by William Gay
The fat man was on his hands and knees trying to get his handkerchief out. Winer was standing over him to see if he tried to help Jiminiz but this was an idea that seemed not to have occurred to him. “A doctor,” he said, looking at his bloody hands. “A doctor.”
There wasn’t any doctor. There was just the frantic barkeep on the phone and a door that looked miles away from the jukebox singing, I have no one to love me except the sailor on the deep blue sea.
When the sirens began Winer was trying to haul Buttcut off Jiminiz. Buttcut was hitting him in the face. “The law’s coming,” Winer said.
“I’ll learn you,” Buttcut said. “Now beg me to quit.” Jiminiz wouldn’t beg.
Jiminiz said, “Fuck you,” through broken teeth.
The law came through the door and didn’t waste any time. Cooper hit Buttcut alongside the head with a slapstick and a pair of highway patrolmen hauled Winer up between them and started for the door. The girl would stay with him. She swung onto his arm. A young hatchetfaced patrolman named Steele turned from Winer momentarily to disengage her, his face turned in profile to Winer was red and freckled, a sharp, intent face. The expression was that of someone immersed in his work, a surgeon perhaps, removing some unwanted growth. It was a curious electric moment. Winer would always remember, the peculiar birdlike feeling of her hand clutching his arm and Steele peeling back one talon at a time, the grip finally lessening. When he struck Steele in the jaw the other patrolman blackjacked Winer and he dropped as if his knees had turned to water.
He sat groggily on the floor. The world darkened then lightened. Intercut with still photographs of the girl’s pale face were random images like sequences in a film improperly spliced: Buttcut holding Cooper aloft by the ankles and upside down and Cooper flailing wildly with the slapstick and cursing Buttcut’s knees. Then Buttcut dropped him and kicked him in the side and stepped across his body into the waiting arms of the highway patrolmen and Winer could hear their labored breathing and after a while Steele say, “He says he’ll come peaceable if we let him ride in the front.”
“Let the big motherfucker drive for all of me,” Cooper said. “I believe he’s tore somethin aloose inside of me.”
The cold air of black night, cold frost on the chrome doortrim. The Packard waiting like a hearse. A hard hand in his back and his cheek on the icy concrete, stars spinning out faint and fainter above the flaring streetlamps. So far, so far.
Then Buttcut’s legs drawing back. Winer’s eyes watching just that, fascinated, the knees coming up in slow motion, the denim tightening over them until you thought it would split, Cooper half-turning, his mouth opening, big brogans kicking out and the windshield exploding in a slow drift of safety glass and the onrush of icy air and the steering wheel clocking as the car slewed against the curb.
8
Bellwether bore the sad tidings to Oliver and sat with his feet cocked on the hearth while the old man digested them in silence save the loud tick of a clock measuring out the moments.
“I asked him was there anybody he wanted let know,” Bellwether said. “He first said no, then he named you.”
“What’s he charged with?”
“Disorderly conduct and assault.”
“What about that Chessor boy?”
“Them two plus public drunkenness. Resistin arrest and assault with intent to commit murder. Destruction of private property, destruction of city property.”
“They Lord God.”
“There may be a few more by now. The returns are still comin in.”
“And you say he whupped that Mexcan feller?”
“I’d say so. He had to have this jaw wired together and he’s got a mouthful of busted-up teeth. He just got generally stove up.”
“What do you reckon Chessor’ll get out of it?”
“He’s good for eleven-twenty-nine anyway.”
The old man arose, turned his back to the heat from the stove. “I’ll tell you what I’m goin to do,” he said. “When his bond is set I aim to go it. I aim to stand good for it, then I’m goin to tell him to ease hisself across the stateline and be gone. What do you think of that?”
“I think you’ll be out some money.”
“In my time I’ve spent more and got less out of it.” Oliver opened the stovelid and spat into the fire. Flickering flames lacquered his brown face with orange. “You ever get anything back on that skeleton?”
“Skull,” Bellwether said. “I was comin to that. Well. It was Winer all right.”
