The Blue Guitar

by Alex Austin

They told how finally, after months of him hiding behind trees or by the house at night, he went to call on her proper because he had heard a man does this if the girl is not in a cat house or standing by the side of the road or in the street waiting for anything male from a tall hound to a bone, half-blind, limpin’, sick man to come along. He went to the one-room shack she lived in. It was a Saturday night. He had no suit, but he bought a red-and-green bow tie for twenty-five cents, which he had the store man put on him the night before so he had to sleep in it to be sure it would not be undone when he needed it.

  He walked the nine miles from town, the distance he had come all the other times, but walking slower now, the nine miles drawn out by the pull of desire into a hundred, the fear dragging heavy at each step he took and in his mind he kept trying to put together all different kinds of words he could say to her, but when he muttered them to himself, they all sounded as if they belonged to some foreign language he could not understand.

  Only when he got there, when he walked up to the side of the house, there being no path from the road to any door, he saw through the familiar window, without even wanting to now, how she was in bed naked with a tall bony bald man he, Joe Tom, had never seen in town.

  “That girl,” Joe Tom said, “she just screwed and laughed, screwed and laughed. What a fine big bitch of a girl she was!”

  “It was like a plain man trying to mount a mare,” the prisoners said. “She was that big a woman, and she laughed that much like a horse.”

  So he had stood there by the window, watching, hearing it all, sick, furious, and bewildered, sweating rage out of him, all of his life having suddenly been translated into the savage dying of this moment, when the woman looked up from her screwing and laughing, saw him, hollered once loud as calling hogs, tossed the man off her like he was no more than a handful of chicken bones. Then she grabbed up an ax she kept by the door and came running out buck-naked in the full moonlight, screaming, “You fucker God son of a bitch . . . ,” just letting the cuss words run out of her like water from an oilcan after you’ve shot a hole in it.

  She came charging at Joe Tom, that ax over her head, the moon burning sparks on it. He hollered, “Hey, girl, God damn it, I love you! I came to tell you I love you!” already running as he said it.

  She screamed, “I’m gonna cut the love right off you, boy!”

  And she chased after him down the dirt road, him hollering how he loved her and had come only to say this and her swinging the ax and calling him more names than there have been Sundays since the world began.

  Sniggering on their heels under the sun, the other prisoners rocked back and forth, skillfully, never falling backward, as they told how this woman chased Joe Tom and the skinny bald man leaped like he was filled up to his neck with scared rabbits, leaped right out of the bed, without being half finished with what he’d come to do in the first place. He grabbed his coat and trousers and a small black paper suitcase that bulged pregnant with a clean shirt and the goods he had to sell along all the roads he walked, and he just ran fast as his bone legs would take him over the hill behind her shack and forever out of her sight. Joe Tom said how he killed that man. “I jumped right in through that open window,” he told Tico Reeves, “because I didn’t even know where the door was, knowing that window like I did. I just jumped in and they both started hollering and screaming and running round that small room. I took the ax, her ax, a heavy one. I took it and finally I caught that bone-white shivering bastard in a corner. And you know what he says to me, boy? He says, ‘Hell, mister, go and have some yourself. It ain’t my fault it’s there, is it? It ain’t my fault.’ And before he could tell me any more, I just put the ax down in the middle of his bone head where it belonged. That shivering bastard!”

  But the others said how the woman was the one who grabbed up that ax and she lit out after Joe Tom with him hollering back over his scared shoulder about love.

  “Jesus, she ran down that road,” they said.

  “She did run all right. And faster than him too, like the ax out in front was pullin’ her faster than she could run all by herself.”

  “And her big fuckin’ boobs, they just bounced and bounced while she was runnin’. Oh, Jesus Lord yes!”

  “And her ass that was the size of a cow’s rump, that ass wobbled and wobbled.”

