WHERE TROUBLE SLEEPS

by Clyde Edgerton

  Leland stood up slowly, wiped his nose with his hand, looked at it, at Stephen. "You better not ever come in my yard again."

  "We'll see about that," said Stephen's mother. "You shouldn't use that gun. That's not fair. You ought to use your bare hands. Stephen, come on in the house. Now." She unhooked the door for him and in the kitchen she took his milk bottle from warm water on the stove, gave it to him with an asthma pill, and told him to go rest on the couch.

  A student from Duke University aimed his camera at a side window of the flintrock store. Peeled paint along with the rust on the bars had caught his eye. / Andrew, over in T.R., had just helped his favorite aunt sell her car because she couldn't see much anymore. As he and his eight-year-old granddaughter pulled into the driveway, the little girl asked, "Will it snow this winter?" and he was trying to answer so that she would not see him crying. / "Some people," said Train to his brother Luke, "will always naturally gravitate to the top and others to the bottom. This is healthy. It gives people something to shoot for. You've got some sense, Luke, if you'd just get off your ass. And do me a favor: Don't try to kill a fly with that blowtorch no more. Use a goddamn flyswatter."

  Late that afternoon, around suppertime, Jack Umstead was back, sitting on the bench at Train's Place, drinking a Blatz. Maybe some woman would come walking by going to the picture show at the school. Maybe that Cheryl would go. She was a little bit young, but not too young.

  It was almost six-thirty. He couldn't remember if the picture show time was seven or seven-thirty.

  A white Cadillac drove up, eased to a stop. Out got a man, reminded him of somebody. The man went inside, came back out with a Coke, sat down on the bench. Umstead looked at the big diamond ring, the Cadillac. Maybe he needn't bother about the Blaine sisters.

  "Looks like they gone let MacArthur take care of the Koreans," said the man, staring straight ahead.

  "The only good communist is a dead communist," said Umstead. "That's who you look like—MacArthur."

  "That's what I've been told. More than once ... Now, if the Russians and the Chinese were to team up we'd be in for a right long haul." The man took a swig of Coke. "Course they ain't got that hydrogen bomb. We could just go on and finish it quick. Which is what we should have done done."

  Jack Umstead took a swig of beer, crossed his legs. "Does anybody go to the picture show down there at the school on Friday nights?"

  "I don't know. I think they do. You're the one living at the Settle Inn, ain't you?"

  "Yeah. Staying there while I visit some of my kinfolks."

  "Over in T.R.?"

  "Pretty good ways on beyond T. R."

  "I'm Claude T. Clark."

  "Delbert Jones. Pleased to meet you."

  "Bunch of gypsies moved in down there at the Settle Inn about a year ago. We finally got some boys to run them out.

  You know, they'll steal right out from under your nose—worse than coons."

  "I heard say they wouldn't kill nobody though."

  "They got all these irregular beliefs, don't they?" said Clark, eyeing Umstead.

  "I wouldn't be surprised. I hear they're pretty strange. Strange customs."

  "That's right. You belong to a church back where you're from?"

  "Well, yeah, I'm a Baptist back in Mississippi and I'm thinking about joining the church down there."

  "My wife's the secretary down there and damned if she ain't moved in her office. Sprained her ankle and just decided to stay over a few days. Got her a little two-eyed hot plate in there and I don't know what all. She done the same thing last winter when it snowed."

  "Sprained her ankle?"

  "Naw, just moved in her office. On account of the snow."

  "Seems like I heard about that."

  "It's all right with me." Mr. Clark took a swig of Coke. "But I tell you what. I do miss her. She's a good thing. My first wife died and I've been mighty lucky on both counts."

  "That's a nice car."

  "I wouldn't have nothing but a Cadillac."

  "I got me a Buick Eight and I'm real pleased with that."

  "A Buick's a good car."

  Sure enough, at six-thirty, Cheryl Daniels came down her front steps, walked by the barbershop, and kept going toward the school. She walked as if her hips were out in front of her.

