by William Gay
Whatever you say, Buddy. Five gallons of money sure has made you decisive and take-charge. It looks good on you.
Later he lay on his back in bed and watched her disrobe. You don’t have to do this, he said. We on’t have to rush things.
I want to rush things, she said, reaching behind to unclasp her brassiere.
Raymer’s mind was in turmoil. There was just too much to understand. He wondered if he would ever drive confidently down what Corrie had called the life’s highway, piloting a sleek car five miles over the limit instead of standing by the road with his collar turned up and his thumb in the air. There were too many variables—the rates of chance and exchange were out of balance. The removal of Corrie’s clothing was to her a casual act, all out of proportion to the torrent of feelings it caused in him. Her apartment was less than forty miles away, but it was no-man’s-land, offlimits. She had laid stones in the pathway that had driven him to a despair that not even the sweet length of her body laid against his would counterbalance.
An hour or so after he should have been asleep, he heard her call him. Buddy? When he didn’t answer, she rose, slowly so that the bed would not creak. She crossed the floor to the bathroom. He could hear the furtive sounds of her dressing, the whisper of fabric on fabric. Then nothing, and though his eyes were still closed, he knew that she was standing in the bathroom door watching him. He lay breathing in, breathing out. He heard her take up the bucket and turn with it. The bucket banged the doorjamb. Goddamn, she breathed. Then he heard the soft sounds of bare feet and nothing further, not even the opening and closing of the front door, before her car cranked.
It was hot and stale in the room. It smelled like attar of roses, like climate-controlled money from the depths of a cave, like a rotting fox in the high white noon.
He got up and raised a window. Night rushed in like balm to his sweating skin. She hadn’t even closed the front door. The yard lay empty, and still and so awash with moonlight that it appeared almost theatrical, like the setting arranged for a dream that was over, or one on which the curtain had not yet risen.
When he crawled back into bed, he lay in the damp spot where they had made love, but he felt nothing. No pleasure, no pain. It was just a wet spot on a bed, and he moved over and thought about getting up and changing the sheets. But he didn’t. He was weary and, despite all the coffee, still a little drunk. He tried to think of Corrie’s lips against his throat, but all his mind would hold on to was the hiss in her voice when the bucket banged the door. Then even that slid away, and on the edge of sleep a boat was rocking on sun-dappled water, an old man was changing the fly on his line, and Raymer was feeling the sun hot on his back and wondering, Would you really lay your hand on the Bible and swear a lie? The old man’s face was inscrutable, as always, but somehow Raymer didn’t think he would, and when he slipped into sleep, it was dreamless and untroubled.
Sugarbaby
WHEN FOLKS TALKED about divorce statistics or the disintegration of the American family they would hold Finis and Doneita Beasley up as the example of the perfect marriage. They had been married thirty years. They worked their place side by side. Raised their kids and now they’ve got each other. You couldn’t blow them apart with a stick of dynamite.
In the months before their thirty-first anniversary Doneita bought a dog. Their two daughters were grown and married with concerns of their own. Finis was much to himself, and he was not easily given to conversation. He was a hard worker yet and had always made them a good living but in all truth he was not very good company. Finis knew a dog would be company for Doneita. A dog would be almost like another child. A dog could not talk to her but she could talk to it. Doneita had told him that bonds form between dogs and their owners and she looked forward to the formation of these bonds.
It was a small dog of some indeterminate breed and Finis just called it a lapdog. A kind of terrier perhaps. It was an ugly dog with black, bulbous eyes and an improbable number of sharp little teeth. There was an atavistic look about it as if millennia had passed and left it unchanged, as if evolution had deemed it not worth bothering with.
Finis did not like the dog. It didn’t seem to like him either. It growled at him when he came into the room. He’d turn to look at it and it would be watching him with something akin to speculation in its protuberant little eyes. Once it bit the back of his ankle where the tendons are, leaving his sock bloody and the prints of its little teeth like claw marks.
