by William Gay
You cowardly son of a bitch, the girl cried. She was looking about wildly for something to throw but could find not so much as a Coke bottle. She made as if to throw the magazine then thought better of it and turned and caught Fleming by the hand.
Can you get up?
He stood but his left leg wouldn’t work. The muscles in his thigh felt as if they had cramped themselves into a series of knots, one atop the other. He made it to the curb and sat down and massaged his leg hard. The muscle in it was jumping like something alive but separate from him and he rubbed it until he could feel some of the tension easing out of it. Blood kept dripping on his jeans and he reached and felt his face and worked his jaw back and forth with his hand then leant and spat a tooth into the street.
Let’s go, the girl said. We need to be out of these streetlights before the law drives by. They’ll lock you up.
He spat a mouthful of blood. I haven’t done anything.
That makes no nevermind. You’re from out of town and you’ve got blood all over you. They’ll lock you up.
He staggered up out of the street. Then by all means, he said.
They went down a narrow sloping alley between the Eat and Run Cafe and a feed store past broken crates and garbage cans and an inkblack cat that vanished into nothing at all in the darkness. They came out on a street near the river and struck out down it, the boy pausing now and again to raise his left foot and kick the leg as if some delicate mechanism had become misaligned and he might jar it back into place. After a while he noticed his right hand was aching and when he raised it to the light there were streaks of blood coursing down his fingers. He just shook his head and went on.
Abruptly the girl stopped in the middle of the street and began to laugh. She grasped his arm. Why did you say that about Sheila Brewer’s brother? she asked.
Hellfire, he said. You were the one that came up with that crazy shit about that no account Sheila Brewer. I’ll bet there’s not even such a person.
After a moment she began to laugh again. It was a throaty halfmusical sound and Fleming for a crazy moment thought that if he hurried he might be able to catch his assailant and get beaten up again and she’d go on doing it.
Anyway I thought I’d make him mad enough to charge me, and if he was out of control I might be able to handle him. It may be that I’ve seen too many movies.
He was out of control, all right, the girl said. I believe that I’ve misjudged you. I believe you’re something of a smartass after all.
I just never can learn when to keep my mouth shut, he said.
I’m sorry about your tooth, I swear. But I never expected you to set him off like that.
He smiled a rueful smile. He was picking shards of broken glass out of his knuckles. He’s going to have a mighty sore pair of sunglasses in the morning, he said.
They left the street under the girl’s lead and ascended a slope to its smoothly mown summit where trees stood about as if landscaped and benches were aligned under their branches. He saw that they were overlooking the river where it passed thirty or forty feet below them. Lights were mounted here on poles and where the light pooled below the bluff the river was a swirling lurid yellow but this tended away toward the enormity of its width and there was not the slightest rumor of a farther shore, as if this was land’s end, they stood with the earth at their backs and all there was left of the world was water.
Let me see your face, she said.
I’ll show you mine if you’ll show me yours.
She wiped his bloody face with the hem of her dress. He glimpsed the smooth brown expanse of her legs when she raised it but she saw the cast of his eyes and turned his face gently away and examined it critically. She raised the dress again and moistened a folded corner of the hem with her tongue and gently scrubbed the blood off his burst lip and the corners of his mouth. She grimaced. This is going to be a swollen-up mess in the morning, she said. You won’t be so pretty then.
I wasn’t much for pretty anyway.
They sat on a bench beneath an enormous maple. Well, she said. Do you suppose Junior and Mama are done yet?
He turned to look at her sharply. What? he asked.
He may be, what is that song they used to play on WLAC, a sixty-minute man. Do you think he’s a sixty-minute man?
What I really think is that you’re mighty blasé about all this, he finally said.
Her eyes widened slightly. Blasé? What kind of word is that? What does it mean?
I just read it somewhere and always wanted to use it in a sentence, he said. I never heard anybody say it. I guess it means that you don’t seem to take what she’s doing, what they’re doing, very seriously. It’s almost like you think it’s funny.
She looked away, across the river into the darkness. I doubt if it’s been thirty minutes since I warned you about getting me and Mama confused, she said. If we’re going to be friends, if we’re going to be anything at all to each other, you’ve got to get that straight. I’m just me, and I’m not taking responsibility for what anyone else in this round world does.
All right, he said. I’m sorry. It seems I’m a dumbass instead of a smartass.
They fell silent. The bench was cool and damp against the back of Fleming’s neck. He closed his eyes. His tongue prodded the hole where lately his tooth had been. He wondered what time it was. It occurred to him that he was over forty miles from home, that Albright had already been drunk and would almost certainly be drunker, and that the road back to Ackerman’s Field from Clifton held hairpin curves and switchbacks beyond his power to number. After a while the girl settled her head against his shoulder. He sat without moving for a long time. Scarcely breathing. It seemed to him that the universe had tilted slightly on its axis and come to rest against him and that the barely perceptible weight on his left shoulder was the only thing that kept the stars spinning on their mitered courses.
