by William Gay
I told you. There’s a man looking for me, and I don’t want him to know where I am. He’ll probably be around here asking questions, and the less you know, the less you can tell him.
What makes you think I’d tell him anything atall?
You’d tell him all right. He’s clever. He’d find out.
Where you from, anyway?
He didn’t know why he lied, but he did. He just did it instinctively. Shipp’s Bend, he said. Over on the other side of Centre.
I know where Shipp’s Bend is. You got a name? And this feller after you, he wouldn’t be named Tyler, would he? Man from over on Lick Creek?
What makes you think that?
She didn’t answer immediately but she lowered the gun. All the meanness around is one reason I always been in the Harrikin. Now I reckon you’ve tracked it in here. You hear about that girl getting herself killed over on Lick Creek?
No.
Tyler girl got killed in a truck wreck. Heard about it this mornin. Her and her brother both drunk and her killed when they turned the truck over. A young girl layin out dead in a field with whiskey all over her and inside her. I’d hate to meet my maker with whiskey on my breath, wouldn’t you?
I get that close I don’t expect to have much of a breath left, Tyler said. He couldn’t have told you what words he spoke. His mind was full of what she had told him about the dead girl in the field.
Make sport of me if you want to. It ain’t me found dead cut all over from a broke whiskey bottle. Nor me that’s run off and hid and bein hunted by the sheriff for manslaughter neither.
I got to get on, Tyler said.
Get on where? To find some other house to break into? I reckon not.
Just let me pay for this mess, and I’ll get on out of the way.
Oh, you’ll pay, all right. I’m still studyin on that one. In good time maybe you’ll go. Why do you think a feller would leave his sister in a fix like that and run just worryin about hisself?
I don’t know, Tyler said.
The old woman’s eyes had turned hard and bitter. Whiskey, she said contemptuously. I wonder when folks’ll ever learn that more comes out of a whiskey bottle than card games and loose women.
Something in her vindictive tone made Tyler ask, Was your man a drinker?
Cecil was a Church of Christ preacher, she said, as if oneprecluded the other.
Anyway, I got to go.
She seemed to have come to some decision. You aim to paint that Delco before you go anywhere, she said.
That what?
That Delco. It don’t make the lights anymore, but I want it painted anyway. Things is went down around here without a man on the place. Cecil painted it ever year right up till the year he died. It quit right after that, too. Ain’t that peculiar?
I don’t even know what one is.
You just before findin out. Sack that stuff back up, and after that Delco’s painted you can have it and be gone with ye.
They went down a narrow corridor that smelled of time and solitude. Tyler could see into rooms piled nigh to the ceiling with mounded clothing and stacked newsprint. As if she expected to live forever and had laid by a permanent supply of raiment and reading matter.
She kept prodding him with the gun. Quit that, he said. I can walk without being shoved along with a shotgun.
Stop and study this picture, she told him.
She gestured wallward with the barrel of the shotgun. You might learn something, she said. You might learn ever act you commit moves you one way or the other. Towards Heaven or towards Hell. Hadn’t you rather be moving towards Heaven as the other place? Study this picture. If you wind up down there roastin in Hell rollin and tumbling in them hot coals it won’t be for lack of bein told.
Like visitors in some curious museum they stood side by side looking at a painting. Faint mottled light from a dingy bedroom window. The picture showed a graveyard. Tombstones capsizing, graves exploding upward, the air full of cemetery dirt. Folks in their graveyard shrouds or funeral silks ascending skyward like startled birds, their arms stretched winglike in supplication or benediction, their faces rapt in the beatific light that hovered over them.
That’s the rapture, she said. When the dead awakes and them what’s goin goes.
Her voice was touched by a nostalgic yearning, as if she had her ticket in hand and foot already raised to climb on board.
Where do you reckon you’ll be on that great getting up morning?
Tyler thought about it. He studied the picture. As far away from this mess as I can get, he said. I reckon I’ll just wait till they get up another load.