  They roared, squatting under the sun, eunuch faces twisted with laughing their own almost forgotten need for a woman out of themselves as they kept on telling the story as constantly as they sucked the stale swamp air into their lungs.

  “It was the craziest laughin’ damn thing anybody ever saw,” they said.

  “Bouncin’ and wobbling! Bouncin’ and wobblin’!”

  “And then she caught up to him,” they said.

  “Or the ax did.”

  “Well, by then she was as good as being part of that ax.”

  They told how she caught up to Joe Tom and damn near walloped his scared head right off his shoulders with the ax, missing by less than an inch, showing just exactly how much with fingers, thumb and index, held in the air as they paused in the story.

  The other prisoners all had their own stories to tell, since after a man has served long enough away from the world, all that’s left of it is the circumstance of guilt that took him away in the first place. But no matter how much they told him their own stories, they all told the story of Joe Tom too, because in the telling, they could see this black-haired woman bouncin’ and wobblin’ buck-naked down that dirt road in the moonlight, swinging that wild ax at the boy she’d caught peeping in at her window because he had to tell her in one way or another, even over his scared shoulder, how he loved her.

  Joe Tom said, “I split that shiverin’ bastard’s head right in two. Him crawlin’ on my girl like a goddam worm. Yes sir! Just split him like a rail.”

  “He took the ax,” the other prisoners would say. “He grabbed it out of her hands, and maybe it was the sight of her all naked like she was that made him crazy. . . .”

  “Waitin’ that long for it.”

  “And never even having had it, either.”

  “But makin’ him crazy so he grabbed that damn ax and he hacked that woman’s body up like he was a butcher makin’ chopped meat.” They said this.

  “And you know I never even had that girl, boy,” Joe Tom would say to Tico Reeves. “They came for me and I never had her. That girl that was the wildest sweet thing God ever made. I split a shiverin’ bastard’s head right open for that girl, but I never had her.” And here the old prisoner’s face would go awry, like it suddenly didn’t belong to him any more and he didn’t know how to control it; and then it would belong to him again. He let the grief and loss and old desire grow inside him like a jungle hung heavy with festering dead vines and flowers that eat a man and are colored brighter than blood mixed with the sun. Once Joe Tom said this girl had a face like clouds. She changed in him so if he saw clouds, a swamp lily, bluejay, anything at all that for a single moment was beautiful, she became this cloud or that bird or a flower he’d tear down from a vine, hold a moment, then drop into the dust or swamp water at his feet. She changed this way for Joe Tom even though he knew well enough she had been wild, but never beautiful; even though he would tell Tico Reeves how what a woman looked like didn’t matter, because if the wrong one was beautiful the way pictures in magazines are, like toothpaste advertisements (one had been hanging over the bed next to his for over ten years now), she would still be wrong. “You find the right one, boy. And don’t you believe any mule-dumb fool bastard who tells you they are all alike. They are different, boy. They are different as a mule is from a copperhead, they are every one of them somebody else.”

  “So when they come to get him,” the others said in the comfortable sun streaming down green over their eunuch heads, “he had put himself in her bed.”

  “He went back to the house. He even carried the ax with him.”

  “Like now it had become a part of him like it had been a part of he
r to begin with.”

  “But he didn’t take the ax to bed with him.”

  “Hell no, he didn’t. He took up a whiskey jug and made that part of him ’stead of the ax.”

  “Sure. He sat there in the bed, Joe Tom did, huggin’ that fool whiskey jug between takin’ swallows out of it. He hugged it like it was a woman. Jesus Christ yes he did!”

  “Like maybe he thought the jug had been part of her before the ax.”

  “Why not?”

  “And he was singin’ when they come. Don’t forget that part of it.”

  “Stretched out in that bed that was still wet with what they hadn’t even had time to finish.”

  “Wet with that and the whiskey too.”

  “And him wet with the blood.”

  “Her blood.”

  “And he was really singin’?”

