by Jay Hopler
As if to mock Sweet Gum’s thoughts, Jeremiah twitched and rubbed his nose suddenly. “Christ, boy,” he said, “I got a itch—Am I going to kiss a fool all the way out here?”
Sweet Gum turned red. “You keep your goddamn kissing to yourself!” he snarled, as if Jeremiah were no one to be afraid of. Had the duty of fulfilling a promise already begun to change him? He felt Jeremiah’s surprise with pride. “Nobody’s going to kiss me,” Sweet Gum said with venom.
Probably no one on Main Street in Plain Dealing saw Jeremiah and Sweet Gum leave, though many would see them leave for the last time a few days later. By now Sweet Gum sat in a real sweat of anticipation, his suit drenched and his eyes squinting past a haze of sweat as if peering out of a disguise. As soon as the startling sign PLAIN DEALING appeared by the ditch, Jeremiah said quietly, “Now, I don’t want no upstart rambunctiousness ruining our plans. You remember that.” Sweet Gum was embarrassed and angry, yet at the same time he knew Jeremiah was right. Behind Jeremiah his family stretched out of sight: all the Coke family, grandfathers and fathers, sons, cousins, brothers, women all over; it made Sweet Gum and his mother and little brother look like a joke someone had played. Of course maybe someone had played a joke—Sweet Gum’s mother was not married, and through years of furious shame he had gathered that his father, whoever he was, was not even the father of his brother. That bothered Sweet Gum as much as not knowing who his father was.
They drove through town. It was larger than they had expected. The main street was wide and paved; at either side long strips of reddish dirt stretched out to buildings and fields far from the road. There were open-air markets for vegetables and fruit and poultry, a schoolhouse (without a flag on its flagpole), a gas station and general store and post office put together (groups of boys and young men straggled about in front of this building, and Sweet Gum stared at them as if trying to recognize someone), houses (all built up on blocks, perched off the ground), and, even, catching the eye of both men, a movie house—in a Quonset but with a roof painted shiny orange and a bright, poster-covered front. Sweet Gum stared as they drove by.
Jeremiah shortly turned the car into a driveway. Sweet Gum wanted to grab his arm in surprise. “This place is where he stays, you found it so fast?” he said faintly. “Hell, no,” Jeremiah said. “Can’t you read? This is a ‘hotel.’ We got to stay overnight, don’t we?” “Overnight?” said Sweet Gum, looking around. “You mean in a room? Somebody else’s room?” “They fix them for you. You get the key to the door and go in and out all you want,” Jeremiah said. He had parked the car on a bumpy incline before an old, wide-verandaed house—peeling white, with pillars and vines and two old men, like twins, sitting in chairs as if somebody had placed them there. “Why are we staying overnight? That’s what I don’t like,” Sweet Gum said. “It ain’t for you to like, then,” Jeremiah said with a sneer. He had climbed with elastic energy out of the car and now began smoothing his suit and hair and face. Out of his pocket he took a necktie: a precise-striped, urban tie, of a conservative gray color. “You ain’t going to leave me, are you?” Sweet Gum said, climbing awkwardly out of the car.
They went to the counter inside and stood with their hands out on it, as if waiting to be fed. A middle-aged woman with a sour face stared back at them. “No luggage, then pay in advance,” she said. “Pay?” said Sweet Gum. Jeremiah jabbed him in the ribs. “How much is it?” Jeremiah said carefully, making a little bow with his head. “Three for the two of you,” the woman said. Sweet Gum hoped that Jeremiah would roar with laughter at this; but instead he took out of his pocket a billfold and money, and counted it out to the woman. One dollar bill and many coins. “Might’s well sleep in the car as pay all that,” Sweet Gum muttered. No one glanced at him. Jeremiah was staring at the woman strangely—standing at his full height, six foot three or so—so that when the woman turned to give him the key she froze and stared right back at him. Jeremiah smiled, dipped his head as if pleased. The woman withdrew from the counter; little prickly wrinkles had appeared on her face. “Ma’am,” Jeremiah said formally, “maybe I could put to you a little question? As how we’re guests here and everything?” “Maybe,” said the woman. Jeremiah paused and wiggled his short beard, as if he were suddenly shy. Sweet Gum waited in an agony of embarrassment, looking at the floor. But finally Jeremiah said, rushing the words out: “Where’s he live? Where’s his house?”
