by William Gay
Later they locked him into a cell with a heavyset man named Brenner. Brenner was a soft sluglike man who was awaiting trial for murdering his mother. He had lived in a house trailer with her for years out on Metal Ford Road, supported by her government money. Then one day she met a widower from Jack’s Branch and began to have a social life. One night Brenner watched through the window as she and the widower made love. When the man left Brenner went inside to confront her. He’d had in mind a heart-to-heart talk, tears of repentance. But things had gotten out of hand and he was caught iὴ the act of burning her body.
Brenner wanted Beasley to understand why he had killed her. My mother was a great lady, he said. A saint. I revered my mother. I wouldn’t have harmed a hair on her old gray head. She changed. Something happened to her morals. I believe it’s these times we live in.
Beasley just looked at him and didn’t say anything.
What are you doing in here? Brenner asked him.
When Beasley told him contempt of court Brenner just shook his head in disbelief. That’s a bullshit charge, he said. That’s just paperwork. You must be crazy.
At least I never burned my mama in a goddamned brush pile, Beasley told him.
NO ONE EVEN KNEW he was in jail for a week and then Clarence came to get him. Berneice is just jumping up and down, he said. She said get you out and no mistake about it. Why didn’t you call somebody?
I didn’t see much sense in it, Beasley said.
They were standing in a concrete courtyard. It was enclosed by a chain-link fence. The day was coldlooking and bleak. A few flakes of snow fell. You could see the street from here and Beasley stood watching the cars pass as if he had some interest in where they were going, some investment in what they were up to.
Clarence lit a cigarette. His hands shook. He was wearing a heavy overcoat and he put the burned match into a side pocket. I don’t understand you, he said through the smoke. This has gone way too far. Way too far. It’s gotten out of hand and we need to get our act together here.
Telephone poles ran along the street and small sparrows had aligned themselves on the wire. Beasley watched them. They all flew away, as if they’d simultaneously received the same urgent message.
Will you not come, or what?
I may as well lay it out and get it over with.
Goddamn, Clarence said. I don’t know about you, Finis. I think I’m beginning to not know about you.
Beasley had his hands in his pockets and he was hunched against the weight of the cold. He smiled. I’m beginning to not know about myself, he said.
Later he lay on his cot with his fingers laced behind his skull and thought about things. Things had gotten out of hand, Clarence had said, and Clarence was undoubtedly right. He couldn’t fathom what had happened to him. Some core of stubbornness he hadn’t even known about had set up inside him like concrete. There had been some curious juxtaposition of lives. He’d been switched around somehow and he was living out the balance of someone else’s chaotic life. Somebody somewhere had burnt out and they’d handed it to him to finish up. Somewhere somebody was placidly living out the balance of his.
JUDGE MORRIS made her tell that part about you shooting her terrier dog twice, a deputy named Harris told him. He couldn’t believe it. He’s going to give you a minimum of thirty days, or I’ll kiss your ass right here in front of the courthouse.
They were sitting facing the courthouse in a police cruiser. Harris kept glancing at his watch. It was not quite time to enter the courtroom and Harris sat in the cruiser smoking cigarettes.
They were in the front seat. Harris had not considered it necessary to confine Beasley to the rear seat where there were no door handles and there was a steel mesh barrier between front and rear. Beasley was not a common criminal. Harris’s baton lay on the seat between them. Beasley had noticed that the end of it was pegged and he figured Harris had drilled it out and poured melted lead into it.
Harris had once been sheriff. He had been sheriff until he had beaten a teenager to death with perhaps this very baton and now he was only a deputy. There had been some controversy about the beating and it had ultimately been decided that the teenager had had to be confined in a straitjacket and had choked to death on his own vomit. But Beasley knew that the county had quietly come up with twenty thousand dollars for the boy’s family and that all it had cost Harris was the next sheriff’s election.
