“No.”
“ ’Fraid so.” Levon raised his hands as if he was framing a headline and recited deadpan: “Teen comes home, murders father, chops him up in the woodshed like so much kindling.”
“Your gun, Levon,” Byard said. “Your ax. Your hounds.”
“Your ass.” Levon’s lip curled with untroubled glee. “I saw it. Mama saw it. Hell, if they’ll let a five-year-old testify, Augrey saw it.”
Byard covered his face with his hands.
“Now, now.” Levon patted him again. “I can keep my mouth shut. If you think you can.”
When Byard removed his hands from his face, his brother was waving the gun in front of him. Byard batted at it and missed.
“Careful. Didn’t anybody tell you to never play with guns?” Levon laughed, but his cheer seemed to have lost steam. He dropped the gun to his side and his expression went flat. He staggered over to Dwayne Hodgister’s car and a second later the engine burbled to life, its muffler rumbling and coughing. Levon eased it over the shallow ditch and out onto the road, presumably heading to the reservoir, where the old station wagon would sink deep into the source of the county’s drinking water.
Byard went into his mother’s trailer. He stayed up most of the night cleaning the blood. Before dawn, he went out to the shed and let the dogs out and scattered new straw over the dirt floor. What bones he found he buried deep enough so the hounds wouldn’t dig them up again. It would be as if the man had never lived.
If anybody in Cincinnati ever wondered what became of Dwayne Hodgister, nobody in Cementville ever heard tell of it.
Levon didn’t come back for days.
But Byard awoke several hours later to the smell of frying fat-back. He had fallen asleep on the couch, and his mother stood at the little two-burner stove. Baby Tony sat in the middle of the floor, beating a pan with a spoon. Daniel came in with a few eggs he’d cadged from a neighbor’s coop.
“You want one or two?” Arlene said when Byard came over and gave her a peck on the cheek. She hid her blue-black face with a tea towel, as if wiping sweat.
“One’ll do me, Mama.” Byard sat at the table where Daniel and Augrey were drawing pictures on flattened grocery sacks. Byard offered up a thank you to whatever force out there had arranged for Daniel to be spending last night with his cousins over at Bett’s house. He shook his head at the number of times he’d engaged in something that came awfully close to prayer in the last twelve hours.
“Where’s Dwayne?” Daniel held a fat Crayola in the air and blinked at Byard with his sweet blue eyes. He was too old for coloring, Levon would have told him, too old for the sissy games he still played with Augrey. Daniel at twelve or thirteen years old was going on five.
Augrey did not look up from her drawing, which Byard could see was a house with a blue door and pink curtains in the windows and a stick figure family assembled in a neat line on the perfect green lawn. A big yellow sun tickled across the whole thing with jagged rays in every color.
“Reckon he must have shoved off again,” Byard said.
Arlene cracked an egg on the edge of the skillet and it sizzled in the grease.
“Good,” Daniel said.
“Good,” Augrey said.
SLEEP DOES COME, IF ONLY for a while, a purifying fog he foolishly believes has done the trick. MaLou stirs next to him, waking Byard from the light doze he had finally managed. Standing by the bed is the figure again, a cartoon version of a lost soul.
“You can’t stay here,” Byard whispers, but Donnie’s ghost responds only with his bland pose of mingled abjection and bewilderment. To prove his point, Byard stands and walks through the apparition to the window, which MaLou has left open. He shoves the sash down and turns to see if Donnie Ray Goins has gone, then clicks the latch in place.
We will be okay, he thinks, watching MaLou sleep. We will leave here. We’ll go to Canada and make a life. He could crawl into bed now, could reach for her. He longs for nothing in this minute but to press her body into his, to tell her: Baby, it’s time. Maybe the shudder of her breath, the warmth of her skin as she rises to him—
But no, he had made the mistake of letting it all back in, of falling asleep with the vision of Dwayne Hodgister’s scattered parts, of his mother’s blue-black face, of the bloodied trailer. The doctor in Canada had told him he had to get the poison out of him, the memories of his father’s death. That night was possibly the real beginning of his fugue state, the doctor had said. There were several terms the doctor mentioned, and they’d been nothing but a confused swarm in Byard’s head. Dissociative disorder, depersonalization, psychogenic amnesia. None of it made sense; and none of that matters now anyway. He has MaLou. What does matter is that he do something about Levon. Because this is what the night of Dwayne Hodgister’s death did teach him: It was Levon. It has always been Levon.
