by Larry Brown
He turned off the highway and slowed a little, splashing through a few low places that still held water. The road was lined with big trees and the pastures were wet, the cows grazing in the deep grass and the little frogs that had come out of the ditches hopping across the blacktop. He’d seen them come out of the road at night in the rain, thousands of them, and he wondered where they came from in such masses, why they did that.
He pulled up in his yard and parked the cruiser. He got out and looked at the empty car shed and went across the gravel to the steps. He had his key out to put it in the door but he saw that it was open. That stopped him. She never left it unlocked. He stood there looking at it from the bottom step. He stared at the car shed as if that would tell him why the door was open.
“Well hell,” he said, and went on up the steps. Maybe she’d gone to the grocery store. Maybe she was quilting a quilt with some of her friends. He didn’t blame her for not wanting to stay by herself at home all the time. The thought crossed his mind that she might have gone to see Virgil now that he was hurt. He didn’t care, kind of even hoped that she would. He didn’t want her to be lonely. Everybody needed somebody.
He pushed the door open and let the screen door flap behind him, took off his gun and dropped it in the chair and sat down and took his boots off. Took his wet socks off, too, stuck them down inside the boots and carried them back to his room and dropped them beside the bed. There were clean boots inside the closet and more uniforms. He undressed and balled up all his clothes and grabbed some clean underwear from a drawer, went down the hall and tossed the clothes into the utility room and went into the bathroom and closed the door just out of habit.
They’d remodeled the bathroom two years before and he liked the shower. He turned the water on and stepped in under the spray, feeling the heat soak into his skin. He put his hands against the stall and just stood there under the spray with his head down. It felt so good he didn’t want to get out from under it, but after a few minutes he shut it off and stepped out.
Back in his room he found an ironed pair of uniform pants and put them on, found some fresh socks and put them down on the bed. He combed his hair in front of the mirror and slipped on a ribbed undershirt and patted at his hair again, then went down the hall into the kitchen and looked around. The first thing he noticed was the pan of spaghetti sauce on the stove. He frowned a little when he walked over to it. The stove was cold. He stuck his finger into the sauce and it was cold, too, but burned around the edges. A faint trace of something acrid still hung in the room. It wasn’t like her to forget about something on the stove and let it burn. Unless maybe she was out in the yard. But she wouldn’t have been out in the yard with it this wet. He picked up the pan and felt around on the bottom of it. There was no trace of heat there. He set it back and turned slowly around in the kitchen. Nothing was out of place. All the dishes were washed. He began to be just a little worried about her. He looked at his watch and saw that it was time for her soap operas to come on. It was strange for her not to be home at this time of day. She never missed her soap operas, never forgot to lock the door, never burned anything on the stove. He thought he ought to walk out in the yard.
He stepped out on the back porch and tried to remember what time he’d tried to call her. It looked like she’d be back by now. It just wasn’t like her to go off and not tell him.
“Damn, Mama,” he said softly. “Where the hell you at?”
The yard was wet and her flowers were bending from the weight of the rain that had fallen on them. He looked down toward the barn. But her car was gone. If her car was gone she was gone. Wasn’t she?
He didn’t have his boots on, was still barefooted, but he went down the steps and stood at the edge of the yard and looked out over that old familiar place. He couldn’t imagine where she could be. And she shouldn’t have gone off like this without letting him know where she was. Maybe she was over at Virgil’s and didn’t want him to know. But wherever she was, it wasn’t any big deal. For once in her life she’d left something on the stove and she’d forgotten to lock the door. She was a grown woman, not some child he had to take care of. She’d probably be in after a while. He went up the steps and back into the house.
