by William Gay
Such town as there was and what there was of it asleep. He trudged through a high-class section of town, into a neighborhood where watchdogs from the dark porches they watched refused even to acknowledge his passage, as if he’d achieved some measure of invisibility. Or was utterly alien to their frame of reference, emissary from some race set apart. He put his hands in his pockets and hunched his shoulders in the wet coat and coming into what appeared to be the business section of town looked for something that might be open. A cab stand, a bus station, an allnight diner. The wet black sidewalks gleamed where the streetlamps pooled and particolored neon pulsed in the streets like a gaudy heartbeat.
Tires sloughed softly on wet macadam. An engine slowed, almost pacing him, the engine idled down so that he could hear the lick the full-race cam was hitting, and he thought cop without even turning to look. A soft breeze had risen in these western flatlands and in the street-lamp’s globe of yellow, rain swung slantwise in a silver spray.
Hey.
Boyd turned. A blue and white cruiser was creeping along, driver’s side window down, slab of beefy red face peering out. Jowly as a bulldog. Hard cop’s eyes, like shards of agate splintered off by the blow of a hammer.
Can I help you?
Not in any way I can think of, Boyd said.
Where are you going? Boyd had increased his pace but the cruiser compensated to match him, the cop’s face intent as if he’d commit him to memory should he be called upon to identify this visage from a witness stand or as if he’d compare it to some handbill seen long ago on a post office wall.
Somewheres it’s dry, Boyd said. Am I breaking one of your laws or something?
None that I know of. It’s just that it’s three o’clock in the morning and most folks is in bed asleep. I seen you walking and thought you might have troubles of some kind. Be looking for a doctor or something.
I don’t reckon I need one, Boyd said. He took a deep breath, held it, forced himself to contain his anger. I was visitin some folks out by the levee, he said. Got caught out in the storm and sheltered under a bridge back yonder. I live east of here, in Lewis County, and I figured there might be a Greyhound station here.
There ain’t no bus station as such. They sell tickets out of the Bob-White Cafe and the bus stops there for pickups. But not till seven thirty in the morning.
And there ain’t nothing else open?
There may be somebody hangin around the cab stand. Get in, I’ll drop you off.
Boyd knew the difference between an order and an invitation. He got in. He sat clasping the door handle. Thinks I’ll steal his fuckin town, Boyd thought with sour amusement. As if they had anything he wanted. The cruiser eased through the sleeping streets, Boyd’s eyes cataloging a five-and-dime, a jewelry store, the aforementioned Bob-White Cafe. Closed, closed, closed, please call again. The entire town of Tiptonville, Tennessee, posted off-limits this April morning in 1952. If he pulls up in front of city hall he’s goin to be one surprised son of a bitch, Boyd thought. He won’t know what hit him.
The cop didn’t speak again. He stopped in front of a small rundown storefront where a sign said TAXI and Boyd knew he was meant to get out. He did. He closed the door and the cruiser eased away. The plate-glass front of the cab stand was cracked in myriad fissures mended with duct tape and the entire window bulged slightly outward as if barely containing some internal force. There was a padlock through the hasp on the peeling green door but a cab parked at the curb before it and Boyd could see a pair of shoe soles propped against the driver’s side window.
When Boyd rapped with a knuckle on the glass the shoes moved and a man raised up in the front seat and rolled a bleary eye up at him. The man wiped a hand across his face as if he’d erase sleep and cranked down the glass.
You needin a ride?
You know where a man might buy a drink of whiskey this time of night?
I might. Get on in here, no, get up here in the front with me. It’s fell a flood ain’t it? Looks like it fell a good bit of it on you.
I got caught out in it, Boyd said, getting in and pulling the door closed. How far is it to this bootlegger’s?
It ain’t never far to a bootlegger, the driver said, cranking the engine and pulling out into the street. Won’t be no more than a fifty-cent run.
