The Blue Guitar

by Alex Austin

  A lopsided huge cloud seemed to be off balance over their heads, like a leaning table that sends dishes and glasses and a red vase crashing to the floor in some absurd comedy.

  “Now,” Miss Smith said, with her lips still touching his cheek, “now I’m filled with summers. With dozens . . .” She laughed, kissed him. “. . . dozens of them. I’ve been to places where it is so hot in the afternoons, you can’t move. The air is very heavy. You can put out your hand and close your fingers around it. Even the leaves on the trees don’t move. The birds do not move. It’s so hot in those places that in the afternoons every town you come to is like the town where Death lives.”

  She paused. Jean drew her body in closer against him and she smiled as soon as she felt the pressure of his arm. She had said, “I do so want things to be perfect, even if I know they’re not and can’t be.”

  Now she said, “Love.” She said it again, this time with a sorrow in her voice as if she had seen the bird disappear and knew somehow it would never return, that it had been made of a moment and all its beauty was created by its quick flight, not by its presence when its warm body had nestled in the palm of a hand like a heart learning how to be alive.

  Jean lay there on his back, holding her body in close to him, calm, feeling its warmth a barricade against the wind. He could hear the surf pounding down across the long shore, the cries of gulls like madness in the sky. He knew the day was fair and could imagine the shapes of clouds overhead as his blind eyes stared up into the dark.

  Jean felt very different now than he had ever felt with Sygen. Miss Smith had held her arms out to him and yet her body, like a completely separate creature, had recoiled from him. He’d heard a brief cry of remonstrance, of fear. Her flesh had turned so suddenly cold. She twisted to one side and moaned as if in a great pain that must remain secret. And still the arms held him, the mouth sought his mouth.

  There was this forbidden secret that had made her afraid. The heart is a small extremity caught in the bestial space of always knowing we must die; her heart had reached that destination and so could do no more than continue to dissolve into that final conspiracy of the dark that makes all men fools.

  Jean called this fear; she never asked more charity than this.

  But with Sygen it was like a game, like laughter, like the sea carrying you out beyond the reach of land, like flight itself if one were a bird or like swimming, in this same way, if one were a fish.

  But it was precisely this forbidden depth, this new dark to enter, that drew him to her in a way he had never been drawn to Sygen. It was like sharing a secret that can be found only on the bottom of the sea.

  He heard her say, “Jean . . .” And he could imagine her smiling by the sound of her voice. He wondered what a woman’s face looked like in that instant when she cried out her joy in loving.

  She said, “Dear Jean . . .” And she thought again, forgiving him, that it was always such a great useless pity that no man would ever know a woman well enough to see the awful lie that turns to dying in her eyes when she must cry out this way, not for his sake in the end, but to say only to herself that what has never truly been is now, for this moment, at least possible.

  She lifted her head, looked down at his face, and was pleased that it was such a handsome face, pleased now as if she had not known this before and had only discovered it this very instant. She drew a slow line down the side of his face with one finger, pausing at his lips, and when he kissed her finger she smiled and pressed down against him. Then: “Do you know,” she said, “I always come to the sea, I think, because I fear it so. I walk along the beach and always I think that one day a great wave will come up and wash me away. I walk along the beach and sometimes I see myself all tangled with seaweed, rising and falling with the sea. But I never fall down completely to the bottom. I have no drowning in me. Isn’t that strange? The sea carries me for years and years and years . . .”

  Sygen was never afraid this way, Jean thought. Often she even seemed to be the proprietor of courage.

  “But now,” Miss Smith continued, “now with you this way, the sea too becomes something else, like those afternoons. Now the sea becomes voyages . . . a thousand ports that have never even been named . . .” She laughed brightly, a laugh of other years, and kissed his mouth and nose and then, very gently, his eyes. “We will come here again?” she asked him, turning the statement to a question as she said the words. There was a child’s kind of complete, shameless fear in her voice as she asked this and her fear surprised Jean for a moment, seemed to demand tenderness of him like a debt, demanding shelter too and a strength he had never been called upon to use before. But then surprise, shaking off responsibility like a dog coming in out of the rain, turned to amusement and he tousled her hair and said, “We’ll come here many times.”

  “A hundred?” she asked, with laughter hanging empty on the edge of her voice like the beginning of an echo.

  “Ten . . .” he said.

  “Oh?”

  “. . . or a thousand.”

  She stared at him, shaking her head slowly from side to side as if to speak many more things in that way than words could possibly say for her.

  “Or a thousand,” she repeated softly.

  “But that’s just to begin with,” he said.

  “Jean . . .” She took his face between her hands, slowly lowered her face to his, again—even against her strongest will—fearfully, as if she thought she would never reach his mouth. But she did and she lingered there a long time as she felt his arms reach up for her face and then his palms pressing in hard on her cheeks, hurting her with a pain that filled her with confusing joy, a joy of returning birds and oceans the color of blind eyes.

