by Shelby Foote
The other was not really a single event; it was a series of them, more or less alike, modeled after the first one back in July of the previous year when the new bridge over the river was opened to traffic and they went across to Arkansas for a night. They had checked in at a tourist court and were driving along the highway in search of a restaurant, when they saw HANNAHS spelled in lights. “Hey: a nightclub!” Amy cried. Drew turned in, though not without misgivings. The entrance was around at the side, two steps leading up to a closed door, beyond which they heard music and stamping feet. When Drew opened the door it was like looking into a cage of lions and monkeys at feeding time, arms and legs blurred with motion, bodies spinning furiously, skirts flaring, trouser legs flopping. This was the jitterbug, which they had heard of but had never seen before. To them it was reminiscent of the Twenties, like the Charleston gone insane.
A row of booths ran down each side of the room. At the far end a blue-and-gold nickelodeon with moving lights was turned up full, and at this end a long window was cut waist-high into the wall so that you looked over a counter into a room where beer and ice and chasers were kept, and even a pump-up stove for toasting sandwiches. A waitress, dressed no differently from the dancing women except that she wore about her waist a towel with a pocket sewed on it to hold her tips, kept moving between the booths and the counter, crying orders shrilly to be heard above the din. Drew and Amy found a booth in back, not far from the music, which beat against their eardrums.
“Oo! what a dive!” Amy cried happily, her voice as high-pitched as the waitress’s. “Break out the bottle, honey lamb. Numb me afore I go deef.” Her eyes had an excited glitter, as from fever, and she turned her head this way and that, watching the dancers and the drinkers. “Look at that one,” she kept saying; “Look at that one.” She even pointed, and sometimes the people would look back at her, scowling. Drew’s misgivings increased. He could see the headline now: BRISTOL BANKER INVOLVED IN ROADHOUSE BRAWL.
In the booth behind them, nearer the blare of the music, a man and his wife were arguing. Their voices came through during pauses when the machine was changing records.
“I never said I wasnt.”
“Ah, you.”
“Some fun, all right—”
“You think I like it?”
“You—”
“Ah, you!”
Then the new record would drown them out. But they came through each time the music paused.
“You—”
“Ah, you.”
Marital bliss, Drew thought, refilling Amy’s glass, which she slid across the table at him. That was when the first one came up—a mousy man with a receding chin and claret-colored suspenders. “Say, mister,” he said. “Mind if I dance a turn with your girlf she’s willing?”
“Thanks,” Drew said. “Not yet awhile. But thanks.”
Amy watched him walk away. “I like this place,” she said over the rim of her glass. “I really do.”
“A little too informal for me,” Drew said.
Then another came up, more positive. “Dance your girl?”
“Sorry,” Drew said, watching Amy. The man stood for a moment looking down at him, hard-faced in a damp blue shirt, the sleeves rolled tight above his biceps. Drew still did not return his look and finally he shrugged and walked away.
“Not my type,” Amy said, sliding her glass across the table. She had even sucked the ice dry.
“Come on,” Drew said. “Lets get out of here.”
“Fill it,” she said. He filled it. This was her third and he was still on his first. “Hats more like it,” she said presently. He thought she meant the drink, but when he looked he saw that she was returning the stares of three men in a booth across the room. They wore gabardine shirts with pearl buttons and contrasting yokes, skin-tight Levis bleached sky-blue, and cowboy boots. “Makes me wish I worn my jodhpurs,” Amy said.
Looking back across the room, Drew saw that one of the men had risen from the booth and was coming toward them. The tallest of the three, he had high cheekbones and a bleached space at the top of his forehead where he wore his hat. “Dance this next?” he said, standing beside the table. He spoke directly to Amy.
“Be back, honey,” she said to Drew before he could decline. She was already standing: had been standing, he realized, since the man first rose to cross the room.
“The name is Tex,” Drew heard him say as he put his arm around her waist. He said it solemnly, as if he might have been saying he had a million dollars or tonight was the end of the world. They danced away and Drew was left nursing his drink.