“We knowed that. Have you told that boy yet?”
“No. I’ve got to though. It’s not somethin I’m looking forward to.”
“I wish you’d hold up a day or two. He’ll kill Dallas Hardin and turn twenty-one in Brushy Mountain state pen.”
“No, he won’t. There’s no proof Hardin even shot him. Mr. Oliver.”
“Why, shitfire. You know as well as I’m settin here that Hardin shot him.”
“Knowin ain’t provin. I can know all day long but what a jury’s goin to want to know is how I know.”
“Young Winer ain’t that picky,” Oliver said.
After Bellwether had gone Oliver went to bed but he could not sleep. He lay in the darkness staring at the unseen ceiling. Over the past few days a plan had presented itself for his consideration, little by little, like an image forming on a photographic plate. If I got to do it then this is the only time, he thought. They boy don’t know yet and he’s out of the way in jail. I won’t get this kind of shot at it again. God knows somebody’s got to do it. And it looks like it’s goin to have to be me.
William Tell Oliver went three times to the sheriff’s office before he caught Cooper there with Bellwether. He pushed the door open a little way and Bellwether was arranging papers in a drawer and Cooper was turning at the noise the door made opening with a cup of coffee in his hand. Cooper looked ill used. His face was battered and swollen and he moved with the caution of a man aware of the fragility of each internal organ.
“Lord God,” Oliver said. “What happened to you?”
Cooper just turned away, a sneer deepening further the asymmetry of his discolored face.
Oliver addressed Bellwether. “I paid that boy’s fine,” he said. “But the judge is keepin him till tomorrow mornin anyhow. They ain’t even set bond. They still studyin about it.”
“Well. That’s between you and the judge, Mr. Oliver. I don’t have anything to do with that end of it.”
“I know. That ain’t what I come about.” He leaned on the desk, his hands cupping the rim and supporting his weight. The hands looked dark and gnarled and bewenned and they looked like something carved with infinite patience from knotty walnut.
“I figured when I brought that thing in yins would scout around a little and maybe find somethin out about it. But I reckon not. Yins send it off to Nashville and let em take pictures of it or whatever and doctors look at it through microscopes And it ten year out of the ground it ort to’ve been in and no words said over it and no end in sight. Well, I wanted to stay out of it all I could but I see I can’t. If yins can’t find the straight of it then, I’ll have to tell you the rest of it.”
Bellwether’s eyes were halfclosed and he wore a patient, bemused look. He rested a jaw on a cupped palm. “All right, Mr. Oliver,” he said. “Pull you up a chair and drop the other shoe. You beens settin with it drawed back long enough.”
They sat in the squadcar. Small, cold wind out of the north, a rattle of frozen trees. All was dark save the random orange pulse of Cooper’s cigarette, then Hardin’s gold lighter flared, his broken profile twinned by the glass beyond it, then darkness again and the sudden rasp of his voice.
“What then?”
“The he said about dark both of you got into a Diamond-T truck. Said his goats was out and he was huntin em up that branch-run and kindly keepin out of sight in the brush, listening for their bells. Said he was lookin right at the truck when all at once the inside of it just lit up yeller and he he
ard a boom and directly you got out draggin Winer toward where that big old pit of a thing is.”
Cooper could see Hardin’s vague dark outline. When Hardin grinned he could see his teeth. “That old son of a bitch,” he said. “That sweet old son of a bitch.” There was something akin to admiration in his voice as if upon coming across his traits encoded idiosyncratically in others he could not help but feel kindly toward their possessors. “Course you know it’s all a pack of lies.”
“Course,” Cooper said automatically.
“You think that old man’s been settin on a piece of information like that for ten years? The shit he has. He’d a done had me in the pen or a pauper, one or the other. Either that or the worms would’ve finished up with him a long time ago.”
“Well, I knowed all along he was lyin.”
“Did you? Somehow I doubt it, Cooper. What you know is what you heard last. When you hear Oliver you know that and then when I talk that’s what you know.”