  “Sure he was singing. When they come to get him. Why wouldn’t he be, a boy dumb as all that, who can split up a woman with an ax, then take a jug of whiskey to bed like he thought he was taking the woman to bed.”

  “And then go spend the rest of his damn fool life thinkin’, believin’ he killed a man instead of a woman.”

  “Well, she looked enough like a man, didn’t she?”

  “Sure she did. Except that she was a woman.”

  But then, day after festering dead day, in swamp or on dirt roads or on the dam when the flood came louder than the word of God in April or in the dark sometimes, talking in heated whispers, Joe Tom would tell Tico Reeves about that one girl and the image that grew in the young prisoner’s mind over the years was of a girl made perfect as clouds the way Joe Tom said, perfect as wild creatures in the wood, graceful there as no man can ever be, no matter where he is; thinking this even if the stories the other prisoners told had to make a madman out of Joe Tom, because if they did, Tico Reeves somehow knew that the old man’s madness had more truth to it than all the sanity those comfortable eunuch men could crap out of them under the comfortable sun.

  Joe Tom was serving life for whichever life he had taken, the man’s or the woman’s, with that moon-covered ax, and he had never had a woman, not that girl or any other. So he tried always, though never successfully, to talk all the desire out of him this way, his voice mounting up high, loud in a way the words themselves did not justify, sounding crazy in swamp shadows or on the dirt road and nobody telling him to shut up because they all knew he could break any one of them in two with only his hands.

  Joe Tom never did let those who would, among the other prisoners, come to his bed at night to satisfy him. Joe Tom would not give up what he wanted merely to be satisfied, even though he knew that what he wanted was impossible. And it was this corrupt great wisdom he imparted to Tico Reeves, though the boy took years of hearing the same words before he even began to understand them.

  What he did understand was that the girl had existed, was not like those pictures torn out of magazines the other prisoners hid in their shirts or beneath mattresses and sometimes took out in the dark to love in feared silence under brown blankets always heavy with the stench of bodies sweating under and on top of them; some even confessing to scattered pale priests who came out of God’s great shadow only to hear sins confessed, saying names given to torn picture faces and breasts and legs, confessing impossible sins to make them possible when it came time to look back and remember. The girl the old man carried in his mind, Tico Reeves knew, was more real than the images the other prisoners gazed at in their furious hunger, of women who did not and would not ever exist, not even on God’s burning list of what they would be damned for or forgiven.

  And though Tico Reeves himself had never had a woman, he knew now, in the deepest reach of his own hunger, he had to find the proper one first and not take anyone merely because her flesh was female and not colored like a toad.

  On his way north, there had been many who would have had him, some who even told him so in words blunt as any he’d ever heard in swamp or on dirt road, but these were not what he knew he would find somewhere just as the old man said he would. There were waitresses in diners where he washed dishes, girls with chalk faces and soft hips and mouths whose scars of desire no paint could cover. There were girls on streets in every town, silken legs always calling, breasts alive in the sun like caged birds; girls in windows and doorways, walking slowly, laughing on buses, sitting with legs crossed so perfectly in parks, in movie houses, girls catching the sad breeze in their skirts, girls as alive as the day itself, girls whose young bodies in mute splendor promised all the world could ever be. The world was so full of girls, it made him dizzy and made him laugh out loud with the joy of just knowing this and being able to watch them walk back and forth across his growing life like separate sweet miracles. And the one girl he’d find would be the sum of them all, whereas any other would be only whatever small part of that sum she could be for a single night or a hidden afternoon.

  There was a rich lady with shiny black hair and a cat’s mouth who picked him up on the road outside of Woodbine, Georgia, in a white open Cadillac, who not more than ten minutes after he got in the car told him she would give him fifty dollars to make love to her and another fifty if he satisfied her. There were others, all kinds. He walked a hundred, a thousand and more streets, and he came finally to this beach where he saw the golden-haired girl and he would wait now because he knew this was the one who would be for him the sum of all others.

  chapter 5

  one

  SYGEN KNEW very well where they were, and so she walked in the opposite direction.

