by Larry Brown
“Well, I’m gonna fix me another drink,” he said. “You want some more orange juice?”
“I got to go,” she said, and she got up and handed him the glass. He took it and then she put her arms around him and held him. He hugged her only a little, fearing to hurt the unborn child. She drew back and looked at him, the top of her head only level with his chin.
“I love you, Daddy,” she said. “I’ll see you.”
She turned to go and he told her to wait a minute. He went back to the bedroom and got some money and brought it out to her.
“Here,” he said. He held out a hundred and a fifty and some twenties. She looked at it and shook her head.
“I didn’t come over here for money.”
“I know you didn’t. Take it. Hell. For doctor bills if nothing else. I know you got doctor bills.”
“I can’t depend on you for the rest of my life. Ain’t none of this your fault.”
“To hell with whose fault it is. Long as I’m able I’m gonna take care of you.” He put the money in her hand and closed her fingers around it. “It ain’t nothing but money.”
But it was not money she was looking at now. He turned his head. Connie stood in the hall in a short blue bathrobe.
“Excuse me,” she said, and went quickly back to the bedroom.
“Damn,” he said.
“Yeah. Damn’s right. She’s the same age as me. You know that? She was in the same grade as me. You ain’t never gonna change. Here. Keep your damn money. I don’t want it.”
She threw it in his face, and left. He didn’t try to call her back.
Wade had been dubious of the job to begin with, and now he was trapped in a living hell of steaming green timber. The men around him were moving like beaters through the lush jungle, breaking through the undergrowth, flailing wildly at the trunks and vines. They’d call out for water or poison, and a man would come running, bearing his refills in plastic milk jugs. Like winos they staggered through the tremendous heat. There were no rests or breaks. But there were yellowjackets to be contended with, and poison ivy, and sullen copperheads, which lay motionless and invisible against the brown leaves, becoming an actual part of them, lethargic and sluggish until the moment they chose to coil and strike.
Joe watched his two new hands from the top of a ridge. The old man stopped every two minutes, looked around, and leaned against a tree. When the boy went ahead too far, he called him back. Joe noted that it took one man working nearly full time just to keep this reluctant tree-killer watered. He lit a cigarette and slapped at a gnat on his neck.
Down in the great green hollow the old man tripped and almost fell. He was approaching a creek. The boy had crossed on a log and was already attacking the young sycamores on the far side with a ferocity driven by the promise of money.
Wade mopped at his unfamiliar sweat and studied the flow of the stream. The banks were five feet high, clotted with vines and treacherous with mud. He walked upstream for twenty yards and stopped. It looked no better there. He went on up, fifty feet more, and paused. He stared back over his shoulder, searching, but Joe was crouched low beneath a young persimmon, silently watching him through the leaves.
The old man stepped behind a bush and sat down. The bossman closed his eyes briefly and shook his head.
At noon the hands walked out of the woods and congregated at the pickup. They piled their poison guns inside the camper hull, and a black dwarf began issuing the lunch sacks from a cardboard box on the seat. The boy was there and took his small parcel, his meal of Vienna sausage and crackers and a hot Coke and a Moon Pie, and sat on the ground and started eating. He could hear the thin tortured cries of his father coming up through the brush, could see not a shape but the mere suggestion of a body struggling, some crippled floundering going on down there among the vast interwoven tapestry of vegetation. Some of the men began to look about.
“Reckon at old man can get up outa there?” said one.
“Aw, he’s all right,” said Gary. “He just ain’t used to workin is all.”
Some had sardines and others potted meat. The radio was playing in the cab, and Joe had wandered off somewhere. From Prince Albert cans kept in back pockets against the sweat of their buttocks, they rolled cigarettes of homegrown dope and passed them around. They smiled, blew smoke in little streams, grew languid and happy. The boy munched his food slowly and sniffed at the air.
Finally the old man emerged from a slash, stumbling along in a strange gait, gone crazy, evidently, slapping at his head as if he’d slap it off. The more coherent ones among them could see the tiny dance of angry insects around his hat. Yellow-and-black, miniature dive bombers stalling their engines in midflight, poised, wings humming, stingers raised aloft before boring in madly, tail first.
“Don’t bring em up here!” the dwarf yelled, but it was too late. They gathered up their drinks and cigarettes quickly, clutching sacks and fighting at the air, yowling like cats as they started getting popped. And within five seconds they were all jerking dementedly and slapping, running away in a drove.
Joe dropped these two off last of all. He pulled up at the entrance to their road and shut off the truck. He took a quick drink of the hot whiskey on the seat and shivered, then got out and walked to the back and peered into the camper. The boy was helping his father crawl across the spare tires, the poison guns and jugs, this elder moaning on all fours like a political prisoner newly released from a dungeon. He stood eyeing them and took off his cap. He knew the boy would work—he’d proven that—but the old man would hold him back. He swept one hand through his thick hair and resettled his cap and put his hands on the side of the truck.
“Can you make it out of there?” he said. He lit a cigarette.