In the course of the next three records he watched them through a haze of smoke and whirling couples. The man was teaching her the jitterbug, throwing her out and pulling her back, showing her how to truck with her knees held close together, pigeon-toed. The hard high heels of his boots made a clatter like hoofs. She seemed to be enjoying it, but in the interval between the third and fourth records—one of those sudden silences which seemed even louder, somehow, than the blare—she came back fanning herself, saying “Woo. Give me a drink. My God.” Her upper lip was beaded with perspiration; her eyes were glassy. She drank. “You see him?” she said. “Tex? My God. His hands were even busier than his feet.”
“Stay way from him then.”
“Well—” The fifth record had started by now.
“Dance?” they heard.
They looked up. It was Tex.
“She’s not dancing,” Drew said evenly.
“Not?” Tex said. “Aint that kind of up to the lady?”
“It’s up to me,” Drew said, watching Amy. “It’s up to me and I say she’s not dancing.”
By this time the two friends had crossed the floor; they stood one on each side of Tex, all three looking lean and capable in their cowboy clothes, a little taller than life in their high-heel boots. Amy looked at them, then back at Drew. The music stopped. Eyes glassy, she suddenly leaned forward, patted his arm, and spoke. It sounded loud against the silence. “Go on, Drew boy. Pop him one.”
BRISTOL BANKER INVOLVED IN ROADHOUSE BRAWL ran across his mind like a streamer, like a headline dummy across an editor’s desk: whereupon he did a thing which, even as he did it, he knew he would never forget, would never remember except with a sense of shame. He looked up at the three men—they stood with their arms held slightly away from their sides, a look of almost happy anticipation on their faces—and smiled; he smiled broadly. “Sit down, fellows. Have a drink,” he said. “Slide over, Amy. Make room for our friends.” Yet behind the glibness and the smile there was an ache of shame; he had never declined a fight before. He thought of the DSC in its leather case in the bureau drawer at home, and for a moment he wished he had it here to show them.
They were a party. The whiskey was gone in less than half an hour—bonded stuff, of which the three men showed their appreciation by swishing it around in their mouths before they swallowed. All this time, speculative, bemused, Tex sat looking down the front of Amy’s dress like a man on a highdive platform contemplating a jackknife or a gainer. Drew kept as brave a face through this as he had through the loss of his whiskey. Amy, who had had more than her share of the bottle, got more and more glassy-eyed, until finally she went to sleep. “Well—” Drew said. He rose. “Time to go.” The others helped him half-guide, half-carry her to the door and out to the car. When one of her breasts tumbled out, Tex leaned forward and with a surprisingly delicate circumspection, of which Drew would never have suspected him capable, stuffed it back. Even then, however, Drew lacked the courage to refuse to shake hands with him. He shook hands all around, for he kept seeing that headline with a subhead: Millionaire’s Wife Was Bone of Contention in Fracas, Witnesses State. As he drove off he saw the three of them in the rear-vision mirror, silhouetted against the electric sign. Bastards! he thought, and wiped his palm against his thigh.
This was only the first in a series of such incidents, for Amy had an increasing fondness for these places. When he curs
ed her proclivity for associating with truck drivers, imitation cowboys and roadhouse touts, however, he paused to consider that it also included small-town bank employes; he was forced to reconcile himself to her tastes. Yet as the incidents became more frequent he saw clearly that marriage was the only answer. Then if they went to such places and she said, “Go on, Drew boy. Pop him one,” he would pop him one with pleasure. BRISTOL BANKER DEFENDS WIFE was a headline he could stomach and be proud of.