He found the coffee in the cabinet and poured some water into the pot and fixed it all and put it on the stove to start it. While it was warming up he went back to his room and put on his socks and his boots and got a clean shirt. He pinned some brass on it at the kitchen table while a cigarette smoked in the ashtray. He hung the shirt on the back of his chair and waited impatiently for the coffee to be ready. He kept listening for her car. He crossed his legs in the chair and leaned back and looked at the walls, tapped the ashes into the ashtray. The coffee perked quietly on the stove. After a bit he got up and found a cup and poured it full, spooned in some sugar, and reached into the icebox for the milk and poured a little in it. He sat at the table and sipped his coffee. He didn’t want to go back to the jail now unless something came up. What he really needed was a nap. Needed one bad. He got up and walked up the hall to the little table where the phone sat and called Mable. He told her he was going to be at home for a while, that if she needed anything to call him there.
In the kitchen he found a pen and a piece of paper and wrote her a note and left it on the table: Wake me up when you get in Love Bobby. He stretched and yawned and went back to his bedroom and took off his boots.
The bed he slept in was the one he’d slept in all his life. It was an old cord bed with high wooden posts at the corners and the spread over it was white and laced with little fuzzy knots of yarn. On the walls hung a few pictures of a young Bobby standing in jeans and cowboy boots in the sawdust of showrings holding black bulls with leather harnesses on their muzzles, first-place ribbons in his hand, staring blankly into the eye of the camera. Sharp old black-and-white photos that had been in the local paper years back. His mother had gone to every event, had helped him wash the bulls like cars in the yard, soaping their black hides and running the water hose over their backs as the soap foamed up and ran down their sides, their legs, both of them combing out the hair and brushing it until it gleamed, leading them into the covered cattle trailer that was his high school graduation present a year early for the rides to the livestock barns in Jackson and Tupelo and Grenada.
He sat down on the bed and took off his socks, then leaned back with a long sigh and put his head down on the pillow and looked at the ceiling. This room had been his for as long as he could remember, his and his alone. But he wanted to sleep in another bed now, forever and always. He closed his eyes and the good memories came back. Anybody watching would have seen the small smile that curved into his mouth, the utter peace and serenity that seemed to seep into his body, would have heard the light snoring that began to rise and fall in the room while the clock ticked its slow minutes and the afternoon crept on by.
He found a grassy road on the back side of her place and drove the car up in there, sliding in a few spots but not caring if he got it stuck once he got it out of sight of the road. He made it up to a wire gap with a POSTED sign hanging on it, locked with a chain. That was far enough. He got out and left the keys in it, took only the whiskey with him. He figured he was at least a hundred yards off the road. Nobody was going to drive up in there and find it. Not today.
The grass he walked in was wet and little seeds stuck to the cuffs of his pants. He climbed over the gap with the whiskey in his hand, carefully, trying not to snag his pants on the wire. The road went up through the woods and he followed it, trying to stay in the drier places, but it was all wet, just like before when he’d gone to the barn the first time to wait for her. He stopped in a little clearing up in the woods and knelt there, uncapped the whiskey and took a drink. He was sweating and he could feel his shirt sticking to his back. He almost took a few minutes to rest and smoke a cigarette, but he thought he’d better get on back and make sure she hadn’t gotten loose. She hadn’t seemed to notice him leave, but he wasn’t sur
e. He got up and capped the whiskey and started walking again.
Once he got down the hill he could see the pond, patches of water through the trees now brown and stirred up by the rain. A few cows were down there in the brush surrounding it and they looked at him as he went by. A huge black bull stood among them, flicking his ears at flies. There was a mud hole at the foot of the hill that he had to walk around, tall grass that he had to put his feet down in, a place where it would be easy to step on a snake. He was glad when he was able to get out of the grass and back on the pasture road.
There was another big patch of woods to walk through where stands of oak and sweet gum and beech trees were hung with muscadine and scuppernong vines, the fruit hanging in clusters among the green and yellow leaves. He kept walking and sweating, worrying about her getting loose and going for help, maybe call somebody. He could have cut the phone lines. But if Bobby tried to call her and the line was dead, he might think something about it and come home. He knew then that hiding the car was the right thing to do. He felt better then. It eased his mind.
He opened the whiskey still walking and turned a drink down his throat. It was starting to get to him and it was making everything easier. There was still plenty of it left and he was glad of that.