Cooper didn’t say anything for a moment as if he were marshalling his forces. “I know one thing,” he said. “I know Bellwether’ll be after Humphries till he issues a warrant first thing Monday mornin and he’ll be on your doorstep before the ink’s good and dry on it.”
“Say it comes to trial, Cooper. Just supposin I wasn’t able to prove I was innocent and it all boiled down to my word agin his. What do you think would happen?”
“Well.” Cooper seemed flattered that his judgment was sought, paused to give it added weight. “I’ll tell you just what I think. That old man has lived here in this county all his life and you won’t find a man he lied to. He’s been rough in his day and had his ups and downs but he’d have to have a awful good reason to come up with a tale like that.”
“He’s got it too. That Goddamn Winer boy smartin off right and left. Whoever did kill old man Winer ort to’ve got to him before he went to seed.” He fell silent, studyin the contents of his wallet. “I thought Jiminiz could teach him a lesson but I see I misplaced my trust. Next time it’ll be just me and him and one on each end of a gunbarrel and he won’t get off so light.”
“What do you want me to do?”
“Get me Dr. Sulhaney. Go down to Clifton tonight and tell him I got to see him tomorrow. Not no telephone, tell him I said come. I’ll put that old son of a bitch so far back in the crazyhouse he’ll wish he’d stuck to goats and ginseng.”
“Sulhaney won’t come cheap.”
“He never did. Doctors ain’t cheap, just deputy sheriffs. Get me that old whiteheaded lawyer Hull too. He looks like a damn senator or a preacher or somethin.”
Cooper was watching the pocketbook with the hypnotic eye of a serpent studying a bird. “Hull ain’t cheap neither,” he said. “It’ll cost you a arm and a leg.”
“I can always grow another one,” Hardin said expansively. “I’ve done it before.”
Bitter cold and timber frozen to the heart kept Simmons’ log crew from the woods and drove them to the warmth of Sam Long’s coalstove, clustered before the hearth amongst the ancient Coke-crate idlers. Beyond the redlettered LONG’s on the fogged windows the wind sang hard pellets of hominy snow along the sidewalks, harried children from their dimestore visions, Christmas enshrined out of reach beneath plateglass.
As it was wont to do, the conversation of these malingers had started with Dallas Hardin and it had remained there.
“All right, say he done it,” Sam Long said. “I don’t know if he did or he didn’t but say he did. You think he’ll get day one out of it? Why, hell no. They can’t prove he had a thing in the world to do with it.”
“Who told it?”
“Hell, everbody’s tellin it. You think you can keep a thing like that quiet? The only way’s to find it and squirrel it away the way they say the old man Oliver did. I don’t know who told it first. Teed Niten’s wife works in the registrar’s office and she said that whole courthouse bunch is talkin about it.”
“Well, you’re right about one thing,” Simmons said. “He won’t do no time. But reckon it’s Winer sure enough?”
“That’s what the government dentist record said. He was World War I. It was Winer all right. Winer with a hole in his skull the size of a number three washtub.”
“You remember when Hardin was supposed to’ve shot old man Wildman? Shot him in the road the way you would shoot a dog and claimed self-defense. Wildman’s mama, she seen it but Lord, she was old, must’ve been ninety if she was a day. Fore it was over Hardin got a doctor to swear she was crazy and had drawed it all up in her head. Hardin got her committed to Boliver and I believe she died there in 1935.”
“Yeah,” a man named Pope said. “Hardin went to Ratcliff and tried to get him to sign some papers but Ratcliff just laughed at him. Charged him five dollars for a consultation and told him to go to hell. Two or three mornins later Ratcliff went up the steps to open his office and here was a big brown poke with the top rolled down. He thought at first it was okry or stringbeans or somethin of that sort, it was summer and folks used to pay him with garden stuff or just whatever they had. Then that poke moved. Ratcliff hit it with his walkin stick and out come this big old velvettail rattlesnake. He said he like to had a stroke right there. That’s what he said but he was able to kill it with his stick and drive to Mormon Springs and throw it on Hardin’s porch. That’s what got me about it. Why didn’t Hardin kill him or burn him out? Less he just always knowed who he had his bluff in with and who he didn’t.”
