The Beetle Leg: Novel

by Hawkes, John

  They waited a moment and then: “Naw, Luke, not tonight.”

  “Ain’t seen him since an hour.”

  “Reckon he’s in to Clare.”

  The little girl laughed, pulled the primer over her face and the chef slammed a handful of meat on the griddle. With the point of his knife he pierced the bun, slit it, laid it flat and smeared on margarine. They heard the meatcake sizzling.

  Across from Estrellita’s was the Metal and Lumber Gymnasium where the welders played the linesmen, where raffles were held and any entertainment, resulting in proceeds for the town, occurred. The grilled windows were open, lights were strung over the slippery hardwood, the instrumentalists followed the scores of their sheet music bought in Clare. Luke paid his dime at the door.

  he’s here,” said Wade of the man with the red wagon.

  “Saw him, did you?”

  “Yes, sir, I got a look at him.”

  There was a desk and a chair on rollers for the Sheriff of Clare and a cane chair for his visitor. But both men stood. In the jail office they did not face each other, rather they waited side by side, the Sheriff’s hand on the other’s arm, talking slowly, not quite in whispers. They did not move but rested on their feet, alert by standing, old now, steady, for nights which kept them from slumbering, together watchful, dimly awake..

  “I knew he was coming, Wade. I heard of it.” The Sheriff gently laid down the fat, wingfolded body of his Stetson.

  No move was made to sit or turn and take the few steps to the open door from which they could have seen a street, a ridge of roof, the sloping, dry and distant night. Their backs remained without effort toward those sights, dim or broad, which might have made them think men slept in safety. Facing walls, the rear of the jail, they breathed together with a faint heave as if pollen and dust tracked them—all day they inhaled the clouds raised by a passing few youths —and the air were still laden long after the setting of the sun. They waited, come to a stop in the middle of the narrow stone room where dried cigarettes lay strewn on the faded blotter of the half open desk, where a winter coat hung from a peg, and the arm of each was made easy by touching the other’s. A thin light hung above their heads from a long cord more rope than wire. Separately they stared at the floor, pausing a moment in those outer, less confining parts of a jail. They smiled.

  “I guess someone will send for you, if there’s need at all.”

  “No. I think you better get him, Wade.”

  Slowly, without looking back, they walked toward the center of the building, down a corridor to the complete darkness of the cell. They reached the coolness of that last room, divided in half and from the glow of the night by bars, and could be no longer hailed from the street. One side cell, the other bare, with iron rods embedded in the floor and ceiling, it was a room in which two men might meet out of town and in which, once before, a hanging had occurred from scarce planks, a hasty rope, and behind a canvas sheet still wet with turpentine and daubs of paint.

  Smoke hardly rose from burning corn silk, no smell of tar or soap. Yet by the tank door—locked—the large shadows of the Sheriff and his friend, allowed owners of the cage, were free to lean against the metal, hold to greasy iron and hear the tinkering of jacknife, the strapping of wrists and tying of the hood. Wind, sand, bugs and daily voices rose and fell sealed beyond the walls of tin and whitewashed brick. The two of them were spread, like men leaning over a fence, against the open slender rails of the tank.

  “Wade, let’s take a look at her.” The voice, the rubbing, creasing sounds of the Sheriff drifted away from bars cool to the forehead. He stepped backwards, groped toward the wall and light cord. “She don’t change.” A match flared on his trousers, sulphur fumed in the darkness and for a moment Wade saw the bodies of sleeping prisoners on the tank room floor.

  “Twelve years ago, Wade, I left this cell unguarded. And that night, when a break or most anything could have blown, I saw Luke Lampson. I spoke to him; I went along to see his brother married. And the jail held. She’s just as strong tonight.” He pulled the cord and both of them, waiting, rubbed their eyes. The Sheriff looked up, saw the gleam, specks of brown and black in the iron, the square slab of the lock. Wade interrupted.

  “Sheriff, is them convicts?”

  “Sure. But you know, Wade,” again the hand lay on the other’s arm, “I can’t be in this room and touch these shining bars but what that wedding comes to mind and I see him.”

  “Sheriff. Tell me about these men. They’re not just borrowing a place to sleep?”