Doneita had Finis build it a small plywood house. Black shingles on the roof. She bought jars of paint and lacquered the house a glossy blue and wrote the dog’s name above the door: Sugarbaby. She painted delicate roses ascending the front corners of the house, the briars hunter green, the blossoms dusky rose.
Sugarbaby did not take to living in the small house. Every night about ten o’clock just as Finis would be drifting off to sleep, it would turn up on the porch scratching at the screen. Yip yip yip, it would say. Its claws dragging down the screen were like fingernails scraping across a blackboard that went on and on forever.
That goddamned yip yip yip is driving me crazy, Beasley said. Get up and make it shut up.
Just ignore it and go to sleep, Doneita said. It doesn’t bother me anyway. It doesn’t keep me awake.
This went on for over a week and one night something seemed to break inside him and he got up and blew the dog off the porch with a .44 magnum. The concussion in the small parlor was enormous. Pictures fell from the walls, window glass rattled in its sashes. There was a ringing in his ears. An appalled silence rolled on him wave on wave like the waters of an ocean.
He couldn’t hear her footsteps for the ringing but abruptly Doneita was standing in the doorway of the bedroom. She was looking at him in a way that he had never seen before.
What on earth are you doing? Was somebody breaking in on us? I shot at that dog, he said.
You did what?
I can’t stand that racket anymore. I shot at Sugarbaby.
Good God. You didn’t hit him did you?
I don’t think so, Finis said. I was trying to scare him into shutting up. Go back to bed.
There is something the matter with you, she said.
IN THE MORNING he was about early. He gathered up the remnants of the dog and buried them below the barn lot. He had been very impressed with what a .44 magnum was capable of. It had virtually disintegrated Sugarbaby and torn out a deep groove in the floorboards then knocked loose a four-by-four porch column so that it dangled out of plumb from the porch beam.
When he came up from burying the dog Doneita was leaving. She had a small station wagon and she was loading possessions into it. Clothing, knickknacks, pictures. I’ll send Clarence after the rest, she told him.
He nodded. Take whatever you want, he said.
In days to come his life went on as usual. He farmed, he fed the horses. His life seemed largely unchanged. He knew how to run a washing machine, he knew how to cook. In truth he preferred his own cooking. He had always believed that Doneita used too much grease, too little salt, though he had been too polite to say so.
WHEN BEASLEY CUT the chainsaw off and turned around his daughter Berneice was standing there watching him.
Hellfire, he said. Why didn’t you speak up? I could have cut a tree on you.
I did but you can’t hear anything for that saw. I don’t believe you can half hear anyway.
I hear fine, Beasley said.
Berneice had had to leave her car and climb the fence and cross the pasture to the edge of the timber where Beasley was sawing firewood. She didn’t look happy. Beasley thought she looked torn between raking him over the coals and crying on his shoulder. He hoped it wouldn’t be crying, but there was a tremulous look to her mouth and a slick wet gleam to her eyes.
What’s all this about Mama? she asked.
Beasley set the saw down and knelt beside it and unscrewed the gas cap. He poured fuel into it from a milk jug he was using as a gas container.
What
you see, I guess, he said. Me living out here and her living wherever she’s living.
She’s living out there in one of those housing authority apartments, Berneice said. Out on Walnut where the old people live. Most of them widows, old women waiting to die. One of them had to die before she could even get in there. She stayed with me and Clarence for a few days.
I guess you got an earful, he said.
Well. How come you shot Sugarbaby?
Beasley thought about it a time. He had unpocketed a file and begun to sharpen the saw. I don’t know, he finally said. I expect it was that yip yip yip every night.
Mama said you told her you meant to just shoot at it. Did you mean to hit it?
I don’t know. I just shot, and there it was.
She don’t need to be out there with nothing but old folks. Mama’s not anywhere near ready to give up and die.
Does she like it out there?