Levon had made him go out tonight. If Byard had stayed home with MaLou, had watched another stupid, insulting episode of The Beverly Hillbillies and turned in early the way she wanted him to, none of this would have happened. Levon is the poison, and they share the same blood, and no amount of talking or “sharing,” as the Canadian doctor tried to get him to do in group therapy, is going to get a man’s blood out of him.
He closes his eyes again—Sleep, sleep! he tells himself, but there it is again, the insistent sound of the stranger’s pleading whine, the man’s thin legs shaking where he stood just hours ago on the bridge railing.
It is too early to be up, but anything resembling real rest is out of the question. It is as if the stranger has locked Byard inside an endless loop tape, and is making him live tonight over and over, punctuated at intervals by Levon’s satisfied grimace. The poison. He has to get it out of him.
In the dirty half-light of dawn, Byard pulls on the dungarees still wet from tonight’s rain. He closes the bedroom door soundlessly behind him. In the kitchen drawer where Martha keeps the phone book, Byard finds a pen and notepad.
To Sheriff O’Donahue, he writes across the top in block letters.
Do with this information what you will.
He has to put it all down before he explodes.
HE’D BEEN WATCHING OUT THE plate-glass window at Pekkar’s Alley earlier tonight when the stranger wobbled up on that pathetic bicycle, the kind that makes you think of an old person with joints all loose and stiff at the same time, oxidized diarrhea-green paint job somebody knew was a mistake right after the spray can went empty. Everybody had seen this guy riding around town on a beat-up Ladies Huffy Cruiser the past week, had speculated as to where he came from, although nobody had actually conversed with the stranger, as far as Byard knew. Shit-green bicycle was how he got around—nobody had seen him driving a car, nobody had noticed a vehicle parked out in front of Mamie’s Rooms-2-Let where people knew for a fact he had taken lodgings. It is not often you see a grown man ride a bike everywhere, not in this town, not in this day and age. This is a town where bicycles are strictly for the entertainment of children, things found by the tree on Christmas morning. Not the sole mode of transport for a grown man.
The stranger had a sober countenance when he dismounted—not drunk at that point, anyway. Levon stopped playing with his new gun for a minute, an old World War I semi-automatic he claims he picked up for nothing. He elbowed Byard and nodded toward the stranger, who threw down a nasty-looking backpack, strolled straight to the jukebox as if he owned the place, slammed in a pocketful of change, and punched in what must have been a dozen Howlin’ Wolf songs back-to-back. He was one of those really thin guys, all cave-chested like he’d been chain-smoking since he was nine, the little treelike twigs in his lungs already shriveled up and shut down, and he shambled over and slumped into the booth kitty-corner to theirs.
Levon said, “Looks like he’s ready to pass out or die. Maybe got the black lung. Could be from over there in Appalachia. Kind of looks Appalachian.”
“How does a person ‘look Appalachian’?” June Cahill said. She stood over the
m with two whiskeys on her tray. She waited for Byard to pay up, made change. “What’re you doing in here tonight, Byard? I thought your wife forbid you from our doors. Especially with this one.” She nodded toward Levon, who gave her the finger.
“Watch it, you, I’ll bite that and more right off,” June said. June Cahill always was a snarly type, but since she was let go at the cement plant and started slinging drinks for minimum wage at Pekkar’s, what is supposed to pass for teasing comes out like fighting words.
“Promises, promises,” Levon said and flashed the shit-eating grin that’s been getting him laid since Mick Jagger made having a big mouth sexy. Levon has these big square teeth and a wide mouth that splits his face in a way people—male and female both—take as welcoming, the first time they see it, and sometimes even after they’ve been bitten.
“If you’re lucky, maybe later on. If I can ditch this one,” Levon told June, jabbing a thumb at Byard.
