by William Gay
He picked the photographs up carefully by their edges and replaced the rubber band and just sat holding them. What to do with them. These trading cards from beyond the river Styx, picture postcards mailed from Hell.
She took the underwear up delicately by its unstained hem. Laid it aside.
Where do you suppose he got them?
He shrugged and took a sip of his coffee. Why might be a better question.
Well, you certainly outdid yourself. I suppose you know what this means. We’ve got the son of a bitch. We’ve got him in a way nobody’s had him before, and it’s going to cost him.
I’ll tell you what, Corrie. You’ve got him. Not me. I want nothing whatever to do with him. I don’t want to talk to him, to see him, to ever hear his voice. I don’t even want to know he’s in this world. I’ve seen some sorry things, but Jesus.
I do. I want to watch his face when I tell him.
He didn’t say anything. There didn’t seem to be anything to say. She was studying the pictures clinically, one at a time, laying them aside. Watching her face by the lamplight, he thought she looked somehow fevered, her rapt eyes fired by something akin to religious frenzy. Sister of some secret sect, perusing its dark devotional. Prayers offered to a horned deitysquatting just beyond the rim of firelight. Watching her so he was touched with pity. She’d come up hard. A childhood that passed with an eye’s blinking. Stepping over sleeping drunks on the way to school. With girlhood came the whistles and catcalls on the schoolyard. Hey, Corrie, how about a piece of that? You’ve done it with everybody else, how about me? He’d fought over her and he remembered the coppery bright taste of blood in his mouth. She tried to be like everybody else. To be one of the freshfaced town girls with their air of entitled confidence. She wore the same kind of clothes the other girls wore but somehow without the right flair, and ultimately all her efforts underlined the fact that she was just another piece of the puzzle that did not quite fit.
Why are you looking at me like that?
I was thinking I’ve known you all my life, and yet I don’t know you at all.
There’s nothing to know. I get up, I work, I do the housework. I cook, I go to bed. Then tomorrow I get up and do the same thing over again.
He didn’t answer.
I don’t know you. I don’t know where you go when you’re wandering around. What you think. No one’s ever known what you think. You get what you think out of a book. It’s like you hardly ever talk and when you do it’s in some foreign language. Some language nobody even speaks. But one thing you can know about me is that I’m going to shove the knife in Fenton Breece and twist it. That’s the main thing about me right now.
I wish you’d forget about Fenton Breece. He’s like that card on the wall, the invisible listener at every conversation, the guest at every meal. You may develop a taste for him. He’s going to put us on Easy Street.
This is absolutely crazy as shit. There is just no way he’s going to smile and start counting hundred-dollar bills into your hand. Just no way.
Hellfire, Kenneth, what can he do? Run to the law? There’s nothing he can do but pay up. Try to put yourself in his shoes.
I don’t want in his shoes, Tyler said. And if I was I’d cut my throat.
During the last few years of his life Tyler’s father would reach a certain stage of drunkenness during which he used to sit and watch Tyler with a peculiar speculation, as if he’d see what manner of beast this was he’d sired. Tyler walked a narrow line those years, it didn’t take much to set the old man off.
When Tyler was twelve or thirteen he took to sleeping in the attic. It was quieter up there, and quiet was at a premium, for the house was ofttimes full of drunks by turns convivial and quarrelsome. There were two doors between the attic and the ground floor and on one of these Tyler had installed a lock he’d come by. He liked the slope of the dark oaken rafters over his iron bed, and there was a window you could open to the weathers in the spring and summer. This window faced the back of the house and looked out upon a stony field sloping toward the cedared horizon. There was a hiding place in the boxing over the door for books he chanced upon. The old man possessed an enormous contempt for the writtenword and those who would decipher it.
That year the old man fell to beating him when the notion struck him, and it struck him more often as time drew on. Young Tyler grew wary and careful and watchful as a cat. All his movements seemed provisional and subject to change at a moment’s notice, he seemed always poised for flight.
