Joe

by Larry Brown

  The man drew his bottle up to his lips, arms still wrapped in his coat, and untwisted the cap. He sipped it as if it were something forbidden. He wiped his lips and his face.

  “What all wrong with her?” he said.

  “Got cancer,” Wade said immediately. “Got cancer of the leg. Just eat up with it all over, can’t even walk. Gonna have to put her in the rest home, I guess.”

  The black man was sucking bubbles from the mouth of the bottle. He put it down and said: “Aw.”

  “Yep. A feller don’t know from one day to the next which one’ll be his last.”

  The scarred head nodded mute agreement to this undeniable truth. But he didn’t offer the bottle in commiseration. The old man watched each swallow, each sip, like a hungry child. Clouds were bunching up high in the east, a dark bank of them that loomed up suddenly to banish the sun. In their hillside glade the shadows bled together. Wade saw that the rain was not far off. He hunched his shoulders against it even as he scanned the ground around him. But he was sitting on something, a hard bump beneath his shoe. He moved one foot and nudged it with his toe and it rose up from where it was half buried, brown and heavy and coated with a brittle corrosion that flaked away as he worried it with his toe.

  “I believe it’s fixin to rain,” he said.

  He let his right hand drop and pulled on it and broke the dirt around it free, a ringbolt twelve inches long, buried where some construction worker, long ago laboring on the shopping mall below, had perhaps flung it one day.

  “Yes,” he said, “I believe it’s fixin to rain some.”

  He whipped the bolt straight across his body without looking and it landed hard on the forehead of the black man, who was in the act of passing the bottle, and knocked him whimpering into the grass with his eyes full of blood. He curled up and began a spasmodic kicking, until the old man hit him again, and then he stiffened and quivered. A sodden thump, a hammer on rotten wood.

  He rifled the pockets quickly. Thirteen dollars in cash, three U.S. Government food coupon booklets worth sixty dollars each.

  And the bottle of Fighting Cock. He got that, too.

  The sun had gone in too early and the sky looked like rain. The air was cooling and the wind shifted and moved among the stiff tops of the pines along the road. The ditches were rich with cans and Gary marked them to memory for later retrieval, for harder times. But these seemed hard enough. His eye was still swollen and black-looking but it didn’t hurt. He could see out of it a little now, anyway.

  He could hear the trucks and cars coming a long way behind him, but he moved to the shoulder of the road and did not turn and raise his thumb as they drove past. The mailboxes were slowly becoming more frequent, the land more populated, but the houses were too far from the road for him to want to ask directions. He kept walking, his stomach empty and hard and tight, his head light. It was all he could do to keep going. The road climbed and twisted through the land. At the tops of hills he could look out over green forests and hay fields far off in the distance, where barns and silver metal towers stood hazy under the gray and leaden sky. Beyond the last greenery he could see was another line, blue as smoke, the last trees of the horizon. Earlier he had come through a bottom where hawks hunted over the sagegrass or merely perched on limbs thin as pencils, watching over all that moved before them, but there were no hawks now. There were neat fenced pastures and deep oak hollows and muscadine vines growing beside the road. Posted signs, barred gates. Little gravel trails stretching away to nothing through lanes of pine trees. He kept seeing mailboxes and he watched for them to stop. He didn’t know for sure if he was on the right road. He was just trying to do something, do anything. He didn’t know how far he’d come but he guessed five miles.

  In another thirty minutes there were more houses, closer together. The sun tried to peek back out but the clouds moved over it and hid it again. In two more hours it would be dark and his journey all for nothing.

  It had been easy money to him and he couldn’t understand why Joe Ransom had let them go. Maybe the man wouldn’t even be home now. Maybe he wouldn’t find his house.

  The rain came, thin drops that spurted dust from the roadside gravel, small explosions of brown dirt. The sun was trying to shine. He could see the rain marching against the forest, bending the treetops with the wind it brought and waving the boughs wildly. He started running, looking, and when he saw the big rusted culvert, he went down the bank over the loose gravel and beer cans and slipped and caught himself with one hand and stepped down into gray muck that sucked his shoetop in. He pulled his foot loose and bent and stepped into the culvert, ducking his head and entering a cavern of corrugated blackness. In the round mouth of the thing he squatted and watched the rain beat the grass flat and slowly grow into a curtain of water that obscured the trees twenty yards away. He bent with his feet spread wide. Before long he felt the first trickle come between them and watched it pipe out in a spout over the lip of the culvert. He tried to put his feet up higher on each side of the barrel, but soon there was four inches of water racing down and rising. It flooded his shoes, then his ankles.

