The accordion seller looked down at the tie he was wearing and reached for the knot he had made this morning. He loosened it with an arrogance about him that rose above the horizontal window, the obese woman, and the nude child; he wanted them to see how far he’d made it.
He wanted them to beg.
The man without sound wrote a third line in his journal: Have mercy.
No one could depict how the man had come from such humility. Even the obese woman thought in her mind how she had not the symptoms of begging, when it did not at all matter: she, too, was without speech.
The accordion seller flipped his hand at the man without sound and turned to face the door he had come out of, the bell halted in its chiming. Heavy, ain’t it? he whispered.
The man without sound heard it. So did they all. They heard it and in their collective waiting wanted the accordion seller to burn in this heat.
If only he would stand near the horizontal window, right up to the face of it, so the sun, in its fiery and catastrophic temperature, could set him ablaze.
The bell rang at the accordion seller’s near departure, and Gill, accompanied by Adam, met him where he stood.
Mr. Satchell, said Gill.
The accordion seller nodded. Train’s late, he said.
Gill walked past the accordion seller and into the ticket booth. An oval-shaped hole for the waiting customers to lean their mouths into.
Immediately, the waiters formed a line before him.
Adam, he said. Wait there.
Adam stood near the obese woman, an empty seat beside her. The humidity had risen in her face, her arms in front of her like the trembling meekness of agony.
He took his place.
The woman shook the nude child out of his sleep, and he reached for her breast to hold his discomfort. She patted him on the spine with a territorial forgiveness. He was the bait of her existence.
She had sat here, as did the accordion seller, every Monday afternoon awaiting the train to Memphis: the nude child had succumbed to a raging ear infection. She had heard of the doctor at the end of the railroad; he would pay for the expense of travel, give free medicine and coupons for penetration.
She knew, even in her waiting, that she was powerless.
The man without sound was near the wooden railing that separated the ticket holder from the train’s coming. I could do it now. No one to grab hold, he thought. Jump.
The obese woman and Adam singularly looked out at him. The obese woman, in her terror, lifted her swollen hand in midair for a moment, but he had walked away from the railing, the journal tucked inside his pocket.
Memphis, said Gill. One by one, they took their tickets and stepped out of the train station and onto the wooden plank outside of the horizontal window.
The bulb of the obese woman’s ankle was stained. The sun had crawled right up her calf and singed it.
Everyone had begun to clear out of the train station.
Gill wore a cap with two yellow lines on it. He removed it from his head and looked down at the blazer he had worn this afternoon. And up thereafter to the obese woman beside Adam.
When he saw such women in their waiting, he could not help but think of his own pitiful mother and her abandonment of him, the scent of the orphanage in the milk of her breasts, the stone he had swallowed—he approached the obese woman.
She looked up at him, down toward her heated foot.
Nobody’s coming, said Gill.
There was an indication in his speech, a penetrable explosion of telepathy.
She was exposed.
Go home, said Gill.
The obese woman ran out and away from the silent train station, the things she had seen—the accordion seller and the muted man, the nude child—and onto the wooden plank where the ticket dwellers were and drew herself to a pause near the railing where she had only moments before risen her swollen hand in an effort to avert the catastrophe of the muted man and thought of it: Jump.
But the accordion seller, in his need for idolatry, took her by the arm and, in their disappearance, patted her hair down; in her hurry, it had flung out of category from her large head.
Adam, said Gill, the train’s coming.
Gill Mender had no more in his words given instruction to Adam than D. D. Pickens when she walked through the wooded forest and gathered Midnight in her arms to heal him. She simply wanted him to breathe.
Adam, in his naïveté, took to Gill, followed him throughout the course of his footsteps with gaping thirst. A journey had begun to develop between them that caused him to sit up from his covers: his father had hung it there above his window, the hooded Klan suit. He was learning what the matter was.
The train had come to a complete stop at the railing. Gill stood near the machine until a Negro porter stepped down from the opening.
