by William Gay
He wondered what the truth was, secretly doubted there was any truth left beneath the shifting weight of myth and folklore. Truth had changed the way the landscape had changed to accommodate progress, altered by each generation to its purpose. He had learned from the talk of old men that there was no such thing as truth, truth was always shaded by perception and expectation. And the old man’s truth might not be Winer’s. Hodges had said that the old man himself had killed two mean, but Oliver had never spoken of it. Now that too was layered with time, had held truth only in the bright millisecond of all time it occupied, now there was the old man’s truth, the dead men’s survivors’ truth, the court’s truth, all of them separate truths men had sworn to. Winer disregarded them all.
“One thing about gettin old,” Oliver was saying. “You can watch another feller work and not feel guilty about it. Though whether or not what that feller’s doin qualifies as work depends on whether you’re payin or gettin paid.”
The man had forsaken the shovel for a mattock and was flailing at the earth. A darkhaired girl came out and took up the shovel with what from a distance seemed reluctance. The pale man ceased and stood gazing thoughtfully off into space then recommenced with renewed enthusiasm when a tall man came into the yard and stood watching them.
“I guess they’ll get it now,” the old man said. “There’s Old Nick in the flesh.”
“Hardin?”
“Whatever he’s goin by now.”
Winer turned as if to share Oliver’s jest but the leathery face showed no sign that the old man had not been serious.
“What do you suppose he’s buildin down there?”
“More room for his meanness, I guess.” Oliver braced himself on the handcarved stick and arose, gaunt and ungainly against the blue void, a figure himself of myth perhaps, an Old Testament patriarch marvelously transported to 1943 and finding the world not entirely to his liking. “The harder times get for everbody else the better they get for folks like Hardin,” Oliver said.
Motormouth’s wife Ruby had left him for what she described as good and all in August. Ruby was a bitch but there was no news in that. She had always been a bitch. He had divined that even when she had been a little girl in white crinoline and white shoes holding her father’s hand on the way to church she was already a bitch, though a more diminutive and less strident one. She had been a bitch in her cradle, a tiny, toothless bitch at her mother’s breast. Motormouth had known all this and had married her anyway, planning to reform her.
The ink had barely dried on their marriage license when she had cuckolded him. He had caught them at a deserted racetrack, naked in the backseat of an old Ford. She had been with a high school junior who was not even seventeen years old. He had been scared so badly he could not even get his pants on, had both feet stuffed into the same trouserleg and was just madly jumping up and down as if he were trying to drive himself into them and escape from sight. Motormouth had been appalled. “Why, he’s not even on the Goddamned football team,” he told her.
He used to get up in the mornings after she had left him and make himself a pot of coffee and just head out. He didn’t have a job anymore and he subsisted on whatever he could eke out. As time drew on his wants became simpler. He used to work some for Abner Lyle at the service station. He would patrol the main highway west of town. He had the old rustcolored Chrysler tricked out with a removable redlight and a siren and he used to cruise the highways like a predator, a hawk on the wing, riding the updrafts and scanning the earth for a victim. Motormouth’s victims were little-old-lady schoolteachers on vacation, elderly couples who appeared prosperous and looked as if they did not know much about automobiles.
“Looks like you about to run a wheel off,” he would tell them once he got them stopped. They always looked apprehensive even before he told them, for there was nothing reassuring in his appearance, Motormouth with his old junker like something from a junkdealer’s dreams, encrusted with blinking lights and reflector mudflaps and various animal tails descending from high, looping police antennas. Him with his cap in hand, puckish-faced hangdog, the bearer of bad tidings, wheelbearings shot, rearends about to fall out. His fey leprechaun’s eyes were halfmad and the lies strung from his mouth like spittle, a demented spider who would draw them into his web. “Just drive right slow to Abner Lyle’s fillin station,” he would tell them. “I’ll foller ye case ye have trouble.”
“Thank you,” they would say uncertainly.
“Lots of folks would just drive on and go about their business,” he would tell them. “But I believe in helpin my feller man.”
