Joe

by Larry Brown

  “See there? It’s easier like that. It don’t give your back out like that.”

  He smiled at the boy but the boy didn’t smile back. When the old man went to the other side to catch the hay, he walked up next to Gary and said, “That’s my granddaddy. Daddy makes me come out here in the summertime and help him. All he ever does is fuss at me, though.”

  “You get paid?”

  “Shit,” the boy said. “I wouldn’t come out here and do it for nothin. What you think I am, crazy?”

  “I don’t guess.”

  “I wouldn’t even be out here if I didn’t have to.

  “Aw.”

  “I don’t care if I don’t never make any money or not.”

  Gary didn’t say anything to that.

  “Plus I have to mow the yard and hang out clothes, too.”

  “Yeah?” Gary said.

  “And they don’t even pay me for that.”

  Long before dinnertime the old man saw the red welts forming on Gary’s hands and gave him an extra pair of gloves. When they had the truck loaded they stopped and tied the load down, the old man on top crawling around and rigging the rope, Gary kneeling under the truck and throwing the free end of the rope around for him to take up the other side and tie off. They rode on top to the trees that held the shade at the fence and left that truck and took an old ’65 Chevy pickup back out to the center of the field. The baler was finishing up and they had what looked like about two hundred more to pick up.

  “We’ll have a hundred and thirty-five on two loads,” the old man said. They had water in plastic milk jugs that had been frozen solid and wrapped in grocery sacks. It was cold and sweet and Gary knew it would ruin him if he drank too much of it. The fat boy, Bobby, turned the jug up time and time again. They took a break under the shade when they had both trucks loaded.

  “You smoke?” the old man said. He pulled a pack of Winstons out of a dry shirt he’d put on.

  “Every once in a while,” Gary said.

  “Well, here.” He gave him a cigarette and then gave him a light. They sat crosslegged on the ground and the man looked at his watch.

  “Ten-thirty,” he said. “Where you live?”

  Gary drew on the cigarette and looked out over the field. He rested his weight on one arm. He tensed it, felt the muscle bunch, untensed it.

  “We live up on Edie Hill,” he said.

  “Edie Hill?” The eyes were flat and gray. The boy could see the lifetime of hard work in them, the hundreds of days like this one still remembered and not banished by time.

  “Yessir,” he said. He flicked at the fire on his cigarette with his little finger. It was quiet on the ground there, the heat rising around them and drawing the sweat effortlessly from them and already dampening and darkening the old man’s fresh shirt.

  “I used to know some folks lived up around there,” he said. “Didn’t know nobody lived up there now.”

  “We just livin in this old house up there,” Gary said. “I don’t reckon it belongs to anybody.”

  “Is it back up there around a big pine thicket? Got some old sheds and stuff around it? Old log house?”

  He drew deeply on the cigarette and studied his feet. He didn’t look up. The burning air had twisted the hair on his neck into wet locks that curled up and cooled his skin. “It’s a log house,” he said.

  “You one of them Joneses that moved back here?”

  “Yessir.”

  The old man nodded and looked off into the distance, the blue denim of his overalls tattered and faded. He waited a few moments before he spoke.

  “How much you reckon’s on them two trucks there?”

  Gary looked. “I don’t know,” he said.

  “A hundred on this one. Thirty on that one.” The old man got up, pulling his billfold from his back pocket. “Six dollars and fifty cents.”

  The boy sat on the ground watching him, the cigarette smoking between his fingers. “What is it?” he said.

  The old man didn’t answer. He stuck a thin thumb between the leather jaws of his billfold and pulled out a five and a one. The two paper bills fluttered to the ground like wounded doves and were anchored almost immediately by two pitched quarters that landed flat and soundlessly and pinned them to the faded green stubble in front of his feet. He looked up. The old man was staring down on him now with his eyes hard and unfeeling. He bent over and picked up the gloves the boy had been using. The woman and the fat boy were standing by the other truck. They had not spoken.

  “Let’s go,” he said, and they climbed into the cab. The haymaster put one foot on the rear hub and gripped the bed with his dark and freckled hands and pulled himself up over it like a seal clambering onto an ice shelf. But there was no coolness in that field. Long after they had gone Gary sat motionless beneath the shade tree, watching their wavering figures struggling relentlessly over the parched ground, their toiling shapes remorseless and wasted and indentured to the heat that rose from the earth and descended from the sky in a vapor hot as fire.

  Sometimes in the singing underbrush the boy could hear sounds that came only at night, strange rustlings and movings that lay dormant in the daytime and rose after the sun fell into the deep green beyond the creek faded to black, the hushed voices and far-off crying dogs that rushed and swept through the dark timber, the faint yellow lights moving across the bottomland. Sometimes he’d go down there to hear them better.