Gill looked at him and nodded.
Adam stood inside the train station.
The Negro porter walked toward the horizontal window; the door opened.
Adam had never been so close, had only seen the rigor mortis of the corpse in Hurry Bullock’s morgue. This was how the living eye moved: the gait of the body before hooked to the pulley, bloody.
Now, only he and the Negro porter stood in the waiting area of the train station.
The Negro porter paused at the sight of him: he stood with proportionate symmetry to the chair that had held the obese woman’s weight. The train talk had been beaten into the contours of his face, a sort of inconsiderate erosion that caused his head to lean forward. Adam had seen this in horses, the inability of the spine to resist.
Adam, the sun bleeding around him, stepped toward the Negro porter, who stood and waited for him without any sign of collision.
The Negro porter, whose round and unbatted eye began to water let Adam touch him: Adam had begun to trace the edges of the Negro porter’s eyelid and, in a moment of silence, opened the palm of his hand and covered the entire sphere of his dark and roaming eye. He felt it: the closing of the globe, how it pulsated on the edge of his hand, as if to steady the reasoning behind the encounter.
The ringing of the bell had long stopped.
Adam’s hand traveled to the mouth, ajar and whispering, up to the flaring nostrils.
Without difference, he had remembered the bird he had trapped in the barn, his tiny fingers over the entire face, the beak warm and perfect.
The train whistle blew.
The conductor stepped away from the machine and, in his urgency, swung open the door to the train station: Adam pulled his hand away from the Negro porter’s face with electrifying hurry.
Nigger, yelled the conductor. The luggage.
Yes, sir, said the Negro porter. Yes, sir.
The yelling, the niggers, the train talk, leaked into Adam’s eardrum.
The conductor awaited the Negro porter—who had disappeared behind the ticket counter—looked at Adam, and nodded.
Adam stepped backward, his hand up to his face, and away from the horizontal window where Gill stood on the wooden plank.
The Negro porter grabbed the luggage and was aboard the train. He hung from a vertical post on the machine as the train began to whistle a third time.
He put his hand up to his face and kept it there until the train took to its tracks and the meeting between them went down in the umbilical heat of dust and cloud.
Gill walked inside the train station, picked up the urine-sodden clothes of the nude child—past the obese woman’s sitting chair, the lone page abandoned by the muted man that lay battered on the wooden floor—and through the back doors of the train station, and tossed them into the Mississippi.
Adam, he yelled. Let’s go.
Adam, yet hung by the atmospheric pressure of the Negro porter’s face, looked down at the palm of his hand, and there it was, the print of a beak, a bird.
chapter seventeen
D. D. Pickens woke alone.
She lay on the pillows, a pounding beneath her cheekbone. She touched it,
her fingers suffocating the nerve. Suddenly, in the hallucinatory setting of her head, she had been looked upon from the window—an element of her own creation—and wished for it, whatever it was, to strike a crashing blow across her face.
She looked beside her, blood.
A cough steered Hoover Pickens out of his sleep by morning. He would wake as if flung from a beast—his hand the only source of gravity—and out of the moon’s eye. He stuck his hand down his throat. He wanted all of it, at one time, to come out of him. And even in his pleading did his lung refuse to obey him.
The lung held it, a seeping hole in the organ, an aching explosion.
D. D. Pickens pretended not to have heard it: she lay on her side upon his return, had practiced the rhythm of her sleeping as though to avoid the depiction of agony.
She could not think of it, would rather have been struck across the face with death, perhaps, rather than carry on like … like the woman in the fabric store. How many years now her husband had been dead. She remembered the bullet, through the cranium it went, a hole in his head.
As she lay, she thought of the months following his death, how the woman at the fabric store, the widow, had walked to the edge of the steps, a carelessness about her: the remnant of possession.
