Dirty Work

by Larry Brown

  “Said Jenny, people has been fighting since God made the first one and they always going to. Nothing don’t change but the reasons, man. All you can do is love the ones close to you and try to do right. That’s all God expects. God can’t be blamed for what happens to men. Ain’t God’s fault what happened to you, to your daddy, or what happened to me. Fifty-eight thousand of ours we lost. Think about it, Walter. Each one thought it wouldn’t happen to him. You know how many friends I lost? Seventeen. I mean friends. People I was tight with. Seventeen. I don’t have to tell you. I mean you get to know a man, you get to talking to him, he pulls out some pictures sometime and show you. Show you his little girl. His crib. His mama and daddy. He alive to them. They all talking about him at home, wondering when he gonna come back. Is he gonna come back. And then he be dead two or three days before they even know it. They don’t know you, but you know him, and you the one have to put him in the bag and zip it up. I done that seventeen times.

  “World don’t change for no man. World gone keep going on. Don’t make no difference what you do, what I do. World keep turning. God got a plan for everything. Man may suffer in this world. But God got a better world waiting. I been waiting to see it twenty-two years, Walter. You ain’t no man if you don’t do this for me. I tired, Walter. I tired and I want to go home. Want to see my mama. She waiting, too.

  “You think you got trouble? You don’t know what trouble is. Trouble when you laying in a rice paddy knowing both your arms and legs blowed off and are they gonna shoot the chopper down before it can come and get you. Trouble when they pick you up and you ain’t three feet long. The people in my fire team started to just let me lay there and bleed to death. Cause they knowed I’d wind up like this if I lived. Knowed I’d lay like this no telling how many years. They ever one of em has come to see me. And they each said the same thing. You know what that was?

  “We wish we’d left you, Braiden.

  “You been sent to me, Walter. You been sent and I ain’t gonna be denied.”

  It was over, finally. She pulled her clothes back together and left, and Braiden turned his face away. I was weak, and there was nothing else to say. But I knew I wouldn’t be back there. All I wanted was to be home.

  I waited for daylight a long time and it seemed like it would never come. I wanted the night behind me. I smoked a cigarette, and I made a few decisions.

  I wouldn’t lock myself away in my room anymore. I’d live with my family and try to help my mother. She was old, and she’d been hurting for a long time, and I didn’t want to cause her any more pain. I knew that this thing must have scared her badly, me being out for two days, not knowing what was going to happen to me. I’d try to decide what to do about my face and my head. There were other hospitals and other doctors, and people everywhere ready to help me. I’d take Beth over to the house, and let Mama meet her, and the three of us could talk about it. That was as far as I got.

  Diva was standing beside the bed suddenly, saying, in a low voice, “Your mama’s on the phone.”

  I turned my head and looked at her. She wouldn’t look at me. She stood with her head down, her hands holding each other in front of her. I got out of the bed, grabbed a robe, and she turned. I put the robe on and I followed her out into the hall.

  Nobody was stirring. The nurses’ station was deserted. The phone was lying on the counter. Diva sat down, but she wouldn’t look at me. She just held her hands folded in her lap. I picked up the phone.

  I said, “Mama?”

  She was crying. She knew what had happened, and I realized then that Diva knew what had happened. But since I couldn’t remember any of it, I had to picture it in my mind, in little flashes of memory before it all went black, how it would have seemed, like somebody watching a movie while she told me.

  It was drizzling light rain, rain for the first time in a long time. It was washing the fields. It was cooling the air. He could feel the tiny spots of it landing on his arm.

  He told her to pull off into Moore Creek, that nobody could see them from there. She eased the car down into the bottom of it and shut it off. She pushed off the headlights. They sat for a moment, looking at each other. Then they came together.