They drove out past the railroad tracks. A string of boxcars and flat-cars stacked with crossties was pulled onto a siding and Boyd turned and watched them out of sight. They rode on past poultry houses with rows of lighted windows that looked long as freight trains and past cotton-fields wet and blacklooking in the headlights and across a rickety bridge that popped and snapped ominously under the cab’s passage and to a bricksiding house in a treeless earth yard.
He don’t sell nothin but halfpint bottles, the cabby said. I think it’s a dollar and a half for a halfpint.
Boyd walked toward the porch beneath a bare lightbulb suspended from a wire that seemed to descend out of the dark heavens themselves. When he knocked a tiny door within the door opened immediately as if they’d had word here of his coming and a moleshaped man stood regarding him benignly from among his stacked cases of bottles.
Let me have two halfpints of whiskey.
I ain’t got nothing but peach brandy left, the man said. I sold a sight in the world of whiskey tonight. Everybody in this part of the country must of decided to get drunk.
Just let me have whatever you got then.
When he’d paid for the brandy and paid the cabdriver Boyd had one lone dollar left and this he folded and slid carefully into the watch pocket of his jeans. In the cab he cracked one of the bottles and drank and offered it to the cabdriver but the cabby waved it away.
Lord no. I ever started drinking when I was behind the wheel I’d likely drive clean off to Asia or somewhere. I can’t be trusted drinkin and drivin an automobile.
Shit ain’t worth drinkin anyhow. Kind of sickly sweet. I bet enough of this stuff’d give a man a hell of a hangover.
I’ll tell you what it’ll give you in Lake County, the cabdriver said. A few days in the crossbar hotel. Where do you want to go? They’ll vag you in this town, you ain’t got a pocketful of money.
About two hundred and fifty miles from here, Boyd said. I guess that’s more than a fifty-cent run, ain’t it. How often they run that train out?
Ever day. Them flatcars of ties leaves some time in the mornin headed towards Jackson. You goin to have to get somewheres until then.
Let me out at the railroad tracks then.
HIS MOTHER had gone in the night with no word of her intent though the signs were there if you cared to read them. In his mind Fleming could see her covert departure. Perhaps carrying her shoes, tiptoeing toward the door past the moonlit windows, light to dark, light to dark until she vanished. Until the night negated her, made her transparent as the shade in some old grandmother’s ghost story, sucked her down where the light goes when you lean and blow out a candle.
She had long been a silent woman, in her early thirties but old before her time, life passing her by, the world going its way without her. She had grown stingy with words, whole days spent in sullen silence, as if her supply of words was being exhausted and she must parcel them out one by one.
He had watched the sallow mask she wore for a face and wondered what went on behind it. A year ago he came upon her burning a box of his books, feeding them one by one to the wood heater. They struggled for a moment over the book she was proffering to the fire. He wrested the box away from her and she threw the book she was holding and slammed him hard in the side of the head. You dreamyeyed little fool, she spat at him, expressing once and for all her contempt for the written word, those who would read it and those who would attempt to transcribe it in spiralbound notebooks.
The night she vanished Boyd had shaken him awake, holding aloft the kerosene lamp, something strange in his face that was echoed in his voice when he spoke.
Where’s your mama?
Fleming didn’t know anyth
ing to say to this. He got up and followed Boyd into the front room. Boyd was searching all about the room though there was no place for her to be. He seemed in the throes of a grief so grotesque it was almost comic, and Fleming watched him with a dispassionate emotion approaching contempt.
If this don’t beat any damn thing I ever seen, Boyd said.
The boy went back to bed. After a while he heard the door close when Boyd went out and then close again when he came back in. He waited for the sound of the bedsprings creaking when Boyd went back to bed but he never heard it. At length he turned his face to the wall and went to sleep.