His words vibrated in the hot musty air. Jeremiah’s face was wet with new perspiration as he listened to them with disbelief. The woman only stared; her lips parted. Sweet Gum, sensing error, wanted to run outside and climb in the car and wait for Jeremiah, but his legs were frozen. Finally the woman whispered, “He? Who do you mean, he? My husband? My husband’s right—” “No, hell!” Jeremiah said. “I mean Motley.” With a clumsy try at secrecy he leaned forward on the counter, craned his neck, and whispered: “Motley. Nathan Motley. Him.” “Why, Nathan Motley,” stammered the woman, “he lives around here somewheres. He—You relatives of his, back country? Why do you want to see him?”
Sweet Gum could bear it no longer. “Who says there’s a why about it?” he snarled. “Why? Why what? What why? You said there was a why about it, we never did! We just drove into town five minutes ago! Where’s there a why about—”
Jeremiah brought his arm around and struck Sweet Gum in the chest. Not with his fist or elbow, but just with his arm; somehow that was degrading, as if Sweet Gum were not worth being hit properly. “That’ll do,” Jeremiah said. The woman was staring at them. “Get outside and get the things,” he whispered to Sweet Gum contemptuously, “while I see to this woman here, you scairt-like-any-goddamn-back-country bastard.”
Outside, four or five young men of Sweet Gum’s age stood around the jalopy. They had hands pushed in their pockets, elbows idle, feet prodding at lumps of dried mud. Sweet Gum, glowering and muttering to himself, walked right down to the car. They made way for him. “How far you come in this thing?” one boy giggled. Sweet Gum leaned over and got the satchel out of the car. He pretended to be checking the lock, as if it had a lock. “Going to lose your license plates back here,” somebody said. “This making way to fall off. Then the cops’ll get you.” Sweet Gum whirled around. “Cops? What the hell do I care about cops?” He lifted his lip. The boys all wore straw hats that looked alike, as if bought in the same store. Sweet Gum had the idea, staring at them, that their deaths—if they should fall over dead right now, one after the other—would mean no more than the random deaths in a woods of skunks and woodchucks and rabbits and squirrels. Somehow this pleased him. “Ain’t worrying my young head over cops,” Sweet Gum said. He knew they were watching as he strode back up to the hotel. Someone yelled out daringly, “Backwoods!” but Sweet Gum did not even glance around.
In a tavern that night Sweet Gum had to keep going back and forth to the outside and stand trembling on the seashell gravel, waiting to get sick; then if he did get sick, good enough, it was over for a while; if not, he went back inside. Each time the fresh air revived him and made him furious at Jeremiah, who sat slouched at the bar talking to a woman, his big knees out in opposite directions. Sweet Gum wanted to grab Jeremiah and say it was time they were about their business. But when he did speak, his voice always came out in a whine: “Ain’t we going to locate him tonight? What about that room they got waiting for us? That woman—” Jeremiah turned away from the conversation he was having—with a strange thick black-haired woman, always smiling—and, with his eyes shut tight, said, “You see to your own bus’ness. I’m finding out about him.” “But—” “Find out some yourself, go over there,” Jeremiah said, his eyes still shut, and waving vaguely behind Sweet Gum. Then he turned away. Sweet Gum drank beer faster and faster. Once in a while he would sniff sadly, wipe his nose, and take out the black cloth change purse in which he had put the money Uncle Simon had given him for “food.” Despair touched him: had he not already betrayed his uncle by drinking instead of eating, by wasting time here, by getting s
ick so that by now people laughed when he got up to hurry outside? If he did have a father, maybe that man would be ashamed of him; and what then? Sweet Gum sometimes dreamt of this—a strange man revealing himself to be his father, and then saying plainly that he was disappointed in his son. A man back from the navy, or from a ranch farther west. Sweet Gum wanted to begin, to go to Motley, to find him somewhere—where would he be hiding, up in an attic? crawled under a house?—and get it over with and return home, have his uncle proud of him and give him the reward, and turn, in two days, into a man. His chest glowed with the thought: he would become a man. But his inspiration was distracted by Jeremiah’s big, sweating indifferent back and Sweet Gum’s own faint, sickish gasey feeling. “Goin’ outside, ain’t comin’ back,” he muttered, purposely low so that Jeremiah would not hear and would wonder, later, where he was. He stumbled down from the stool and wavered through the crowd. Someone poked him, Sweet Gum looked around expecting to find a friend, found nothing instead—faces—and someone laughed. A woman somewhere laughed. Sweet Gum’s stomach jerked with anger and he had to run to the door.
