by William Gay
Snake huntin? the old man asked.
These cottonmouth hides ain’t worth nothin, Bonedaddy said. Nobody wants a belt made out of em. Too muddy-lookin and no pattern to speak of. I mostly shoot copperheads and rattlesnakes. Once in a while just whatever varmint wanders up to the fire.
Scribner was watching Bonedaddy s right hand. The left clasped a beer bottle but the right never strayed far from the pistol. The hand was big and heavy-knuckled and he couldn’t avoid thinking of it slamming into Karen’s mouth.
You knocked her around pretty good, he said. You probably ain’t more than twice her size.
She ought not called me a son of a bitch. Anybody calls me that needs to have size and all such as that into consideration before they open their mouth.
The old man didn’t reply. He hunkered, watching, the stippled water, the farther shore that was just a land in darkness, anybody’s guess, a world up for grabs. He listened to the river sucking at the banks like an animal trying to find its way in. He saw that people lived their own lives, went their own way. They grew up and lived lives that did not take him into consideration.
I don’t want to argue, Bonedaddy said, patient as a teacher explaining something to a pupil who was a little slow. Matter of fact I come down here to avoid it. But there’s catfish in this river six or eight feet long, what they tell me. And if you don’t think I’ll shoot you and feed you to them then you need to say so right now.
The hand had taken up the pistol. When it started around its arc was interrupted by Scribner swinging the ball bat. He swung from the ground up as hard as he could, like a batter trying desperately for the outfield wall. The pistol fired once and went skittering away. Bonedaddy made some sort of muffled grunt and crumpled in the leaves. The old man looked at the bat in his hands, at Bonedaddy lying on his back. Bonedaddy’s hands were flexing. Loosening, clasping. They loosened nor would they clasp again. His head looked like something a truck had run over. Scribner glanced at the bat in mild surprise, then turned and threw it in the river. Somewhere off in the milk-white fog the throaty horn of a barge sounded, lights arced through the murk vague as lights seen in the muddy depths of the river.
He dragged Bonedaddy to the cabin then up the steps and inside. There was a five-gallon can of kerosene and he soaked the floors with it, hurled it at the walls. He lit it with a torch from the campfire. With another he searched for blood in the leaves. Bonedaddy’s half-drunk beer was propped against a weathered husk of stump, and for a reason he couldn’t name Scribner picked it up and drank it and slung the bottle into the river.
He stayed to see that everything burned. When the roof caught, an enormous cedar lowering onto it burst into flames and burned white-hot as a magnesium flare, sparks rushing skyward in the roaring updraft, like a pillar of fire God had inexplicably set against the wet black bluff.
Hey, he said, trying to shake Rabon awake.
Rabon came awake reluctantly, his hands trying to fend the old man away. Scribner kept shaking him roughly. Get up, he said. Rabon sat up in bed rubbing his eyes. What is it? What’s the matter?
I killed a feller, Scribner said.
Rabon was instantly alert. What the hell are you talking about? He was looking all about the room as if he might see some outstretched burglar run afoul of the old man.
A feller named Willard Pulley. Folks called him Bonedaddy. I killed him with Alton’s baseball bat and set him afire. Must be twenty years ago. He had a shifty little pistol he kept wavin in my face.
Are you crazy? You had a bad dream, you never killed anybody. Go back to sleep.
I ain’t been asleep, Scribner said.
Rabon was looking at his watch. It’s two o’clock in the morning, he said, as if it were the deadline for something. The old man was watching Rabon’s eyes. Something had flickered there when he had mentioned Willard Pulley but he couldn’t put a name to what he had seen: anger, apprehension, fear. Then it all smoothed into irritation, an expression Scribner was so accustomed to seeing that he had no difficulty interpreting it.
You know who I’m talkin about?
Of course I know who you’re talking about. You must have had a nightmare about him because we were talking about Karen. He did once live with Karen, but nobody killed him, nobody set him afire, as you put it. He was just a young drunk and now he’s an old drunk. It hasn’t been a week since I saw him lounging against the front of the City Café, the way he’s done for twentyfive years. You were dreaming.