Time to go in, Harris said. He got out and shoved the baton in his belt. I’ll come around, he said.
Harris opened the door and Beasley got out. They had turned to go when Harris said, turning, Oh shit. I forgot the cuffs.
What? You forgot what?
Morris wanted you brought in in handcuffs. He wants to make an example of you.
Hellfire, Beasley said. What kind of example?
To tell the truth I was a little foggy on that myself, Harris said. But he’s the judge. To other dog shooters maybe, I don’t know.
He had turned back to the cruiser and opened the door and was leaned fumbling in the console. When he started to straighten and turn with the cuffs in his hand Beasley slipped the baton from Harris’s garrison belt and with a continuation of that single swift motion slammed him with all his might just above the right ear and Harris dropped as if he’d been depending from suddenly cut strings.
Beasley was dragging him back onto the grass when a station wagon pulled into a parking space and a woman got out. The wind was getting up and the woman got out into it holding her hat on with both hands and gaping at Beasley.
He’s had some kind of attack, Beasley said. I believe it’s his heart. Would you run across to the General and call the ambulance while I get him over here?
Of course, the woman said, and hurried off. Beasley watched her. She’d forgotten her hat and the wind blew it off but she went on anyway.
Beasley got behind the wheel of the cruiser. When the woman went into the General Care he cranked the engine and sat a moment just listening to the rock-steady lick the cam was hitting. Then he put the cruiser in gear and drove away.
The first place he went was home. Clarence had sent him from the Navy PX a Winchester .32 Special he wouldn’t have traded for an emerging nation and looking about the small front room he saw little else he could not do without. Then he went into the bedroom and came out with a heavier coat and a blanket. When he left he didn’t even pull the door closed behind him or turn the lights out and glancing once over his shoulder the house looked as temporary and impersonal as a motel room.
He drove toward Riverside. He knew already that he was going into the Harrikin, a wild stretch of land that had once been mined for iron ore. It was all company land, dangerous mine shafts, abandoned machinery. No one lived there, and there were miles of unbroken timber you couldn’t work your way through with a road map in one hand and a compass in the other. He felt he knew the country well enough to struggle through into Wayne County and strike out for Alabama. He didn’t envision posses. How many bounty hunters could be on your ass for contempt of court? And coldcocking an overweight deputy sheriff.
He stopped at a country store and bought pork and beans and tinned Vienna sausages and crackers. He bought a quart of milk and a pound of coffee. The storekeep was totting up these purchases on a ticket book with a stub of pencil and he kept glancing out at the cruiser idling before a rusting gas pump that did not work and that advertised a brand of gasoline that no longer existed.
Finis, I can’t help but notice that you’ve swapped vehicles, he finally said.
No, the county hired me to try her out, Beasley said. It’s one of these new thirty-two-valve jobs and the county itself don’t know how fast she’ll go. None of them deputies got the balls to wind her out. They hired me to take her out to Riverside and straighten out a few of them curves.
The storekeep was regarding him with a benign skepticism. Long as you pay before you wind her out I don’t care how many lies you tell me.
Beasley was counting out ones,
laying coins atop. That was my intention, he said.
Beasley left and drove to where the terrain began its steep descent toward the river. He stopped on a sharp switchback curve and parked on the shoulder of the road and got out. The day was blue-looking and windy and the horizon looked as hard as iron and it was very cold. The cruiser sat idling puffing little bursts of exhaust. He looked around. A high-tension power line crossed the road here and following it with his eyes he could see where the towers faded into the blurred multiple horizons of the Harrikin.
He cocked the front wheels of the cruiser toward the hollow and with the stock of the Winchester tapped the gearshift into drive and stepped away. The cruiser bumped off the shoulder of macadam and eased over waist-high scrub blackjack and gaining momentum sped down the hillside toward the hollow. The car started around the side of the steep incline like a daredevil motorcycle in a wheel of death but it wasn’t going fast enough and grew top-heavy and rolled over again and again and fetched up at the bottom of the hollow upside down against an enormous beech. It ran for a while and then it quit.
