On Fire

by Larry Brown

“Linkage messed up,” said Junior.

  “Let’s see if we can fix it at dinner.”

  “All right.”

  They turned at the intersection and took the road that led out of town. The stores were just opening.

  “Say you was still in the bed, Junior?”

  “Yessir. I got off with Dooley and them last night. Don’t even know what time we got in. It was late.”

  “I guess y’all was drinking some whiskey.”

  “Shoot. Whiskey and beer both. I won me a little money and then got drunk and lost it.”

  Joe looked out at the coming morning. It was coming fast.

  “Shit,” he said. “We got to hurry. Y’all can’t stay with it in this heat. Gonna be ninety somethin today.”

  “You done got the ice?”

  He started to touch the brake and then he shook his head, mashing the gas harder instead.

  “Why, hell naw. We ain’t got time to go back for it now. There’s probably still some left in the cooler. Freddy may have some. We’ll get some out there if he does.”

  “Let me get one more of them cigarettes off you.”

  “Up there on the dash, son. I’m gonna have to start takin cigarettes and beer out of you boys’ pay. I went out to the truck other evening after we quit and it was one beer in the cooler. Y’all drink it up fast as I can buy it.”

  “Them old cold beers good when you get off,” said Junior.

  “Well I guess so when it’s free.”

  They rode in silence for a few miles, the dark trees whipping past on both sides and the lights beginning to come on in the houses along the road. Once in a while they had to straddle a smashed possum.

  “And say that was Noony that got shot? Was he the one that used to work for me? Little short guy?”

  “Naw. That’s his brother. Duwight. Noony the one been in all that trouble with the law. I think he spent about three years in the pen.”

  “He did? When was he down there?”

  “I don’t know. He been out I guess three or four years.”

  “I just wondered was he the one I used to know one time. What did he get put in the pen for?”

  “I think he cut somebody. He just got to where he stayed in jail all the time. He’s on probation right now.”

  “He is?”

  “He was. Motherfucker dead now.”

  Joe got the last cigarette and crumpled the pack and threw it out the window. He leaned over the steering wheel with both arms as the old truck rushed along. He could hear faint cries coming from the back and he grinned.

  “Goin too fast for them boys,” he said. “How come that boy to shoot him? What? Did he come over there fuckin with him?”

  “I imagine. Aw, I know he did. He always think he have to be fuckin with somebody. I knocked him in the head with a speaker one day.”

  “You did?”

  “I sure did. He come over at Mama’s one day, said I owed him some money. I told him he better get his ass out I didn’t owe him shit. Told him he want some money get out and work for it. What I have to do.”

  “Then you knocked him in the head.”

  “Knocked a durn hole in his head. Mama said he got shot about three o’clock. Been out there till the garbagemen found him.”

  “You don’t know what time y’all got in?”

  “Naw. It was late.”

  “He wasn’t out there when y’all got in?”

  “I don’t reckon. He mighta been.”

  Joe cracked the vent wider and flicked the ashes off his smoke.

  “Well, I’ll tell you,” he said. “Folks lookin for trouble can find more than they want.”

  Junior nodded and crossed his legs.

  “You right,” he said. “You exactly right about that.”

  They unloaded from the back end at Dogtown like a pack of hounds themselves and went into the store talking and laughing and opening the doors on the coolers, reaching for milk and Cokes and orange juice. Joe watched them milling around inside while he pumped gas into the truck. Cars were coming along the road with their lights on, carrying people headed to work in the factories who had to be on the job by seven. He had done that and he was glad he wasn’t doing it now. He shut off the pump and hung up the nozzle and looked at his watch as he went in.

  “Y’all hurry up, now,” he said. They were getting Moon Pies and crackers and sardines and cans of Vienna sausage.

  At the counter Freddy looked up at him with a sick smile as the men lined up in front of him with their lunches. Freddy charged their food and drinks and smokes to them each day and was paid off on Friday when Joe brought them by. He kept their tickets in little pads beneath the counter.