She claims she does but she don’t. She’s trying to fit in. She plays bridge with those old ladies. She’s planted a bed of petunias. They sit around talking about quilts and their dead husbands.
If she says she likes it then she probably does. Doneita was never one to hold her tongue when something needed saying.
What makes you the way you are, Daddy? Everything’s gone, it’s just such a waste. Thirty years of memories. You’ve just thrown it away.
You can’t throw away a memory, Beasley said. Anyway she can always come back. Nobody ever said she couldn’t come back.
She’s too stubborn. Both of you. All our Christmases gone, all the birthdays. Now she was crying silently, tears tracking down her cheeks. Beasley was growing more uncomfortable by the second.
Go out there and talk it over with her, Berneice said. Try and work it out.
Beasley was silent. He didn’t know why people were always trying to change things, to get back to where they were. People were who they were, and the things they did were just the things they did. He could not call back the bullet, silence the enormous concussion of the pistol.
And you might take her a little dog of some kind.
Beasley watched her cross back through the pasture. In due course Beasley received a certified letter from a lawyer’s office in Ackerman’s Field. He read it through three times. He studied it in a sort of bemused wonder. He was being sued for divorce. He had been mentally cruel, there were irreconcilable differences. Doneita wanted support, a division of their mutual properties. A date was shown for a hearing where these particulars might be discussed.
Beasley saw no need for that. If she wanted a divorce she was entitled to one. He personally did not believe in divorce. He decided to have no part of whatever happened. He would do nothing to prevent it but he would not abet it.
As the year drew on more letters came. They grew more insistent, the legalese the message was couched in more strident: His presence was requested in court. His lack of cooperation was making things more difficult for everyone. The letters began to anger Beasley. Who are the sons of bitches? he wondered. Why are they aggravating the hell out of me? Why is everybody nosing around in my business?
WHAT YOU SHOULD HAVE DONE at the beginning was go talk to her and get her to come back home, Clarence said.
I guess, Beasley told his son-in-law.
And since you didn’t do that, what you should have done was go talk to her when the court served you with those papers. Work something out. That’s what she wanted. But you didn’t do that either. You just let it roll.
I just let it roll, Beasley agreed.
It was the first cold day of winter and he had the rocking chair dragged before the fireplace and his feet propped on the brick hearth. He had been cutting and hauling firewood all day and he was tired and cold. He liked Clarence but he did not want to discuss this with him. At the very bottom of things he did not consider it any of Clarence s business. It was not even any of his business. It was the business of Doneita and the lawyer she had hired.
Clarence was a schoolteacher and the word he always used to describe Beasley was stoic. He’s tougher than a cut of sweet gum, he told Berneice once when Beasley was still within earshot. You can’t break him or split him, the grain runs every which way. He’s a vanishing breed. An anachronism.
This stoic anachronism sat regarding Clarence from the rocking chair. I appreciate your advice, Clarence, he said. But I decided a while back to just not have anything to do with all this mess. To just let it roll over me and get on out of sight.
It’ll roll over you, all right, Clarence said. You need a lawyer. It’s not any of my business, but this place has been in your family for generations. Now a bunch of lawyers are going to be fighting over it like dogs over a garbage can. They won’t leave you a pot to piss in. Nor a place to set it down if you had a pot.
I’ve always minded my own business, Beasley said. Kept my own counsel. I’ve always believed if a man minded his own business everybody would leave him alone.
You don’t understand, Clarence said.
Maybe not. But I haven’t bothered anybody. I pay my debts, I don’t owe a dime in this world. If they think they can do anything to me let them bring it on.
Well they’ll damn sure bring it. They’ll bring it in wholesale lots. She’s pissed about that dog. That Sugarbaby, and from what I hear the judge she went before is pissed too. They’re going to take you out.
Clarence, Beasley said, wanting to explain but unable to articulate what he meant. It was just that it wasn’t his kind of deal. He was not going to explain his business to a bunch of people in neckties and suits.