  “I caught them little devils tonight, Wade. Others are still loose. I think I’ll let them go in the morning. They ain’t much use to hold.” He turned slowly, raised his eyes and settled his shoulder tightly between the bars, thrust his body into the pen. A swift prisoner could have caught and twisted the fat arm, an animal torn it with one slash. “I think of Luke right here. This is where I come back to, where I could remember straight, after the wedding. He wanted to come too; I didn’t bring him. I wouldn’t let him further than the office. There’s not many like you, Wade, who want to hang around a jail, who have that need for the taste of lime and light that’s different through ordinary window glass. I didn’t know if to trust him. But ever after, Wade, this room’s been full of fire. I like stone, a man of the law has got to like things hard; he’s got to like the extra weight of a gun and the sound of a closing door. He’s got to watch the men he guards when they’re shaving from a basin on their knees. I was alone for weeks at that time. I didn’t even leave the jail to eat.

  “Wade, I wasn’t the man to witness marriage. But he wanted it. We stood together, we pushed through all them women. And if I wanted I could have broke it up, I could have run the lot of them out of town. This cell here hasn’t changed, it’s just kept some of that celebration ever since the time I met him.”

  “Sheriff,” Wade peered at the sleepers—one lay almost near enough to touch by stretching a restless foot—and his body slackened, fists settled heavily, arms rested high, “have they been fed?”

  “Watered,” continued the Sheriff in a voice low and wandering from the heat, “I watered them.” The other nodded. “You know, Wade, I didn’t even see his brother that night. Two years before I saw him though. I knew that he was marrying, but for all I care he didn’t speak that night.

  “But Luke spoke. By the time they had been married half an hour, with all those women trailing after them, and set maybe in some dark room with a latch on the door—I never cared to know where they spent that night—we were in the office, tipping easy together in our chairs. He could have been one of my boys right then, Wade. He was young enough. I could tell he liked it. But I sent him back and waited for morning by myself.”

  “You’re not alone tonight, Sheriff. But, you sure these men ain’t sick?”

  “Wade, stop putting me off my thought. They’re just locked up for the night is all.” The Sheriff turned, placed his wide face between the bars so that they pressed on his temples and stared into the cell.

  The prisoners did not rise. Occasional words, lights burning past the hour, caused no awakening fumble or sudden oath. A few Red Devils lay awkwardly spread eagle in the cell, the black driving mitten of one flung upon the seamless snout of another, tangled, sleeping, perhaps ready to spring with wild rubber limbs high and low against the bars. In captivity, sometime during the night, they had heaped themselves in the middle of the painted floor like a stack of slashed and darkened tires. The Sheriff and Wade slumped, grinned.

  “Sheriff, watch this.” Wade, beginning silently to shake, stooped and squeezed, pushed his leg recklessly through the bars. He puffed and it thrust forward, trousers sticking and riding up the bulky calf.

  “Wade,” the Sheriff chuckled and whispered, “you’ll get it bit off.”

  The dusty shoe of a full sized man probed toward the small formless foot of the nearest sprawled prisoner. Wade hung low and twisted, stopped breathing and bent his head to aim. The Sheriff waited.
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  He kicked, then kicked again and suddenly pulling and swaying with all his weight he cursed, strained and drew it back. The Devil’s foot moved a few inches and lay still.

  “Hell,” Wade caught his breath, “they’re harmless.”

  “I told you. But, Wade,” the fingers pressed, relaxed, “go get him for me.”

  The red wagon stood at the end of the street. Now and then a volley of firecrackers burst from a huddle of black braided Indians and with a dismal but high pitched cry they scattered, then returned panting toward the wagon. Or a single brave, eyes closed and ankle shoes clumping in the dust, would break from the rest and race with terrified showy speed away from the leaning red spectacle of the traveling house, straight up the center of the empty street.

  The fireworks were old. Hoarded in leantos and one room cabins among families of fifteen children and ancient long haired eagle men, they were unearthed, armfuls brought into the street, supplied by bareback riders with pockets stuffed, lathered in haste. The paper cartridges exploded with stored energy or fizzled dangerously in clouds of smoke, the breath of a long horned animal on its knees. Above the clamor of the young men—their legs worked to the rattling of dry stones—the oldest Indian alive, without eyes, chin wrinkled into the mouth, clothed in baggy coat on the shoulders of which scraped his yellowed hair, stood rigidly still and, smiling or grimacing, waved in jerky circles a hissing sparkler.