He opened his eyes. Fireflies had come out over the river, thousands of them, more. They seemed to have appeared inexplicably and simultaneously, so many of them that he could see the dark water moving below them. They’d shaped themselves to the contour of the river, shifting and darting and roiling like sparks thrown upward by a river of smoldering fire. As far as the eye could see, up the river, down, like some rite of nature he’d been called forth to witness. He watched until she rose and pulled him up by a hand and led him off toward town.
Where’ve you been? Mrs. Halfacre asked.
We walked uptown, the girl said.
Town’s closed.
It’s closed but it’s still there, the girl said, as if that was that.
Fleming sat in the armchair in the corner of the room. Albright and Mrs. Halfacre were on the couch. There was nowhere else to sit and Raven Lee poured Fleming half a glass of wine and gave it to him and settled herself on the arm of his chair.
Mrs. Halfacre seemed to have lost all the playful friendliness she’d exhibited earlier. She looked drunk, not like a raucous drunk or a happy-go-lucky drunk but a mean drunk, a drunk who is looking for trouble and knowing just where it’s hidden. Every time Fleming glanced up she’d be watching him. Mean little eyes in the thickening flesh of her face.
What’s happened to him? she finally asked.
He kept falling down, Raven Lee said. He’s about the clumsiest boy I ever came across.
Albright bore evidence of what Fleming had feared. He seemed to be profoundly drunk. He’d spilled wine all down his front and he was holding a guitar in his lap like something he’d found somewhere and couldn’t fathom the use of. He sat watching the tall radio cabinet with a fixed intensity as if he saw through the speaker cloth to where wires and condensers and tubes magically reconstructed images of folk picking guitars, sawing on fiddles, hawking barn paint.
I guess you know you’ve got blood all over the tail of that dress, Mrs. Halfacre said. It won’t come out. I reckon you think dresses like that are just give away.
The girl didn’t even reply.
Fleming w
as looking at Albright with a wary disgust, already dreading the long ride home. Something had changed during his absence, the very atmosphere had altered. Perhaps some shift in the magnetic field. Perhaps she’d asked Albright for more money, the twenty Fleming had given him was all he had. Spending the night here no longer seemed an option to be considered.
You know who he is, don’t you? the woman suddenly asked.
A curl like a comma, like a question mark, had fallen over Raven Lee’s eyes. She raked it away with a hand. Of course I know who he is.
He’s a Bloodworth and I won’t have one in the house after the way that cousin of his done.
What’s this about? Fleming asked.
Never you mind what it’s about, Mrs. Halfacre said.
Don’t pay her any mind, the girl said. She’s drunk.
Fleming laid a hand gently on the girl’s back. He could feel the bone knobs of her vertebrae through the thin cloth of her dress. Then he dropped the hand and set the wine down and arose.
It’s time to go, he said.
Albright turned. He laid the guitar in Mrs. Halfacre’s lap. She jerked it up and tossed it into a corner. What? Albright asked.
It’s time to go.
It’s early yet.
It’s time to go.
They went out into the yard. Moonlight through the branches made the yard black and silver, light and shadow, the clotted ivy was black as jet.
You’re drunk as a dog, Fleming said. Drunker than a dog. You’ll kill us both before we get to the city limits. I’d better drive and I don’t trust my driving much more than I do yours.
I can drive, Albright said. He clasped Fleming’s shoulder. I can drive better dog drunk than you can cold sober. Better asleep than you can awake. Trust me.
Raven Lee had followed them out. You better make him drive slow, she said.
Make him? You can’t make him anything. That’s like making the sun wait up because you need a few more minutes of daylight.
Albright was already in the car. The engine cranked, set idling. Albright was mopping condensation off the inside of the windshield with a wadded shirt.
Well, Raven Lee said. It was certainly interesting drinking a Coke with you. Thanks for the magazine. Do you reckon you’ll ever make it back down here?
I was just going to ask you about that. How about going to the show with me next weekend?
She nodded her head toward the house. You heard her opinion of Bloodworths.
I also heard you say you don’t tell her how to live her life and she don’t tell you how to live yours.
Well. She smiled. I guess you’ve got me there. You could try and see.
It’s a long way down here just to try and see.
Don’t you think I’m worth it?
Yes. I know you’re worth it. I’ll try and see.
Have you got a car?
Of course I’ve got a car, he said, wondering where he’d get one. But such minor details could be worked out later.
She suddenly placed both hands on his forearm as if she’d use it for leverage to raise herself higher and tiptoed and kissed him on the mouth. He turned to hold her but she’d pulled away and she was already going up the walk toward the house.
A mile or so out of Clifton Albright pulled onto the shoulder of the road. Maybe you’d better do this, he said. The road keeps fadin in and out like. I don’t know what’s the matter with it.
Fleming got out and came around and slid under the wheel. Albright had scooted over and was resting his face against the glass.
I might as well, Fleming said. If I’m goin to get killed I may as well have some control over it.
What would it matter if you got killed, Albright said. You was kissed on the mouth by Raven Lee Halfacre. What in the world did you do to her to make her do that?
Fleming didn’t reply. After a while he looked over and Albright was asleep with his head against the window. He drove on. The thought of her hands on his forearm as she’d tiptoed to kiss his mouth lessened the ache in his thigh, straightened the curves in the road toward Ackerman’s Field. The weight of her head on his shoulder as he watched the fireflies.