What was the use of having principles if you abandoned them when the going got rough? If you said, Well, maybe I’ll do this but I won’t do that. If you said, Well, I’ll move the lines back to here, but no farther? Beasley wasn’t moving any lines. The lines stayed where they were.
This has all gotten out of hand, Clarence said in frustration, rising to go, resting his hand a moment in passing on Beasley’s shoulder. You were together thirty years. What’s this all about?
I just couldn’t stand that goddamned yip yip yip, Beasley finally said.
BEASLEY HAD ON clean overalls. He had on a clean chambray shirt so faded by repeated launderings that its collar had gone soft and shapeless. He was freshly shaven and there was a streak of talcum on his throat.
Well, the elusive Mr. Beasley, the lawyer said. Take a seat there, Mr. Beasley.
Beasley seated himself in a wooden chair with rollers on it. It creaked when he adjusted his weight. He sat studying the lawyer. The lawyer’s name was Townsley. He was a thin young man given to the wearing of loud sport coats. Today he wore a coat of some woolly fabric in blue and green checks whose clash was almost audible. The coat had plastic buttons as big as golf balls. He had smooth oily hair, smooth oily skin, a smooth oily voice.
I’m only here because my son-in-law said I ought to be, Beasley said. I thought there might be some misunderstanding and I aim to clear it up. It’s never been my intention to beat her out of anything. I want that understood. The farm’s half hers and always has been. I thought she knew that. If you want it in writing then that’s what I’m here for.
I’m afraid it’s not that simple, the lawyer said. The time for arbitration has come and gone. What we’re asking for is an accounting of assets. Then an equal division of them.
Half the farm? That’s fine with me. Half of two hundred acres is one hundred acres. That’s fine with me.
It’s not that simple, Townsley said again. We’re asking half the value of your total assets in cash. Your wife no longer has an interest in the farm. There’ll be an appraisal of your properties to determine their value. Which you will pay for, by the way, it’ll be itemized on the bill for expenses. The court has already sent you a demand for an accounting of assets by certified mail. Ignore it at your peril. Ignore it and you’ll be in contempt of court.
I don’t have that kind of money, Beasley said after a time.
The lawyer shrugg
ed. We’re not asking for more than you’ve got, he said. Simply half of it.
BEASLEY ALREADY HAD his glasses on when the deputy brought the warrant and so did not have to get up to go get them. He had been sitting before the fire reading a seed catalog that had come that day and he laid it in a magazine rack and took the warrant and unfolded it and read it. Then he handed it back to the deputy.
The deputy looked outsize and strange in Beasley’s small parlor. His pressed khakis, the black garrison belt. The bolstered pistol and all that it conveyed.
I have to arrest you, the deputy said. But it don’t amount to that much. We’ll go to city hall and post bond. They’ll let you sign for yourself, hell, everybody knows you. Or Clarence could sign for you.
I don’t want anybody signing for me, Beasley said.
What?
I don’t want to tie Clarence up. He might be out some money.
How’s that?
I might just head out. All this is getting too heavy to carry around. Hellfire, a man’s not rooted to the ground the way a goddamned tree is.
All they want you to do is comply with the court, the deputy said. I heard the judge say so himself. Talking to Townsley. He said you were an arrogant son of a bitch and he was going to teach you a lesson.
Then let’s be for learning it, Beasley said.
BEASLEY WAS TURNED into the bullpen with other nightshade denizens who’d run afoul of the law. It was a weekend and business had been brisk and here were miscreants of every stripe. Dread-locked black men and pony tailed white drug dealers, luckless drunks and wifebeaters and child molesters of every taste and inclination. Beasley judged he could keep himself entertained for a day or two just reading the tattoos.
A huge black man stood regarding this clean-cut and well-barbered man of advancing years with some interest.
What’d they get you for? he asked.
Contempt of court, Beasley said.
Shit. And I thought I was a judge of character. I had you figured for a murderer at the very least.