A schoolteacher who’d befriended him came once to visit. She sat for a time under the malevolent gaze of the old man, glancing about with nervous skittery eyes. She never came back. You better quit hangin around them goddamn schoolteachers, he said, wiping a hand across his mouth. Grayyellow stubble flecked with ambeer and spittle. Washedout blue eyes veined with meanness. You won’t amount to a goddamned thing.
It was a summer of storms that year. Lightning walked the ridges all that July and August and conjured out of the night in strobic configuration stormbent trees writhing in the windy rain. Images of heightened reality rendered instantly out of the flickering night then snatched so instantly back into the absolute darkness they seemed never to have existed at all.
After the old man beat him he’d flee into these windtossed nights. Something in all this chaos seemed to find its counterpart in his own chaotic heart and he’d turn a face stained with blood and tears into the remote heavens and defy the lightning to take him, to char his heart and boil the blood hammering in his veins and seize and short the circuits in his head but this was not to be. Once he followed a light through sheets of windy rain, and in the riverbottom a lightningstruck pine burned like a solitary candle flaring down the night. Set there like a sign to read could he but decipher it. Then he quit crying altogether and took the beatings he couldn’t escapewith a kind of stoic and sullen outrage.
In his fourteenth year he heard the old man’s step on the stair and snapped the thumbbolt. The steps ceased and there was no sound anywhere save the whippoorwills measuring out the dark. He was holding his breath and waiting for the steps to start their descent when the old man’s shoulder abruptly slammed against the door.
He was sitting on the cot with his back against the wall and his arms laced around his knees. He figured the lock to hold. The lock did, but on the third stroke of the old man’s shoulder the top hinge gave and the very door itself toppled into the room with the old man athwart it like some demented carpetrider and Tyler was out the window and gone. He went hand over hand down a trellis crept with ivy with the ivy tearing away in handfuls and the trellis itself tilting away from the wall like a toppling ladder, and he jumped the last few feet and was up and gone into the cedars.
The wind that night was out of the south and warm and balmy and there was a smell of freshly turned loam on it. From the sanctity of farther woods whippoorwills were calling each to each and he walked on toward them.
This time he just kept on walking, as if the boundaries of his world had suddenly dissolved and the landscape before him become limitless. He crossed thin dark woods with light falling in broken shards about him and owls calling inquiringly and when the woods ended fallow fields began so white in the starlight they appeared ghostfields. He went on in a straight line, steering by the stars. Through a cornfield so dry with ancient autumns he moved steadily in a conspiratorial whispering of cornblades and finally out of anything at all attended by men and he guessed he was in the edge of the HarrikinHe came to a creek or river and waded into it. When his feet lost the bottom he drifted downstream awhile then dogpaddled to the far side. He climbed a bank strung with honeysuckle slick black in the moonlight and through such a heady reek of their blossoms he seemed drunk on them and he staggered on.
Daylight found him where he’d never been. He went down a bloodred ravine cut out of clay by old floodwaters and came out in a field with the tilted ghosts of old cornstalks leached thin and fragile as ancient parchment. The sun came
smoking up out of the mist and hung above the black treeline and it was almost instantly hot. After a while his clothes began to steam. Below him an abandoned farmhouse and fallen barn and fences gone to kudzu and wild roses. There was no sign of life in all that he surveyed, then he looked upward and a hawk wheeled against a flawless void and it glittered in the sun like some sinister contrivance of flesh and chrome.
He wandered aimlessly about the farm, his mind reconstructing old lives. Old long-silent voices told him tales. Beseeched him to remember them and carry them back to the world they’d lost. Folks were born here, grew old here. Died here, for he found tilting tablets of stone and sunken oblong declivities in the earth beneath the sawbriars and orange bells of cowitch. Old rooms papered with newsprint and flour paste, and he’d wander the house reading this surreal mural of old news as if it had something to tell him.