Levon had made overtures to Byard after Augrey’s funeral, something that fell just short of apology. He said he wanted to let go the bad blood between them. They had gone out a few times together. MaLou had even given a reluctant blessing to their efforts to make up. She thought it might help their mother to move through her grief if she didn’t have to worry about her two eldest sons killing each other. MaLou had kissed Byard goodbye tonight and sent him off for a beer with Levon, saying not to be too late, she’d wait supper for him.
The stranger melted lower into the booth on the other side of the room. Levon got up, skirted the pool table, and sat down opposite him. Table legs scooted and wobbled and jostled the stranger out of whatever drowse he had managed amidst the racket of Friday night at Pekkar’s Alley.
Byard could not hear what was said between the two, but he registered Levon’s grin from across the room and saw in the stranger’s relieved face that he’d fallen for it like an ugly girl asked to dance. Making a friend in a town like this isn’t the easiest thing in the world. The fellow stood and picked up the mangy backpack, but Levon took it from him and slung it over his own shoulder, stopping along to introduce him to Benny and some of the boys. The stranger slid in opposite Byard. Levon sat next to him and flashed three fingers three times at June, who lined up nine shots on the table before Byard even caught this new fellow’s name.
Above Howlin’ Wolf’s low growl Levon hollered, “Meet Virgil Grundy!” and raised two fingers to his forehead in a half salute.
The whiskey was performing its highest function as social lubricant before long, and that kind of banter that’s general and vague and way too personal all at once was gushing around the table. Byard tried to remind himself of his tendency to blab things he would later wish he hadn’t. They didn’t know jack about Virgil Grundy, whether he had come to stay or was passing through. Levon ordered chasers, and Virgil said his gut was busting and headed for the head.
That’s when Levon threw the backpack across the table and said, “Open it.” The way he stared at it, it might have been full of rattlesnakes. But they found in the stranger’s bag nothing unexpected. The cellophane pack of powdered mini-donuts, the thermos of thick coffee, the regulation Army knife, the bandanna. The raggedy billfold.
“Wilson Graves,” Levon read from the driver’s license in the billfold. “Probably one of those scabs taking our jobs at the paper cup factory. Hold on, hold on. What else he got in here?”
“Isn’t a scab somebody who crosses a picket line?” Byard said.
Levon pulled from the bottom of the pack a sandwich bag of something white. Handling it like a gold brick from Fort Knox, he looked over his shoulder, untwisted the twisty tie, moistened a pinkie, and took a dip. Licked his finger. “Grade A,” he said.
“Who died and made you Top Narc?” Byard asked, but knew there was nothing to be gained by telling his brother he doesn’t know what he’s talking about, that a neat baggie of heroin that size, especially pure, would be worth more than the likes of this bone-thin wayfarer and his crappy spray-paint bicycle would see in five lifetimes. Ever since Ginny left this last time, Levon’s disability check has turned him into a cop-show addict. He’s got it in his blood, ferreting out slimebuckets trying to spread their evil love in his town like a pestilence.
“I bet you anything he escaped from that narcotics farm the government’s got up there in Lexington.”
“What the hell are you talking about, Levon?” Byard wonders how long his brother’s drunken ramblings here at Pekkar’s will be ignored by this community whose grief has rendered it languorous. When Jimmy Smith’s Vietnamese wife turned up dead, Levon practically cheered. Said it was about time somebody woke up to the presence of “enemy infiltrators.” Levon has been bloviating all over town about how he finally figured out his purpose in life: That this place was changing for the worse, and it was past time for some cleaning up around here. Levon had always been a mean drunk, but now he was mean and pious.
Here he was again, sitting across from Byard and flipping through some unfortunate wayfarer’s billfold and muttering about how there were people tearing the place apart, “dragging down a good town, till before long it will be in the same gutter this whole shitty country seems hell-bent on gushing down.”
“Again,” Byard said. “What the hell are you talking about?”