  "Well, well," said Umstead. "I think I might get on down to the school and watch that movie."

  "Take it easy."

  "Going to the movie?" Mr. Jones—Delbert—called out as he caught up.

  "Yessir."

  Cheryl had hoped something exactly like this might happen. He looked just enough like a movie star that she could go ahead and pretend he was.

  " 'Yessir?' I thought I told you not to call me that."

  "I know."

  "How come you ain't working?"

  "I get Monday and Friday nights off. And all day Sunday."

  "It's a pretty evening, ain't it?"

  "It sure is. How old are you, anyway?"

  "Thirty-one," he said. "In my prime."

  That night after supper, Stephen's father and mother played policeman with him. He mounted his bicycle with training wheels and wheeled from the kitchen into the dining room, where his father, sitting in a chair, was a policeman holding up his hand for Stephen to stop, then motioning him on into the living room where his mother was the policeman. On each turn he signaled with his arm. A grown-up thing.

  Before bed, on the couch in the living room, he listened as his mother read to him from Aunt Margaret's Bible Stories.

  ...and while he was building the Ark, people laughed at Noah. They would not believe that anything bad was going to happen. They would not believe in God.

  By and by Noah opened the window of the Ark and let out a raven. The raven never came back, because a raven eats dead things, and there were so many dead bodies floating around that it got plenty of food, and never came back to the Ark that had saved it. Noah waited a week, and then he let out a dove, but the dove flew back to the Ark, and Noah took her back and kept her a week, then let her fly again. This time when she came back she brought a sprig of olive branch. Ever since that time the olive branch has meant something good.

  Then God made a promise to Noah that no flood should ever drown all the world again, but spring, summer, autumn, and winter, day and night, would go on to the end of the world, when the world would not be drowned by water, but instead be burned up by fire. Then God gave a gift as a sign of his promise: the rainbow.

  At about 1:00 a.m., Cheryl flipped back her top sheet. She was fully dressed. She walked very quietly to the front door, opened it, slipped out of the house—it was a warm night—crossed the quiet, silent intersection, and headed toward the Settle Inn. She studied her eerie blinking yellow shadow. She'd done some things, but this was one of the best yet. Delbert Jones might as well be a movie star. She'd kidded him about things. He'd laughed. She'd been hoping for somebody like him to come along since she started reading movie magazines. He was real trustworthy and gentle-like and she was so happy she felt like she could just jump up and down. She skipped a couple of times to hurry up. She could hardly hold back from running, so she skipped along like a little girl.

  After the movie, while they had sat by themselves in the dark on the top row of the grandstand, Delbert had told her all about moving away from the other side of T.R. down to Columbia, South Carolina, and then on to Rolling Fork, Mississippi; told her about the grandstand down there in Rolling Fork where he'd played high school baseball and had been scouted by the Boston Red Sox; about the movies they took of him, movies he had in his room back at the Settle Inn along with a projector. Would she mind letting him kiss her right now? he'd asked—he was very polite—and then later on if she could come on down to the Settle Inn, he'd show her the movies of him and maybe they could kiss a little more, go for a late-night ride over to Summerlin, or T.R., or somewhere, ride in his new car with the windows down letting the night air in after such a hot day. Then he could let her off n
ear her house and she could be in bed for a few hours of sleep before morning. A fun little plan.

  That afternoon MRS. Toomey had taken Stephen with her to cut Bea and Mae Blaine's toenails, and in the night of that day, as Jack Umstead sat beside Cheryl Daniels in the grandstand after watching The Best Years of Our Lives, Stephen played with his doodie in a serious way. Stuck there in his head was an image of Miss Bea pulling her black dress apart at the waist, lifting the upper part of the dress so that her ribs, brought to light and life, alive, in a greenish tint, pulled him into a light green then yellow pulsing place of pure feeling in his doodie, a smooth yellow-green yearning feeling like the train's faraway whistle sound in his ears, getting closer and closer, louder and louder.

  Mrs. clark sat on her couch over at the church, content, reading her Bible. She was reading about Moses.