  “Well, crap,” he said. He braced himself up like a cat facing a dog until his back met the roof of the tunnel he was in. The roar was a din and the color of the water was like pure mud. One foot slipped, then one hand, and he flew out of the culvert and landed churning in the middle of a creek rising to an angry level, foaming with bits of straw and trash and sticks. He pawed his way through the brown water to the bank and clambered up over the edge of it, his knees coated with mud, his shirtfront and his hands slick with it. The water was cold and the wind was a solid thing he could push his body against and feel it push back. There was nothing for shelter. Leaves were wafting across the road as they were torn from the trees and sucked out of the woods. He tried to go up another bank slippery with mud, but it defeated him again and again. His ears were full of water. It didn’t seem possible to him, but the rain doubled in intensity. The world was gone, nothing left but gray disaster. He squatted on the side of the bank and dug his heels in, covering his head with his arms and waiting for it to be over. He was washed clean by the rain. Every drop of mud ran from his clothes and shoes. He had never seen such a rain. He had never even imagined that such a rain could come.

  Fay would keep her own promises. The lights she dreamed of, the clothes she would wear, the distant cities shimmering in the highways of her mind. “He ain’t comin back,” she said. That old woman she had watched grow older and older until she was bent and wasted neither turned her face nor gave any sign that she’d heard. There was something bubbling before her in a lard can, set atop a niggardly fire banked with dirt on a rotten sheet of rusted tin in the floor. The smoke had settled comfortably in the ceiling, to drift at its leisure out the windows and shift slowly among the hewed timbers. They could hear the wasps dropping like lead shot on the floor in the other room. Not one penetrated that wall of fumes. By morning they would all be gone, scattered to the four winds, their paper home a fabled trophy for a small boy to prize.

  “If he was comin back he’d of done been back.”

  The little girl paid no attention. She’d made a doll of sticks and rags and she was rocking it to sleep. On its burnt face she laid some sweet kisses that almost made the older sister stay. Fay watched her mother, perceiving not even the rise and fall of her chest to mark her breathing. Just the thin bubbling in the lard can, the wisps of steam playing below her face. She could almost hate her for staying with him for this long, never having a house to call her own. Nothing but squatting before a fire like this one for as long as she could remember. She couldn’t remember now how long Tom had been dead. Maybe it was ten years. Maybe it was twelve. And Calvin. Wherever he was, if he wasn’t dead, he was better off than them.

  “I seen him in a dream,” her mother said.

  “Hush.”

  “He was in a car. Had the longest purtiest hair, like a woman’s. Long and curly, down on his back. Like Absalom.
Absalom was on a mule runnin away from his enemies and caught his hair on a limb. I member the picture from the Bible was in it. He was tryin to cut his hair loose with a sword. Things’ll get better.”

  “Things won’t never get better here.”

  “They can’t get no worse.”

  “That’s where you wrong, Mama.”

  She stood up. She slipped her feet into her shoes and she picked up her purse and she looked around in the room. She had the clothes she was wearing, a skirt stuffed into the purse, and that was all she had. She looked at her little sister once. She was curled up in the corner, talking silently to the stick baby.

  “I’m gone,” she said.

  “If you goin to the store I wish you’d bring me back some Kotex,” the old woman said.

  She didn’t look at her mother again. She stepped across the floor and down the rickety set of steps and gingerly, dodging the briers, picked her way out of the yard and through the honeysuckle vines and only looked back once, at the ruined house and the smoke coming out of the windows and the tall black pines growing blacker as dusk fell.

  Joe almost didn’t hear the dog for the rain on the roof. The sound of the growling was an undercurrent, an accompaniment, something that might have been there for a long time. The noise stopped, then it started again. It got a little louder.

  “Is that that dog?” he said.

  Connie was in the chair with just panties and a robe on, a beer in her hand. They’d been drinking since afternoon but he hadn’t touched her. There were days she couldn’t make him.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “Is somebody out there?”

  “I don’t hear anybody. Ain’t heard no car drive up.”

  “It probably ain’t nobody. Ain’t nobody with any sense out in this.”

  He nodded and lit a cigarette, coughing a little. “Why don’t you fix me another drink, baby?” he said.

  She got up and took his glass to the table and got out some more ice and Coke and whiskey. She didn’t put much whiskey in it. She stirred it with her finger. When she handed it to him, he took a small sip and didn’t look away from the television, just held out the glass and said: “I can’t even taste that.”

  She took it back to the table and poured more whiskey in it. She gave him the glass again and got her beer and sat down in the chair.

  “We gonna go anywhere tonight?” she said.

  “I don’t know.” He looked at her. “Where you want to go?”

  “I don’t know. I just wondered if we was.”

  “I hadn’t planned on it. Unless you want to.”

  “We don’t have to.”

  He looked away. “I’m just sorta enjoyin settin here with the TV,” he said. She had cleaned the house from one end to the other, washed all his clothes and ironed his shirts, cleaned all the bad food out of the refrigerator, feeding the scraps to the dog and trying to make friends with him. He guessed it wouldn’t hurt to take her somewhere, but he hated to get up and take a bath and get dressed and drive to town in all this rain.