“You know, they got that drug addict prison farm in Lexington. Make them milk cows and whatnot, and in exchange for letting the doctors study their brains, they get paid off in drugs. Heroin addicts, most of them. All them colored horn players, junkies, they get busted up in New York City, and wind up milking cows.” Levon whistled, like he couldn’t believe he and Byard came so close to being bamboozled by this drug-dealing hillbilly, saved only by Levon’s own quick thinking. “Bet you this Virgil’s one of them.”
“I thought you just said he was an Appalachian scab.”
Levon dipped his finger in the baggie again. “I could identify that shit a mile away.” His pronouncement sucked the air out of the place. The bad feeling that had been quietly circling in Byard’s belly since the stranger parked his shitty Huffy outside nestled into his gut as if it planned on staying.
“Let’s flush it,” Byard said. “MaLou’s got supper waiting.”
“Last thing this town needs,” Levon snarled into his beer, as though he was sad to have to share the news.
Virgil-Wilson-Grundy-Graves came back from the john, slid in, drummed on the table, and said, “You all Howlin’ Wolf fans?”
“Don’t you know it!” Levon flashed the grin. “Say, Virgil, you hungry?”
“I was planning to take a couple of Pekkar’s Burgers home with me. Got an appointment with the television in Miss Mamie’s living room later on. She’s making waffles. That’s how exciting my life is!” Grundy-Graves was too enthusiastic. “That spoon, that spoon, that spoooonful,” he sang with the Wolf and drummed his hands on the table.
“Now, we can’t let you eat rotgut burgers when you’re visiting our town,” Levon said. “Isn’t that right, little brother?” He looked at Byard for confirmation and winked. “What say we show Virgil what a real steak dinner looks like?”
“Shoot, I’m not visiting, I’m moving here! I appreciate it anyway, but Mamie sent me out to borrow a cup of flour. I’ve been riding all over trying to get somebody to answer the door. Mamie’s no doubt wondering where the heck I’ve got to.”
“You have to forgive them,” Byard said, “people here are usually friendly. We’ve been trying to put ourselves back together again . . .” Levon’s glare made him wish he could shut the hell up. Byard was suddenly very drunk, and they were all three heading for the door.
MAYBE IT IS HIS IMAGINATION, but in the slow-motion reel of this awful night playing in Byard’s head, Benny and the guys playing pool seem to stop, then give a joint nod for whatever thing Levon was figuring to do, as if they are not only in on it, they give their blessing to the whole shit-storm unfolding. In grade school Levon had been the reigning king of practical jokes, fast thinki
ng and witty, a great mimic. But the innocent pranks that began typically enough in adolescence had grown progressively nastier through high school until the other boys expended more energy trying not to make an enemy of Levon than they did trying to earn his friendship. So maybe Benny and the other poolroom hoods aren’t so much nodding approval as they are failing to conceal their own longstanding fear of Levon Ferguson.
But it must be his mind playing tricks on him, sitting here at Martha Goins’s kitchen table in the half-light with the wall clock ticking behind him and the pencil in his hand, hovering over the letter to Sheriff O’Donahue. Which is the story he will feed to the law? He needs to make sure Levon is put away and put away for good. Byard cocks an ear to the song of a nightjar—Poor Will, poor Will! the song goes—so close it must be sitting in the tree whose branches scrape the walls of Rate’s house.
In Byard’s head the show goes savagely on, an unsilent film that will keep rolling, the mental reel that must uncoil itself and spill the night’s events.
BYARD WALKED TO THE DRIVER’S side of the company truck, the keys to which Gil Miller gave him just last week. (In these parts, such a gesture is as good as giving a man a share of the family blood.) Byard would drop Virgil, or whatever his name was, at Mamie’s to enjoy some late-night waffles. Then Byard and Virgil both can get a good night’s sleep. And tomorrow, get the hell out of town.
But Levon said, “Here, lemme drive.”
“He’s awfully trusting for a scumbag drug dealer,” Byard whispered.
Levon glared at him.
“Levon. It’s flour. For waffles.” Byard said this even as he handed his brother the keys.
“You never know, now, do you, little brother?” Levon said. “That’s how they trick you.”
MaLou, in Byard’s head, said, You promised me we were leaving here.
The stranger threw his bicycle in the back of the truck and climbed up in the middle between Byard and Levon.
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