  He helped her take her shirt off. The rain came down on the roof. It was dark in the car; she was kissing him. They were high from the grass. He was messed up and she was messed up and somehow they had found each other like a miracle or dream. And in their combined dreams they were whole, and happy at last, and normal. The rain swelled a little, it lashed at the wheels of the car. He unsnapped her jeans. He could feel the curly hairs just below her waist and he could feel the terrible scars like ridges on leather as he drew her pants off her legs.

  I don’t want you to see me, she said.

  I ain’t looking, he said. Just feeling.

  Well. That’s all right.

  He touched her webbed skin and she touched his ruined face.

  That dog eat me up.

  I know. But I’m going to make everything okay. You’re lovely to me. That’s all that matters.

  It rained harder. For a while it rained harder than he’d ever seen it.

  You think we might ought to back the car out of here?

  We can back it out if it gets too bad. Not right now. Kiss me. I’ve been waiting a long time. All night. All my life. Have you slept with a lot of women?

  Some.

  How many?

  I don’t know. Hell. I’d have to count them up.

  How long’s it been since you’ve slept with one?

  A long time.

  Since you got hurt?

  Since I got hurt.

  That’s a long time for a man, isn’t it?

  He smiled at her.

  Too long.

  The rain murmured and whispered against the windows of the car and he thought of ponchos tented against the rainy nights and the leaves slowly dripping water down on them. He spread her open and she moaned as she took it. He buried his face in her neck. The jungle had been like this, so dark there was no form or shape to it, only the blackness that made your eyes ache. But in the blackness there had been that longing for this, this moment that he was living now. He pushed himself up into her deeper and felt her wrap her legs around him tighter, heard her breath hissing through her slightly parted teeth. Sweet lips and her hair lashed with sweat, struggling against him, like a crippled fish astounded at the shock of dry land. Oh God you’re killing me. Do you want me to stop? No. Please don’t. I can’t. I can’t say what I feel. Oh. Please. Yes. Am I hurting you? No. I just. I never thought anybody would want me. I want you. I want you for the rest of my life. The rain and the jungle and the wounded people and the crying babies and the white phosphorous blooms in the air that etched images on the wall of the retina, slow pinwheelings that smoked across the black sky. The red tracers coming every four rounds so slowly you could watch them fly, watch them shatter the brush, watch them seeking you. Jesus, she said, Jesus. I don’t mean to hurt you. It’s better now. It doesn’t hurt as bad. I can take it. Go on. This is just the first time. We’ve got plenty of other times. I can’t wait until the next time. Oh. Damn. Yes.

  The rain flowed under the tires and rose over the pattern of logs laid like ties over the low crossing and covered them, rising steadily, the water flowing toward the river. The rain fell over the elms and beeches and water oaks and they trailed it down their trunks and emptied it down their roots and trailing feeder roots, down the gutted banks and over the stones glistening softly in the dark and down the thin shoots of cane into Moore Creek. It rose up under the wheels and covered the axles, bellying up under the frame. It poured down the gravel road and channeled its own escape, washing the gravel with it, seeking lower ground. It thundered, and the lightning snapped, and the car kept rocking gently as the water flowed in over the rocker panels, pooling in the floorboards and rising toward the front seat. She hammered at his shoulder and hammered at his chest and cried out his name, but the weight of him was something dead
, something buried deep within her. The water rose onto the seat with her and her hair clung from the back of her head as she tried to keep her nose above it. She called out for God to call back the rain. It slanted down from the high tops of the trees over the car into the creek and foamed up in little shrouds like white lace softly churning and dancing in the muddy water. She pushed his head up and fought his dead weight like something caged or just released and sank back under the ponderous burden of his head and chest and legs. She fought him with everything she had. She tried to draw her legs out and tried to slide him sideways and the water rose over her cheeks, into her ears, into her nose until she strangled and lurched wildly up with it pouring over her head. She took his torn face and with every last ounce of strength she had, pushed it up and over and wedged it into the steering wheel.