“Aw. Yeah. I’ll make it. I guess,” Wade whispered. “Just help me over to the tailgate, son,” he said in a broken voice. The boy had him by the arm, guiding him along. Joe watched him dispassionately and knew almost certainly that whatever the boy made, the old man would take from him. Probably every penny. He quickly figured in his head what he owed them, and had the money ready by the time the old man swung his legs over the tailgate. He counted it again and laid it down.
“What?” said Wade. He picked up his money. “You pay ever day?”
“Naw,” said Joe. “I don’t need y’all back no more. That’s yours there, son,” he said, nodding at the remaining bills.
“Well,” Wade said, but that was all he said. Gary picked up his money and looked at it. Then he looked at Joe.
“I’d sure like to work some more,” he said.
“Maybe later. I’ll let you know.” He started to say more, started to tell him to be out on the road at six in the morning ready to work, that he could always use somebody who worked as hard as he did. But he looked at the old man again. He’d gained strength suddenly, was already pushing himself off the tailgate, turning, starting to hurry the boy away from the road, not looking back. But the boy looked back. Joe could read his face. Panic. I need the money. Don’t leave yet.
He got back into the cab and sat there. He took another drink of the whiskey and chased it with a sip of Coke off the dash. He wanted to see how long it would take, if he’d even wait until they were out of sight. He leaned across the seat, smoking the cigarette and thumping the ashes into the floor. They were going slowly up the dirt road. The old man held his hip, prodding it along. He stopped and looked back. Joe cranked the truck and pushed it up into reverse. He started backing, looking out at them standing a hundred yards away. The old man and the boy faced each other in the dust of the road, like boxers. Then the boy fell. He kicked the ground, on his back, holding his pockets. The old man bent over, pawing at him, but Joe didn’t wait to see any more.
Their supper was cooked in a pot against the coals, and the blackening flames ran up the sides of the vessel as if they’d climb into the food. Nameless beans with a piece of rancid rind bubbling in the spring water, stale loaf bread in a bag. The boy’s eye was closed and he kept soaking it wit
h a wet rag. The old man had gone with the money. The four of them sat speechless in the yard with the dark trees all around. The youngest girl had her legs crossed beneath her dress, and she rocked, hugging her elbows in her hands. The old woman seemed entranced by the flames. Her face was like the faces of soldiers shell-shocked in the trenches whose minds had heard the enormity of the blast and could not accept it as real. Stunned into silence, remembering . . .
The car and the man and the woman. The music and the lights and how they weren’t like them. How the cut grass smelled and the sounds of the children splashing in the fountain and the aroma of barbecue in the air, the lights strung from pole to pole and the microphones and the stage and the people milling everywhere and the quilts spread on the ground and the lawn chairs and coolers and picnic baskets they were eating from and how the bats soared briefly over the softball field and the heat and the children. She remembered him hitting her, although there was no memory of the pain, just the blackness she fell into and waking up later to find that Calvin was gone for good.
Careening softly and with his hands out before him, Wade went like a blind man down through the alley and out onto the street. Cars and trucks were parked nose to tail on both sides and others were cruising for parking places. He stood with his back against a wall and listened to the gigantic pounding of a great drum in the night that came from a brightly lit door in the alleyway where young people were walking in twos and threes, so many of them at the entrance they had formed a large group. A man at the door was checking them and herding them single file up a walkway like cattle. But it spoke of nothing if not the promise of drink. Wade pushed himself off the wall and went across with his arms dreamily coming up, astonished at the lightness of his feet. Past a beauty salon with padded chairs displayed in muted lights and big mirrors reflecting his movements as he glided past, a figure of unbalanced gait and slouchy posture. He eased up at the rear of the crowd, and they moved aside and made room for him so quickly that he felt welcome. Whatever lump of shabby currency his roving hand found first in the pockets of his overalls it drew out and clutched. Closer and closer to the magic door he drifted, the keeper of it already eyeing him and shooing the students in like chicks. Over their heads the bouncer watched this vision come forward with his tattered scraps of paper money. Music and smoke poured out the door into the alley, and the old man felt warm and safe and happy. As he drew nearer, such a deafening clash of sound emanated that the patrons and the keeper of the door shouted in one another’s ears. He was alone suddenly, none behind him and none before him but the linebacker or whatever he was, a monster man, a giant blocking the way with his thick arms folded over his massive chest. His face was impassive and he did not speak. He blinked his eyes once slowly and heavily like some huge lizard and shook his head and stood his ground. Turn back, old man, begone. There is no room in the inn.