  “I guess we could go eat,” he said. “Get us a steak somewhere. Or would you rather have some seafood?”

  “It’s just with you. I don’t have to go nowhere.”

  What the fuck’d you bring it up for then? he wondered.

  “I don’t guess we got anything here,” he said.

  “Hot dogs.”

  “I meant to give you some money and let you go to the store. I guess we need to do that before long.”

  She nodded. The dog kept growling under the house.

  “Stick your head out the door and see what that damn dog’s so unhappy about,” he said. She got up and went to the door and opened it. It was dark out there. She looked.

  “They’s somebody out here.”

  “Hit the light.”

  She turned it on. A bright yellow glare lit up the mud and the streaming grass.

  “Who is it?”

  “I don’t know. He’s just standin out there by the road. What you want me to tell him?”

  “Tell him to come on in.”

  She looked back at him. “He ain’t gonna come in long as that dog’s out there.”

  “Say you can’t tell who it is?”

  “Naw. I don’t know who it is.”

  “Well, fuck. It’s somebody either wantin a drink or money one,” he said. “That’s the only reason anybody comes to see me, anyway.”

  He got up off the couch with his drink and went to the door. He looked out. There was a thin dark shape standing out by the road, just standing there. He squinted.

  “I can’t tell who it is,” he said. She pulled her robe closed and held it with one hand. The rain slanted brightly in front of the porch light, obscuring the form standing so still in the glistening road.

  “Shut up,” he said, but the dog wouldn’t hear. “I wish I could tell who it is.”

  “Well, don’t make him just stand out there in the rain all night.”

  “I ain’t making him stand out there. Didn’t even know he’s out there.”

  “He’s scared of that dog’s what it is,” she said.

  “Well, go down there and hold him. He won’t bite you.”

  “That’s what you said last time.”

  “He knows you now, though.”

  “Shit.”

  “I don’t want to get out. I ain’t got any shoes on.”

  “I ain’t either. I wouldn’t touch that dog if I did.”

  “Aw, go on.”

  “Not me.”

  “I wish to hell I knew who it was,” he said.

  And then the little wet shape called out: “Would y’all hold that dog?”

  “Aw, hell,” Joe said. “Here. Hold this.”

  He went down the steps barefooted and snapped his fingers until the dog came out to stand beside him, then squatted in the rain and took him by the collar. He patted him. The dog strangled with his rage.

  “Settle down, now. Ain’t nobody messin with me,” he said. He tightened his grip on the hamestring.

  “I got him,” he said. “Come on in.”

  “You sure you got him?”

  “Who is it, Joe?”

  “This boy I know. Come on, now, I’m gettin wet.”

  The boy stepped off the road and came slowly across the muddy yard, never taking his eyes off the dog. His feet were encased in gobs of red mud.

  “Go on up the steps there,” Joe told him. “Take your boots off.”

  The boy bent over and started fumbling with the sodden laces on his boots.

  “Go on up the steps,” Joe said. The boy straightened and looked at him, looked up at Connie.

  “You can set down right here and take em off,” she said. She moved back from the door, and he went up the steps and sat on the doorsill.

  “Y’all hurry up,” Joe said. “I’m gettin wet.”

  The boy got his boots off and set them together on the top step and stood and turned and walked to the center of the room, where he stood shedding water onto the carpet. Joe turned loose of the dog and shoved him under the porch with his foot and slammed the door going in.

  “Damn, Gary,” he said. “How long you been out there?”

  “I don’t know. A good while.”

  “Let me get you a towel,” Connie said.

  “Bring me one, too. Boy, you soakin ass wet. You liable to be sick from this. Why didn’t you holler?”

  The boy looked up, small, muddy, forlorn. Quietly dripping all over the floor. “I hollered one time,” he said. “That dog almost come after me. I’s afraid if I run he’d come after me anyway.” He motioned helplessly with his hands. “I’s sorta trapped,” he said. “Couldn’t get no closer and couldn’t get no further away.”

  “What’s you gonna do? Stand there all night?”

  He thought about it. He shook his head. “I guess I would’ve. Fore I’da had him get ahold of me.”

  Connie came back with the towels and gave him one. He dried his hands and then sta
rted rubbing his head with it.

  “He ought to get out of them wet clothes,” she said. “He’ll have pneumonia.”

  “Aw, I’m all right,” Gary said. “I just wanted to talk to you about workin some more.”

  The bossman draped the towel over his shoulders and picked up his cigarettes. He smiled a little crooked smile, not unkindly. “Work? Boy, don’t you see what it’s doing out there? It’s pouring down rain.”

  “Yessir,” Gary said. He rubbed the towel over his head. He put a finger in it and drilled his earholes a little.

  “Where’s my drink at? Have you got some pants he can wear? What size waist you got, anyway?”