As autumn dew on he lived an increasingly precarious existence, sleeping wherever dark or exhaustion overtook him, a curious nomad, homeless as a gypsy, the old Chrysler parked in brush by the river’s edge, out of sight at some roadside table. He took to carrying soap and a razor and a change of clothing and he would just stay out for days at a time.
Listening to the radio in the falling night by the river the disc jockey’s voice overlay an incessant crying of frogs and the voices became his consorts, all there was of friendship left in the world. Silences elongated, for there were fewer and fewer people who would listen to Motormouth’s troubles. His face in these solitary hours between waking and the drugged unconsciousness he accepted as sleep took on a peculiarly serious look, a kind of slackjawed thoughtfulness as if all his resources were locked in concentration, devising a way out of the quandary he found himself in. Sometimes while the voices and guitars underlined his plight he feared madness, thought, I've got to get a hold of myself, but he could not find the handle. By day he’d spend the kickbacks Lyle paid him at Hardin’s or wherever temptation and opportunity coincided, sure of an audience as long as he parceled out his worn greenbacks.
His theory was that all would have gone well had it not been for the Blalock brothers. “If I could just keep the sons of bitches away from her,” he told Hardin one day. “If me and her was off to ourselves and let alone I know she’d be all right. But they’re like a pack of Goddamn dogs around her. I had it all to do over I’d marry somebody so ugly nobody would even fuck her.”
“There is nobody that ugly,” Hardin told him from the height of his experience. Hardin was whittling with a big bonehandled Case pocketknife, carving something unrecognizable from soft red cedar. He favored Motormouth with a look of sour condescension. “People will fuck anything,” he said. “Chickens, cows, sheep, each other. They’ll fuck watermelons and cucumbers. Anything with a hole in it or that’s soft enough to cut one, somebody somewhere will fuck it.”
This romantic view of the world of Eros did not sit well with Motormouth. “Ruby ain’t like that,” he said sullenly.
Hardin would listen to Motormouth’s incessant monotone as long as there was money left to spend but when Motormouth began stretching out his last beer and letting it warm in his hands Hardin would know he was broke and he would grow restless, wanting him gone, his sad stories falling on other ears. “I’ll tell you how it is, Hodges,” he said. “It’s a fact of life and you might as well face it. When you lay down with the hogs you ain’t got but two choices. You can waller with em in the mud or you can get clean away from em. You can’t have it both ways.”
Motormouth lurched drunkenly to his feet, the Coke crate falling behind him against the house. “I didn’t come here to be made sport of,” he said, running a big freckled hand through his hair, his face seized with besotted dignity. “And furthermore Ruby ain’t no hog.”
He looked for a moment as if he might reseat himself, then thought better of it and shambled around the corner of the house. After a while they heard the Chrysler cough and start.
“Hodges had to draw light in ever pot he was ever in,” Wymer told Hardin. “But he really outdone hisself on that Blalock deal. Cecil Blalock took to wantin to screw that gal Motormouth was married to so he got his brother Clyde to go over and get Motormouth to go coonhuntin. They was coonhuntin heavy there for a while. Motormouth was always b
raggin about it, he thought they wasn’t nobody like Clyde Blalock. Me and Clyde this, me and Clyde that. What fine coondogs Clyde had. And all the time Cecil screwin her right in Motormouth’s bed an then him and Clyde sniggerin about it.”
“It does sound like he’s missin a face card or two,” Hardin said.
“Hell, he used to ride em around in that old car. Him and Clyde in the front and her and Cecil settin in the back.”
“He talks like he thinks a right smart of her.”
“Yeah, I guess so. But he done it to himself. He’s just too dumb to live.”
Hardin sat for a time in silence, just listening to Wymer talk. Hardin lived in a world he manipulated day to day, you never knew when a piece of information might have a use. Life was a jigsaw puzzle someone had kicked apart on the day Hardin was born and he was still putting it back together a piece at a time, turning each section this way and that to see where it fit. He sat listening and whittling while Wymer talked on and the evening shadows lengthened.
She had been gone for over forty years and Oliver would have thought her forgotten long ago. Wherever she was she was old or maybe even dead but that was not the way he remembered her, for in some curious way she had transcended the ravages of the years. From where she waited in time she still looked the way she had that morning long ago when she had walked through the door with no backward look, not even pulling the door to, just across the porch with her shoulders stiffened and into the road.