“Bluff, hell,” Long said. “Ask Nathan Winer about his bluff. Senior or junior.”
“That boy’s peculiar,” Simmons said. “Acts like he’s about half-smart.”
“That boy’s all right,” Long said. “If I was Hardin I’d be dreadin him worse than anybody else. Hardin’ll have to kill him to stop him.”
Amidst the longforsaken oddments of scrapiron Oliver found a thin length of steel with two screwholes that when he hacksawed it aligned themselves with the jambs of the front door. He drove nails through the holes across the closed door and then went into the kitchen.
Figuring Hardin for a backdoor man, he set the leatherbottomed ladderback perpendicular to and about six feet inside the kitchen door. He backed off a time or two and eyed it from different angles, repositioned it slightly to his liking. He toenailed the chair to the kitchen floor with eightpenny nails and lashed the Browning shotgun to the back of the chair with pliers clipping the excess neatly and feeling to see was the gun tied securely. He looped a slipknot of staging around the trigger and down through the rungs of the chair and across the torn linoleum to the door and he stood for a time studying it. It presented a complication. The door opened inward. He thought about it then pushed the door, closed it, took up slack in his line, and reknotted the staging. This time there was a dry click when the door was halfopen. Oliver closed the door and recocked the gun and stood studying it. He packed his pipe and lit it with a kitchen match and went outside and came through the kitchen door.
He had thought so. When the hammer fell he was standing aside to come through the opening the way a man comes through a door and the blast might have torn an arm off but Oliver was not hunting arms this night. He went back and retightened the staging once more and this time the click came when the door was open only an inch or so and a man would be fully in front of it. He nodded thoughtfully to himself. It was a neat, workmanlike job.
Oliver was a man of many cautions so he toenailed each window save one to the ledge so that the kitchen door would be the only access. He had an old hammerless Smith and Wesson revolver and he checked the load and slid it down into a jumper pocket and filled a quart fruitjar with coffee. He took down a cardboard box emblazoned with faded flying ducks and took out one of the waxed red cylinders and loaded the gun and cocked it. He raised the kitchen window and set out the hammer and the nails and coffee and as an afterthought a folded blanket and with some difficulty maneuvered himself outside. He nailed the window closed and took up the coffee and blanket and went on to
the barn.
Dark was falling and a cold wind out of the north arose but it was warm wrapped in the blanket and bundled down into the hay. He was hoping for a light night, for he’d have to keep watch on the door. The only visitor he expected was Hardin, for he had seen to it that Winer was still in jail, but still he wanted a good view of the back door and plenty of time to warn folks wandering toward his kitchen.
It grew darker till and the world blurred and vanished in blue murk, then a cold December moon cradled up out of the apple orchard and hung like corpse candle over a haunted wood.
It’ll have to be tonight, he thought. Tonight is all we’ve got, me and Hardin. Still, I’ll be here till two or three o’clock in the mornin.
Infrequent cars passed, then about eight or nine o’clock the traffic picked up and he lay watching the Saturday-night revelers and sipping the now cold coffee and wondering what these folks would think if they knew they were calling on a dead man. He stared at the dark rectangle of screendoor in the cold white moonlight and it held for him a peculiar fascination. It looked like the back door to hell.
The curious altered time of three o’clock in the morning. Pearl sat watching Hardin and the girl. Hardin was as near drunk as he ever seemed to get and he kept feeding the girl whiskey and Coke from his glass. She was watching with a sense of apprehension, a sense of things slipping away from her. Hardin leaned to the girl’s ear and whispered something low and then he laughed softly to himself and cupped her breast with a palm. The girl shook her head from side to side. She was tugging at Hardin’s hand. “Quit it,” she said. Hardin released her breast. He put both elbows on the scarred tabletop and studied the girl’s face with an almost clinical detachment. Her eyes looked drowsy and vague, her face had a slack sleeprobbed look.