by John Yount
He felt the way he did during fistfights. He always stood his ground and traded the necessary insults and shoves, but he never actually believed the fight would occur, even after it had clearly begun. Neither blows nor the taste of blood in his mouth could overcome his disbelief, and as a consequence, his anger and strength never came to his rescue because a part of him wouldn’t believe it and had withdrawn beyond the reach of pain or the need for rescue.
The moment the rifle went off, it was that way. Some essential part of him simply went away, and it wouldn’t come back, not even when they began to labor through the iron-hard roots of laurel and rhododendron to get a hole deep enough to bury the body. He was shocked and weak in his limbs, but another side of him had gone away somewhere and wouldn’t acknowledge what they had done.
When they got down off the mountain and into the nearly grassless hard-packed earth of Lester’s backyard, Effie was on the dogtrot washing clothes, but she didn’t speak to them. She merely gave Lester a brief, discreet glance when he passed her to take the rifle back inside to put it away. Listlessly, James propped the spade against the fence and wandered over to the apple tree by the springhouse to get a treat for the crow.
“You boys want a little something to eat?” he heard Effie ask gently when Lester came out again.
“I reckon,” Lester told her and went on to fetch the spade and put it away in the tool shed.
The crow didn’t seem to want the apple. When James held it out, the crow merely glared at it as though it had no idea what an apple was, and then it hopped to his shoulder and rapped him solidly in the head, pulling out a tuft of hair. “Ouch, you bastard!” James said, brushed the bird off, and inspected the side of his head tenderly with his fingertips. He wasn’t surprised to find a little blood.
“Must think you’re a tree and he’s a woodpecker,” Lester said, sounding almost like himself. “Hold him for me.”
Carefully, so as not to injure the crow’s leg, which was already scarred by the hog staple bent around it, Lester pulled open the metal band, took the crow out of James’s hands, and gave it a pitch in the air. “So long, Blackjack,” he said, but the crow hovered uncertainly for a moment and then lit again on the rail.
“What are you up to, chile?” Effie called from the dogtrot. “Blackjack don’t do no harm.”
“He don’t do no good neither,” Lester told her. “Scat,” he said and gave the bird a push, but it simply flopped its wings for balance and moved a few inches down the rail until Lester picked it up and pitched it high overhead. This time, after it had fluffed in the air a moment like a swimmer treading water, it banked over to the roof of the springhouse where it made a clumsy landing. When it had righted itself, it wiped one side and then the other of its beak against the comb of the roof, getting rid of some of James’s hair, and stared at its new surroundings with what looked like pure hatred.
Lester rushed at it, waving his arms. “Shoo, get outta here!” he shouted, but a single beat of its wings lifted it into the apple tree. “Well,” Lester said, looking up at it, “I reckon you ain’t had much slack.”
“Awwwh honey …” Effie said, shading her eyes with her hand and looking at Lester sadly.
“I’ve just growed out of it, Momma,” Lester told her.
“Come on,” he said to James, “less us take this next’n off a ways.”
“Awwwh honey,” Effie said as James followed Lester around the house, “you got no call … Poppa didn’t mean …” she stammered from the front end of the dogtrot.
“I know it,” Lester told her, opened his pocketknife, cut the cotton rope with a single stroke, and began to pull the fox from beneath the house.
James could hear its small, keening growls before it came into view, all four feet braced against being dragged and its bushy tail thrashing side to side like the tail of a cat.
“Ha,” Lester said. “Ain’t you in for a surprise though.”
With Effie looking after them, they went off down the wagon road, the fox making frenzied dashes toward any sort of cover before the rope, coming taut, snatched it off its feet, but it was always up in an instant, making a mad dash in another direction. When they were out of sight of the house, they cut across the lower pasture, where, at last, Lester knelt and began to pull the fox gently toward him. “Well, well, buddyroe, easy now, well, well,” he crooned, but he got bitten just the same, quicker than the eye could follow. Still, he got his left hand around its muzzle, got the collar off, and stroked the fox gently and fondly until it quit bucking and jerking. But the moment he turned it loose, it skimmed across the open ground of the pasture and into the woods. Gone. Vanished. Just like that.