  He could follow the path without a light and climb a hill behind the house and come out on a dirt road washed with shadows, where he could see little puffs of dust rising and falling beneath his bare feet. He’d stop on the wooden bridge and listen, squatting there in the warm night. He could hear men talking, the quick baying, the short rush of dogs through the woods.

  One night he sat motionless on the bridge with the rough wood under him and heard the quick splash of little feet in the shallows. He knew it was a coon. He could hear the dogs far back, trailing. There was no sound around him but the slow musical trickle of the stream and the slow wind that rustled the cane. The little feet came closer, stopped. He saw the coon, one small dark blob on the creek bank, a scurrying shape bent south with humped and pumping legs. The dogs came upon him in a rush; it wasn’t until he heard their feet striking the water that the first one opened again. Five dogs, mottled moiling shapes indistinct in the dark, splashed down the ribbon of water and flowed beneath the bridge with their voices like hammers, sudden shocks of noise that disrupted the peace and serenity of the night, tore it apart with their anguished cries, swept past the bridge and down the bank, their voices louder than he could have imagined, echoing up and down and back behind him, all around him, until the whole of the woods rang with the sound of the race. The boy heard them catch it, heard the angry sounds of the dogs and the high thin chittering of the coon as they pulled it apart with their teeth. He saw the yellow lights struggling up through the woods as the men who owned the dogs came to see after them, and he got up, and waited a moment, some longing deep within him he couldn’t name, and went away before they came too close.

  Somebody was beating on something down the road. The boy had been walking for a long time and he could hear the sound of it now. It was midmorning and he was on his way to the store again, their supplies low, empty bellies all around him. He still had money saved back, hidden under a rock a long way from the house, but already he’d seen the old man in the woods, bending, stooping, looking. He knew he’d have to move it soon, maybe find a hollow tree or even bury it. There was a good bit in his pocket but he would hide that before he returned home.

  The sound of banging was irregular, hollow and muffled, and as he got closer he could hear small random curses. It appeared to be coming from near Joe’s house. He rounded the last curve and the old GMC was there, the hood up, the left front fender off, the bossman kneeling over it on the ground and attacking it with a ball peen hammer and a tire iron. The boy stood watching him for a moment. Then he smiled. He walked on up the road and turned
into the yard. Joe was laying the flat end of the tire iron in the wrinkles in the metal and drawing back and whopping it with the hammer. He would hit a few licks and then pause to examine his handiwork.

  “Hey,” Gary said.

  Joe looked over his shoulder at him and smiled.

  “Hey, boy,” he said. “What you doing?”

  Gary walked up beside him and squatted. The fender was lying with the painted side down and he could see the edge of an anvil sticking out from under it.

  “I’s headed to the store. What are you up to?”

  Joe laid the hammer down and sat back on his heels. He fished a cigarette out of his pocket and lit it. Sweat had soaked his shirt.

  “Ah hell, I’m trying to beat some of the dents out of this fender. You still want this truck?”

  Gary got up and went around to the front of it. The mangled grille was lying on the ground. He looked inside the engine compartment. The radiator had been pulled out, but what looked like a new one was lying on a piece of cardboard beside the truck.

  “Is this all that’s wrong with it?”

  “Yeah. I done had a new windshield put in it. I got another hood and put on it.”

  Gary looked. The glass was new and it had a new inspection sticker in the corner. The hood was a pale green.

  “How did you get it to the shop?”

  “I had to go over to the junk yard where they towed it. They put that hood on for me and put that windshield in. I drove it home but the radiator had a leak in it. I got James Maples to bring me a radiator from town yesterday. I’m fixing to put it in quick as I get through with this fender. Come here and help me hold it down, how about it?”

  The boy sat down and gripped the edge of the sheet metal. Joe put his tire iron on it and beat a wrinkle flat.

  “It may not look too good but it’ll beat not having one on it at all,” he said.

  “We gonna work any more?” the boy said, in between licks.

  Joe didn’t pause with his hammering. “Nah. We through. I got to get cleaned up. And go to Bruce. Get my money. Try to find my dog. You want to go?”

  “Yessir.”

  “All right. We got to put this back on. Put that radiator in. I ain’t been able to find a grille.”

  The boy didn’t know whether to ask him about being in jail or not. Maybe Joe knew what was on his mind. He stopped hammering and looked up.

  “I guess you heard what happened to me.”

  “Well.” The boy looked down at the fender, looked back up, squinting against the sun. “Sort of. I heard you had a wreck.”

  “That all you heard?”

  “Nosir. I heard you got put in jail.”

  “It wasn’t the first time,” said Joe. “Probably won’t be the last. Did you know I’d been in the penitentiary?”

  Gary shook his head slowly. “Nosir,” he said.