  And Moses spake unto all the congregation of the children of Israel, saying, This is the thing which the Lord commanded, saying, Take ye from among you an offering unto the Lord; whosoever is of a willing heart, let him bring it, an offering of the Lord; gold, and silver, and brass, and blue, and purple, and scarlet, and fine linen, and goats' hair, and rams' skins dyed red, and badgers' skins, and shittim wood. And oil for the light, and spices for anointing oil, and for the sweet incense, and onyx stones, and stones to be set for the sphod, and for the breastplate.

  They were so colorful back then, she thought. She skipped along and read, And every man, with whom was found blue, and purple, and scarlet, and fine linen, and goats' hair and red skins of rams, and badgers' skins, brought them ... And all the women that were wise-hearted did spin with their hands, and brought that which they had spun, both of blue, and of purple, and of scarlet, and of fine linen. And all the women whose heart's stirred them up in wisdom spun goats' hair.

  And then there was some writing about slaves and the Levites, the ones who got in trouble. It was all so interesting, even though she couldn't quite take in the meaning of it all. It was history! True history!

  Just after the film Hot in the Kitchen started, Delbert stopped the projector. "I'm as sorry as I can be, Cheryl. This ain't what it's supposed to be. I swear I thought... I guess I brought the wrong box of films. This here is some sultry stuff my brother left behind when he went to Germany."

  "What's 'sultry'?"

  "Naked people and such as that. Cavorting around. It's really kind of fun."

  "Can we watch it?" He was fun, and smart, and polite, thought Cheryl.

  "Well, yeah, if you want to. We'll watch some of it."

  Right in the middle of the film, he stopped the projector and told Cheryl his big problem in life: a condition he was ashamed of, and that maybe they could talk about it—did she mind?—and then after he told her as tenderly and meekly as he could that he had a weakness for lying and that he had lied some to her out of embarrassment because of a very unlucky past, and that he had a thinking condition that made him not be able to control some of his thinking and doing. After telling her all that, he asked her if she had anything she was ashamed of. And here she told him she didn't have any big problems in life, nothing that she was ashamed of except her daddy and maybe her mama sometimes—the way they acted sometimes.

  And later while they talked after they'd made love—making love, he was the most kind and gentle person, and oh, he knew how to wait while he moved his tongue in and out between her fingers and made this sound deep in his throat, making her want to make the same sound—later, she told him that the Settle Inn was where the gypsies always stopped when they came through, but that nobody in Listre would go down there while they were there, and everybody hid things that could be stolen, and that she'd always wanted to come down to the Settle Inn and talk to them and watch them, but she was afraid to tell that to anybody, had never told that to anybody before because everybody said some of the gypsies were witches and that they all had wild habits and would steal you blind.

  She saw a faint yellow on his blood-vesseled arms, yellow through a slit in the blinds—on off on off on off—the glow, blinking away seconds of her life, one after another, one less, another less second in which to take all the love she could get from this movie star man before he might have to leave for some reason. She was afraid he might leave, but she wouldn't say that.

  He said that there were lots of things he could tell her, and that she could pretend he was a gypsy if she wanted to. A good one. He had even traveled with a bunch of gypsies between Carrollton, Georgia, and New Orleans when he was selling knives one time.

  He whispered to her, "I love you." He kept his lips on her ear after he said it.

  "I love you, too. I love you like mad. Is there anything you ain't done?"

  "A few things. I ain't ever throwed up from drinking and I ain't ever hit a woman. I even had a small part in a movie one time. Probably not one you would have heard about. It was called The Wild Idiot and it starred some unknowns."

  "Was it sultry?"

  "Oh, no. I wouldn't do that."

  SHOVEL PRINTS

  Jack Umstead was back in his chair outside cabin 6, watching the morning traffic, when he heard the car brake, the thump, and the cat's guttural shriek. He looked through the fence: The kitten was by no means dead, but by no means fully alive either. The car kept going—a light blue car.

  I could of told you, he said to himself.