BOYD WAS half asleep when the cars were coupled to the engine, a loud metallic shunting and a series of jolts he could feel in his teeth. He raised up from the straw he’d been lying in when the cars began to move, the dark landscape of light and shadow sliding past the open door. He drank from the opened bottle and put it back inside his shirt with its brother where he could feel it cold and smooth against his belly. He took out his tobacco and began to build a cigarette, watching past the flare of the match sleeping houses streaking past like islands afloat in the moving sea of night, the train’s speed increasing, so that he was caught in a rising tide of exhilaration at its sheer movement.
I wouldn’t mind one of them smokes, a voice said.
Boyd leapt involuntarily at the sound; he hadn’t known there was anybody else in the world. At length he could make out a shape, a darker shadow among other shadows.
I ain’t goin to bring it to you.
The shadow stirred, and Boyd could smell the man, a rank sour compound of perspiration, whiskey. He reached the tobacco across when the man hunkered before him, the man separating out a paper and sifting tobacco into it, light slant across his bearded jaw, long lank strawcolored hair that fell like a shadow across his eyes.
I had some money I’d buy a sack of my own. You ain’t got a quarter you’d let a man have have you?
All I got is a dollar bill and there ain’t no way of breakin it. If I had some change I’d give it to you.
That dollar’d work, the man said. His face was wolfish in the orange flare of the match, somehow unreal through the exhaled smoke, not like a man but the malevolent embodiment of one, just another obstacle the angry fates had stood in Boyd’s path.
Boyd was gauging the man’s size and he didn’t reply. He was confident of his own size and strength, once when he’d worked at the tie yards he’d on a bet shouldered and walked off with a seven-by-nine crosstie on each shoulder. He could feel the tensing muscles of his thighs, the rockhard biceps, and he drew comfort from them. Boyd was as fastidious in his personal habits as circumstances permitted and he thought, if I can get past the smell of him I’ll be all right.
How about a little drink of that whiskey?
I ain’t got no whiskey.
The hell you don’t. If there’s one thing I ain’t never mistook about it’s the sound of a whiskey bottle lid bein screwed off. There ain’t nothin else in the world sounds like it.
Why don’t you just get away and leave me the hell alone? I ain’t botherin you.
Let’s have that dollar you been braggin about.
Boyd shoved him hard backward but the man seemed to have been expecting it and when he came up he was opening a hawkbill knife that just appeared from nowhere. Boyd crouched and waited for the thrust of the knife and when it came he grasped the arm as hard as he could and broke it across his knee. The knife spun away. As he stooped to pick it up the man gave a cry of animal rage and butted him so hard he went backpedaling away until his feet ran out of surface and he was falling, a nightmarish vision of the door receding not only upward but jerked hard to the right, the wheels clocking and gears gnashing like hell’s jaws and abruptly he was rolling knees over head down a stony slope, pain that was liquid fire flaring in his sides and strange lights flickering behind his eyelids. He fetched up at the bottom of the slope sitting on his haunches and watching the vanishing train with a stunned disbelief.
At length he rose and pulled his shirt off and shook the glass out of it. Blood black as tar in the starlight was tracking down his ribcage from myriad cuts. He studied his wounds as best he could to gauge the seriousness of them and when he was satisfied stood picking the shards of glass out of his skin. The shirt was soaked with blood and peach brandy but there was nothing for it. He pulled the shirt on and buttoned it.
He turned left, right, trying to pinpoint the four points of the compass in all this dark. This world was flat as a pool table and as featureless. He wasted a few minutes searching for the tobacco and on the faint hope that only one of the bottles had shattered but gave it up when he found both bottlecaps.
It seemed a long time before the faintest wash of light appeared in the eastern sky and when it did he rose and walked off toward it.
WHEN E. F. BLOODWORTH came up the concrete stairway from the basement carrying the cased banjo she was sitting in the swing on the end of the porch waiting for him the way he had known she would be. He could hear the peas she was shelling begin striking the tin bucket set beside the swing but she had commenced only upon hearing him close the door to his rented room. The thought of her sitting there with unshelled peas held at the ready and waiting for the sound of his footfalls was a little disquieting, and he began to feel boxed in, a way he did not like to feel. And never had for long.