  “Well, I have. I did twenty-nine months for assault on a police officer. The motherfuckers pulled me over behind a shopping center uptown and thought they were gonna whip my ass. I wasn’t doing nothing. Waiting on an old gal to get off from work. Now I was drunk, I’ll admit that. But I wasn’t fucking with them.” He looked up and smiled grimly. “But I had put one of em in the hospital about a month before.”

  The twisted piece of metal in front of him was beginning to resemble a fender again, just a little.

  “What I need are some dollies. I used to be a body man a long time ago.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Dollies?”

  “Body man.”

  Joe glanced up at him briefly and then back down.

  Sometimes it seemed that the boy didn’t know a lot of things a boy his age should know. They’d been driving by the Rock Ridge Colored Church one day back in the spring and the boy had asked him who lived in that big white house.

  “That’s a guy that fixes cars after they’re wrecked. You know. Put on new doors. New fenders. Or like this. Straighten the old ones. It’s cheaper. Sometimes it don’t look as good. You got to know what you’re doing. I used to paint a lot but I started having nosebleeds and I had to quit it.”

  The boy nodded.

  “I’ll give you a job this winter. We’ll start in setting pines about December. We’ll work on that till March or April. You can make you plenty of money then. Planting pays more than deadening.”

  “You mean we’re gonna set out trees?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well, how you do it? You have to dig a hole and everything?”

  “Naw, naw, it ain’t like that. Here, let’s move it up a little this way. Make sure that anvil’s under it. All right. Hold it right there. See if we can get this big crease out of it. No, we set em with a dibble. Little old iron bar. It’s got a dull blade on it. You just kick it in the ground and it digs a little hole. You just stick your tree in and then close it up, stomp on it. Go on to the next one. Takes about five seconds.”

  “Five seconds? How big’s the trees?”

  “Oh, they’re just little bitty things. Baby pines. About a foot long. Naw, but what I was telling you about them motherfuckers . . . see a cop can fuck over you if he wants to. Don’t get me wrong, there’s some good ones. But you live in a place and get on the wrong side of the law like I did. Like I do. They’ll look for you. They find out where you hang out, they’ll park and wait for you. That’s what they did to me that night.”

  “You mean the other night?”

  “What other night?”

  “The night you had the wreck. Got put in jail.”

  Joe looked up at him and pointed to the fender with the hammer.

  “You mean this?”

  “Yessir.”

  “Naw, naw.” He shook his head. “I’m talking about what I got sent to the pen over. Move it a little more that way. Hold it. Hell, I been out a good while. Stayed in two and half years. They tried to shoot me. After I whipped all three of them they did. Or one did. He went for his gun and I grabbed it. He was fixing to kill me. Told me he was. But all he did was blow his kneecap off. Hold it right there, now.”

  The boy watched him while he hammered, watched the muscle bunching in his bicep and the pellet hole there and the crooked nose and the dark hair curled in ringlets on the back of his neck. Watched the tanned hands and the scarred knuckles, outsized, knotty with gristle.

  “Only way I got out light as I did was my lawyer got him on the witness stand and made him mad.” He looked up, looked back down. “I told him they’d been fucking with me. He went and looked it up. They were gonna put me in as a habitual offender. You can get thirty years for that. They’d pulled me over seventeen times in sixty-four days. They’d arrested me once. That was when one of em hit me in the back with his stick and I put him in the hospital. My lawyer went to the police station. He looked at the arrest records. A good lawyer’s worth his money. I got old David Carson up at Oxford. He’s high but he’s good. It took me two years to pay him off after I got out of the pen. But it would have took me a lot longer if I’d still been in.”

  He laid down the hammer and the tire iron and lit another cigarette.

  “Let’s see what she looks like now,” he said. He raised the fender and turned it over. It resembled something of its original shape. “Hell, that ought to be good enough. Long as the bolts’ll go in.”

  “What you want me to do?”

  “Help me hang it back on the fenderwell. I got all the bolts over here in a hubcap. Hold it a minute.”

  The boy stood holding the fender in place. Joe stooped and picked up the hubcap and set it on the breather.

  “Now just hold it until I can get one started,” he said. He had a socket and a ratchet in his hand. “You just hold it and I’ll put em in. Yeah, old David’s a good lawyer. He’s been out here and deer-hunted with me. I’ve got access to some good timberland. I get it about a year before they cut it.”

  The boy didn’t say anything, just stood holding the fender while he started the bolts and ratcheted them down. When he ha
d three in, Joe told him he could turn it loose. He stepped back and looked inside the cab. Mud was caked on the floormats. The seat had a huge rip across the driver’s side. There was a rubber-coated gunrack mounted above and behind the seat. The dash was piled high with papers. There was a long brown sack with a bottle in it lying against the hump in the floor. Joe looked around the corner of the hood.

  “You want to do something for me?”

  “Yessir.”

  “Reach in there and get me one of them beers out of that cooler in the back. Damn if I ain’t done got hot.”