’s room taking the keys
with him. The man sat in the car. Inside, Sylder lit a cigarette, smoked it in long pulls and flipped the butt into the toilet. He splashed some cold water on his face and went out again, paid the sleepy-eyed attendant and got in the car. The man was sitting as he had left him. An unmistakable trace of fresh tobacco smoke hung on the wet air.

Dawn. Fields smoking where the mist shoaled, trees white as bone. The gray shrubbery hard-looking as metal in the morning wetness. Beads of water raced on the windscreen and he turned on the wipers, watched the arms descend in slow benediction, was mopping at the glass with the back of his hand when the right rear tire went out with a sudden hollow detonation and they flapped to a stop.

Later Sylder realized that the man had passed up one chance with the jack handle, had waited until he took the jack from under the car and handed it himself to the man to put in the trunk. And realized too that the man had only miscalculated by part of a second the length of time it would take him to bend and slam the hubcap back on the rim with the heel of his hand. So although he never saw it, had no warning, he had already made a half turn and started to rise when the jack crashed into his shoulder and slammed him into the side of the car. Something crashed alongside his head into the quarterpanel—he remembered that too, but couldn’t know until later that it was the base of the jack. He didn’t duck the second time either, but only slid down the door of the coupe when the man swung, sideways—he was watching him now—tearing a ragged hole in the metal. Then he was sitting on the ground, his head leaned back against the door, looking up, not yet outraged but only in wonder, at the figure above him,
his arm trailing in the dirt like a shattered wing. But when the man jerked the shaft of the jack from the punctured door he reached up, slowly, he thought, and laid his hand on the jack and still slowly closed his fingers over it. The man looked down at him, and in the gradual suffusion of light gathered and held between the gloss of the car’s enamel and the paling road dust he saw terror carved and molded on that face like a physical deformity. They were like that for some few seconds, he sitting, the man standing, holding either end of the jack as if suspended in the act of passing it one to the other. Then Sylder stood, still in that somnambulant slow motion as if time itself were running down, and watched the man turn, seeming to labor not under water but in some more viscous fluid, torturous slow, and the jack itself falling down on an angle over the dying forces of gravity, leaving Sylder’s own hand and bouncing slowly in the road while his leaden arm rose in a stiff arc and his fingers cocked like a cat’s claws unsheathing and buried themselves in the cheesy neck-flesh of the man who fled from him without apparent headway as in a nightmare.

Whether he fell forward or whether the man pulled them over he did not know. They were lying in the road, the man with his face in the dirt and Sylder on top of him, motionless for the moment as resting lovers. Something in Sylder’s shoulder traveled obliquely down to his lungs with each breath to cut off the air. He still had one hand locked in the man’s neck and now he inched himself forward and whispered into his ear:

Why don’t you say something now, bastard? Ain’t you got some more talk to spiel for us?

He was jerking at the man’s head but the man had both hands over it and seemed lost in speculation upon the pebbles of the road. Sylder let his hand relax and
wander through the folds of the neck until they arrived at the throat. The man took that for a few minutes, then suddenly twisted sideways, spat in Sylder’s face, and tried to wrench himself free. Sylder rolled with him and had him then flat backward in the road and astride him, still the one arm swinging from his broken shoulder like a piece of rope. He crept forward and placed one leg behind the man’s head, elevating it slightly, looking like some hulking nurse administering to the wounded. He pushed the head back into the crook of his leg, straightened his arm, and bore down upon the man’s neck with all his weight and strength. The boneless-looking face twitched a few times but other than that showed no change of expression, only the same rubbery look of fear, speechless and uncomprehending, which Sylder felt was not his doing either but the everyday look of the man. And the jaw kept coming down not on any detectable hinges but like a mass of offal, some obscene waste matter uncongealing and collapsing in slow folds over the web of his hand. It occurred to him then that the man was trying to bite him and this struck him as somehow so ludicrous that a snort of laughter wheezed in his nose. Finally the man’s hands came up to rest on his arm, the puffy fingers trailing over his own hand and wrist reminding him of baby possums he had seen once, blind and pink.

Sylder held him like that for a long time. Like squeezing a boil, he thought. After a while the man did try to say something but no words came, only a bubbling sound. Sylder was watching him in a sort of mesmerized fascination, noting blink of eye, loll of tongue. Then he eased his grip and the man’s eyes widened.

For Christ’s sake, he gasped. Jesus Christ, just turn me loose.

Sylder put his face to the man’s and in a low voice
said, You better call on somebody closer than that. Then he saw his shoulder, saw the man looking at it. He dug his thumb into the man’s windpipe and felt it collapse like a dried tule. The man got his hand up and began with his eyes closed to beat Sylder about the face and chest. Sylder closed his eyes too and buried his face in his shoulder to protect it. The flailings grew violent, slowed, finally stopped altogether. When Sylder opened his eyes again the man was staring at him owlishly, the little tongue tipped just past the open lips. He relaxed his hand and the fingers contracted, shriveling into a tight claw, like a killed spider. He tried to open it again but could not. He looked at the man again and time was coming back, gaining, so that all the clocks would be right.