I know where you’ll be, she told him with satisfaction. And you’re not goin to like it.
They went out the front door and around to the back of the house. The generator was behind the shed. delco, raised letters on the side said. She had found a bucket of paint and an old illcleaned brush. He pried the lid off the paint bucket with the blade of his pocketknife. The paint was turgid and a vile green. A slick, oily scum rode the top of it. He stirred it with a stick. The woman had brought a lawn chair and seated herself to watch with the gun laid across her knees.
You don’t need the gun, he said. I’ll paint this crazy thing for you, whatever it is, without a shotgun being held on me.
I feel better with it, she said. Desperate folks around here lately, seems like. You never know what’ll come bustin out of the woods next.
He dipped the brush into the paint. You better hang onto itthen, he said. Because the next fellow out of the woods is a lot more desperate than I am.
He began to paint the generator. Upon contact with the paint the brush had swollen up to twice its size and become virtually unmanageable and it was like trying to paint with a halfgrown housecat.
You got a better brush?
That’s the only one I know of, sonny. Just do the best you can.
You want all these little wires and everything painted?
Just paint where Cecil did. Where it was painted before. It wouldn’t surprise me if the lights come on and the icebox worked after you get a good coat of paint on it. It’s goin to be a comfort havin this thing painted even if they don’t, though. You know, I never noticed that grape arbor goin down like it is. That thing’s nearly rotten, ain’t it?
The grapevines are dead anyway.
They may come out in the spring. I’ve seen em do it before. I believe we’ll just put a good coat of paint on it when we get through with this Delco.
It’s about rotted down. Paint won’t help that.
He wanted desperately to be gone. He didn’t know if she’d shoot or not and he didn’t know if she was as crazy as she acted and he halfsuspected she had known all along who he was and was just trying to keep him here. To collect the reward for a manslaughterer perhaps. He had a nightmare vision of Sutter leaping upon him while this old woman forced him at gunpoint to paint everything on the place this vile green.
She was studying the grape arbor musingly. You may be right at that, she said. We took a couple of them old palins ouof the barn yonder and braced it first, it’d be better. Can you drive a nail as well as you steal apple pies?
Just about, he said.
I got a hammer and some nails in the house. You reckon I could trust you to go on paintin while I go in the house and get em?
I don’t know what you’ve got to lose besides an unpainted grape arbor. Anyway, I can’t outrun buckshot.
You’d be the very fool to try it, though, she said. I believe I’ll just take this with me and keep a eye on you out the winder. You use your own judgment about whether you can outrun shot or not. She shouldered the shotgun and trudged heavily toward the house.
He looked at the sun. Pale washedout sun of the winter solstice. It stood at midmorning. He looked back to his work and went on painting until the screendoor slammed to behind her. He made one last stroke and wiped the brush on the rim of the bucket. He put the lid on the bucket and tapped it home with a fist and laid the b
rush neatly atop it and walked off rapidly toward the walnut grove. He was already in it and moving fast when he heard the creak of the keeperspring and her call, Boy?
He was down the gully recovering the rifle when she called, I won’t shoot you. Boy?
He kept on going. She kept on calling Boy fainter and fainter with his progress, and finally he couldn’t hear her anymore.
He followed Little Buffalo out of the Harrikin and by midafternoon he was near a road. He could hear an occasional car drone by on the flatlands, and when he began to hear them downshifting to second he knew he was near the hills leading away from the river. He veered right across a sandbar of silt and gravel. There was a thick fishy smell in the air and in stagnant backwater pools there were rotting carp discarded from someone’s trotline.
The sandbar ended and he was in a brake of wild cane grown with tangles of wild grapevines and it was heavy going. When it ended it ended so abruptly he stepped through it like an actor making a curtain call in an untended field and he could see the roadway and a fence winding along beside it on the other side.