I ain’t been asleep, Scribner said, but he had grown uncertain even about this. His mind had gone over to the other side where the enemy camped, truth that had once been hard-edged as stone had turned ephemeral and evasive. Subject to gravity, it ran through the cracks and pooled on the floorboards like quicksilver. He was reduced to studying people’s eyes for the reaction to something he had said, trying to mirror truth in other people’s faces.
IN THE DAYS FOLLOWING, a dull rage possessed him. Nor would it abate. He felt ravaged, violated. Somewhere along the line his life had been stolen. Some hand furtive as a pickpocket’s had taken everything worth taking and he hadn’t even missed it. Ellen and his children and a house that was his own had fallen by the wayside. He was left bereft and impotent, dependent upon the whims and machinations of others. Faceless women prodded him with needles, spooned tasteless food into him, continually downloaded an endless supply of pills even horses couldn’t swallow. The pills kept coming, as if these women were connected directly to their source, so that no matter how many he ingested there was always a full tray waiting atop the bureau. He pondered upon all this and eventually the pickpocket had a face as well as a hand. The puppeteer controlling all these strings was Rabon.
At noon a nameless woman in a dusty Bronco brought him a foam tray of food. He sat down in Rabon’s recliner in the living room and prepared to eat. A mouthful of tasteless mashed potatoes clove to his palate, grew rubbery and enormous so that he could not swallow it. He spat it onto the carpet. This is the last goddamned straw, he said. All his life he’d doubled up on the salt and pepper and now the food everyone brought him was cooked without benefit of grease or seasoning. There was a compartment of poisonous-looking green peas and he began to pick them up one by one and flick them at the television screen. Try not to get this all over everything, he said.
When the peas were gone he carried the tray to the kitchen. He raked the carrots and mashed potatoes into the sink and found a can of peas in a cabinet and opened them with an electric can opener. Standing in the living room doorway he began to fling handfuls of them onto the carpet, scattering them about the room as if he were sowing them.
When the peas were gone he got the tray of pills and went out into the backyard. The tray was compartmentalized, Monday, Tuesday, all the days of the week. He dumped them all together as if time had no further significance, as if all days were one.
Rabon had a motley brood of scraggly-looking chickens that were foraging for insects near a split-rail fence, and Scribner began to throw handfuls of pills at them. They ran excitedly about pecking up the pills and searching for more. Get em while they’re hot, the old man called. These high-powered vitamins’ll have you sailin like hawks and singin like mockinbirds.
He went in and set the tray in its accustomed place. From the bottom of the closet he took up the plastic box he used for storing his tapes. Wearing the look of a man burning the last of his bridges, he began to unspool them, tugging out the thin tape until a shell was empty, discarding it and taking up another. At length they were all empty. He sat on the bed with his hands on his knees. He did not move for a long time, his eyes black and depthless and empty looking, ankle-deep in dead bluegrass musicians and shredded mandolins and harps and flattop guitars, in old lost songs nobody wanted anymore.
Rabon was standing in the doorway wiping crushed peas off the soles of his socks. The old man lay on the bed with his fingers laced behind his skull watching Rabon through slitted eyes.
What the hell happ
ened in the living room? Where did all those peas come from?
A bunch of boys done it, Scribner said. Broke in here. Four or five of the biggest ones held me down and the little ones throwed peas all over the front room.
Do you think this is funny? Rabon asked.
Hell no. You try bein held down by a bunch of boys and peas throwed all over the place. See if you think it’s funny. I tried to run em off but I’m old and weak and they overpowered me.
We’ll see how funny it is from the door of the old folks’ home, Rabon said. Or the crazy house. Rabon was looking at the medicine tray. What happened to all those pills?
The chickens got em, Scribner said.
THE GOING WAS SLOWER than he had expected and by the time the chert road topped out at the crossroads where the blacktop ran it was ten o’clock and the heat was malefic. The treeline shimmered like something seen through bad glass and the blacktop radiated heat upward as if somewhere beneath it a banked fire smoldered.