He had started down the opposite side of the embankment where the power line wound toward the Harrikin but then he turned and came back across the road and stood looking down at the cruiser. It was almost hidden by brush. He stood with the rifle across his shoulders and both arms hung from the barrel and stock. He just stood for a time thinking. He was thinking about the weighted baton. He could see Harris making it. Harris had it clamped in a vise, he was drilling a hole in the end, pouring melted lead into it.
After a while he went down the embankment, the hillside so steep in places he was sliding tree to tree. When he’d reached the door-sprung cruiser he leaned the Winchester against the trunk of a tree and began to gather up windfall branches and lengths of dead wood and a stump weathered thin and silver and almost weightless and to fill the cruiser with them. He piled on leaves and set them afire and then he went back the way he’d come with the fire popping and snapping like something alive coming up the hillside after him.
He was a mile and better along the power line before he looked back. The black smoke was rolling against the sky and he felt he’d drawn a line forever between the world that yawned before him and everything that had gone before. When he looked forward the way he was headed the long endless line of marching towers looked like angular giants skeletoned up out of steel.
Goddamn you, Sugarbaby, Beasley said.
♦ ♦ ♦
HE CAME UP THROUGH a long blue dusk that lay like smoke between the cedars, wending his way through a sage field to where the house sat almost hidden by trees. The wind had shifted around to the north and grown more chill yet and he could hear it soughing through the cedars and rattling a loose section of tin and banging a shutter against the wall in random percussion.
The house was abandoned. A cedar had grown up through the rotted porch and was slowly dismantling the roof. The stone chimney had tilted away from the house or the house away from it. At his step over the threshold something unseen scrambled up and went with near-liquid grace through an unglazed window sash and gone.
He leaned the rifle carefully against a wall, set the paper bag of food by the fireplace hearth, and looked about for something to burn. He broke up rotting floorboards from the porch and stacked the fireplace with them and with the bag for tinder set them alight. He could hear a heavy swift beating of wings up the flue and a rain of soot fell. After a while the area immediately before the hearth warmed but the wind came looping across the windowsill and he wrapped the blanket about his shoulders and sat crouched before the fire with his hands extended like a supplicant.
When he was warm he opened a can of the beans and a tin of the sausages and set them near the coals to heat. He ate crackers while they warmed and when they did he ate with his pocketknife, chewing slowly and staring abstractedly into the fire.
He was warm and dry and almost content. He figured at least he wasn’t in jail. Nobody was telling him about burning their mother’s body or crying out in their sleep and if the notion struck him to just walk out the door into the night there were no bars. All around him was the Harrikin, miles of uninhabited woods smothered in rain and darkness and he drew a small bitter comfort from it.
After a while he dozed crouched before the fire but awoke cold and disoriented and for a moment he couldn’t fathom where he’d got to. The dead wood had burned away to the faintest glow in the depths of a feathery caul of ash. It was still raining and the wind was still blowing in a cold mist through the broken windows so that the blanket felt damp across his shoulders. He got up and went through the house striking matches looking for something to burn. Beneath a collapsed shelf he found a motley of books and he stacked an armload and carried them back to the fireplace. He ripped out pages and piled them on the quaking ash until they flared up and then he laid on the volumes. Finally they caught and he sat before them watching little blue flames flicker over the leather bindings.
He noticed with some amusement that they comprised a set of State of Tennessee law books and it occurred to him how all-encompassing the law was: he and Doneita had both appealed to it each in their own way and both had drawn a modicum of comfort from it each according to their natures.
WITH THE BLANKET mantled about him and the rifle slung under it he watched from beneath the wet ruin of his hat four police cruisers creep up the road far below him. From his aerie the red chert road wound like a capillary of road on a map. The road widened where fifty years before the post office and commissary had stood and here the cruisers pulled over side by side and stopped. Across the folds of rain-blurred horizons the cars looked tiny and insignificant. Men got out of the cars into the rain and stood in a loose group. He wished he’d had the foresight to bring binoculars. He’d have liked to know was Harris along.