The day had warmed pleasantly and the sky when he glanced upward at it was cloudless and very blue. He knew vaguely but not precisely where he was and he knew Patton’s store was somewhere about. He crossed the fence and came out on the blacktop swinging the rifle along by his side. The only car that passed passed oblivious of him, for he’d crouched in a dry gully watching cautiously through a curtain of dry pigweed and then he came out and went on.
Within a mile he could see the hills where the roads converged, and he could make out the gaspumps in front of the store. The field to the right was given over to an enormous graveyard for wrecked automobiles or those deceased from natural causes, and he crossed through the barbed-wire fence and followed a footpath worn between the rows of cars. Perverse sampling of Detroit’s wares. Old partsrobbed Hudsons and DeSotos and Studebakers. A black Buick Roadmaster that seemed to have been dropped from some enormous height, so caved and buckled was it. Discarded emptycarton death had come in.
At the store he prowled the aisles studying the shelves, trying to decide what to take. He selected tinned Vienna sausages and pork and beans. Little packages of crackers. He bought thick bars of Hershey chocolate and a small tin of snuff just for the tin to keep matches in, and he bought matches. As an afterthought in consideration of bad weather, he bought a lined pair of cotton gloves and a woolen Navy watchcap.
The storekeep was totting all this up on a brown paper bag. Lastly Tyler took a dripping Coke from the icewater in the dopebox and set it on the wooden counter.
I make it four dollars and a nickel. Be a penny more if you aim to take the bottle with you.
I almost forgot. I need a box of .22 long rifles.
The storekeep fetched up the ammunition from beneath the counter. Looks like you might be headin into the Harrikin huntin.
I was thinking about it.
Best be careful less you’re used to it. I got lost once in there diggin sang and like to never come out. Went in with the sun shinin and it darkened up and come up a cloud and I didn’t know east from west. Barely knowed up from down. They tell you moss grows on the north side of trees, but, hell, back in there it was growin all the way around em. I walked till I thought I’d drop and finally wound up over in the corner of Lawrence County. Not a bit over twenty-five miles from where I thought I was at. And glad to be there, what I mean. Glad to be anywhere it was houses and folks. Be four-eighty with the shells.
Tyler handed him a five, pocketed the change. Your name wouldn’t be Tyler by any chance, would it?
He thought about it a minute. What the hell. His fame seemed to be preceding him somehow. Yes, he said.
Thought it might be. Granville Sutter said you’d be in. Told what you looked like. Said tell you he’d see you on the road somewheres.
Thanks, Tyler said. There was a point of cold ice at the nape of his neck, as if someone had touched him gently there with the point of an icepick. When was he in?
Not morn an hour ago. You hurry you might catch him. Or he might be waitin on you. You goin in the Harrikin, Granville’s a good un to go with. He knows it, or ort to, much as he’s laid out in there hidin from the law.
Well. Thanks for telling me. I’d better be getting on.
Come back, the storekeep said.
The boy passed through the wrecked cars, his purchases in a tow sack slung over his shoulder. Sutter from behind a crumpled Lincoln watched him go. Down the blued length of rifle barrel. He laid a cheek against the smooth walnut. Peered into the scope and aligned the crosshairs behind Tyler’s left ear. Tyler seemed very close, Sutter felt he could almost see into the skull and read the thoughts there. Sunlight in the soft blond stubble on Tyler’s cheeks.
Bang, he said softly.
Something akin to disappointment touched him. He hadn’t thought it would be this easy, had expected more of a contest than the sorry showing Tyler had made. He wanted Tyler to think he was going to make it. To be giddy with victory, the money within grasp, Ackerman’s Field a few feet away. Sutter still couldn’t believe Tyler’s nerve: that he could think he could burn Granville Sutter’s house for no more than the price of amatch and then go about his business with impunity.
He was at war with himself. A part of him wanted to just kill him now and have done with it. On the other side of the scale, he had nothing else to do and no home to go to, and he was looking any day for more papers to come down. Son of a bitches in courthouses whose sole function was to prepare and serve papers with his name affixed to them.