  “Hey, Joe,” he said. He stopped writing, sighed deeply and put down his pen. “You want some coffee?”

  “I can get it.” He found a Styrofoam cup and poured it full, then dumped in a whole lot of sugar and stirred it well.

  “Let’s see now,” Freddy said. He was examining Shorty carefully. “You’re Hilliard, right?”

  “Shorty,” Shorty said, and pointed to another man. “He Hilliard.”

  Freddy shook his head and looked at Shorty’s groceries.

  “Y’all gonna have to start wearin name tags. I can’t keep you straight from one day to the next.”

  “Y’all gonna have to hurry up,” Joe said. “It’s almost six-thirty. Where you got Jimmy at today?”

  “All right,” Freddy said. “That’s got you. Who’s next? You want a sack for that?”

  “Yessir. Please.”

  He pulled out a small bag and started putting the items inside.

  “Gone fishin,” he said. “I’m fixin to fire that boy.”

  “He told me you’d done fired him three times.”

  “I’m gonna fire him for good if he don’t start helpin me out some.”

  “Where did they go? Sardis?”

  “Naw. I don’t know. Off on some goddamn river somewhere. Him and Icky. They’ll probably come in drunk today and won’t have no money or no fish either, more than likely.”

  “You gonna see if he got any ice?” said Junior.

  Joe set his coffee on the counter. “Yeah. Freddy, you got any ice?”

  “I don’t know. He didn’t run yesterday but you can look in the freezer and see. There may be some left.”

  “Go see if he’s got any, Junior.” He looked at his watch again.

  “Y’all gonna have to get the lead out, now. It’s almost daylight right now.”

  “They two bags back here,” Junior called out.

  “Well, go put it in the cooler, then. Put some more water in there, too.”

  He picked up his coffee and stood sipping it until the last hand had gone out the door with his little sack. Then he set it on the counter again and waited for the storekeeper to open the till. Freddy didn’t look happy when he looked up from his money, and spoke to Joe.

  “You couldn’t wait a little while on this, could you?”

  “What’s the matter? You ain’t got it?”

  “Aw, I got it. I got it right here. My gas man’s due today, though. If I can’t buy gas I might as well not even keep the door open.”

  “When you gonna learn not to bet money you can’t afford to lose, Freddy?”

  “I never thought Duran would beat him.”

  “So you said.”

  “Would you let me give you half this week and half next week? She’s gonna notice this as it is.”

  He thought about it for a moment, about winners and losers and high rollers and those who aspired to be. Finally he said: “All right. Give it here.”

  Freddy reached in quickly and took out three hundred dollars and handed it over, shaking his head with relief.

  “I sure appreciate it, Joe. Business ain’t been good lately.”

  “Looks pretty good to me,” said Joe.

  They were trying to finish up a tract of a hundred and seventeen acres close to Toccopola that they’d been on for eight days. He’d start
ed with a crew of eleven, but he’d fired two and one had quit the second day. He stopped the truck on a bulldozed road deep in the woods, a slash of red dirt high in the green hills of timber. He sat on the tailgate with the file in his hand, while Shorty and Dooley held the blades across his leg for sharpening, a small pocket of bright filings growing in a crease in his jeans. When he had five ready, he told Junior to get the men started. Shorty had climbed into the back and wrestled the thirty-gallon drum of poison over on its side and he and Dooley were filling the plastic milk jugs with the thick brown fluid.

  Joe raised his head and looked far down the tract to the dying trees they’d injected three days before. It was as if a blight had grown across the emerald tops of the forest and was trying to catch up to where they stood.

  “Y’all won’t need no water yet,” he said. “Go on down there to where we quit yesterday and start in before it gets too hot.”

  “It ain’t gonna rain, is it?” one said hopefully.

  Joe looked up to a sky gray and overcast, with rumblings of thunder in the distance.

  “It ain’t gonna rain,” he said. “Not till dinner anyway.”