He felt remote, utterly alone. With the cool earth against his back he awoke sometime in his second night and he could feel the earth wheeling on its mitred course through eternity. Here the sky was clear and so strewn with stars there seemed no darkness between them but simply a vast phantasmagoria of light. Weak with hunger he watched loom out of the night strange gaudy constellations like great wheels rolling toward him and turning endless in the void as if here in the Harrikin even the heavens were ancient and strange. They seemed to alter night to night as if the universe itself was still in flux. Once a shower of falling stars that seemed to have fallen prey to some celestial epidemic but instead of them showering around him he felt the pull of the earth fall away from his back and he became weightless, rising toward their streaking light like ofttold tales of souls raptured upward.
On the third day he came upon an apple orchard reverting to wildness. Most of the trees were dead, black twisted trees like the skeletons of profoundly deformed beasts. Yet one was thick with fistsize summer apples. The earth beneath strewn with them and the drone of bees and the musk of apples everywhere. They were sweetly tart and full of winy juice and he wanted nothing better. He seemed to have reached some curious point where he wanted nothing at all save the fall of night and the configurations of the stars to study as if he’d decipher some message there. Some sign.
On the third or fourth night in a dream or vision an old man came to him who would lead him out of this blighted waste. He’d been sent, he said, he couldn’t say by whom. The old man’s flesh had wasted away on his bones and beneath the faded chambray shirt he wore his arms were thin and fragile as sticks. In times past he’d been shackled in irons, hands and feet. He wore them yet but the chains had been sawn away, they were just heavy bracelets at the ankles and wrists with the sawn links appended like fey adornments.
Tyler had a fire going he kept feeding sticks and balls of grass. He on one side of the fire and the old man at the otherlike ancients at council. Somewhere in the night foxhounds bayed then passed in a hollow below them and the wind brought voices or ghostvoices of men. He shook his head and told the old man he guessed he’d find his own way out. He couldn’t be beholden to another. In order to survive in this world and then make a life in it he had to do this on his own. At last he lay back and slept with his head pillowed on an arm. He awoke once in the night and raised up and looked through the smoke of the dying fire and he was alone.
The next day his sister and a schoolteacher named Phelan and a hunter they’d hired as guide named Tippydo found him and took him home. It didn’t seem to matter. All things and all places had come to seem transitory at best and he seemed to have arrived at some idea of where he fit or did not fit into the scheme of things.
The old man was contrite. He grasped Tippydo’s hand and pressed into it a twenty-dollar bill. Twin tears crept down his pouched cheeks, etching paths of cleanness out of the grime. He’d never do it again. Wouldn’t have done it then but for bad whiskey. There seemed little whiskey that was good that year for soon he was at it again. He seemed in a constant state of anger which Tyler seemed to bring into focus.
By the time he died Tyler could have whipped him instead, but he never did it. He never hit him, never cursed him, just did his best to stay out of his way. Honoring some biblical restraint of parental honor.
Already he was groping for a way to live, to accommodate himself to the world or it to him. He felt that if he fell upon his father with murder in his heart that he had proven irrevocably that he and the old man had the selfsame cankered blood in both their hearts and if this was so all was lost. The day the old man died he was standing on the stairs to the attic. He’d stopped a minute to rest and catch his breath, and then he’d come on and batter at the door. Tyler imagined the door charring beneath his ceaseless tirade of invective. Against Tyler, against the uncaring God who’d let such twisted fruit of his loins thrive.
The way Tyler always imagined it God had been sitting before the fireplace with his feet propped up on the hearth. Or maybe just on midair—God could do that. He was reading an old hymnbook or maybe a seed catalog. Listening with one ear and trying to concentrate on his reading. Finally after years and years of this just getting totally fed up and throwing his book against the wall of Heaven and turning and fixing the old man with his fierce eye. God’s eyes flickered with electric blue light and the old man’s heart exploded in a torrent of black blood and corruption and he just dropped like a stone, dead before his body touched the stairs, and God went back to his seed catalog.