When Sweet Gum woke, lying flat on his stomach in the gravel, he could tell by the smell of the night that it was late. Everything was quiet: the tavern was closed and looked dark and harmless, like an abandoned house. Sweet Gum spat and got up. A thought touched him, really a recollection; and, with sweet memories of abandoned houses, he groped for a handful of seashells and pebbles and threw them at the window nearest him. It did not break and he threw again, more energetically: this time the window shattered. Sweet Gum nodded and went out to the road.
He went back to the hotel but found the door to the room locked. He could hear Jeremiah snoring inside. Yet instead of being angry, he felt strangely pleased, even pacified, and lay down on the floor outside. As he fell asleep he thought of Jeremiah, one of his many cousins, a Coke rightfully enough—a Coke who had killed a man before he was twenty-five and whose clever talk made all the girls whoop with laughter and look around at one another, as they never did with Sweet Gum.
After breakfast the next morning Jeremiah and Sweet Gum and the black-haired woman drove in Jeremiah’s car through town. The woman sat by the door, where Sweet Gum wanted to sit, and as they drove up and down Main Street she shrieked and waved and roared with laughter at people on the street. “Don’t know ‘ern!” she yelled at someone, a man, and shrugged her shoulders high. “Never seen ‘em before!” Even Jeremiah thought that was funny. But after a while, when they had driven back and forth several times, Jeremiah announced that they had to be about their business: they were on a proposition and their time wasn’t all their own. “Hell, just one more time around,” said the woman loudly. She had a broad, splendid face, so shiny with lipstick and makeup and pencil lines that Sweet Gum’s eye slid around helplessly and could not focus on any single part. “Ain’t got time for it,” Jeremiah said, “we got to be about our business. Which way is it?” “Drive on. Straight,” the woman said sullenly. She had a big head of hair, a big body, and a hard, red, waxen mouth that fascinated Sweet Gum, but whenever he looked at her she was looking at something else; she never noticed him. All she did was push him away with her elbow and thigh, trying to make more room for herself but doing it without glancing at him, as if she didn’t really know he was there. “Keep straight. A mile or two,” she said, yawning.
A few minutes later, out in the country, they stopped in front of a house. It was a small single-story house, covered with ripped brown siding, set up on wobbly blocks. “He don’t do no work that I know of,” the woman said. “He’s got his finger in some backwoods whiskey—y’know, whiskey from the backwoods.” She winked at Jeremiah. Sweet Gum’s heart was pounding; Jeremiah kept jiggling his beard. In the cinder driveway an old brown dog lay as if exhausted and watched them, getting ready to bark. There was a wild field next to the house on the right, and an old decaying orchard—pear trees—on the left. Across the road, a quarter mile away, was a small farm: Sweet Gum could see cows grazing by a creek. “All right, honey,” Jeremiah said, “you can start back now.” “Walk back?” said the woman. “Yes, we got bus’ness here, between men. Ain’t I explained that?” “What kind of bus’ness?” said the woman. “Men’s business,” Jeremiah said, but kindly; and he reached past Sweet Gum and put his big hairy hand on the woman’s arm. “You start walking back and like’s not we’ll catch up in a few minutes and ride you back. Don’t worry Jeremiah now, honey.” The woman hesitated, though Sweet Gum knew she had already made up her mind. “Well,” she said, “all right, if it’s men’s bus’ness. But don’t … maybe don’t tell Nathan it was me put you on him.” “We won’t never do that,” Jeremiah said.
Jeremiah wasted more time by waving at the woman and blowing kisses as she walked away, but finally he calmed down and got out of the car and straightened his clothes and pressed down on his hair; he took out the necktie once more and tied it around his neck. Sweet Gum, carrying the satchel, climbed over the door on Jeremiah’s side and jumped to the ground. The dog’s ears shifted but the dog itself did not move. On the porch of the house sat a child, and behind him were piles of junk—firewood, old boxes, barrels, coils of rusted wire. The screen door opened and another child came out, a boy of about eight. He wore jeans and was barefoot. He and the smaller child and the dog watched Jeremiah and Sweet Gum arrange their clothing, slick down their hair by spitting into their palms and rubbing their heads viciously, and stare straight before them as if each were alone. Finally it was time: they crossed the ditch to the house.