  He finished with the last blade and tried to hurry the hands as much as he could while they in turn tried to prolong the beginning of their labor by filling their guns and priming the tubes.

  “All right, let’s hit it,” he said. “Y’all done fucked around long enough. We got to finish by tomorrow if it takes all day.”

  The man who carried their water and poison took up a jug of each and followed behind them and they all went off down into the hollow to find their marks and begin. Joe got in the cab and pulled the whiskey out from under the seat and opened a hot Coke and sat there. He lit a cigarette and coughed long and slow, spacing the spasms out, clearing his throat and finally spitting something onto the ground and wiping his mouth. He took a couple of drinks and then capped the bottle. The wind was coming up a little. Faint flashes of lightning speared the earth miles away. He lay down on the seat with his cap over his eyes and his feet out the door. Before many minutes had passed he was asleep.

  Soft droplets on his face woke him. He opened his eyes and looked at the cab roof over his head. He’d knocked his cap off and water was running down the inside of the door on him. His feet were wet. The windshield was blurred by rain and he could see only bleary forms of greenery through it. It was ten minutes after nine. He put his cap on and slid out the open door, put his feet into the mud already forming. The new ground was soft and he was under a hill, so he got in and cranked the truck and backed sliding and fishtailing through the red muck until he could wheel it onto a turnaround and point it out. He left it there and went down into the woods to see if he could find the hands.

  It was a fine rain, a fragile mist that paled everything in the distance to a thin gray obscurity. The green woods, the dead red hills. He had to watch his balance going down into the hollow, catching at saplings on the steepest parts and easing himself down like an older man, the thousands of days of cigarettes wheezing in his chest.

  At the bottom of the hill there was a small creek with tiny young cane and rocks and dewberries that he jumped in stride, landing heavily on the wet leaves and looking and finding the pink plastic ribbon tied to the tree. He walked around and found the fresh cuts on the live timber and stood looking at them for a minute. They’d never get the tract finished by the next day if the rain drove them out now. He knew they’d want to quit, even though the rain wasn’t going to hurt them. He watched the sky, leaden and heavy with clouds. It wasn’t going to clear off. It looked ready to set in for the day. He got in under a big tree and lit a cigarette and squatted, smoking, the smoke hanging in a small drifting cloud in front of him. It seemed as if the air itself had thickened.

  He picked up a little stick and idly began breaking it into pieces, looking out at the woods from under the bill of his cap. At once the rain came harder and he made up his mind. He got up and went back toward the hill, across the creek again, bending to get through the underbrush, getting his cap snatched off once by a brier and picking it up and brushing the dirt from it before carefully setting it back on his head.

  He leaned on the horn for two minutes, until he was sure they’d heard it. He gave them ten more minutes and then blew it again to let them get their direction and cut off the distance by coming straight to him. It took them almost twenty minutes to get back. They arrived in a herd, laughing, wet, their clothes sticking to them, large red overshoes of mud encasing their feet. They stomped and kicked their shoes against the tires and the bumper, scraped them with sticks.

  “Let’s get in and go before it gets any worse,” he said. “This road’s slick as owl shit now.”

  They loaded up and settled in the back. They were happy and laughing, able to get by on two hours’ pay. He heard somebody yelling just as he cranked the motor, and Shorty came around in a hurry, stepping high and wild in the mud, grinning.

  “Let us get our stuff,” he said.

  The sacks were piled up on the seat and he handed them out the window. Shorty went back with them stacked up in his arms. The rain was coming harder now and the wipers beat against the streaming water as he eased out on the clutch and felt the tires trying to spin in the clay. The red ground was bleeding, little torrents of muddy water already eating into the hillsides and funneling down the road. Missiles of mud bombarded the fenderwells with hollow detonations. He had to keep it in low and not risk missing second all the way up the hill. The truck slid and almost bogged down and tried to swap ends, but he kept cutting the wheel and finally they crested over the top and trundled away peacefully toward the highway, another day gone and wasted.