He seldom thought of her except in fall, and he could not have said why that was. Something in the way the skies looked or the woods smelled sent him reeling down the years. The leafy hill he and Winer were climbing became transient in time, could have been the same hill forty years before.
Course, I wouldn’t change things now if I could, he thought hastily. Except about Willie and maybe if that changed the rest would too, for that was the root it growed from. But I wouldn’t beg her to stay even now. I never begged man or woman for any blessed thing. But if it would do any good I would about the boy—
“Let’s blow awhile,” he said aloud. “I can’t tramp these hills like I used to.”
Winer paused and seated himself on a stump on the hillside.
“We ain’t goin to find no sang in this holler anyway,” William Tell Oliver said. “Damn cordwood trucks and saws had ruint it. I reckon they’ll keep on cuttin till all timber biggern a broomhandle is hauled off to them chemical plants.”
“I guess the country around here’s a lot different that it was when you were a boy.”
“Oh Lord, yes. But you know, you always hearin about how things is growin but I don’t know. The way I see it it’s gone down. They was thirty-five hundred people livin at Riverside then and now they ain’t nothin but a grocery store. That and them old wrecked furnaces. The railroad tracks run all the way to Centerville then and the train run ever day haulin out pigiron. Boy, that was a rough place. Saturday nights Riverside was lit up like a Christmas tree.
“And Napier was boomin too, they was minin iron ore over there. Worked over there for a while. Me and this other feller swung fifty-pound sledgehammers. All this raw ore come down a big chute with water runnin through it to wash the dirt out. They had it rigged where it come out of the river, didn’t have no pump or nothin like that. These big chunks of ore comin tumblin off the chute and we had to bust em up. He’d swing and I’d swing. All day long. They Godamighty. Fifty-pound hammers. Now I doubt I could pick one up.”
“I bet it was rough around here back then.”
“Well. It was tolerable rough. That bunch around Riverside was more roughhouse than mean, though they was a few cuttins and the like when they got to drinkin. But I’ll tell you what, I’d take a week of it over thirty minutes down at Hardin’s on a Saturday night. We used to have a lot of dances down there back then. Wasn’t much else to do. Course, they wasn’t enough women to go around but everbody would get drunk and listen to the music.”
The night he met her the fiddle played: You ought to see my Cindy, she lives away down south…
They came out of the dance arm in arm to a balmy Saturday night and the local boys had run off his mule. She’d been tied to a tree in the schoolhouse yard but she was long gone now. He’d walked Cindy home and kissed her. As he’d been walking (twelve miles, to this day he could not remember passing through Rockhouse, or crossing the river, though that was the only way. As if he’d floated or been in a trance) home out of Riverside someone had thrown a railroad spike at him and it had sung past his head, turning end over end. He could still hear the vicious fluttering sound it made in the air. He’d whirled but there’d been no one there.
“They say folks was mean at Napier back then.”
“What? Oh well, I reckon they was. Riverside couldn’t hold Napier a light for rough. They had a bunch of them whitecaps over there tried to run everbody’s business. Take folks out and whup em, that sort of stuff. But the truth is people don’t change much. Individuals change, me and you change, but people in general just keep on bein people. All you can do is just try to pull yourself up as high as you can. Your own self, that’s all you can be helt accountable for. Sometimes you’ll think folks is gettin a higher foot on the ladder, and then here comes a son of a bitch like Hardin and it all goes out the winder with the dishwasher. But you can’t worry about that. Leave that to the preachers, they get paid for it.”
Winer was silent a time. Past the timbered horizon and west was awash with purple. Whippoorwills began to call one to the other tree to tree. With falling light the woods took on a quality of ambiguity, as if nothing were quite what it seemed.
“Don’t it bother you living by yourself all the time?” he finally asked the old man.
“Well, I don’t reckon. It did awhile, some time ago. Course, a man don’t always get his druthers, he has to make do sometimes. Why?”
“I don’t know. I was just thinking about Motormouth Hodges. Him and his wife split up and his wife took up with somebody else. He acts like he’s about halfcrazy. Tryin to get her back all the time.”