For the first week after the briefcase disappeared from the trunk of his Lincoln, Fenton Breece lived on tenterhooks, waiting for the other shoe to fall. Dark visions haunted him waking and sleeping. The faceless burglar in an alley or a stone culvert hurriedly slashing open the briefcase and dumping out its spare contents, expecting money or who knew what but certainly not expecting the neat stack of photographs. Riffling through them an act of sacrilege. A greasy thumbprint perhaps on the pale bloom of a breast. A thin fingernail of ice traced the nape of Breece’s neck and down hispine.
I’ve just got to do something, he thought in his brisk businesslike manner. But there wasn’t anything to do.
Then in a few days a measure of reason returned. No one had called him. Nothing sinister in the mail, the sky had not fallen. At length he began to see the faceless thief glancing at the rubberbanded photographs in disgust and tossing them away in a ditch. Mud, debris, shards of broken glass, and clotted leaves hid them modestly from prying eyes. Yellow water opaque with mud sent them turning dreamily, pale washedout ghosts of themselves, toward the muddy sanctity of the Tennessee River.
The woman behind the desk had an officious manner and carefully coiffed bluelooking hair. She seemed to have appraised the girl by some abstract standard she kept in her head and found her wanting.
Mr. Breece is not in right now, she said.
I reckon I’ll just wait then, the girl said.
It may be a good while, the woman said.
Then I reckon I’ve got a good while to wait, the girl said. She crossed the narrow office and seated herself in a contoured yellow chair. She took up a magazine and sat staring at it though she could have told you no word that it said. She could hear the woman shuffling papers importantly about. After a while the woman cleared her throat.
What was it about?
It was about me seeing Fenton Breece, she said. She went back to her magazine.
He may not be in for a while. Perhaps I could help you. You couldn’t unless you’re Fenton Breece, and I don’t believe you are.
After a while the outer door opened and Breece himself came in. He was wet and coldlooking and beyond him rain fell slantwise in the wind. She hadn’t known it had begun to rain. Breece folded his umbrella and stood it in the wastebasket to drain. Messy out, he said brightly. A pale hand to the smooth bird’s wing of his hair.
A lady to see you, the woman said grudgingly.
Breece turned, and for an instant recognition and something other flickered in his eyes. Then nothing. He glanced back at the woman behind the desk. He looked at his w
atch.
You can go any time, Mrs. Cothron, he said. My office is back here, he told the girl. He pointed down a narrow hall. She got up and followed him.
She sat primly on the edge of an armchair. Worn purse clutched bothhanded in her lap. Her eyes on Breece’s face were fierce and intent and unwavering, and they made him nervous.
You buried my father, she began.
He nodded unctuously. He couldn’t wonder what this was about. He remembered the girl, and he remembered the old man, but he couldn’t fathom what she wanted unless someone else was dead. He kept glancing at the purse, and he couldn’t remember if it had all been paid or not. Maybe she owed him money.
Mann Tyler, she said. He had an insurance. We paid for an eight-hundred-dollar steel vault to go over his casket, and it’s not there anymore.
The room was very quiet. She could hear rain at the window. Breece got up and crossed the room. He peereddown the hall and closed the door. He went back and sat down. His hands placed together atop the desk formed an arch. He was watching her and she could see sick fear rise up in his eyes.
Just not there, she went on. And that’s not all. He’s buried without all the clothes we bought for him, and he’s been…mutilated.
She just watched him. A tic pulsed at the corner of one bulging eye like something monstrous stirring beneath a thin veneer of flesh.
Absurd on the face of it. I’m a reputable businessman; no one has ever questioned my professional ethics. My work is exemplary, a matter of pride to me, and you are treading on dangerous legal ground if you intend to accuse me of misconduct.