  She felt his body slowly turn to her, his thighs reach for her thighs, his breast for her breast, his mouth suddenly for all of her body, and she fell back onto the warm sand to take him into her and she smiled with old wonder at the sky because, beyond whatever pain or sickening fear that filled her now, she knew she could feel beautiful, the sleeping traveler who must reach all destinations in dreams, before he is so rudely wakened to be told that he has finally arrived in another town that had no name.

  four

  The former prisoner, Tico Reeves, had walked once again all the way from town to this beach where he would see the golden-haired girl.

  Each time he came to the beach he became a little braver; it was as if his fascination and desire were, day by day, turned to courage, to wear that mask that would hide him properly from what he feared. And so, each time, he would go closer to the gray frame house that stood tall against the sea and sky like the faded photograph of a palace that had fallen to ruin many years before any who lived in it now had even been born.

  On this day, Tico Reeves, his black leather jacket holding the warmth of his body safe against the wind that blew in off the sea, stopped only after he had come to within forty or fifty yards of the house. Then, as always, he lay down on his belly at the edge of a dune so he would be safely hidden there and still would be able to see anyone who came out of the house or along the beach.

  Tico Reeves had come a long way, longer than even the distance of his own years, to find such a girl and so he could be patient now. His was the patience of men who know there is very little in the world that is worth our true desire. And this he had learned from the old prisoner Joe Tomassario, who was called Joe Tom by all the prisoners, by the guards, and finally, after so many years of it, even by himself.

  Joe Tom was a man built like a tree that had been cut down to mere dead stump and somehow that stump had towered up out of dying to be taller than the tree itself had been in the first place. It was as if one could see vestiges of other lives in him, scars of old deaths in the occasional (and surprising) looseness of his stern mouth, gallant secrets of old loves in the slow turning of his eyes to catch a bluejay or a mockingbird the instant the bird vanished up into air. The strength of him could be seen in every move he made and even more in his merely stan
ding still, without Joe Tom himself caring anything much about how strong he was or if anybody knew it.

  He had animal eyes, green and yellow, that burned fiercely in the dark. He had a mouth too big for a man’s mouth, something unnecessarily powerful about it for the mere chewing of cooked meat, boiled vegetables, and such. His hair was long and white, his skin under the brown mask of sun and wind was gray as old clothes or a corpse; his entire body to the thick tips of his fingers was this gray discarded color. But he was huge, well over six feet in height like the tree’s stump, and the size of him gave back the life the color seemed to drain from the complete image of the man. And he had hands even the prison hounds and swamp snakes feared.

  He was the strangest damn man Tico Reeves had ever seen, a man more like the story of a man, a wild fantastic story, than the man himself. He spoke in a voice powerful enough to break out of the inside of great rocks, but in that voice there was laughter too, laughter that could be worn like a crown, that could shake floorboards, cause mules to answer, birds and frogs to flee. When he cussed the chains chewing his ankle flesh, he sounded like he could curse God Himself because no mortal man was worth the power and the rich virtuosity of his damning.

  When Tico Reeves came in the black open truck, covered with dust, eyes stinging from it, to the prison camp on a crazed August day when the sun was not ten feet above the earth, it had been the old man, Joe Tom, who had come to him and told him simply there was nothing to fear.

  “You’re safe in here, boy,” Joe Tom had said. The words had the sound of having been spoken from a pulpit in a church God had abandoned a long time ago, not in anger, but in simple disgust. “You’re safe in here,” Joe Tom said. “Even the copperheads don’t want prison meat.” And he had laughed then in such a way that the fear actually had gone out of Tico Reeves and he had started laughing along with the old man and then Joe Tom, looming like a stone man in the black shadow of a cypress, said, “I killed a man once. What about you?”

  “Mine lived,” said Tico Reeves.

  “Good then,” said Joe Tom. “You won’t die in this fistful of hell the way I will.”

  The old man and Tico Reeves slept beside each other on wood boards set up on fat oak legs to be clear of rats, and they worked together in the swamp or on red clay roads and even on the dam the year the flood came after endless rains and the convicts were chained ankle to ankle and led before hounds in the still raining night to save the rotten poor-dirt land that had been taken from them, justly or no, by the ever-indignant law of righteous men.

  It was not long after he came to the place, finally a prisoner, the world put to one side of his life for fifteen years by a flat-faced, indignant and judicious agate-eyed judge, that Tico Reeves learned how men condemned as he had been—whose lives now were ankle chains, swampland, board beds, fly-covered mules, smell of hounds—constructed faces to fill pasts that had faded like photographs left out too long in the sun and rain. They peopled unlived lives with corrupt shadows that in time would become more real to them than any flesh man or woman could have been. Theirs was the desperate and furious skill of the doomed, damnation their muse, heaven itself the comic relief in their sad comedies.

  Joe Tom told Tico Reeves he had killed a man when he had been nineteen years old. “Split that cock son of a bitch’s head in two with an ax!” The old man laughed and rocked back and forth as he told the story which Tico Reeves was to hear many times in the fifteen years he was himself a prisoner.

  It began in different ways as if journeymen of twenty different gods were arguing at the market which one of them had hell to bargain with or heaven to sell.

  Other prisoners said Joe Tom never killed a man, but used the ax on a woman.