  When he could steer with one hand, he reached and got the bottle from beneath the seat and set it between his legs. He twisted off the cap and searched on the seat for a Coke. It started raining harder.

  He had them all home by ten-thirty and he was back at the house by noon. The dog met him, stood looking at him from behind the steps, his broad white head lumpy with masses of scar tissue and the yellow eyes peaceful and strangely human in their expression of wistfulness. He spoke to the dog and went on in with his two sacks. The house felt empty now, always. Loud and hollow. He looked at the mud he was tracking over the carpet and sat down on the floor beside the door, unlacing his boots and standing them together beside the refrigerator. There was a pack of hot dogs and a bag of buns and a dozen eggs and two six-packs of Bud in one sack and he put it all in the icebox. He poured some Coke in a glass and dropped in three ice cubes and filled the rest of it with whiskey, then sat down at the table with a pencil and some paper to do his figuring. Days and time and hours where he saw his profit coming through. Even with the bad weather he was making over two hundred dollars a day. He figured up what he would owe the hands if they didn’t work the next day and drew it all up into individual columns and figured their Social Security and subtracted it and wrote down all their names and the amounts he owed them and then he was through.

  There was a little watery stuff left in the glass, and he rattled the thin cubes around and drank it off. The rain was coming down hard on the roof and he thought about the dog in the mud, trying to find a dry spot in this sudden world of water. He got up and opened the back door and looked at the shed. The dog raised his head from his forepaws and regarded him solemnly from his bed of rotten quilts. Then he settled, whining slightly, watching the dripping trees and flattened grass with his eyes blinking once or twice before they closed.

  He closed the door and thought about making another drink, but then he went into the living room and turned on the television and sat on the couch. Somebody was giving the farm report. He got up and changed channels. News and weather. The soap operas hadn’t come on yet. There was a pale pink bedspread on the floor and he picked it up and pulled it over himself like a shroud and lay on his side watching the news. After a while he turned over on his back and adjusted his head on the pillow that stayed there. He closed his
eyes and breathed in the stillness with his hands crossed on his chest like a man laid out in a coffin, his toes sticking out from under the edge of the bedspread. He thought about her and what she’d said that morning.

  She was on the front desk now and that was better because he could go in like anybody else and talk to her if he didn’t talk too long. He’d gotten at the end of the line and waited, watching her deal with other people, watching her smile. She looked better than he remembered, each time he saw her, as if leaving him had made her more beautiful.

  The line moved slowly and he didn’t know what he would buy. Stamps and more stamps, a drawer full of them at home already. Finally he stood before her, smiling slightly, averting his whiskey breath.

  “You lookin good today,” he said. “They keep you busy.”

  She kept her eyes on slips of paper in front of her, kept her hands busy with things on the counter. She looked up. Pain was marked in those eyes so deep it was like a color, old love unrequited, a glad sadness on seeing him this close.

  “Hi, Joe.” She didn’t smile, this thin girl with brown hair and skin like an Indian who’d born his children.

  “How you been gettin along? You all right?”

  “I’m okay. How are you?” She still didn’t smile, only folded her little hands together on the marble slab, her painted nails red as blood. He looked at her hands and then he looked at her face.

  “I’m all right. We got rained out today and I done took everbody back home. What time you get off for lunch?”

  “I don’t know today,” she said. Her eyes wandered, then came back to rest uneasily on him. “Jean’s sick and Sheila’s having her baby. I don’t know when I’ll get to go.”

  He coughed. He started to reach for a cigarette and then stayed his hand.

  “I thought I’d see if you wanted to eat some lunch. Thought you might want to go out to the Beacon or somewhere.”

  “I don’t think there’s any need in that. Do you?”

  “It wouldn’t hurt. I’d just like to buy you some lunch.”

  She pulled a pencil from beside her ear and opened a drawer at her waist. But she closed the drawer and laid down the pencil.