The widow had come down from the steps of the fabric store and, in her yawning, broke the surface of a spun web that had lived for a time between the space of two vertical columns. When she recognized the thing of which she had done, she left her arm out in public: the spider, in its nomadic pattern, crawled up the base of her arm, near the shoulder.
She reached for it. Her opposite hand and finger came down, close to the blade where the spider had attached itself to her palm. She looked out at D. D. Pickens and, with or without the need for attention, brought her hands together and she cared not who saw it: the spider was dead.
D. D. Pickens watched as the widow took her hand and mounted the corpse on the tip of her index finger. And ate it.
Were it not for Adam’s sickness, D. D. Pickens never would have witnessed this.
A maliciousness about the widow, fixed isolation, perhaps, plunged from the stability of her ego and into the burning hemisphere of heat around her. No wonder they found him dead: her husband all bloated and fat on the covers, the wound leaking from his lips, the mouth bruised by fascination, a bullet.
The widow made her sick. Her will for independence. If killing was an announcement, the manner of her introduction to the world that she was, at last, here, then must she pass it down the line, the throat?
D. D. Pickens lived alongside the muscle of a narrow corridor. It was as narrow as her mind. She had to be told, had only moved to the diction of her very own Hoover Pickens, who bade her attention no more than the source of his waking.
The blood that woke Hoover was dark now. There lay a threaded seam from the pillows and onto the floor—she could measure with proximity the exact manner of which he reached for his belly, the position he had conformed to in his sickness. Near the pulse of the sunlit window was where his arm rose above his head, a fever. And there was where he tried to hold it, the drum, the cough. Her own blood had come to a close without him.
The blade of her confinement muted.
He was not dead, but she felt it, dreamed of the happening. He would wake from the bed, reach out in front of him, and stumble, lie there with his lips parted: a stream of blood from his lung oozing out, away from the tongue.
She imagined, too, how the widow had done it: her husband had been sick, a disease, and had finally drifted into the rhythm of a coma. Everyone had heard about it, how the doctor had gone out to the widow’s house and willed her husband dead. He had been lifted from the covers, frozen with rigor mortis, and onto a wooden gurney. He lay as they found him, in the fetal position.
D. D. Pickens, now more than ever a time, saw the widow in her gown, the gun in her hands, and heard the final blow, the blast of gunpowder from behind: a bullet to the back of the head blasts the cells out of equilibrium. The shoulder grows heavy, cannot account for the loss of weight, and the torso leans in to the catastrophe, and whether sitting or lying down, it looks as though it has been pushed from the spine on purpose.
Now she forced the pillow out of proportion and brought it to her: a wrinkle, trapped by the pattern of her husband’s breathing, shaped itself into the fabric. Her fingertip caught it, smoothed it out of perplexity.
Had anyone been in the house at this moment, he would not have heard it. She moaned from her stomach and into the hem where the blood was. She thought of Adam at birth, the vulnerability of his round head. She had lain down next to him, her hand over the fontanel—a pulse there, the skull without bone—as if the exposure of the cranium struck the testimony of her solitude: she shook so when she thought of it.
The morning of Adam’s conception, she had emerged nude from her bathing, her hair and body wet, and stood near the edge of the window. She was drawn to the chimera of a lighted star, her full eye upward. It was without benefit that she did not hear him.
Hoover Pickens stood behind her, penis erect. What do you want? he asked.
At this particular and yet pitiful moment, she turned only a little to say to him, Look at it, when he plunged his penis into her. She could remember now the aching of her collarbone: the tapping, tapping of the shoulder, until at once, a cracked fissure drew itself upon the glass window, a tiny sound and, suddenly, mute.
The coming of Adam.
Was it hate that she had felt when, indeed, it was Hoover Pickens who had taken her in, a dirty stone, and brought her here to live and be his, belong to him? Perhaps it was gratitude that caused her to neglect how he smothered the pounding muscle in her face so that now she could feel it, even in her hummingbird bone, throb within the mobility of her cheek.
