by William Gay
“You hear about them fine Morgans Hardin’s got?” a man in the poolroom asked him.
“No. What sort of Morgans are they?
“Big stallion and two mares. Finelookin horseflesh.”
“Where’d he get em?” Blalock asked, though by now he knew.
“He told me he found em.”
“The hell he did,” Blalock said.
This was late on a Saturday evening and by good light on Sunday morning he was up and breakfasted and had the sideboards on the truck. A redhaired woman clad in a slip stood in the door and watched him make ready to leave. “You be careful,” she called but he didn’t say if he would or he wouldn’t.
He had turned in at the yard and was backing toward the outbuildings when Hardin stopped him.
“You tearin my yard all to hell Blalock. Ain’t you had no raisin? I never heard you say you could cross it or kiss my ass or nothin.”
Blalock looked down from the driver’s seat of the truck, his face tight and angry. He had been about halfmad all night anyway and he wanted his horses but an innate sense of caution had made him hope Hardin would still be asleep. By all odds he should have been after Saturday night but here was Hardin all wide awake and cleareyed at six o’clock of a Sunday morning, playing the country squire, smiling upon him despite the harshness of his words, a benign smile so transparently crafty it would not have deceived a child.
“I come for my horses.”
“Can you prove they’re yourn?”
“You know damn well I can.”
“I sort of thought you could. Get out awhile and we’ll talk about it.” He crossed over to the porch and stepped onto it. He hitched up his dress slacks and squatted not on the porch but on the heels of his shiny shoes.
“There ain’t nothin to talk about. I come after em. Figure up what I owe for their keep and send me a bill.”
“Whatever you say, you’re the doctor. I guess we could dicker about it. I figure you owe me somethin in the neighborhood of eight hundred dollars.”
Suspecting some defect in his hearing, Blalock sought clarification. “Eight hundred dollars? For what?”
Hardin arose and crossed the branch. Curiously birdlike, a graceless bird all joints and angles. Imprints of his shoulderblades through the thin yellow dress shirt he wore, morning sun off a gold cufflink when he pointed across the stream.
“I had me a fine corncrop there and they done wiped me out before I knew they was on the place. They came in the night.”
Apoplectic with rage Blalock swung open the door and leapt out. He slammed the door so hard the truck rocked on its springs and he strode past Hardin and across the stream and up the stony bank. Past the tilting dead cornstalks all he could see was Spanish nettled and sawbriars and great slabs of white limestone. He turned. Hardin was watching him amiably, a grin on his crooked face, hand pocketed and thumbs tucked in the loops of his trousers.
“And where is this fine corncrop?” Blalock asked.
Hardin had a sharpened kitchen match in his mouth for a toothpick. He withdrew it and threw it away. “I thought I said,” he told Blalock. “It’s gone. They eat it. They wiped me out.”
“Why, there ain’t a Goddamned thing out here but rocks and sawbriars. You couldn’t hire a fuckin stalk of corn to grow here.”
Hardin was deferential. “I admit it don’t look like much now,” he said. “But you ought to have seen it before your horses got in it.”
Blalock climbed back down the abutment and this time waded right through the branch. He was watching Hardin’s pocket trying to see did he have a gun there but he couldn’t tell. If he did it was a small one.
“If you think I’m givin you eight hundred dollars for a few bales of hay you’re crazy as hell. I’ll give you what I think’s fair and you can like it or not. Just whatever suits you. And I’ll tell you another thing. Anybody else would’ve let me know where them horses was. It takes a damn sorry feller to put up another man’s stock and not say a word about it. Especially a stallion worth as much as that one.”
“How’d I know whose they was? They ain’t got no license plates on em like say a automobile nor collars like a coonhound, and this old free-range shit has about played out. Most everybody keeps their stock up nowadays.”
“I do keep em up, Goddamn it. Somebody cut my fences.”
“Well.” Hardin shrugged. “It wasn’t me.” He walked back toward the truck and Blalock stood awkwardly for a moment and then followed.
“Why don’t you buy your own damn horses and leave mine alone?”