  One of the runners who had left with shouts and returned in a low scuffle, emerged from the alleys between the main buildings of Clare and quietly, whispering, crept to the front of the wagon to hold a bag of gray kernels under the strange horse’s nose. Suddenly it thrashed its tail and ate.

  The women of the tribe were waiting. Just beyond range of a sooted and yellow lantern that had been lighted, fanned, and set crookedly near the pair of weathered steps dropped on hinges from the back of the wagon, they bundled together and their brown skeletal cheekbones now and then twitched with pain. Their blank eyes turned upwards to the low but thick red door.

  The wagon consisted of four rear wheels, extra high, and a little two windowed hut daubed with one barn color coat of paint. A tin chimney, that could be removed and wired to the side, stuck abruptly from the center of the sharp pointed roof and poured a fresh, foreign smelling smoke into the hot night air. It mixed with whiffs of gunpowder. Large, outsized shutters, stolen from a Victorian estate and thick enough to be bulletproof, were nailed across the windows. The house wagon was rough, gaudy, a small fortress of unmatched parts, with an air about it of harsh and lonely ill-repute. It was a cramped and wandering hovel. Yet high over the horse’s sloping rump, the driver’s seat was draped with a soft silk-haired sheepskin. The dirty but comfortable curls hung to the floorboards and over the rusty springs.

  Fat, hands in pockets, grinning, Wade worked his way down the street, careful to keep in shadow. He knew the Indians could see him, the wet shirt and trousers white. He stayed in the dark. For a time he sat, a drunk rolled in a corner, on an empty porch of the provisional store, resting. He saw a tin can blown suddenly into the air. The sharp-mouthed Indians leapt across the street to the sound of beating drums. He chuckled quietly from deep beneath his leather belt, watched them burn down, tormented by the moon.

  Wade again crept lumbering toward the hut on wheels. The thin stick of the chimney turned a spotted orange. In a row of gray false fronts, among a few gilt lettered windows—a town laid out and staged with a few hundred people on the plains—the red wagon took its crooked place like a bloody thorn, an impudent shambles in the midst of cattle houses. It had not been driven to the side but blocked the road.

  Wade, abstractly picking a tooth, saw the squaws clustered about the doll size steps. They looked darkly or, a few old and with toothless gums, happily, up to the bright light burning through splits and knotholes in the rain warped door. In the pack he saw one, two, that were maidens in unbelted dresses. The paralytic old chief’s sparkler flashed on their tightly drawn black hair. It was a circle he could not enter, never touch those with woodsmoke under their fingernails. The months of the maiden Indians came with the tearing of young dogs; Wade scratched his neck and looked at the gently stooping shoulders.

  Suddenly, as bright lips parted, the stolid door flew open. In the heat of the boiling pot stove Cap Leech stood above them, holding by the throat a brown chested boy, the other hand dripping an instrument of metal.

  Cap Leech dropped him. The boy—until that one moment the men outside had cried in his stead, he had curled his tongue and perspired—fell in pain from the platform. But Wade, as well as the audience of women, saw that he had jumped. And when he hit the ground he glanced quickly at foster mothers, sisters, clutched his jaw and screamed. The women babbled and turned away. Cap Leech raised the metal, flicked it, and the small skin wrapped molar landed among them. Dismayed, they fought for it, picked it up.

  The street was empty except for the fiery Cap Leech still framed in the midget doorway and Wade trembling at his feet. A last string of firecrackers rattled and died. The little man with bare arms did not move.

  “What do you want?”

  His voice was hoarse from long speechless months. He wore black trousers and a stained vest folded low on a thin scarred waist. He stood with his back baking toward the stove the color of which, a cool glow, increased minute by minute. Glancing at the lantern, “Put it out,” he said. Wade sank down and grunted.

  Cap Leech did not watch him lay his head on its side, burn his nose, blow, and blow again. With eyes bleakly commanding up and down the street as if the Indians still congregated, he continued merely to wipe, almost polish, the hammer pliers shape of metal. The duster-sized piece of waste rag fluffed up and down as he worked with thin fast fingers. Then, done looking at the town, he flung the tool backward, not turning to aim, and shoved the rag into his hip pocket. The pincers crashed behind the stove.