  A road crew checking bridges and crossings for flash flooding found them, an amazed party slowly advancing with hip boots, their flashlights playing over the water flowing through the car, and coming to rest on the two naked people caught in there like driftwood, his head just inches above the rising water, hers just beneath. He seemed to be sleeping there, on top of her, moving gently in the current.

  Going back to the ward with her following me, I thought of images I remembered and hadn’t told him. A chopper tilting sideways with black smoke pouring out of it and slamming into a treeline and sixteen men on it all screaming for their mamas as it burst into flames. The picture of my father on the wall of my room, grinning and saluting as he received his Purple Heart. Standing in the middle of a cold and muddy river with the trigger of the M60 locked down and the belt chattering and the drops of water it sprayed up sizzling on the barrel.

  And what was he dreaming of when I stood beside his bed? The sleep of all silence, meadows of sheep, green fields of grass? Peace and serenity, or kids like we used to be catching lightning bugs flying. Cotton picking in the Mississippi Delta and the long rows of white and the slow rides back to the barn in the trailers, the wire mesh we used to cling to, the people waving as we passed. I don’t think he dreamed of that thing over there. I think he dreamed of Africa, the vast plains his people had come from, the little houses of sticks and the footprints in the dust. The cheetah streaking across the veldt, the lion blinking in the tall brown grass, the elephant, the rhino, the crocodile sliding into the river with one fan of his tail. Impala meat over the coals of a fire and that orange ball of the sun, miles wide, burning down over the horizon while a man with a spear on his shoulder walked in black silhouette across the face of it.

  I stood over him for a long moment. He opened his eyes and looked at me when I closed my hands around his throat. He said Jesus loves you. I shut my eyes because I knew better than that shit. I knew that somewhere Jesus wept.

  HOW I BECAME A WRITER

  A Late Start

  by LARRY BROWN

  From a talk given at

  the Fifth Biennial Conference

  on Southern Literature

  April 8, 1989

  Chattanooga, Tennessee

  © 1989 by Mary Annie Brown.

  I’d like to say first how honored I am to be asked to appear alongside such distinguished writers. I don’t usually give lectures, but what I’d like to do here is talk a little about how I came to be a writer, and about why I think I write the things I do.

  North Mississippi

  I’ve only been writing for about eight and a half years. I didn’t start until I was twenty-nine. I figure most people start a lot younger than that. Most people who want to make something out of their lives probably take control of them a lot earlier than that.

  I live at a little place called Yocona in North Mississippi, in Lafayette County, an area whose history and people have already been well-documented by Mr. Faulkner, a writer I hold a great respect for. Some comparisons have been made by reviewers holding my work up to his, and this is something I didn’t want that I knew was going to happen anyway. I also knew there wouldn’t be anything I could do about it. There’s already been a good bit written about the handing down of some sort of symbolic literary torch. People just naturally expect a lot out of me as a writer because I was born in Oxford. But I try not to worry much about it, and just go on and do my work.

  When I was born in 1951, my father was sharecropping on some land at Potlockney, in a small creek bottom about eight or nine miles south of where I live now. Potlockney is also south of Tula, where I ran a little country store for a couple of years. I’ve been lucky enough with my writing lately so that I don’t have to do that anymore. I am still a full-time firefighter for the City of Oxford, but I only have to work ten shift days a month, and it’s wonderful to finally have those other twenty days a month to write.

  The Heart of the Matter

  World War II had been over for about six years when I was born, and my father was a veteran of it. He had been an infantry soldier for four years, had fought at the Battle of the Bulge, had fought with his division all the way across Europe, had been at Berlin when it fell, had been wounded physically only once. It’s taken me a long time to understand this, but it left emotional scars on him that were never to heal.

  The stories he told were terrible, frightening things about the friends he had seen killed, and the cold they fought in, and the overwhelming amount of death he had seen on both sides. My mother told me once that shortly after they’d married, he woke her up in the middle of the night while he was having a horrible nightmare, thinking he was back in it again, fighting in hand-to-hand combat, with bayonets and gun stocks.