After a while Lester seemed to notice, in a distant sort of way, the puncture wounds the fox’s sharp teeth had left between his thumb and forefinger, and absently, he sucked them and spat, sucked them and spat, gazing across the somehow outrageously empty pasture the fox had left in its wake.
James didn’t know what made him think he understood how Lester was feeling, but he was sure that, on some level or other, he did understand, and he couldn’t take it another minute. “Did you know that chiggers don’t bite?” he asked all at once.
Lester gave him an odd look.
“That’s right,” James told him. “They spit on you, and the spit is such a powerful acid, it dissolves your skin at once, and then the chigger climbs down in the hole and eats the dissolved skin. You can put clear fingernail polish over the little bastards and smother them, but you’ll still itch like mad because you’ve got all that chigger spit down in there, plus a dead chigger. It’s true,” James said, looking into Lester’s perplexed face, “I read it in the Sunday paper in an article about strange animal facts, or some such thing. Did you know that more people die every year from bee stings than they do of snake bite? And,” he said, pointing a finger at Lester as though he were delivering an important lecture, “did you know that if an eagle were flying a mile up and could read, he could have read the headlines of that Sunday paper?”
At last Lester began to grin and shake his head. “No,” he said, “I didn’t know none of them things, but I’m beginning to suspicion you’re a little bit crazy.”
“I absolutely guarantee it,” James said and pushed Lester over backwards.
“Why you …” Lester said, but James caught one of Lester’s bare feet, as horny with callous as a horse’s hoof, and spun him on his back.
“Let me git a-holt … durn you …” Lester sputtered, but James rushed him, lifting the foot as high as he could and standing Lester almost on his head before he turned loose, and Lester went over as stiffly as a chopped tree to land flat on his belly.
“Oooff! Daaagone little …” Lester said and scrabbled up.
But he was awkward and slow, and for a while James was able to sidestep him, to duck under his big, grasping hands, to push him off, but finally Lester managed to catch an arm, and although James yanked him off his feet, he couldn’t jerk free. Laughing, they both fell thrashing and rolling down the steep pasture until James found himself nearly paralyzed by the strength of Lester’s grip.
“Jesus,” he said at last, gasping with laughter and pain, “turn loose! You’re killing me!”
Lester obeyed instantly, but it took a while before James could shake some feeling back into the arm Lester had grabbed. His neck, which Lester had also gotten a passing grip on, felt seriously wrenched. He’d seen Grandfather Marshall wring the neck of a chicken, and he felt Lester had stopped just short of doing the same thing.
“I never meant to hurt you none,” Lester told him, looking embarrassed and ashamed.
“I believe it,” James said, “otherwise I’d be dead.” Lester, he’d decided long ago, was made out of something inhuman, steel wire or some such thing, since no one so thin had any right to be so strong, and horseplay with him was always painful. Mostly because he was clumsy and would half kill you by accident.
EDWARD TALLY
“Enter,” Paris sang
out when he knocked on her door, and he came in to find her on the love seat in her underwear, wads of cotton between her toes and all her fingers sticking out at odd angles. Her fingernails and toenails were red as blood, red as her lips, and she was waving her hands around as though shooing flies. “I’m just about ready,” she said and puckered her lips for a kiss.
“Sure you are,” he told her, wondering how she’d known it was him, or if she’d known it was him, since she always complained about the man downstairs who found endless excuses to come knocking on her door. “Mmmmmmmh,” she said, kissing him, holding his head down with her wrists, although he could still feel her waving her hands around behind his head to dry her nails.
“I just have to slip into my sundress and sandals. All the serious primping is over,” she told him. “Why don’t you make us a gin and tonic, sweetie, while my nails dry.”