Then in September, soon after the war got under way in Europe, he received the offer from the Memphis bank, and having refused it he found his position intolerable, being required not only to act the role of a physical coward (for which he was in no way suited) but also to turn down all outside advantages, no matter how exceptional. It seemed to him that he was putting so much more into this thing than she was—in spite of the fact that she would stuff bills of rather large denominations into his side coat pocket as they drove out of town; for what was that but money? while he was giving his peace of mind, his self-respect, his future. A burning sense of the injustice of all this brought him at last to the proposal of murder. The week he received the offer from Memphis he and Amy were driving out of town on a Saturday morning; it had been a year and seven months since the night in the state-line tourist court. “What I dont like is all this waiting,” he said, hardly knowing how to begin, in spite of all the thinking he had done. Mainly he was exasperated, but he was also a little afraid; for you could never tell about women. They had stopped at a traffic signal and he fiddled with the steering wheel spokes while waiting for the light to change. “Damn it, Amy—”
He paused, then said it again. “Damn it, Amy—” But she was scarcely listening. She had this ability to blank out when the talk grew serious, just as some people can do when a radio program is held up for the commercial. Sunlight fell in long gold pencilings through the leaves of the oaks and sycamores that grew between the sidewalk and the curb; now was the climax of summer and the nights were perceptibly longer, though no cooler. Maybe the guns in Europe would bring rain—that was how they had explained the rain she remembered falling ceaselessly through her early teens, the long Carolina afternoons with a patter on the windowpanes and the nights when there was a steady drumming on the roof; “It’s the guns in Europe,” they told her, and now the guns were barking and growling again. A woman dressed in gray stood at the curb, holding a market basket with both hands. The light was with her but she did not move. Then it changed, glared green, and Drew engaged the clutch; the car rolled forward.
He was silent for a time, apparently having decided that ‘Damn it, Amy’ was the wrong approach. They were well out of town before he spoke again, telling her—to her surprise, for he seldom spoke of the war—a rather tiring story about a man, a friend of his, who got gas in his eyes. Lewisite, he said. It was not very interesting; she was looking out over the fields, alternately green or green-and-white, depending on whether the pickers had passed over them; she only heard snatches of the story. Presently the scene was a hospital behind the lines, the friend in bed with a bandage over his eyes, and Drew was sitting beside him. They were talking; the man was asking for something. He was blind and they were about to send him home. A pistol. “Did you give it to him?” Amy said, interrupting.
“I did.”
“Wasnt that kind of risky?”
“Risky? How, risky?”
“The pistol: theyd trace it.”
“Mm—no. It wasnt mine. It was one I picked up in a retreat.” He kept his eyes on the road, and suddenly for no good reason Amy knew that it was all a lie. He was making it up.
“Did he use it?”
“He used it; he used it that night.” Drew kept his eyes on the road. He drove for a while, saying nothing. Then he said, “Dyou think I did right?”
“I guess. If thats what he wanted.”
“No: I mean apart from that. He was sort of delirious anyhow—off his rocker. I mean because of the blindness. Wasnt he better off?”
“I dont know. It depends on how he felt about it. Look at Jeff.”
Drew said nothing to this, but he began to glance at her from time to time, barely turning his head. She wondered why he had gone to the trouble of making all this up, this rigmarole about a blind man and a pistol, and suddenly she remembered something Jeff had said five years ago: Youre all the way evil, Amy. She smiled. ‘I’m going to take a little nap,’ she intended to say, but she was asleep before she could form the words.
Then he woke her. They were there. The sun was coming straight down. It was noon. “I was sleeping so good,” she said. “I dreamed—I dreamed—” But she could not remember; she gave it up. “Where are we?”
“Thats Clarksdale down the road a piece.”
He had already checked in at the office. They went into the cabin. It was neater and cleaner than most; there were dotted Swiss curtains at the windows and a reading lamp on each of the twin beds—they had reached the twin-beds stage by now. Amy looked around. “Why, this is downright nice. Whats our name?”
“Amos Tooth,” he said solemnly. They both laughed, for this was a game they played; Drew signed a different name on the register each trip. He was really quite ingenious in this respect. Once he had signed ‘Major Malcolm Barcroft,’ which wasnt very funny—being a sort of private joke—but he made up for it next time by signing ‘David Copperfield.’ Amy was always ‘& Wife.’ After the first few times he began to call her that. “Shall we go eat, & Wife?”