D. D. Pickens was not vindictive: she held neither the gall nor the appetite for holding a gun, as she had not the courage to swallow a spider. Her stomach, so hungry it was for shelter that she simply turned from the cracked window and drew her breath in so as to blame it all on the world and slipped beneath the covers.
By morning, none of it had happened.
A dream.
They hung on one line: she, Adam, and Hoover Pickens. Drawn out in her mind with one stroke. She had not paid attention, but her hand trembled the entire time. The line was as crooked and distorted as the spine pushed by the tip of the finger.
Someone entered the house.
She stood for a moment, silence.
D. D., yelled Lenora Bullock, get down yonder. I’ve got pie.
The voice of Lenora Bullock, familiar and disturbing, caused her to abandon the pillow. A microscopic surge of light fell through the eye of the window and disappeared through an opening on the wooden floor.
It had gone down below, down to the axis of Lenora Bullock’s full arm: she discovered it in rotation, her wrist upturned. The parallel beam of light sat on the vein. Through the course of its pulsation, her free hand fell to her hip. She measured the synchronicity of wrist to hip, both with pounding texture: her jawbone had fallen out of the alignment of her mouth as she stood in her remote discovery.
The sound of D. D. Pickens traveling down the stairs of the house flung her arm out of position.
D. D. Pickens’s hair hung at the shoulder. The warmth of the parallel beam of light had sunk into the globe of her eye. She had stepped into it.
I done brought pie, said Lenora Bullock, her powdered birthmark annihilated from the things of the room.
They had both seen the parallel beam of light, equally and with hesitation, an extraordinary pulling, a magnet.
D. D. Pickens opened the kitchen drawer, took up a knife, and joined Lenora Bullock, who sat at the table with her hands in front of her.
Salem’s done sick, said Lenora Bullock.
D. D. Pickens brought the pie toward her and cut it. What’s took ’m?
Lenora Bullock looked down at her wrist, still burning: Spitting up blood.
Lenora shouldn’t have come today, thought D. D. Pickens. Of all the times Lenora Bullock had brought news into her house: she noticed the downward slope of her eyelid, the whole matter of her speech narcissistic, as if it were unbearable for her to think and breathe and be one person.
I say he’s spitting up blood, repeated Lenora Bullock. Weak, I reckon.
Lenora had set the table. Two forks. Two plates. The patterns of their arrangement were forced into condition.
D. D. Pickens sat the pie before her, her plate empty.
Leaves a stain, said Lenora Bullock.
Something of preservation rose between the two women, belonging more to Lenora Bullock. Her voice, trained to exaggeration, erupted out of an invisible fascination with pity. A stone.
Blood, she whispered.
The words, entrapment.
A hole punctured Lenora Bullock beneath her breasts, the entire abdomen failing to participate in her exhalation: D. D. Pickens had done it. She had begun to ask herself why Lenora Bullock had come here this morning.
And so Lenora Bullock had eaten her slice, conformed to the spine of her chair, and looked out at the empty plate. The parallel beam lay between her and D. D. Pickens, and there could be seen the sperm of floating molecules. Dust.
You hadn’t touched it, D. D., she said. Seems you done had a slice by now, all the time it took.
Not hungry, whispered D. D. Pickens.
Without comment, Lenora Bullock rose from her chair.
A photo of irritation, mockery.
She knew not what she had done. But could only think to say it again without regard to how loud and pregnant it was: weak.
Her hand traveled from her hip and into the dust of the parallel beam of light. After all she had done, the sewing of the robe, to be treated with such despondency.
Her finger struck the molecular dust.
Sonny Willow had begun to howl in the woods.
D. D. Pickens stood up to face Lenora Bullock: Leaves a stain, she whispered.
Lenora Bullock, in turn, walked away from the Pickens house, the bed of her wrist burning.
A Killing in This Town Page 7