When he came out of the woods he could see the back side of the barn again. He stopped for a moment and looked at everything. It all looked just as it had before. The sweat was rolling down his temples and he mopped at it with the back of his hand and took another drink of whiskey. His legs and feet were wet and his hair was hanging down over his forehead. He started climbing up through the nests of blackberry bushes that dotted the hilly pasture behind the barn. The thorns tore at his arms and hands, cutting lines in his skin that raised tiny welts of blood not much thicker than hairs. They stung and then his sweat seeped into the cuts and they stung even more. He cursed constantly and fought his way through the worst of the bushes and skirted around some of them and finally made his way up to the fence. He could see the house from there and he stopped again. Everything looked as before. He went over the fence quietly and through the back door of the barn to stand in the dim light once again. He was almost afraid to look into the stall, fearing that she had somehow gotten away, that some trap was waiting to be sprung. But when he took a deep breath and stepped around the edge of the stall, she was lying there on the hay, her head turned to one side, her breasts rising and falling gently with each breath, her arms still suspended in the air. She stirred when she heard him and her head moved. He hoped she wouldn’t try to talk to him anymore if he took the gag off. She looked as if she were having a hard time breathing, but he didn’t want to talk to her. He only wanted to do what he had to do. In a way he felt sorry for her. She had made a mistake a long time ago and now it was time for her to pay for it. He knew about mistakes. He’d had to pay for his, and his father’s too. Now Bobby had made a mistake and his mother was going to have to pay for it. This one and the other one, might as well make her pay for both of them at the same time. He wondered when people would learn not to mess with him. Somebody always had to be messing with him and he was tired of it. He was sick of it. You couldn’t just let people run over you. They’d get to thinking they could do it all the time and they’d keep on doing it if you didn’t do something about it. And he’d had about enough of her shit. His mother had told him about her all his life. He was just taking up for his mother. It was time somebody did.
He went closer, and she heard him and tried to scoot backwards. Her feet pushed at the hay and she went back a little, but stopped when the sea grass strings stretched out tight. He could see the bottom of her slip behind her knees and he could see partway up one of her thighs. He could see that her legs were still good. She was even kind of pretty to be so old, and that was good too. That would make it easier.
Her whole body was braced, and with the blindfold over her eyes he was reminded of a picture he’d once seen in school of the Statue of Liberty. And something a teacher had said—was it her?—about justice being blind. But he knew better than that. He knew the guilty always got punished. That was how things were supposed to be in the real world. You did something wrong, you got punished for it if you were around to punish.
He knelt next to her and set the bottle in the hay. He untied the gag and pulled it away. His feet were wet. He started taking off his shoes, the same cheap lace-ups he’d worn out of the gate at the prison. They were soaked and he had to pick at the laces with his scabbed hands, those monkey bites still there. That seemed so long ago now. The briar cuts were still stinging. He raised his head from time to time and watched her listening to him. Her head was still up, her mouth open slightly, but as he pulled his left shoe off his foot she gave out a little groan and let her head fall back into the hay. He stripped off the wet sock and hung it on a board in the stall and bent to the right shoe. It was very quiet in the barn. It felt nice to him, just the two of them sharing this space, not having to talk. He worked his foot out of the other shoe and laid it aside, pulled off the sock and hung it beside the other one. He wiggled his toes and looked at them. They were wrinkled, looked like he’d been taking a bath. But he stretched them out in the hay and the dry warmth of it felt good on his feet. He looked at her. She turned her head away from him. Now he could have a drink in the cool darkness and smoke another cigarette, sit here for a while and just relax before he got started.