“He ort to let it lay, but it ain’t for me to advise nobody. And Lord knows a man can’t always do what he ort to. Me, I got used to livin by myself. When you come right down to it, a man’s always by hisself anyhow. When push to comes shove all you got’s yourself.”
“Leavin? Leavin where?” He’d come in off the third shift and she had her suitcase already packed. He’d come home an hour early, had the furnace not broken down she’d have been down the road and gone. “It come up might sudden,” he said. “And might hard too for you to set out walkin four miles to town.”
“It’s nothin to me. I’m going and you can’t stop me.”
“The hell I can’t.” She’d been standing by the bed and he’d pushed her back, gently laid his weight against her, his hands cupped her face. He’d kissed her, but the face was dead, she lay quite still without looking at him, staring at the ceiling, he did not exist anymore. He laid a wrist across her throat: he’d been feeding the boilers at Napier then, loading them three times an hour with iron ore, and his arms were thick and corded with muscle. He had never hit her but he was dizzy for a moment with an awareness of his own strength. He could have broken her neck, crushed her throat in his hands, but he could not get what he wanted or make her do anything but that she had already made up her mid to do.
“It’s that son of a bitch on Jack’s Branch, ain’t it.”
“Jack’s Branch or China, it’s all the same to you. I’m leavin.”
It was a week before Rayner came by.
“Rasbury talked to Clyde and knows you ain’t sick. He said to tell you he’d hold your job for twenty-fours hours and then that’s it. He’s hirin somebody else.”
“You tell Rasbury I said hold it or drop it, or just whatever suits him.”
“Oliver, what the fuck’s the matter with you? You look like death warmed over and this place is a Goddamned pigsty. What're you doin?”
“What does
it look like I’m doin?”
“It looks like you're tryin to crawl down the neck of a whiskey bottle. And to my way of thinkin makin pretty fair progress.”
“I lived by myself a lot of years,” Oliver said. “Used to work twelve hours and walk home and feed the stock by lanternlight. Cook and eat and hit the bed and in the mornin tryin to farm. Back that night at the furnaces. A man that busy don’t have much time for feelin sorry for hisself.” He looked westward, arose stiffly. The last of the light had drained off, the might crept up like rising waters. “We stayed longern I meant to. We don’t get out of this mess of tops fore good dark we’ll be here in the mornin.”
Nights Motormouth spent time like linty change fished up from the pockets of his jeans. Drinking in the Snowwhite Cafe, Hardin’s. In the Snowwhite a slanteyed whore with a mop of curly black hair give him a halfsmile he carried with him into the cooling night, where his only other comfort was the slow drift of the Chrysler’s wheels in the gravel, his only absolute the moonlit road coming at him like gleaming cable unreeling dizzily from a spool.
Out of town then, where the last of the streetlights were sentries marking civilization’s end, all that dark beyond them a world in flux, unclaimed, provinces without dominion. A world up for grabs, where a man with an eye for the angles might make a stand. Here where the light pooled and gave the slick pavement the gleam of dark glass he went, reflected headlights tracking below like something sinister pacing him just beneath the surface of the earth, car and anticar snaking past the city limits and gone, looking perhaps for the deceptively simple curve where matter and antimatter collided in a brief and fatal explosion, the slow rain of falling glass, the tilting headlights limning panoramic birches white as bone, the grinding wrench of crumpling metal, sweet peace.
For there where nights when Hodges sought death like a brother, courted it like a longlost lover, a bitter and unnamed grief lodged in his breast like a stone. If I can make it at seventy-five, can I make it at eighty? he’d wonder, the mysteries of physics spread before him, a clinical coolness settling over him. Hands steady on the wheel, the fruitjar cocked between his thighs, the spiel of disc jockeys a dislocated and demented commentary on the onslaught of night coming at him faster and faster, a dark frieze of trees and mailboxes and nameless tenant houses. Then at the moment he was sure of his control a feeling of elation almost orgasmic would seize him, he’d slow and raise the fruitjar and drink to the fates pacing him who’d seen fit to spare him once again, some joy perverse and sweetly erotic.