He got down glasses, poured a generous dollop of gin in each, got a lime, tonic, and ice from her refrigerator, and made the drinks. She took a sip of hers, leaving a smudge of lipstick on the rim of the glass, and when he saw it, he realized his mouth felt peculiar, somehow waxy, and he wiped it with the back of his hand. There was a streak of red from his watch to his knuckles. He wiped his mouth again.
“Awwwwh, you looked cute,” she said. “I like it when you’ve got my lipstick on.” She cocked her head and puffed out her lower lip in a pout. “Then anybody can see you belong to me.”
“Since Lincoln freed the slaves, no one belongs to anyone,” he told her.
“Aren’t we in a nice mood,” she said. “Is it because of the zoo? Do you not want to take me to the zoo?”
He wiped his mouth again. “I’m sorry,” he said. “Six days a week and twelve hours a day, climbing around in the top of a steel mill putting up conduit …” He waved the rest of his apology away. It was a lie anyhow. He was angry, but he wasn’t sure why. “You look beautiful, and I’m glad to take you to the zoo, or any damned place you’d like to go.” He winked at her and took a swallow of his gin and tonic, grinning, trying his best to look happy as hell, but she eyed him suspiciously, reluctant, it seemed, to give up her pouting.
Maybe she thought it was seductive, and in some strange way it was, her lower lip puffed out, the pink buds of her nipples and the shadow of her pubic hair showing through the sheer, lacy, buff-colored underwear, which was so nearly the color of her skin she might have grown it too, merely as a decoration. One long leg was bent at the knee, her foot, cotton between the vivid toes, braced on the edge of the love seat; the other leg flopped, loose-jointed, with her heel resting on the floor. She had the slender, wonderful muscle tone of a dancer and short, kinky blond hair with a vicious part down the middle as straight as a chalk line. There was, in fact, blond hair all over her, a soft whirl of it in the small of her back and on her belly, at her temples and on her upper lip, but it was soft as down, as peach fuzz, as velvet; and it made her seem both little-girlish and somehow feline. She was all over the color of ripe wheat. Even her eyes weren’t so much hazel as yellow, fringed with thick, buff eyelashes she crimped in a curler.
“God damn,” he said, put his drink down on the end table—pushing aside an assortment of cutesy carnival figurines to make room for it—took her breasts in his hands, and kissed her. For her part, she moaned, opened her mouth, and cupped his crotch in both her hands.
He felt his zipper come down, and she began to speak against his mouth. “I want to give my Tallywhacker a kiss,” she told him.
One way or another it was an old joke to him, but not to her. According to Paris Pergola, he had the only authentic “Tallywhacker” she’d ever met.
“And it is my Tallywhacker,” she said against his lips, “and I don’t want to hear nothing about any Abraham Lincoln.”
Then he was in her mouth and she was doing those incredible things with her tongue. “Holy God,” he whispered.
Later, in the bathroom, he discovered lipstick on his fly, and he dampened a washcloth, dabbed it against a bar of soap, and tried to scrub the front of his trousers clean. He couldn’t quite tell if he’d been successful; certainly his fly was damp, wrinkled, and disreputable-looking, but he wasn’t so sure it wasn’t still a faint pink in the bargain. Like having lipstick on his mouth, having it on his fly never seemed to bother Paris one whit. Outrageous as it was, it seemed to please her. She often giggled about it as though it were some sort of ad she’d taken out. A warning to other women that he was already, by God, thoroughly spoken for? A sign to other men of the sort of lover she could be, perhaps an incentive to provoke them to try and beat Edward Tally’s time with her? Whatever, she would blush and giggle to see her lipstick on his fly, but she was never scandalized by it. If he wanted to clean himself up, she never pouted, but she never helped either.