  “It was the Sheriff told me to come over,” said Wade and brushed at the soot streaks on his trousers.

  Cap Leech stepped into the flames and slammed the door. Wade listened to the hurried sounds, the clattering of small objects, a ransacked scuffling. After a pause he heard the whisper of iron, the shooting of grated coal, and the sudden breathing of the fire. Leech reappeared from beneath the wagon, scowled, flung up the steps and fastened a padlock through the rings.

  “Bring that lantern,” he said.

  He sank into the sheepskin and pushed the stiff, long handled brake. Wade saw that on his feet he wore only a toe curled pair of bedroom slippers.

  With the easing forward of the hickory lever and the release of the wooden grip which bound the wheels and which, on wallowing hills, was apt to lock and pitch the wagon into the limbs of a bare tree, smoke flattened from the pipe and the men leaned backward, pulled with the head down charge of a blind horse chased by fire. The driver held a loose rein, ran his other hand through the shedding yellow locks on the seat and, shaggy toes pointed restfully together, stared with eyes that never watered toward the horizon, above and beyond any obstacle that might have crossed their path. The son of a light boned suffragette, kept alive by a spirit half stimulant, half sleep, he bounced unconscious of the twisting wagon frame, the knocks of the makeshift caisson.

  “Turn around! Turn around, you’ve passed it.”

  “Whoa,” said Cap Leech, sending not a signal down the reins, and the horse stopped. An obedient, angular wrenching of the shafts, a tilt as one wheel skidded up and across the sidewalk planking, and again Wade’s damp wavy hair scratched in his eyes. The stove at their backs was fanned by speed, not wind, and occasionally, without noise, chunked airy wads of ember from the funnel topped chimney, fireballs that floated in the wake of the blood letter.

  The ministerial tie strings, knotted, but no longer in a bow, the high collar flapping about the neck, the ease with which he overrode the country familiar or not, all marked a man who had been anesthetized, against whose chest villagers of fifty years had spit their brains
.

  He drove with the one hand uselessly extended and peered far ahead of the low stars, dismissed without thinking Clare’s shut houses. He would travel unlighted roads to reach the distant end of the river, the last of his line. Echoing moans met him at the limits of every township.

  Cap Leech did not stop his horse—wide at the rump it tapered to the small head, jet black prehistoric animal that could run forever —before the jail, but turned it instead, with a whisper to the pinned down ears, between the stone wall and vacant wooden wall. H? discovered, without an extra movement, the still and littered end of Clare. The wheels rocked in the glassy sand, the horse exhaled.

  “You give me a ride here,” said Wade. Leech nimbly disappeared on the other side of the wagon. The silent flatlands, the lonely shrub, the plains, moved in upon the town and passed across the weeded railroad line carrying part of Clare off into the night, a few hundred yards into what was once grazing country, now shorn, beyond which there was nothing. Behind, on the streets they had just left, the loping body of a wild dog appeared at the cloudless, hardly sleeping skyline, turned and bounded into the jail.

  “I’ll tell you what it says.” The Sheriff glanced at Wade, looked at Cap Leech from the side of his eye, wrinkled, brown, a mole. “Put his bag in the corner.” But for a moment longer he read to himself, holding with both hands the thumb-pressed pages of the yellow paper book. The thick dry lips hung loose, dissociated from the mind that had been concentrating for a long while and in a bad light. “The new of the moon is best,” he said briefly and was again silent. To study, he needed the rough cut desk, gum, dust, and streaks of coal dark ink under his fingers. He was gathered over the printed sheet, deciphering sign by sign, breathing at the end of every sentence. Now and then he stopped and his eyes retraced slowly to the top of the page.

  “Why don’t you let Wade there take your bag?”

  But the zodiac was strong and he fell once more to creasing the paper against the round of his knee, tongue tip appearing at the corner of his mouth. He considered the indoor gardener’s calendar, a timetable of work, failure, and church holidays, with a slow beating of his heart and patient, slight movements in the cane chair. A gambled harvest, the weather, and days on which accidents were most likely to occur, he calculated; and he discovered, prodding the elements, that they were in the old of the moon. He shut it, leaned forward, and carefully lay it before him on sheets scrawled with dates of years long past and those still to come.