The day he had carried the guitar to the freight office to be shipped to Ackerman’s Field she had been at work but she had missed the old Martin double-F immediately and inquired about it. He had shipped the guitar first because he could not carry both instruments at once, and he hated worse being separated from the banjo.
You’ll fall out in that sun, she said. You know what the doctor told you.
Bloodworth was coming around the end of the porch, fending his way through the box elders with a walking stick. He only told me that because I was about broke, he said. If I had had twenty more dollars I could of got a more favorable report.
He crossed between the box elders and the porch. You planted all this mess so I couldn’t fight my way through it and escape, he told her. He set the banjo case down on a cracked and wonky sidewalk and seated himself with some difficulty on the edge of the porch.
She went on shelling peas. It don’t seem to be working too well, does it? she asked.
He took off his hat, a pearlgray Stetson fedora, and ran a hand across the long black strands of his hair. The sun was in his face and he shaded it with a hand. He had a craggy, hawklike face. His black eyes were heavylidded and sleepylooking, but watchful as a predator’s. He sat for a long moment watching her out of these hooded eyes.
She was as square and solid and unlovely as a wooden packing crate. Her high-complexioned moonshaped face bloomed with the high blood pressure she suffered from and her hair was dyed a hard bright orange that nature would have been hard put to replicate. But she sat in the shade of a rose trellis and the shadows of roses and the shadows of their leaves climbed her clean white nurse’s uniform onto her face and her eyes were a clear bright blue that reminded the old man of Indian summer skies he had seen long ago as a boy. On top of that she was as kind a human being as he had ever encountered and he had thought long and hard before deciding to make this move.
You are a fool, she told him. But then you don’t need me to tell you that.
Where were you fifty years ago? he asked. If you’d told me that then it might have done some good. I might have straightened right out.
You couldn’t be straightened out with a block and tackle hooked on each end of you. The only way you’ll ever be straightened out is when they arrange you in the box and clasp your hands together.
Damned if you wouldn’t cheer a feller up, he said. I bet in your spare time you set around making up sayings that would look good carved on tombstones.
I spend too much of my time taking care of people who die in spite of all they can do, she said. It aggravates me to see a man with a choice just set out to k
ill himself. You’ll die on that bus. They’ll take you off on a stretcher in some place where nobody gives a damn about you. It looks to me like if a man’s set on dying he’d want to do it where there’s somebody cares something about him.
I don’t want to do it nowhere, Bloodworth said. And ain’t about to.
You know I care something about you. I’d take care of you. And I can do it right, that’s what I do for a living.
The amount of care I need has been way overstated, the old man said. I believe I’m capable of taking care of myself.
He fell silent, watching her. He didn’t want to tell her that what she did for a living was part of the problem. Cora worked in a hospital in Little Rock, in the wing where patients were sent to die. It was Cora’s job to help them, and he guessed she was good at it, they all died, but he didn’t want any help from a professional. An aura of death hung about her like a plague. The smell of dying folks had soaked into her clothes, her lungs were saturated from breathing the last breaths of too many men, when she got up to cross the floor the unquiet dead she’d helped ferry across the Styx struggled up and followed obediently after her. She moved always encumbered by a legion of the invisible dead.
The tunes and words to songs ran perpetually through the old man’s head and he thought of one he used to sing: who’ll rock the cradle, who’ll sing the song? and he wondered when the time came who would bind Cora’s slack jaws, who would lean to close her eyelids forever.
It’s just somethin I’ve got to do, he said. I want to see the country where I was a boy. And I guess maybe I want to see how long hard feel-ins can last.
They last a long time, she told him. I’ve no doubt that you’ll learn that, at least.
He stood up, took up the banjo. I’ve got to get this thing shipped, I can’t set around here jawing with you all day. I’m not even leaving till I get a little more of my strength back. Likely the way it’ll go is I’ll stay a month or two and come back before winter. Or maybe send for you, Cora, how about that? Would you come if I sent for you?