A sense of the power he held over Tyler washed over him. He was ever the gambler. Fuck it, he decided. He lowered the rifle and just watched Tyler go. Eating his candy bar. Drinking his dope.
I’ll get you where folks ain’t so thick, he said. If I got you once, I can damn sure get you again. Who knows, I may even let you walk again. If it ain’t out of my reach. Like the cat told the mouse.
All day Tyler moved in the woods and all day the winds blew. He moved in a steady shifting of the depths of leaves that roiled and lifted and spun in whirlwinds and all he could hear was the rushing in the trees above him as if he moved through some convergence of all the world’s winds.
The perpetual winds grated on his nerves and he hoped they would abate with nightfall but they did not. He went on bearing what he judged was northeast well into the night by what moonlight there was and he moved through a world that was eerie and strange all black shadow and silver light. When he wearied he slept in a stumphole covered with dry leaves and even in his dreams he listened to the creaking of the branches bowering him and he dreamed stormtossed shipson perilous seas. He awoke once and the wind blew still, and he could hear the soft clashing of dry leaves and from somewhere in the night the faroff and faint chimes of belled goats or cattle, and he drew comfort that beyond all this dark there was somewhere a world of lights and men.
In his hushed world of locked doors and drawn shades Breece went dragging the radio across the hardwood floor. Its feet left little skidmarks on the waxed oak. This radio was a huge wooden Crosley console he could barely get his arms around and it was heavier than he’d expected. He ended up with a shoulder against it sliding it toward the double door that opened onto what had become the heart of Breece’s home, what he considered the business end of the embalming business, the parlor that held his worktable and pumps and chemicals and all the tools of his trade.
In other more social days Breece had told folks he listened to symphonies and concertos but in truth he had become addicted to a series of soap operas that divided his afternoons into fifteen minute increments. Our Gal Sunday, Young Widder Brown, Stella Dallas. Pepper Young’s Family. Tales of women jerked from obscurity into improbable adventures. Young girls from tiny Colorado mining towns who married rich and titled Englishmen, backstage wives who wondered in their more fatalistic moments if there was romance and happiness at the age of thirty-five, and beyond.
This
was a baffling world that had become as tactile and real as his day-to-day existence. Yet a comforting limbo where it took forever for anything to be resolved, a vast slowmoving pageantry of incremental crisis, tales of folk who never developed an immunity to amnesia so that they caught it with bewildering regularity, who were constantly being framed and standing trial for murder, folks whose very identities seemed in constant flux because other folks were always stealing their identities and pretending to be them. Doppelgangers posing as wastrel scions of wealthy families rumored long lost in the Mateo Grosso were always turning up for the reading of the wills. Homespun philosophers ruminated and spat and shuffled and passed on shopworn homilies to descendents who didn’t want to hear them anyway and were black sheep forever wandering away from the flock.
He propped the doors wide with a hassock and a magazine rack and dragged the radio onto the tiled floor of the workroom. He stood for a moment breathing hard and perspiring almost audibly. He’d had a thought for one of the plastic tabletop radios that would have been more transportable but he’d tried one in the store and didn’t care for the tinny tone of it and thought of it as vastly inferior to the rich bass pronouncements and organ music that rolled authoritatively through the velvetcovered speakers of the Crosley. The Crosley’s words had the gravity of carved stone handed down ceremoniously from the mountain and a solemnity that dwarfed the tentative whinings of the tabletops. Anyway this room more and more was becoming his Badger’s den and he kept moving more of his favorite things into it until it had become living room and bedroom and above all his refuge from the world and its puzzling doings that transpired just outside his walls.
He was no more than inside the room before he halted his radio ministrations and closed the doors behind him. This doorhad a heavy lock that clicked to in an oiled reassuring manner and a solid deadbolt that he trusted and immediately shoved home. He felt suddenly lighter, cares lifted from him, he felt he could waltz the radio across the room to the wallplug, and humming to himself he slid it across the tile and plugged it in.