In truth he was a little surprised. He’d have thought they’d have waited for better weather but he guessed burning a squad car raised the ante considerably and he was truly a wanted man.
He was not alarmed. The men moved into the sodden woods with a reluctance that was almost visible to the naked eye. The deputies he had seen around the jail looked soft and out of shape. They looked as if they drank too much beer, smoked too many cigarettes, ate too many doughnuts. Beasley did not drink and had not smoked a cigarette for twenty-five years and he could take a doughnut or leave it alone and scrambling up the bluff toward deeper timber he was not even breathing hard.
As the day progressed the weather did not warm as he’d expected nor did the rain abate and if there was sun at all behind the leaden weeping sky he saw no sign of it. By noon he was far back in the Harrikin, following the spine of a ridge that kept breaking off into deep blue hollows. He could hear the rain in the trees and by midafternoon it had begun to be mixed with sleet and it was freezing on the leaves and branches and the leaves he brushed had the tinny half-musical, sound of a carillon.
He passed by an ancient graveyard, the tilting slabs leached thin and fragile, transient as whatever souls they’d marked. Sheltered beneath a cedar he ate the last of the Viennas and crackers and listened to the sleet rattle in the leaves. Graveyard cleanin, dinner on the ground, he thought sardonically.
The day wore on gray and cold and darkened so incrementally you couldn’t have told the exact moment night fell but after a while he was walking in darkness.
He knew he had to stop. Only a fool would continue on here. He knew this country as well as anyone but there were core-sample holes deep as wells, their bottoms drifted with leaves covering the bones of luckless animals or perhaps worse that stumbled into them. And if he became lost he would in all probability wander for miles in the wrong direction.
By the time he had a fire going he was half frozen. He finally found tinder beneath a rotten husk of log and when he had it going he piled on whatever he could find, branches and fallen saplings and finally the log itself was burning and he had an enormous bonfire going he figured you could see for miles. Snow had beg
un falling with the sleet and huge flakes drifted into the toiling smoky glare and vanished. The wet earth began to steam and standing before the fire with the blanket cowled about him Beasley looked like some cautionary symbol set up to warn of such depths of misery as the human race can sink to.
Beasley thought of his other life but already it was lost to him. It had been a mere prelude to this. He seemed to have been born the moment he shot Sugarbaby through the screen. He stood back to the fire with the rifle at port arms scanning the darkness. There was nothing beyond the limits of the fire, where the light tended away the world simply ceased to exist. Come on you sons of bitches, Beasley called. If you’re out there come up and warm.
For the first time in his life he realized that sometimes in life you go through doors that only open one way. You can stand before them and think about whether you want to go through them or not. But when you do and the door closes behind you there is no way to go back. The door is featureless and unknobbed and smooth as a sheet of glass. You can pound on it and claw till your fingers are bleeding, scream until your throat is raw, but no one will open the door, no one will even hear you.
HE WAS LOST and he had been lost for some time, the drifting snow obscuring landmarks and giving the landscape a curious sameness, the snow already ankle-deep and falling so fast and hard he could scarcely see where he was going.
He was following a sound, a hollow clang of metal on metal that he seemed to have heard subliminally for hours, maybe longer, maybe since the moment something had wound too tight inside him and finally broken and he’d blown Sugarbaby off the porch. The sound seemed all there was left in the world, all there was of reality beyond the curtain of shifting white. It was a random and infrequent noise, and sometimes he’d have to stand still in the hushed woods waiting for it to come again so that he could get a fix on it, waiting and hearing nothing but the sound of his breathing and the soft hiss of the woods filling up with snow. Then finally the clang would come again and he would go on.