  How many other black kittens had gotten run over by blue cars that same morning? he wondered. In North Carolina. In Georgia. How many states had that happened in yesterday? Say over ten times. With a blue car. What percentage of all cats would die in ten years from automobiles? As up against poisoning—accidental poisoning. As up against intentional poisoning. He couldn't remember ever hearing about a cat getting accidentally poisoned. So intentional would be higher. Something like 3 percent intentional to o percent accidental, and something like 20 percent death by automobile. Of... well, no ... it was more dogs it seemed like on death by automobile. A few more anyway. Maybe not that many more.

  The kitten had been knocked into the Toomey yard and was flopping and flipping around. One of the two boys on the porch—the Toomey boy—was running toward it. Ten feet or so from the kitty he stopped and watched it flip and flop. One of its eyeballs was hanging out.

  The boy screamed and cried, "Inky, Inky, Mama, Mama," then ran into the house, leaving the other boy walking out toward the cat, kind of tiptoeing in the grass.

  Maybe he ought to go on over and kill it.

  Flip ... flip ... flop-flip.

  The Toomey woman ran down the front porch steps, around the house toward the garage out back. "Stephen, stay on the porch," she called.

  The boy stood on the edge of the porch, crying, his arms buried between his legs, his face red and contorted. Mrs. Toomey came running with the ax, heaved it up over her head. She heaved it up too far, stepped backward a step, off balance. "Lord, his eyeball is out," she said. "Move back, Terry." She swung downward. The ax blade buried itself short of the kitten.

  On the next swing she was well balanced and didn't heave the ax so far back behind her head. In fact, she didn't lift it very high at all, but on its downward fall, the kitten flopped out of the way and the ax was buried in the ground again.

  "Terry," said the Toomey woman, "you think you can kind of hold that cat down with your foot? I'll be careful."

  "No ma'am."

  Umstead saw the drunk man who lived there, hair sticking out in every direction, come out onto the porch steps barefoot, stand, gather in what seemed to be happening, then say something—ask the boy a question.

  "He got run over," the boy wailed.

  Umstead realized the man had said, "What the hell did that kitty do?"

  June Odum, wondering what in Lord's name, walked over from her yard, across the driveway, an unlit Pall Mall hanging from her lips. She stopped a few yards from the kitten, lit her Pall Mall with her flip-top lighter out of her apron pocket, her eyes on the kitten as the ax cleanly separated its head and body. At th
e cat's mouth, a slight grin appeared and disappeared. A body shiver, then both parts rested still. She squinted, removed the cigarette from her mouth, looked at the remains. "You just can't beat a cat for a pet, can you?" she said.

  "I hate cats," said Terry. "But that one was a good one."

  For Stephen, the kitten, no longer moving at all, rested at the center of all space and all objects and at the end of all time. It had belonged to him. It was his own. Now it was just plain dead. It couldn't move.

  He sat down on the porch steps, Terry sat down on the grass, his mother rested the ax on the ground—her hand on the handle as if it were a cane.

  Mr. Jones, the gypsy man, walked up. "That's a shame about that kitty," he said.

  Alease felt a satisfaction that came from doing the right thing when the right thing was hard to do and when a lot of other people would have been unable to do it. She'd taken things into her own hands and solved the problem. Her mother had been that way, and her grandmother. Without her to finish it up, there's no telling what would have happened. "It is a shame," she said, "but somebody had to put him out of his misery."

  Stephen walked out into the yard from the porch steps and wailed another long, desperate cry. His mother, holding the ax, walked to him and put her arm around his shoulder. Stephen screamed straight up into the sky, "I'm going to kill them. They run over Inky. They was in a blue car."

  "It was a blue car, Budrow," said the gypsy man.

  Stephen dropped to his knees out of his mother's grasp, looked up at the gypsy man. There was a picture in his head of the inside of the world, a moving picture of the inside of the world going around and around like water spinning inside a bucket so fast it was climbing the bucket walls and the colors were a green and yellow and brown. He looked up at his mother. "Why did you have to do that?"