“Well, I’ll make you another deal. I’ll count you out five one hundred dollar bills for that horse right here and now. Then we’ll go have a little drink and forget we ever had words.”
“That horse ain’t for sale and you know it. And even if it was that wouldn’t make a down payment.”
“Whatever you think. Whether you go loaded or unloaded is all the same to me.”
“I’ll go loaded or by God, know the reason why?”
Hardin turned. “All right,” he said. “This is the reason. If you so much as trespass a foot farther onto my property, so much as open a gate or cut my fences, they will carry your dead ass out of here on a stretcher. They will load you up and haul you away. Do you understand me?”
“You’re crazy, you’re the one that’s goin to be hauled away.”
“Not so crazy I don’t know whose property we’re standing on.”
“Nor me either,” Blalock said. “Thomas Hovington’s.”
Watching the yellow eyes fade to slits Blalock thought for a second that he was a dead man. Had Hardin been carrying a pistol perhaps he would have been. There was a moment when things could have gone either way, and then his eyes widened a little and Hardin said, “Like I said it’s on you. You can bet or fold.”
“I’m suin you,” Blalock said. “I’m gettin a lawyer right now.”
“That’s fine. I’ll get me one too and while our lawyers is dickering back and forth and runnin up the tab, the price on the horse is goin down and the corn’s goin up.”
“I can’t talk to you,” Blalock said. He opened the door on the truck and climbed in. “I’ll be back,” he said. “I’ll get them papers and I’ll be back.”
“That don’t surprise me,” Hardin said.
There was a faint wash of light on the window curtains, a cessation then of the sound of an engine somewhere down the road. Hardin rose on his elbows and peered at the phosphorescent hands of the clock. It was after one o’clock. He lay back stiff and silent, listening, thinking, Well, why not? If they’re goin to try it they’ll try it now. Hovington’s dead and buried. He had always known without articulating it that Hovington was a kind of insurance policy as long as he lay dying. He knew the curious decorum of county folks, their superstitious fear of death and dying, and he had slept a little better at night, had not been afraid of the windowlights being shot out, the house being torched. That policy had lapsed now, and he thought of another, the Winchester leaning in the corner, a 30-06 in a land of .22-caliber squirrel rifles.
There was a long elastic interval between the faint hushing of the motor and any other sound so that he lay completely wide awake now, straining for any aberration in the night, his ears amplifying the whir of dryflies, and he thought, Well, is there anything or not? A carload of drunks? He immediately discarded that, he had never known drunks to remain so quiet. A courting couple, someone getting them a little? He had halfrelaxed when the first sound came, though less a sound than some suggestion of difference, of disquiet, some delicate change in the balance of the night, so that he was off the bed and halfway to the gun when the first firm step came on the porch. By the time the shoulder or whatever heavy it was slammed against the front door he was on the floor with the rifle in his arms and scrambling toward the back door aware of Pearl awakening in the bed behind him, her saying, “Dallas?” Then, “What is it, Dallas?” And of the girl crying out in the front room, the noise the latch made flying off and skit
tering across the linoleum. He was swearing running into and around dark objects that seemed conspired to snare him, as if the house and ultimately the night itself were aligned against him.
There were already two of them at the back door, garbed in white, faces obscured by masks, featureless save dark eyeholes. He felt hands clutch at him, jerk him forward, he could hear their grunts of triumph and something, a club or cudgel, caught him alongside the shoulder so that for an instant his left arm went dead and he was conscious of a great rush of relief, thinking, Sticks. The son of a bitches have just got sticks.
The moon was shining and the dusty yard gleamed lime mica. He was down in it for an instant, twisting a cheek against the ground, the cold rifle still beneath him, his elbows holding it against his naked stomach. “Help me hold him, Ray. The son of a bitch is gettin up.” He staggered up with one of them astride his back, an arm about his throat, and struck blindly with the barrel of the rifle, felt metal strike bone again and again till one of them said, “Can you get aholt of his fuckin gun?” The other man kept swinging the stick. The voice behind him said, “Goddamn, Ray, you hittin me, not him. Try to hit him just ever now and then.” A glancing blow to Hardin’s head knocked him halfsenseless and he felt his legs buckle.