He stood for a time in the shade of a pin oak debating his choices. He was uncertain about going on, but then again it was a long way back. When he looked down the road the way he had come, the perspiration burning his eyes made the landscape blur in and out of focus like something with a provisional reality, like something he’d conjured but could not maintain. After a while he heard a car, then saw its towed slipstream of dust, and when it stopped for the sign at the crossroads he was standing on the edge of the road leaning on his stick.
The face of the woman peering out of the car window was familiar but he could call no name in mind. He was wearing an old brown fedora and he tipped the brim of it in a gesture that was almost courtly.
Mr. Scribner, what are you doing out in all this heat?
Sweating a lot, Scribner said. I need me a ride into town if you’re going that far.
Why of course, the woman said. Then a note of uncertainty crept into her voice. But aren’t you … where is Rabon? We heard you were sick. Are you supposed to be going to town?
I need to get me a haircut and a few things. There ain’t nothin the matter with me, either. That boy’s carried me to doctors all over Tennessee and can’t none of em kill me.
If you’re sure it’s all right, she said, moving her purse off the passenger seat to make room. Get in here where it’s air-conditioned before you have a stroke.
He got out at the town square of Ackerman’s Field and stood for a moment sizing things up, getting his bearings. He crossed at the traffic light and went on down the street to the City Café by some ingrained habit older than the sense of strangeness the town had acquired.
In midmorning the place was almost deserted, three stools occupied by drunks he vaguely recognized, bleary-eyed sots with nowhere else to be. He sat down at the bar, just breathing in the atmosphere: the ancient residue of beer encoded into the very woodwork, sweat, the intangible smell of old violence. There was something evocative about it, almost nostalgic. The old man had come home.
He laid his hat on the counter and studied the barman across from him. Let me have two tall Budweisers, he said, already fumbling at his wallet. He had it in a shirt pocket and the pocket itself secured with a large safety pin. It surprised him that the beer actually appeared, Skully sliding back the lid of the cooler and turning with two frosty cans of Budweiser and setting them on the Formica bar. The old man regarded them with mild astonishment. Well now, he said. He fought an impulse to look over his shoulder and see was Rabon’s rubbery face pressed to the glass watching him.
You got a mouse in your pocket, Mr. Scribner? a grinning Skully asked him.
No, it’s just me myself, Scribner said, still struggling clumsily with the safety pin. He had huge hands grown stiff and clumsy and he couldn’t get it unlatched. I always used one to chase the other one with.
I ain’t seen you in here in a long time.
That boy keeps me on a pretty tight leash. I just caught me a ride this mornin and came to town. I need me a haircut and a few things.
You forget that money, Skully said. I ain’t taking it. These are on the house for old time’s sake.
Scribner had the wallet out. He extracted a bill and smoothed it carefully on the bar. He picked up one of the cans and drank from it, his Adam’s apple convulsively pumping the beer down, the can rattling emptily when he set it atop the bar. He turned and regarded the other three drinkers with a benign magnanimity, his eyes slightly unfocused. Hidy boys, he said.
How you, Mr. Scribner?
He slid the bill across to Skully. I thank you for the beer, he said. Let me buy them highbinders down the bar a couple.
There was a flurry of goodwill from the drunks downbar toward this big spender from the outlands and the old man accepted their thanks with grace and drank down the second can of beer.
We heard you was sick and confined to your son’s house, Skully said. You look pretty healthy to me. What supposed to be the matter with you?
I reckon my mind’s goin out on me, Scribner said. It fades in and out like a weak TV station. I expect to wake up some morning with no mind at all. There ain’t nothin wrong with me, though. He hit himself in the chest with a meaty fist. I could still sweep this place out on a Saturday night. You remember when I used to do that.
Yes I do.
I just can’t remember names. What went with folks. All last week I was thinkin about this old boy I used to see around. Name of Willard Pulley. I couldn’t remember what become of him. Folks called him Bonedaddy.