  One of the questions about human nature that interests me most is how people bear up under monstrous calamity, all the terrible things that can befall them, war, poverty, desperation. I know my father tried to deal with all those because I saw him try, again and again. I was exposed to these things early, and it instilled in me a strong belief in the resiliency of the human spirit.

  As a writer, it bothers me to be accused of brutality, of cruelty, of hardheartedness, of a lack of compassion. Only a few reviewers of my work have lodged these complaints. But more than a few seem to register a certain uneasy feeling, and I wonder if this is because I make them look a little too deeply into my characters’ lives. Maybe I make them know more than they want to about the poor, or the unfortunate, or the alcoholic. But a sensible writer writes what he or she knows best, and draws on the material that’s closest, and the lives that are observed. I try to write as close as I can to the heart of the matter. I write out of experience and imagination, toward blind faith and hope.

  * * *

  Plenty to Write About

  We left Mississippi when I was three, no doubt looking for a better existence, and simply put, my early life was a series of rented houses in Memphis. We lived in one place for a while, and then we moved to another place, and then to another place. Memphis was full of streets and houses, full of schools.

  Flannery O’Connor, who I’m happy to admit is one of my idols, said that a writer didn’t need to have much happen to him after age twenty-one. She said by that time, there was plenty to write about. And even though I’d had plenty of material for a long time, I didn’t know that I needed it or was ever going to want to use it until I was almost thirty. When I was twenty-nine, I stopped and looked at my life and wondered if I was ever going to do anything with it. I had been a firefighter for six years, and on my off days I had set out pine trees, done carpentry work, cleaned carpets, cut pulpwood, deadened timber, you name it. I’d built those chain-link fences for Sears & Roebuck, and painted houses, and I’d hauled hay. I knew what it was like to pick up eighty- and ninety-pound bales and stack them on a truck all day under the sun, and then unload it and stack the bales in some hot old barn full of red wasps. I had done all these things to support my wife and my two little boys, to make ends meet. When I was in high school I never gave a thought to more education. I did poorly in school, especially in English, and I paid so little attention to that course that I was obliged to attend su
mmer school after my senior year just to get my diploma. I loved reading, and had all my life, but I didn’t see how English was going to help me get a job after I got out of school, which was all I wanted to do.

  But standing just short of thirty I suddenly realized that if I didn’t find something else to do with my life, I was never going to amount to anything. When I had gotten married, I hadn’t looked too far into the future. I guess what I thought for most of my life was that I’d just let one day take care of the next. I’d made it that way okay for a long time, had some good times, some beautiful babies. But those babies were going to grow up. They were going to want things, and I wanted things to be better for them than they had been for me. I didn’t want mine to start out like I did, working in a factory.

  The Proposition of Writing

  The proposition of writing came on me slowly. I had been wondering how this process evolved, how these books and stories came to be written. I knew that people sat down and wrote them, but it seemed almost impossible that people could actually do something like that. I wondered what it took to be a writer, and I wondered if just anybody could do it. I wondered if it might be like learning how to build houses, or lay brick, or even fight fires, for that matter. I knew that some writers made a lot of money. I was a big fan of Stephen King, and I knew that his books sold well. The main question was, could a person teach himself how to do it by doing it? It seemed a logical question to me. I had absolutely no idea of the odds against me when I decided to try it.

  My wife had an old portable Smith-Corona electric, and I went out and bought a box of typing paper and sat down in our bedroom one night and started writing a novel. It was about a man-eating bear in Yellowstone National Park, a place I’d never been to, and it had a lot of sex in it. I thought sex sold, because of the Harold Robbins novels I’d read. I was wrong. Nobody in New York wanted it. I know because I almost wore that novel out sending it around. It took me five months to write it and I couldn’t understand why nobody wanted it. The main reason they didn’t want it, I know now, is because it was horrible. You would not believe how horrible. Just imagine. It was 327 single-spaced pages of sex and man-eating.