He turned away as he knew he must, down the boarded catwalk and past the white walls where someone patted his back. He did not turn to see the face. A black arrow pointed his way. He walked with great sadness in his heart past darkened cars and trash cans and a warehouse door studded with cracked windows. Into each life a little rain must fall but perhaps it monsooned in his. He trailed with his hand a yellow stripe at waist level and his shoulder scrubbed lightly at the brick. His feet tried to twist under him, and he told them silently to keep moving one ahead of the other until he stood with his hands in his pockets on another sidewalk. Cars went by, close, their exhaust fumes like rotten eggs. Across the street was a bank; and in a shop, darkened shoes in rows. He let another black arrow direct him west and walked until the street was bisected once more. Cars and buildings lined both sides of a roughly paved lane. There was a hole in a brick wall halfway down the left side that threw a square of yellow light onto the pavement, and he made his way toward it on his tired and wasted legs. He stepped past the corner of the doorway and stood there blinking at the stairs. What manner of establishment? He went up the stairs and peered in through a security door, cupped his hands around his face and watched what went on. Tables and chairs. Stools set up along a wooden bar and glasses shining in ranks overhead and the polished handles of kegs. All was not lost. Salvation lurked just beyond the glass. He opened the door and took himself inside.
Things got quiet when he presented himself at the bar. Pool cues rested, patrons turned and stared. The bartender ceased his whiskey-sour vibrations. The old man heard voices from below and craned his neck sideways to see concrete steps and the legs of people standing. Another world beneath this one. He slid off the barstool and made his way downstairs to find a beer bar and bearded drinkers with gold earrings and cutoffs and Harley-Davidson insignias on their skins and clothes. The floor was spotted with red paint, scuffed away by the shoes of many. He ordered Miller and was served immediately. He paid and lifted the bottle to his lips. Then he went back upstairs.
He tapped a cigarette out of the pack and lit it with a match, waving it slowly in his hand, dropping it on the floor. He crossed the room, sucking at the beer, and stopped to watch a game of eight ball. A thin boy dropped the ball in a corner pocket and another boy gave him a dollar. He moved on, deeper into the room.
He passed under some brick arches and out a door into an open room with no roof. He stood there and studied the stars in the heavens with the beer tilted up to his mouth. Everywhere around him loomed the walls of the old hotel. He finished the beer and set the bottle on one of the benches and opened the door at the far side of the room. He found himself on a landing above a cavernous room so packed with people and music and lights that it made his head sing for a moment. A girl sat at a card table in front of him with a cigar box full of money and a rubber stamp in her hand. He eased up to her and pulled out his green.
“How much?” he said.
She stood up and waved to somebody. Somebody waved back. She turned back around and watched him with eyes uneasy, not believing his ripped clothes, his gray whiskers, his black fingernails.
“Wait a minute,” she said. She pinched her nose and deserted her post and went down the stairs. The old man pocketed his money and stamped the back of his hand with the rubber stamp and went down the stairs behind her. He was quickly lost in the milling crowd below.
Late that night the rain fell thinly in the streets around the square, slashes of water streaming diagonally in the air above the wet sidewalks. Passing cars sprayed it up from their wheels, and the blooming taillights spread a weak red glow across the pavement as the hum of their engines quietly receded into a night no lonelier than any other. The stained marble soldier raised in tribute to a long dead and vanquished army went on with his charge, the tip of his bayonet broken off by tree primers, his epaulets covered with pigeon droppings. Easing up to the square in uncertain caution came a junkmobile, replete with innertube strips hung from the bumpers and decals on the fenders and wired dogs’ heads wagging on the back shelf, the windows rolled tightly on the skull-bursting music screaming to be loosed from within. Untagged, uninspected, unmuffled, its gutted iron bowels hung low and scraped upon the street, unpinioned at last by rusty coat hangers, a dying shower of sparks flowing in brilliant orange bits. No tail-lights glimmered from this derelict vehicle, no red flash of brakes as it pulled to a stop. It inched forward in jerks, low on transmission fluid. The old man watched these things. Later that night he was thrown in jail.
A public drunk was reported, an inebriated senior citizen whooping out great obscenities on the county square, performing some unmetered step on the timeworn bricks. Two policemen in a dispatched cruiser picked him out, a sly sot now apparently dozing on a green bench. They threw the light on him. He tried to run. The cops left the cruiser idling in the middle of the street and took off after him. Their feet slapped loudly around the sidewalks as the old man hobbled down the steps to the street. Some drunken students from the university were going to their cars from The Rose, and they stopped to watch the fun.
But he was old and the police were young
and they hemmed him up against the front of a jewelry store. He elected to make his stand against a backdrop of silver platters and bridal china, his eyes wild and red in the flashlight beams, his thin chest heaving from his exertions. The cops went closer and then suddenly stopped.
“Shit,” said one.
“Goddamn,” said the other.
They seemed loath to put their hands on him. A crowd of students had gathered by then, it being past midnight and the bars now closed, and they stood watching the feinting and dodging. One of the cops approached and the old man immediately tried to put a headlock on him. The cop flung him off like a bundle of rags and he dropped to the pavement and started moaning.
“Stop that,” the cop said. “Get up here. Here.”
The old man huddled into a wretched ball on the concrete.
“Go on and kick me, you sumbitches,” he said.
They stood watching him, unsure of how to proceed.
“Put the cuffs on him.”
“You put the cuffs on him.”
“I ain’t touching him. I ain’t putting my hands on the stinking son of a bitch.”
“What you gonna do? Walk him to the jail?”