Joe

by Larry Brown

  “I got him,” her mother called. “Let’s kill him.”

  The only thing in the room big enough to do it was a brick. The child grabbed it up and tore through the room and leaped out the door and across the yard. He saw her coming and tried to get away. He was up, jerking his leg, sliding his wife along the ground, trying to get into the protective woods. When the little girl got close she threw the brick. It missed. She ran back toward the house for another one. She was going to rob the fireplace, one at a time. She squatted beside the blackened bricks and tugged one loose, then another one. She gathered them up in her arms, but when she went back he had pulled himself loose and was leaning against a tree with a big stick in his hand, while her mother lay in the yard with her legs spread, calling out to him to come on and do it to her, him shaking his head, trying to find a smoke in one of his pockets.

  It was past three when the boy returned. He came up the road with his shirt wrapped around him, his hands empty. They were sitting in the back yard and he looked at his father. The others went into the house.

  “When’d you get back?” the boy said.

  The old man had two or three hot beers spread in the grass beside him. He was drinking them slowly, cupping each one in his hands. He had no answer for this upstart of his loins. The boy stood there. His hands were cut and bruised, his eyes burning from the poison that had splashed up into them.

  “Where’s your money?” Wade said.

  Gary shrugged. He squatted a ways off. “He ain’t give us none yet.” His mother leaned out the door and said that supper would be ready in a few minutes.

  “Gimme some money,” Wade said.

  Gary looked at him, looked away.

  “I ain’t got none.”

  Something flickered over the old man’s face. The boy had hard muscles in his arms. He was crouched lightly in the yard, the waiting over for a day that had seemed so far off in the future down the lonely roads of years past and was now here without warning.

  “He ain’t paid you?”

  “He ain’t paid me. He’ll pay me Friday.”

  Wade sucked the last of the suds gently from the can and eased it to rest beside his leg in the grass.

  “Gimme some money.”

  Gary didn’t even look at him. “No,” he said.

  The old man reared up drunkenly.

  “What’d you say?”

  “I said no.”

  Wade came across the grass after him and caught him by the leg, and they rose, holding each other until the old man began to hit him in the head with his doubled fist. The boy clenched his father close and smelled the awful stench of him, pushed him back while receiving the blows on his face and neck.

  “Now quit it,” he said. His father’s breath was coming harder. His arms were swinging, his knotted fists finding no target as his son pushed him away. He swung so hard at Gary that he turned all the way around and fell. He lay on his back, scrabbling at the ground like an overturned turtle. He made it up on one knee and pushed off with his hands.

  “I ain’t got no money,” the boy said. “He ain’t paid us yet.”

  “Pays ever day,” said Wade, coming after him.

  “Just cause he fired us that time.”

  He backed around in the yard. His father followed him, but his breath was beginning to go and his legs were shaking. His steps were wobbly. Drinking hot beer in the sunshine had given him an uncontrollable head. Finally he went to his knees, his tongue out. His eyes were rolled up almost white in his head. He pitched over face forward into the grass and then he didn’t move any more. The boy looked at him. He looked back at the house. His mother and his one remaining sister were standing in the doorway watching.

  “Drag him around in the shade and come eat,” his mother said.

  Joe began to drive them harder as the last days of May slipped away. He stayed with them constantly now, taking a gun himself and joining their ranks as he tried to finish the tracts he had contracted for. He hired more hands, a load of them that bellied the pickup down so that it scraped and dragged over every rough spot in the road and ran down the highway canted up, and still they were not enough. He could see now that June would catch him unfinished, a matter of a lot of money. He pushed them more and more, harrying them around their edges, shouting, prodding the slow, the lazy, the hung-over, his own head throbbing and pounding under the summer sun. Clouds of gnats enveloped them and the yellowjackets rose boiling from their nests in the ground, and they moved through the green and tangled veldt like zombies in a monster movie or the damned in some prison gang, until under their breath they cursed him and work and the heat and the life their ways had led them to. They began to quit one by one. Three quit one Saturday and he made them understand they’d walk back to the truck and wait until the working day was over before he’d take them back to town. They stood in a small group, muttering, their eyes baleful and lowered, watching him narrowly as he moved away with the rest of the crew.

  “Hey!” one of them said.

  He turned back. “What?” he said. He had sweat in his eyes and he was already angry over their quitting. He’d been stung five times that morning and all he wanted to hear was one wrong word.

  Gary was listening but he wasn’t looking back. He had his head down, making overtime. Taking all he could get and glad to get it.

  “You need to take us back to town,” a man named Sammy said.

  “You want to go back to town you can walk,” Joe told him. “I ain’t got time to run you back to town.” He turned to walk off again.

  “I ain’t walkin back to town.”

  “Then you gonna have to wait on your goddamn ride.”