The dog whimpered. “Son,” cried Jeremiah to the older boy, “is your pa anywheres handy?” The boy’s toes twitched on the edge of the steps. He began stepping backward, cautiously, and the other boy scrambled to his feet and backed up, too, retreating behind the piles of junk. “Tell your pa we’re here to see him,” said Jeremiah. He walked ahead; Sweet Gum, hugging the satchel, followed close. Faces appeared at a window, another child or a woman. Then the screen door opened cautiously and a man stepped out.
He was about forty, gone to fat now, with a reddish apologetic face. The way he scratched the underside of his jaw made Sweet Gum know that he was apologetic about something. “You Nathan Motley?” Jeremiah cried. “What’s that to you?” the man said, clearing his throat. Behind the piles of junk the two boys crouched, watching. “Here, boy,” Jeremiah said to Sweet Gum, “open it up.” Sweet Gum opened up the satchel and Jeremiah took out his pistol, an old rust-streaked revolver that had belonged to his father. He aimed it at the man and fired. Someone screamed. But when Sweet Gum could see again, the porch was empty even of children—the screen door had fallen shut. “Goddamn,” said Jeremiah, still holding the pistol aloof, “you spose I missed him?”
Sweet Gum had his pistol now—not his own yet, but it would be when he returned home. “I’m going around here,” Sweet Gum said. He ran around the house. In the driveway the dog had drawn its muddy feet up to its body and lay watching them with wet, alert eyes. Sweet Gum had just rounded the back corner when he saw someone diving into a clump of bushes in the wild field behind the house. Sweet Gum let out a yodel: this was all familiar to him, nothing frightening about it, it was exactly like the games he had played as a child. “Here! Back here!” he yelled. He fired wildly at the clump of bushes. Behind him, in the house, there were screams and shrieks—Jeremiah was stomping through the house, bellowing. When he appeared running out of the back door his tie was thrown back over his shoulder as if someone had playfully pulled it there, and he still looked surprised. “This is hot weather for a hunt,” he said when he caught up to Sweet Gum. They ran through the stiff grass, in brilliant sunshine, and about them birds flew up in terror. The field smelled of sunburned grass. “I’m headed this way, you keep straight,” Jeremiah grunted. Sweet Gum ran on, slashing through bushes, pushing aside tree branches with his gun. “You, Motley!” he cried in despair. “Where you hiding at?” Something stumbled on the far side of a clump of bushes; Sweet Gum fired in
to it. In a moment Jeremiah appeared, mouth open and sucking for breath, as if he were swimming through the foliage. “Where’s that bastard? He ain’t over on my side, I swear it,” Jeremiah said.
“If he gets away it ain’t my fault,” Sweet Gum cried. He was so angry he wanted to dance around. “He was standing there for you and you missed! Uncle Simon asks me, I got to tell the truth!”
Jeremiah scratched his head. “I got a feeling he’s over this way. Let’s track him over here.” “I never seen him on my side,” Sweet Gum said sullenly. “Nor me on mine,” Jeremiah answered. They walked along, slashing at the tops of weeds with their guns. Birds sang airily about them. After a minute or two they slowed to a stop. Jeremiah scratched his beard with the barrel of the gun. “Spose we went back to the house,” he said suddenly. “He’s got to come back for supper, don’t he? Or to sleep tonight?” Sweet Gum wished he had thought of that, but did not let on. “Hell of a idea,” he grumbled. “First you miss him at that close, then want to quit tracking him.” “You track him, I’ll go back alone,” Jeremiah said. “Naw,” said Sweet Gum, hiding his alarm, “I ain’t staying back here alone.” They turned and followed their paths back through the field.
Then something fortunate happened: Sweet Gum happened to see a hen pheasant start up in a panic. Off to their left, in a big long stretch of high grass. Sweet Gum fired into the grass. “There he is, he’s hiding in there! He’s hiding in there!” Jeremiah started forward, yelling, “Where do you see him? Do you see him?” He pushed past Sweet Gum, who fired again into the weeds. “He’s laid flat,” Sweet Gum said, “crawling around on the ground—” In the silence that followed, however, they heard only the usual country noises, insects and birds. “Motley, are you in there?” Jeremiah asked. His voice had a touch of impatience. “Where are you?” They waited. Then, incredibly, a voice lifted—”What do you want?” Sweet Gum fired at once. Both he and Jeremiah ran forward. “Which way was it? Was it this way?” Sweet Gum cried. He and Jeremiah collided. Jeremiah even swung his gun around and hit Sweet Gum, hard, on the chest. Sweet Gum sobbed with pain and anger. “I found him! I saw the pheasant go up!” he snarled. “Shut your mouth and keep it shut!” Jeremiah said.