Let me see, now, Skully said.
He’s dead, one of the men down the bar said.
Scribner turned so abruptly the stool spun with him and he almost fell. What? he asked.
He’s dead. He got drunk and burnt hisself up down on the Tennessee River. Must be over twenty years ago.
Wasn’t much gone, another said. He ain’t no kin to you is he?
No, no, I just wondered what become of him. And say he’s dead sure enough?
All they found was ashes and bones. That’s as dead as I ever want to be.
I got to get on, the old man said. He rose and put on his hat and shoveled his change into a pocket and took up his stick.
When the door closed behind him with its soft chime, one of the drunks said, There goes what’s left of a hell of a man. I’ve worked settin trusses with him where the foreman would have three men on one end and just him on the other. He never faded nothin.
He wasn’t lying about cleaning this place out, either, Skully said. He’d sweep it out on a Saturday night like a long-handled broom but he never started nothin. He’d set and mind his own business. Play them old songs on the jukebox. It didn’t pay to fuck with him though.
THE OLD MAN SAT in the barber chair, a towel wound about his shoulders and he couldn’t remember what he wanted. I need a, he said, and the word just wasn’t there. He thought of words, inserting them into the phrase and trying them silently in his mind to see if they worked. I need a picket fence, a bicycle, a heating stove. The hot blood of anger and humiliation suffused his throat and face.
What kind of haircut you want, Mr. Scribner?
A haircut, the old man said in relief. Why hell yes. That’s what I want, a haircut. Take it all off. Let me have my money’s worth.
All of it?
Just shear it off.
When Scribner left, his buzz-cut bullet head was hairless as a cue ball and the fedora cocked at a jaunty angle. He drank two more beers at Skully’s, then thought he’d amble down to the courthouse lawn and see who was sitting on the benches there. When he stood on the sidewalk, the street suddenly yawned before him as if he were looking down the sides of a chasm onto a stream of dark water pebbled with moonlight. He’d already commenced his step and when he tried to retract it he overbalanced and pitched into the street. He tried to catch himself with his palms, but his head still rapped the asphalt solidly, and lights flickered on and off behind his eyes. He dragged himself up and was sitting groggily on the sidewalk when Skully came out the do
or.
Skully helped him up and seated him against the wall. I done called the ambulance, he said. He retrieved Scribner’s hat and set it carefully in the old man’s lap. Scribner sat and watched the blood running off his hands. Somewhere on the outskirts of town a siren began, the approaching whoop whoop whoop like some alarm the old man had inadvertently triggered that was homing in on him.
ALL THIS SILENCE was something the old man was apprehensive about. Rabon hadn’t even had much to say when, still in his schoolteaching suit, he had picked Scribner up at the emergency room. Once he had ascertained that the old man wasn’t seriously hurt he had studied his new haircut and his bandaged hands and said, I believe this is about it for me.
He hadn’t even gone in to teach the next day. He had stayed in his bedroom with the door locked, talking on the telephone. Scribner could hear the rise and fall of the mumbling voice but even with an ear to the door he could distinguish no word. It was his opinion that Rabon was calling one old folks’ home after another trying to find one desperate enough to take him, and he had no doubt that sooner or later he would succeed.
The day drew on strange and surreal. His life was a series of instants, each one of which bore no relation to the one preceding, the one following. He was reborn moment to moment. He had long taken refuge in the past, but time had proven laden with deadfalls he himself had laid long ago with land mines that were better not stepped on. So he went further back, to the land of his childhood, where everything lay under a troubled truce. Old voices long silenced by the grave spoke again, their ancient timbres and cadences unchanged by time, by death itself. He was bothered by the image of the little man in the green checked suit and the derby hat, rapping the spotted dog with a malacca cane and saying: I just hate a dog at a funeral, don’t you? Who the hell was that? Scribner wondered, the dust of old lost roads coating his bare feet, the sun of another constellation warming his back.