  “Hey!”

  Joe threw his poison gun down. He turned and walked back. “You got anything to say, say it. I got work to do.”

  Sammy must have thought the other two were going to back him up, but now they stepped away. He looked around at them.

  “Y’all gonna let him do this to us?” he said.

  “I ain’t done nothin to you,” Joe said. “I hired you to work and if you don’t want to work when I need you, I ain’t got time to mess with you. I ain’t worked you no harder than anybody else. Look yonder.” He pointed. “They all still workin.” But they weren’t. They had stopped and turned back to watch what happened.

  “Ain’t hired on to work no nine hours a day. Didn’t say nothin bout workin weekends.”

  “You didn’t have to get in the truck this mornin, Sammy. And I can’t do nothin about the weather. I got till the first of June to finish up and if you don’t want to help you can go set in the truck. But I don’t want to hear no more of your mouth. You’ve laid on your goddamned ass all your life and drawed welfare and people like me’s paid for it. That’s why you don’t want to work. Now shut your fuckin mouth.”

  He turned one last time to go away and be done with it and heard the quick movement behind him, stepped back and spun as the knife passed under his arm, coming up, the steel flashing bright and quick to make a burning red stripe on his tricep. He hit Sammy in the nose and Sammy’s nose exploded. The knife fell. He went to his knees and Joe grabbed his collar and pulled him forward. Nothing was said, no sound but their gasping breath in the early morning stillness and the scrape of their feet in the leaves. Sammy swung wild, once, then closed his eyes when he saw the next one coming. It snapped his head back and then it was over. Joe stood over him, a thin trickle of blood winding down his arm like a red vine and, drop by drop, falling off his middle finger to spot the leaves crimson, little spatters on the floor of the woods, like the trail of a wounded deer.

  He said: “If they’s anybody else don’t want to work, or got somethin to say, you better speak up now.”

  Nobody spoke. They stood immobile in the hush with the thin calling of tree frogs the only comment.

  He said: “I don’t give a fuck if ever one of you wants to quit right now. I’ll load the whole bunch up and pay you off. Last chance.”

  Gary turned aw
ay and slashed at a small bush. He went up to a tree, stabbing, pumping the poison into it. He mopped his forehead with his arm. The rest of them turned away one by one and fell back to work. Joe walked over to his poison gun and picked it up. The two who had quit with Sammy looked at each other uncertainly, now that their mouthpiece had been silenced.

  “What you want us to do with Sammy?” one called out.

  Joe cut and slashed and checked the time by his watch. “I guess you better drag him back to the truck if you want to ride to town this evening,” he said.

  An hour later he noted that all three had fallen back into the ranks silently and were working beside everybody else. Nothing else was said but he paid those three off that afternoon.

  It came up one day at lunch that Joe was going to get rid of his old truck and buy a new one when they got finished with their tracts. The boy chewed his bologna sandwich dry and worked up enough spit to ask him how much he wanted for the old one. Joe turned his head and looked at him.

  “Why? You want to buy it?”

  “I’d like to have it,” Gary said.

  “It needs some work done on it.”

  “I can fix it.”

  “You ever worked on a automobile before?”

  “I can learn.”

  “Oh. Well, you might have to work on that one a good bit. I spend about as much time workin on it as I do drivin it. Course it ain’t nothin major wrong with it. Just little shit. Old motor uses a little oil. Needs some brakes on it. Needs that shifter fixed for sure.”

  “How much?”

  He thought about it. They wouldn’t give him anything for it on a trade-in. Two or three hundred dollars at the most. The body was beat all to hell, the tires were slick. The front bumper was hanging loose on one end.

  “I hate to price it,” he said. “I ain’t ready to get rid of it right now.”

  “I won’t need it long as I’m ridin with you,” Gary said.

  Joe lit a cigarette and stretched out on the ground. He looked at his watch and called out to his workers: “Y’all hurry up, now, it’s almost time.” They were only taking fifteen minutes for lunch now, but everybody kept quiet about it. He was paying them time and a half after two p.m. and double time on Saturdays and Sundays.

  “I couldn’t guarantee it, now. That truck’s old. Got a lot of miles on it. You might do better to just try to find you one in town somewhere. Or let me look around for you one.”

  “It wouldn’t look too bad if it was washed up. I’d take that camper bed off it. Fix that bumper. All it needs is a bolt in it probably.”

  He looked at the boy. Then he looked at the truck. It was old, it was dirty, it was junky. But he guessed he wasn’t looking at it from the boy’s side. The boy had probably never had anything to call his own. He started to just say he’d give it to him.

  “I’ll take two hundred dollars for it when I get my new one,” he said.

  Gary stuck his hand out. “That’s a deal.”

  Joe took the hand, squeezed it, then got up. He put his hands on his hips and called out that it was time to start back to work.