There was something oddly restful about the fireflies. He couldn’t put his finger on it but he drew comfort from it anyway. The way they’d seemed not separate entities but a single being, a moving river of light that flowed above the dark water like its negative image and attained a transient and fragile dominion over the provinces of night.
BOOK THREE
IN DETROIT Boyd had worked for a time in a steel mill, stoking furnaces in an atmosphere so charged with fire and noise and molten metal he seemed constantly to toil in the eye of an electrical storm, a place if not hell then certainly the room across the hall from it, a foundry that he felt might be more aptly occupied by scaleyskinned demons or other of the devil’s toadies. Then he got a job in a factory loading huge rolls of corrugated cardboard onto a machine that sucked the cardboard off the roll into itself and spat it out in cardboard boxes.
He was a man much to himself. He asked no questions, and in turn was asked few himself. He seemed to be descending into a well of silence so deep the hammering of machinery was as impotent to defray it as the discordant jangling jukeboxes that furnished the hillbilly bars he haunted at night. He’d eat his meager supper and bathe and put on clean clothes that were just like the clothes he’d taken off except laundered and go into the nighttime bars where other hillbillies crossed and re-crossed in tangents of random violence as if they were all looking for something they’d lost.
These folk from Arkansas, Tennessee, Missouri did not seem to melt into the common culture of the city. They seemed to have changed only in the matter of geography. They were who they were. Drop them into a beaker of acid and they would list down and rest unchanged on the bottom, unassimilated, unrepentant, unreconstructed. All these folk seemed to have more past than future and it was a common past of failure and loss and they seemed to recognize each other on sight as Masons were told to do.
So he never doubted that he would find them. The peddler was much given to drink and Boyd had only to haunt the bars in the hillbilly section of Detroit. Trash always settles to the bottom, he had told himself, drifting downward himself. The wonder was not that he found them, but that it took so long. They must have been moving through the gaudy neon half a beat out of sync, coming when he was going, arriving when he’d just left.
He saw them once crossing the street where Delancey intersected 114th. He saw them first from the back, but he knew them instantly, as if something had been encoded into him so that he would have known them from the ghost of a reflected gesture, from a scuffmark on the sidewalk. Boyd’s wife had said something and the man had turned to hear. Something grinning and obsequious in his manner gave Boyd a moment of unease, perhaps he was killing the wrong half of this couple. The peddler seemed deferential and indecisive. Yet something ran through Boyd tangible as a seismic tremor, he felt an actual altering of his heartbeat, a change in the speed of the blood coursing through his body.
He was stopped from killing the peddler not by any compunction at violence or even by the fear of getting caught in so public a place under the eyes of scores of witnesses but by the sheer and abrupt realization that it would be the end of something. It was less a jumping off place than a denouement. He had not thought beyond it. He did not know what came next. He was at the point on an ancient map beyond which the old cartographers had drawn dragons.
He went back to his room at the boarding house and lay on his bed atop the covers with all his clothes on. He lay on the sweaty sheets with arms outflung in an attitude of crucifixion. He looked like a man who had fallen from an enormous height. There was a ceiling fan turning above him and he lay watching light play on the revolving blade. His life had honed itself down to a finite number of revolutions of a metal blade through dead air.
They came into a bar on Twenty-sixth Street. He watched them cross the room to a table near the back. The m
an came to the bar to order drinks. He stood at Boyd’s elbow unbeknownst as he did it. Like a man asking the Reaper if the seat next to him was taken. He ordered Boyd’s wife a whiskey sour. She used to be down on drinking but he guessed not so much anymore. He pondered how all good resolve is sanded away by the attrition of time and circumstance. The man paid for the drinks and left the bar. Boyd finished his bourbon and water and set the glass back. He ordered another. He drank it slowly, tasting the smooth whiskey on the back of his tongue. When he set the glass back empty he raked his change off the bar and pocketed it.
He was halfway across the room when the woman saw him. She sprang up, her chair fell behind her unnoticed. She had the peddler by the arm saying something harsh and peremptory to him. Instead of running the peddler jerked up the woman’s purse, and for a surreal instant Boyd thought that was funny; grabbing up a purse ought to be the last thing you’d do when someone was bearing down upon you with a hawkbill knife. But the man had opened the purse and was dumping its contents on the table. Coins went cartwheeling, lipsticks and bottles rolled off the table. A small chromeplated automatic pistol tilted onto the black Formica.
When the woman slapped the pistol away there was a moment when things could have gone either way. But Boyd was upon him now, there had been too many nights of absolute solitude, things had just gone too far, too far. The knife sank itself so deeply into the peddler’s viscera he thought his fist would go too, he jerked the knife upward with such force it wedged itself in the breastbone.
He rocked the knife free and turned and fled in what appeared one smooth motion, a movement so graceful it might have been rehearsed, choreographed. He came out on the street and then into it a dead run, horns blowing and tires squalling and then he was crossing on the hoods and trunks of automobiles, leaping from one to the other, the outraged faces behind the windshields like the appalled faces beyond footlights of a stage where a play has gone horribly wrong.