  The sun that burned not ten feet above the earth sweated the men dry before any day was done and if it had lasted one hour longer the blood itself would have been sweated out of them. And because they could never be sure any day would not have that one blood hour, they always found time to stop the sweat awhile, to go in hunched under cypress and willow shade and squat down comfortable on their heels to crap and gossip and laugh like old ladies whose years have turned all womanhood neutral in them so they look like castrated men.

  Crapping comfortably under the August sun that reached even into the shade, they gossiped and laughed. They told stories, all kinds, but mostly of Joe Tom because that was the one above all others that made the laugh howl in them wild again, the sound of the only freedom they could possess.

  They told how (always keeping a fearful eye set for Joe Tom’s coming) the woman used to plow fields behind her spavined mules. She’d cut wood, haul water, mend traces and hoofs and stable doors that fell off old hinges as regularly as drunks are drunk.

  “She was a man except that she was a woman,” they said.

  They sat crapping and they laughed loudly at this woman not a one of them had ever seen, but who knew of her from others who had seen her, who did know the truth, they said, of what had happened.

  “Shit,” they said, “that woman had more men in her than a barber’s chair.”

  Joe Tom said, “She was more female than any bastard here’s ever known. For a fact she was.”

  The others, squat on their heels, said, “That man don’t even see what he looks at.”

  “What that man looks at ain’t even there. He-he-he-he. . . .”

  “Don’t you crap on your heels again now, Charlie. You’ll stink all night.”

  Joe Tom would say, “Women, boy, they are wild. The good ones. They are. They ain’t pale and easy to break. Not the good ones. They are like what you go huntin’ in the wood. Bear if there is bear. Wildcat. Even copperheads. The good ones I mean. Not the biscuit bakers, not them that sing up to poor Jesus because he never had a woman and that’s the kind of man they want. Pants to press, but not what’s in ’em. No sir! Shit! The good ones are wild and they are better to look at than, damn it, the color of whiskey, boy. This color of whiskey or the moon. That fine to look at. The good ones. Not like a toothpaste advertisement. I don’t mean pretty. I don’t mean like somethin’ you can tear out of them magazines. No sir! Not like a woman who, if she did or could spread her legs, she wouldn’t ever know all her life long what that spreadin’ was for anyways. No sir! I mean like the goddam moon, they are wild like that. And they hold you like if they never let go, you’d never die. No sir. You would not die. They hold that hard. The good ones.”

  The other prisoners, gossiping, laughing hard in the green sunlight under leaves, told how Joe Tom, the young man, had been wild this way himself, drinking down enough whiskey for ten or fifteen men and laughing loud enough to be heard two counties away. But he didn’t go in to the cat houses or pick up one of the cotton-dress girls with eyes that looked like they came off a counter in the five-and-dime. Joe Tom drank his whiskey and had great fights for the joy they were, smashing ribs and skulls and throwing men as big as he was through closed windows or store fronts or even once, at the head of a sleeping mule, knocking the mule over so both man and mule howled and whinnied on that dry afternoon like a pair of comedians performing in hell.

  But he finally did find the woman he wanted, so the fights stopped and all he ever did was try to get his hands on her. But from how they told it, he would reach out to just that place in front of him where he could be sure she would not be, doing it that way for months, and the need crushing his insides until he had the face of a man who had spent an entire lifetime (though he was only nineteen) slowly approaching a single quick moment in which madness would explode in him like a stick of dynamite with a fuse as long as the tails of twenty mules.

  “Ass Jesus man, he, that damn boy, he’d go out by her fields and he’d hide himself behind a fat tree . . .”

  “No fatter ‘n her!”

  “. . . and just watch her. Like there was something for seeing how she reined the mules or even spit into the dirt or wiped the sweat off her face like any man would. He’d hide and watch.”

  “And b
y the house too.”

  “Sure by the house.”

  “Where mebbe he’d see her nekid! Jesus Christ! Shit!”

  They all laughed and laughed all through every telling. “Except it would be like seeing a horse naked.”

  “But nekid anyways!”

  “Yeah. By her window, damn fool boy!”

  This woman, black-haired (wild round her head as they told it) and heavier than a girl because she was past thirty a good few years and big to begin with, was as strong as Joe Tom was. She had a house and two mules in rope-mended harness and seven acres of land and a mongrel that had the face of a sick coyote. She had a father once, they said, but he fell down dead drunk on the road one night and the next morning when she found him, bottle in one hand, he wasn’t drunk any more, only dead. She lifted him up over her shoulder, carried him back to the one-room shack of a house, washed him down, even shaved him, then dressed him in the only suit he had ever owned and buried him out in back of the house, even saying the words to God. And from that day on, she ran the place herself.

  Joe Tom said how the girl—he never did call her a woman—was not beautiful. But the other prisoners said she had a horse’s face if the horse was sick enough, a wildcat’s temper if somebody had just kicked its rump with a spiked boot, and she couldn’t talk any softer than a crow screams if he has his two feet caught in a trap set out for rabbits in the brush. Joe Tom said he loved this girl. “She was the wildest damn girl God ever made,” he said.