He got out a cigarette and lit it, watching her. She raised her head when she heard the lighter strike, held it up for a moment, then put it back down. He twisted the cap off the whiskey and took a drink, then decided he’d give her a drink. He raised up on his knees, not saying anything, and saw her draw back as she felt him come near. He tilted the neck of the bottle carefully, brought it near her lips, and poured a little onto her mouth. He poured too much and some of it went up her nose. She reared up and choked and strangled but the ropes wouldn’t let her come all the way up and she sagged back, coughing, slinging her head and trying to shake the whiskey off her face. He thought she might ask him not to do that again but she didn’t. He guessed she didn’t like whiskey. He took another drink for himself and she lowered herself back to where she had been, slowly rubbing the side of her face against the hay. Some of it stuck to her cheek and he reached out and brushed it away. She let him do that. She cleared her throat and then lay still.
He looked at her legs again, put the cigarette in his mouth and reached out and rubbed the top of her shin. She didn’t move but he felt the muscles in her leg tense up. He trailed his fingers down to her ankle slowly, then back up to her knee. He let his hand rest there for a moment, and then ran it up to the middle of her thigh, cool and smooth. She started trembling and her mouth creased downward and he could tell that she was trying not to cry. He let it rest there, felt the silkiness of her skin, and he wondered how many times his father had felt it too. His hand rubbed back and forth, almost as if he were trying to soothe her, let her know that everything was going to be all right. She stopped trembling and he patted her thigh in reassurance. She lay unmoving in the hay and he looked at the fine wrinkles of skin at her throat and remembered her in bright dresses, with a ribbon in her hair, remembered her grading papers at her desk with her glasses low on her nose. He finished the cigarette. When the car pulled in they both heard it at the same time and he lunged over her body, spilling some of the whiskey on her, covering her mouth with his hand and crushing back the rising scream and bottling it in her throat. His knee was beside her head and he pushed harder on her mouth until she stopped trying to scream.
Outside somewhere a car door slammed and he knelt there in the hay, breathing hard, listening. But there was nothing else to hear. He knew it was Bobby, had to be.
He leaned close to her ear, put his lips right up against her hair, spoke in a whisper: “You better be quiet.” Her head nodded beneath his hand and he let off the pressure a little. Her nostrils flared and she took in a big breath of air. But still he didn’t move his hand.
He was listening for the sound of a door slamming, and finally he heard it. After that there was nothing. He was probably inside the house by now.
“Is that him?” he said.
She nodded. She was trying to say something and he lifted the pressure of his hand so that when she spoke the sound of her voice was muffled against his palm. “I guess so.”
“What’s he doing home?”
She paused for another breath. “He comes in at different times.”
He looked out toward the front of the barn, but he couldn’t see the house from where he was. He would have to get up and leave her, find a crack in the wall or something, look out. But she might scream if he left her. So he set the whiskey on a timber at the base of the wall and reached into his pants for the little pocketknife he’d used on Jewel’s screen. He held his hand over her mouth and watched her. He couldn’t tell if she was going to do anything or not. She didn’t move when he lifted his hand a little. He took his hand away from her mouth and opened the knife quickly and then turned it in his hand and pushed the tip of the blade into the soft skin just beneath her jaw, right into the side of her throat. It made a small dent in her skin and she stopped breathing, held it in. He spoke to her again. “I can kill you and go out the back door and he’ll never catch me. If you make any noise, you’ll get this in you. You hear me?”
He waited for her answer. She nodded slowly.
“You believe me?”
She nodded again, very slowly.
“You better.”
He pulled the knife away and she took a breath. He kept watching her. She didn’t move or anything, just lay there like before. He got up, still watching her, and slowly began to back away from her. He didn’t think she was going to try anything. The knife, she was scared of that. He kept easing toward the entryway until he got to a place where he couldn’t see her anymore. The boards that formed the walls of the barn were old and full of cracks where they had shrunk and pulled loose and he knelt next to a small split place and put one eye up against it. There were some flowers out there, some grass and a tree. He backed away and moved on up the wall, looking for another crack. There was one about waist high and he got down on one knee and looked out. He could see the whole back side of the house, the porch and steps. Now he just had to wait. Long slow minutes with everything quiet and then suddenly there he was, coming out the back door. He had on a pair of pants and an undershirt. He was barefoot. He walked to the end of the porch and stood there for a moment, put his hands on his hips and looked out over the yard.