  The boy worried about how he was going to pay for it all afternoon. He had to have some way to hide part of the money while he was saving it, and he had to have the money by the time Joe got ready to trade, which wouldn’t be far off. The end of the month. It presented other problems. Gas and oil to buy, and his job would be over. But he reconciled himself with the thought that he could find something else to do. There were jobs everywhere, he figured. You just had to get out and find them. And he needed a vehicle for that. He hit upon it as they were taking a break from the heat that afternoon.

  “What if you was to hold some of my money out and keep up with it?”

  Joe was taking a drink of whiskey and when the boy came out of nowhere with that, he didn’t know what he was talking about. He squinched his eyes almost shut and searched for the Coke on the dash and grabbed it and took a swallow.

  “What are you talkin about, son?”

  “To pay for my truck. How bout if you hold out about fifty dollars a week and let me pay for it like that?”

  “Well. We probably won’t work but about two more weeks. Hell, they all ready to quit. They been ready. Only reason they’ve stayed this long’s cause I had to hit Sammy that day.”

  The boy fell silent. He had fifty dollars hidden under a rock down in the woods behind the house. The whole family was living off him now. His father robbed his pockets at night until there was nothing left.

  “Where were you born?” Joe said.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Where’s the rest of your family at?”

  “This is all of us, I reckon.”

  “Where were you raised?”

  The boy looked down. He still remembered Tom falling off the truck and the truck behind them going over his head, how everybody gathered around in the hot Florida sun, looking at him sprawled there dead. Was he four or five? And Calvin. Little brother. Gone now too.

  “Different places,” he said.

  Joe looked at him. He knew nothing of him except that he would work. But his work was almost over. It was a long time from June to December.

  “We finish this tract,” he said, “they’ll settle up with me. They’ll shut us off after this one. They won’t be no more work I can give you until this winter.”

  “What do you do?”

  “You mean when I ain’t doing this?”

  “Yessir. When you ain’t doing this.”

  Fuck. Drink. Gamble.

  “I get by,” he said.

  “You know of anything I could do until this winter? I got to keep a job.”

  “Y’all can’t stay in that damned old house this winter, can you?”

  Gary turned up the last of his hot Coke and drained it. He set the can on the ground and pulled out his cigarettes. He had taken to smoking regularly since he was making money regularly.

  “How cold does it get around here in the winter?”

  “Shit. It gets cold as a witch’s titty. We had ice stayed on the ground four days last year. You couldn’t even get out on the road. I stayed up at the store with John about half the time. It didn’t do to try and drive on it. They was cars all up and down the road in ditches.”

  “What did people do about goin to work?”

  “They didn’t go. The ones that live out here didn’t. It stayed below ten degrees for three straight days. People had water pipes froze and busted and couldn’t get into town for parts to fix em with. We couldn’t work. Ground was froze solid.”

  The boy sat there, studying the situation. “I got a little money saved up,” he said, finally. “If we could work two more weeks I believe I can get enough up to pay you.”

  “Well. We’ll worry about that later. We’ll work it out. Let’s get on up and hit it.”

  The other hands rose in a group like a herd of cows or trained dogs in a circus act when they saw the bossman stand up. They picked up their implements and thumped their cigarettes away. The whole party moved off into the deep shade with their poison guns over their shoulders, the merciless sun beating down and the gnats hovering in parabolic ballets on the still and steaming air. The heat stood in a vapor over the land, shimmering waves of it rising up from the valleys to cook the horizon into a quaking mass that stood far off in the distance with mountains of green painted below the blue and cloudless sky. Joe stood in the bladed road with his hands on his hips and watched them go. He surveyed his domain and the dominion he held over them not lightly, his eyes half-lidded and sleepy under the dying forest. He didn’t feel good about being the one to kill it. He guessed it never occurred to any of them what they were doing. But it had occurred to him.

  The shelves in the old wooden safe that stood in a corner of the log house were now stocked with food. Gary couldn’t remember when they’d ever eaten so well. There were proper pans to cook in and Joe had given him a little green Coleman stove that burned each evening with a cheery blue f
lame. Their windows were tacked over with Visqueen, which admitted, in brightest sunshine, a pale murky light, like half-light, that kept the interior in a gloom through which their restless figures moved without shadow. He’d chinked the cracks between the logs with old cotton found in a pen in a field. In the dead of night under their mildewed quilts recycled from the hands of the haves, these have-nots lay with their ears pricked in the darkness as the drone of the mosquitoes moved toward them like supersonic aircraft, their radar just as deadly, just as accurate. He bought poison and sprayed for ticks, whacked with a broken joe-blade the assemblage of overgrowth surrounding the house into some semblance of a yard. He kept an eye out for a castoff screen door, but these seemed hard to come by.