He whirled and the man on his back slipped free. Hardin’s momentum spun him halfway around and he fell, sitting with one leg twisted beneath him, the rifle in his lap momentarily disoriented, seeing rising above him the gray bulk of the house and the play of flashlights at the windows, above the inkblack pyramid of the roofline the luminous fabric of the sky, all of it swimming sideways in a sick illusion of motion as if he alone was stationary, all the universe spinning dizzily past him.
He could hear Pearl and the girl screaming, he was dimly aware that they had been herded into the yard. He heard blows without knowing where they were coming from, who they were directed against. One of the men dove behind the hood of the truck just as Hardin fired and simultaneously there was the whang of the bullet and then the more solid thunk against the engine block. He could hear running footsteps, they seemed to come from everywhere. A man was sprinting desperately for the road, bobbing in the moonlight. Hardin aimed, took a breath and held it, squeezed the trigger almost gently. The man did an eerily comic dance in the roadbed, his right leg flung out rubbery and unhinged, the knee shot away. Then he fell forward, balled up in the driveway. Hardin could hear him moaning. The man halfrose and began to vomit.
Hardin wiped the blood out of his eyes. The hair at his temples was wet with it. He could hear the brush popping in a diminishing flurry and in a multitude of directions. In a little while the car cranked somewhere down the road and he could hear the tires in the gravel. Hardin grinned. He thought, The first son of a bitch there took off with the car and left the rest of them to walk it. There’ll be some sore feet and mad whitecaps in Ackerman’s Field in the mornin.
“Shut it up,” he told the girl. She was sitting on the doorstep crying. She did not cease. Her face was hidden by her hands and twin wings of long black hair.
“Did they hurt you?”
“No.”
“Then shut it up.”
Pearl leaned her head against a porch support. Her eyes were closed.
“Are you hurt?”
“They hit my legs with a big old stick or something. They never done me and Tom thisaway. This never happened before.”
“Nor is it likely to happen again. Can you walk?”
“I reckon. Let me see about your head.”
“Let it go. Just help me load him in the car. Get a bedspread or quilt or somethin out of the house and put it in the back. Bastard’s bleedin like a hog with its throat cut.”
She arose, stood massaging the flesh of her thigh. She seemed dazed or drunken. “You ain’t aimin to kill him, are you? I can’t stand no more trouble.”
“Just get it like I told you.”
Hardin backed the Packard up to where the man lay and opened the right rear door. He knelt beside the man. Apparently he had passed out. He lay unmoving but Hardin could hear the steady rasp of his breathing. He took out the bonehandled Case pocketknife and tested the blade with a thumb, slit the pillowcase and folded it aside like a caul.
Pearl stood looking down, a quilt draped across her arm.
“Who is he, Blackwell, Blackburn, Blacksomethin. I’ve seen him.”
“Why, that’s Mr Blackstock,” Pearl said. “He runs the drygoods store in town.”
“He’ll run the son of a bitch out of a wheelchair now if he runs it at all. No, I ain’t goin to kill him. If I killed him I’d have to hide him, and I don’t want him hid. I want him where folks can see him, ever day of his life, right there in that drygood store. Get that quilt laid out in there.”
The man was heavy and slack, a seemingly boneless weight they could hardly handle. When he was almost in Hardin fell to swearing at him and shoved him the rest of the way in with the door, leaning his weight against it until he heard the latch catch.
“Where do you live, Slick?” Hardin asked, neither expecting nor receiving an answer, glancing upward at the rearview mirror and not seeing the man either, just the top of the upholstery and the back glass where fled a landscape in motion, a retreating moonlit world with a blacktop highway snaking down the middle of it. He looked forward again and the night was coming in wisps and tatters of fog like clouds blown past the speeding car. The countryside was remote, locked in sleep. Off the blacktop then and back to chert and past old man Oliver’s unlit house and the orchard of dead apple trees, tree on tree looming at him from the silver roadside, unpruned branches gnarled and twisted and dead, charred bone juxtaposed against the seamless heavens like some childhood witchwood of myth or nightmare. Taking the curve the headlights yawned across the unkept yard and touched the windowpanes with illusory life, leapt past the hedge of alders gleaming white as bone the road straightened here and he accelerated onto the long stretch to town.