  As soon as she was off the gravel pathway her mother had made that led from the back door to the beach, Sygen removed her shoes, as she always did, and ran a little way down the beach before she settled into a slow, idle kind of walk.

  She had seen Miss Smith and her brother leave the house together. Jean had told her he was going for a walk with Miss Smith, and Sygen had said, “Well, that’s really fine. I’ve some sewing to do. It’s been lying around for ages.”

  But she had no sewing to do. Anything that Sygen ever had to do was done promptly, with no thought about being prompt. She was so very natural in her way of getting things done, as animals are, she was always unable to understand why people had forgotten to write letters or do a bit of sewing or take the wash in. Watching and listening to the summer guests, Sygen had always thought that life was so much simpler really than any of these outrageously comical people seemed to think it was. They were always walking backward and sideways or on their hands; and all one ever had to do was to walk straight ahead on one’s own two feet.

  The instant she had finished lying to her brother, she was very surprised with herself for having lied. She had never lied to him before. The mere idea of not telling Jean the truth—about anything at all—had never even occurred to her. It had not even occurred to her when she had told him about the sewing; it was almost as if someone else had spoken the words through her, the way voices come out of a radio and it is certainly not the radio that is speaking.

  Now, feeling cold sand damp between her toes, Sygen wished she had the power to take back her lie. It was silly, foolish. She was angry with herself. But at the same time she wanted to giggle. The stifled desire to giggle turned the anger to a moment of sheer fury; she kicked at the sand, but as soon as she hurt her toes against it, bending down to soothe them with a quick caress, she forgot both the fury and the giggling.

  As she walked on, limping for several yards, she was certain that if her brother were to come again to her to say he was taking a walk with Miss Smith, she would not say anything about the sewing. She was not sure exactly what she would say, but she would not lie to him. And at the same time, like wheels turning in opposite directions against each other to move a machine, an uncomfortable, strange voice inside her told her she would not only lie again, but if given a second chance, the lie would be an even more elaborate one. And the lie somehow would be more true to what she felt than the truth (it seemed to her) could ever be.<
br />
  Perhaps, the voice said, she would even tell him she was going into town, that a young man had called her and had asked her to spend the afternoon with him. He might say, “Doing what?” And she could say, “Walking around town.”

  She whirled about once, her skirt billowing to circle her legs and rest on the air a moment before falling back in against her.

  She pictured it all. Her pink skirt. She would wear that. A white blouse. She fixed her hair back with a rubber band. She chose faces and skirts and hairdos with great speed out of remembered magazines.

  He’d take hold of her hand, this boy. He would have dark hair. That was the first part of him she constructed in her mind. His voice would be soft. He’d speak slowly. They would walk through the town, her skirt and his soft voice. They’d walk slowly.

  “We walked around town,” she’d say.

  But then the boy’s mouth formed itself in her mind and she clapped both hands quickly over her eyes to hide what burst helplessly out of her as laughing, because it was this mouth that told her this other boy was so completely impossible. If she ever held any hand in all the long number of her days, it would be Jean’s hand. She knew this; it was as much a truth in her as her own heart. She could tell the lie, but never believe it.

  Taking her hands from her eyes, she smiled, thinking all this, because it was a game to play, no more, not anything to call a lie. She and Jean had played so many games over the years together. As children (she slowed her walking) they had sailed to the most marvelous ports in all the world. They had found treasures rich enough to purchase any world, and they had discovered birds who lived not on earth, perched on a gray rock, but on one star or another and whose feathers were the mottled lost color of moons seen far off, as in another sky, when night was done. They had been kings and queens and they had turned a stray brown cat once into a dragon.

  She thought all ours, meaning the games first, but then the very world itself, that gray rock, and that bird. And the boy walking around town could possess only what he himself was, not a penny or a dream more than that.