Scrubbing on his fly, he felt his dark mood returning. He washed his hands and his face and found one of her most recent decorating touches when he flipped up the toilet seat to urinate. There was a bright turquoise cover on the lid made of terry cloth, which, when he raised it, revealed two can-can dancers doing a very high kick, as well as the legend In France They Say WEE WEE. He stared at it and realized he didn’t understand, even in the tiniest and most remote way, the sort of person who would buy such a thing. Her apartment was full of stuffed animals in an assortment of vivid colors and covered in some sort of sleazy fur that seemed to float about in the air and get up his nose like cat fur, so that he sometimes plucked his nose and snorted to get rid of it. There were Kewpie dolls everywhere and a vase by her bed, which contained, not flowers, but painted birds hung from sticks such as one might win tossing rings at a carnival. He stared at the toilet seat cover and began to shake his head. “I’ve gone crazy,” he told himself in a small, tight voice, that nevertheless broke, “totally, fucking crazy!”
At the zoo a nervous sweat misted his armpits and rolled occasionally down his ribs, but she was happy. She dropped dimes into slender green machines and received pellets of food to feed the animals; and oohing and aahing over each exhibit and pressing his arm to her side, she dragged him from llamas to antelope, monkeys to baboons. One big male with a multicolored ass reminded him at once of the stuffed animals perched on her dressers and snuggled on her bed and reminded him, as well, of himself, although he wasn’t sure just why. But at last he began to take a pleasure in her happiness and forgot that a zoo was the last place he would have chosen to spend his one day off a week.
They had dinner in a small French restaurant she knew, and never having been in such a place before, he let her order for him. He was impressed, and although he could have eaten three times as much food as he was given, he thought it the most delicious he’d ever tasted.
“How did you ever learn to handle yourself in a place like this?” he asked her. She worked the desk of a small hotel, after all, where he’d stayed for a week before he’d found cheaper lodgings a block down the street over D’Fonzio’s bar; and he knew she couldn’t afford such prices. Hell, he couldn’t afford them either.
She giggled and leaned toward him, her eyes collecting candlelight. “I was a waitress here a couple of years ago, and I even lived with the chef for about six weeks. We had such a hot romance, I thought we were going to tie the knot,” she told him and shook her head with wonder or regret, he couldn’t be sure. “But it turned out he was an evil, jealous bastard who was already married, for Christ’s sake, and even had kids.”
He had no idea what to say. He didn’t even know what he felt. Perhaps a touch of the chef’s jealousy around his heart, perhaps a more general regret and sadness.
“He sent me to the hospital with a black eye and a cracked cheekbone, the prick,” she told him, “and that’s when I packed up and moved out, but you’ve got to admit he can cook.”
“He still cooks here?” Edward asked in disbelief.
“Sure,” she said, “he owns half interest in the place.”
“And you still eat here?”
“Not very often,�
�� she told him matter-of-factly. “It costs a fortune.”
Asking Paris a question was like trying to walk up a steep, icy hill and sliding back two steps for every step he took. You always lost more ground than you gained. From the first it was that way. His third night in Pittsburgh, pretending to himself that he was justifiably angry and totally, by God, independent, but, in fact, feeling forlorn as hell, he’d asked if he could buy her a drink when she got off her shift. He’d thought he recognized something in her eyes somehow equally lonely and cast out. “Where?” she’d asked him with a wry smile, “in your room?” “No,” he’d told her, and nodded across the small lobby of the Hampton House toward the bar, “right here.” She’d studied him for a moment, her yellow eyes suddenly quite sad he’d thought. “You’re married, aren’t you?” she’d said. He’d nodded that he was. “Well,” she’d said with a little humorless snort of laughter, “that’s all right because I am too.” But her shift wasn’t over until midnight, and that happened to be when the bar closed. “Another time,” she’d told him. Yet at a quarter till twelve she’d called his room. “This is Paris Pergola at the desk,” she’d said in a cheerful voice. “You got your pants on?” He was just enough awake to say that he did. “Good,” she’d said, “you keep them on. What do you drink?” Any sour mash bourbon was fine, he’d told her. Room service would be up in fifteen minutes, she gave him to understand, which allowed him to get out of bed, wash his face, comb his hair, and get dressed, grateful, for the first time, that Womb Broom was bunking with Ironfield Cox at D’Fonzio’s and he was the odd man out.