The old man roused from whatever state of halfsleep he habited and watched the wash of light across the faded wallpaper, arose and rested on his elbows till the light faded, the wall momentarily disappearing and then regaining visibility in the moonlight. For a moment he had thought the car was coming here, for a moment past and present had merged and he was unable to tell one from the other, dream from reality. Old days of crisis in the night, the knock at the door, the light at the window. Then he recognized the deepthroated roar of the Packard’s muffler and lay back listening to it fade away.
The town was in restless slumber as well but there was an allnight cabstand out of which a man named Wolf de Vries ran a bootlegging establishment and an almost perpetual poker game. Hardin parked in front of the cabstand and cut the lights and switch. He went in the front and passed by a desk where a woman slept with her mouth open and her head pillowed against a telephone and down a narrow hall to a locked green door. He knocked.
“Who is it?”
“Dallas Hardin.”
After a moment the door opened a crack and a face studied him. The door opened wider. Stale blue smoke boiled out and Hardin coughed. He fanned the air wildly. “Jesus Christ,” he said. “They goin to find ever one of you sots in here smothered to death some mornin. Does this place not have a winder?”
“Deal Hardin in,” de Vries called. De Vries was a quick little man with a slick, evasive face like a failed politician’s. “His money’s as good as anybody else’s”
Hardin studied the men circling the green baize table. “Looks like you got a full set of fools without me.”
De Vries had noticed the blood drying at Hardin’s temple. “What the hell happened to you? You been sorting cats?”
“No.” Hardin didn’t smile. “You know where a feller name of Blackstock lives? Runs a drygood store.”
“Charles Blackstock? Sure. West Fourth Street, right behind the school. Why?”
“I got him out in the car. Him and some whitecaps or Kluxers or some damn thing come down to the house
to teach me a lesson.”
“Is he dead?”
“No, but he may have wished he was a time or two.”
The men at the table arose and followed Hardin back through the cabstand. The woman had awakened and her face wore a stunned, vapid look as if she did not know where she was, or care.
Blackstock was conscious as well. He stirred on the back floorboard, said something unintelligible. His eyes stared at the faces ringing the windows of the Packard but did not remark them. He flung an arm across his face as if the light bothered him. His trouserleg from the knee down was saturated with coagulating blood.
“Shitfire,” de Vries said. “You better get him to a hospital fore you’re lookin a murder charge in the face.”
Hardin got behind the wheel, cranked the engine. “By the way,” he said, “you didn’t by any chance know anything about this, did you? Or know anybody else who might be in on it?”
“Hell no, Hardin. They may hit me next.”
“No. It was me they wanted.”
The man remained conscious all the way to his house, mumbling something incoherent, prayer, blasphemy, benediction. When Hardin opened the door and laid a hand on either side of his shirtfront the eyes opened and when Hardin jerked as hard as he could the face blanched lifeless and the eyes rolled back and he went to sleep again. Hardin laid him in the dewy grass and sat down breathing hard. As he arose a black dog loped around the corner of the house, paused, its hackles rising. It growled deep in its throat.
Hardin had the pocketknife out. “Try it if you feel lucky,” he told the dog. The dog hushed and then dropped to its belly and began to inch along the ground toward the wounded man.
Hardin got back in the car and blew the horn. The dog turned and lay watching him across the fallen man. Hardin lit a cigarette with the gold lighter, turned to study the house. It was silent and dark. He blew the horn again, longer, puffed the cigarette, his image reflected back by the windshield fiercely orange, a curious fiery face with black recesses for eyes.
The porchlight came on. The door opened and a woman stood under the lightbulb tying the belt of a yellow robe. She raised a hand to her face and stood staring at the crumpled man on the lawn. She opened her mouth to speak but the Packard abruptly cut off whatever she said. Hardin glanced back once and she was running down the walk.