There was a restaurant just up the road. They ate and came straight back to bed. Later the afternoon sun beat golden against the shades, which billowed and sighed from time to time when there was a little breeze. Languid, Amy lay and listened; the stick at the bottom of the shade made a tapping against the sill; the rhythm of it put her to sleep, and when she woke darkness had almost come. Drew lay in the adjoining bed, a pale naked shadow blowing smoke rings that were steel-gray in the gloom. She watched him through the lattice of her lashes. After a while she said, “Why’d you make up all that business about the blind man?”
“Make up?”
“Yes.”
He paused. Caught unprepared he was never a very good liar. “I wanted to see how you felt,” he said, and added immediately: “Besides, it really did happen, to a friend of mine.”
“The blind man?”
“No: the one who gave him the pistol.”
“Oh. Did he really give it to him?”
“Well—he started to. And afterwards he wondered if he shouldnt have.”
“I see.” She thought a while. “What happened to him?”
“The blind man? I dont know. Somebody said he really did kill himself, on the boat going back. I dont know. There were lots like him.”
She watched him light another cigarette, his face dead white in the flare. When he blew out the match the darkness was complete; it was as if night had fallen during that brief spurt of flame. He lay back, the cigarette tip glowing and fading like a signal light. “Were you very scared in the war?” she asked.
“Not very. No. I was what you might call moderately scared. Comparatively speaking, that is.” He spoke slowly. “Looking back on it—the excitement and all—I guess it was maybe the best time of my life. I know an old man lives on Lamar Street would sell his soul for ten minutes of what I had almost two years of.”
Amy let this pass. The cigarette glowed and faded, glowed and faded. He was thinking. Then he said, “We’ve all got about the same amount of courage. The difference comes in whether we’re willing to use it, provided we get a chance. Take you and me. We want something beyond all this”—he made a gesture, describing a red arc with the tip of his cigarette “—but whether we take it or not is up to us. It’s a question of using courage.”
“What do you mean?”
“This,” he said, and the springs creaked under him. He sat up, flipping the cigarette through the bathroom door. It fell like a miniature comet with a little burst of sparks against the tiles.
While he talked it faded and presently it went out. This was what he had been working toward. He took his time; he made it clear. Who would be surprised to hear that the houseboy coming to work one morning had found the blind man crumpled at the foot of the stairs, dead of a broken neck since sometime late the night before? Theyd say he got up for a drink of water or a midnight snack and missed his footing; it was just that simple. Drew spoke in a conspirator’s undertone—not so much in fear of being overheard, however, as in an attempt to gauge her reaction to the words. When he had finished he waited for her to speak. She waited too. It was almost a full minute before she replied.
“You want me to hold his legs or something while you trip him?”
In the dark he could not see that she was smiling her slow, down-tending smile; he did not hear the mockery in her voice. He was too delighted with the words themselves to pay much attention to the tone in which they were spoken. “No, no,” he said, leaning forward, speaking rapidly; “all I want is—” and was interrupted by a burst of laughter. While she laughed he sat there in the darkness, hating her. It was some little time before she could speak, though not as long as it seemed. Then she said:
“I swear, Drew boy; I swear you take the cake.”
This came just in time; for the truth was, she was beginning to weary of him, and not only of him but of the Delta too. Not that he had failed her in the prime respect: the days of what he, in his artilleryman’s jargon, called ‘muzzle bursts’ were long since past, and she had frequent cause to bless her patience through the trying first few weeks: nowadays in their gladiatorial contests it was quite often Amy who lay sweat-drenched and exhausted, spread-eagle on the mat, and Drew who leaned above her, hawk-faced and triumphant, glaring down—‘There! There, by God!’—victorious after the bitter defeats of the early encounters. She had no complaint in that direction. Paradoxically, what was wearying her of him was what had drawn her in the first place: her essential promiscuity. It was really that simple. She wanted a change.
