by William Gay
He went on up a muddy grade past an old pickup truck hopelessly mired in the sucking clay, and he didn’t even notice it. He was thinking: You better be here. They better hope you are because whatever happens if you ain’t will be on your head. He crossed onto the porch and began to hammer on the door.
For a time he could hear nothing. He hammered again as if he’d rouse the dead, and there was an abrupt scuttling of claws across the floor and a fierce yip yip yip of a small dog on the other side of the door. The dog was growling and sounded as if it were tearing the door from its hinges and its barking was wellnigh hysterical.
Shut up, you little son of a bitch, he told it. A woman’s muffled voice said, What on earth? Then: Claude. You wake up, Claude. Then silence, but he could imagine the man swinging his legs off the creaking bed and sitting so for a moment and running a hand through sleeptousled hair, then going to the door.
Shut up, a voice told the dog. You the Lost Sheep back? it asked the door.
Yes, Sutter said, as lost a sheep as ever was.
The door opened onto a musky sleepy dark. Somewhere in the room a match flared. He could smell kerosene, stale whiskey breath, taste the residue of old unspent angers. A lamp was lit and adjusted to a dim yellow glow. Shadows flitted about the walls and ceased.
What the hell? Claude said. He added inanely, It’s three o’clock in the mornin, as if perhaps Sutter had merely stopped to inquire the time.
Sutter hadn’t waited to be asked in. He was standing in the center of the front room. His clothes were soaked and reeking and he was dripping water onto the rug. A woman had come in, children, the room seemed to be filling up. A ravenhaired girl restrained the dog then took it up in her arms and clutched it protectively to her breast.
How long’s he been gone?
Who?
That Tyler boy. You tell me what I want to know and I’ll be on my way without anybody gettin hurt.
Just who the goddamn hell do you think you are, mister? You seem to forgot you’re on my property. As a matter of fact, you’re in my house without bein asked at three o’clock in the mornin.
I’m the fellow that’s huntin Tyler, Sutter said. And if youdon’t tell me damn quick where he’s at I’m goin to unbreech you like a shotgun. Now I better hear somethin.
Sutter’s hand had found the knife. Its blade lay against his thigh. A forefinger felt its edge. It winked dully in the light. No one save the woman seemed to notice.
She said, Tell him, Claude.
Shut up. I ain’t tellin him jackshit. And you ain’t neither. I don’t care for the ways this feller’s got. I don’t take orders from ever son of a bitch wanders up out of the woods.
He’s went to Ackerman’s Field, the woman cried.
Claude’s blow was thrown wild but it caught Sutter hard enough to jar him and make blue lights flash behind his eyes. Claude seemed halfdrunk. He was windmilling his arms crazily but a glancing blow jarred Sutter’s jaw and Sutter could taste blood in his mouth. Now Claude was listing to the side like a drunken dancing bear and Sutter just stepped inside the flailing arms and hooked the knife deep and jerked upward in an explosion of blood and putrid gasses so hard Claude’s feet momentarily cleared the floor. When he withdrew the knife Claude stood disemboweled and looking down at himself with stunned incredulity and trying to put himself back together with both bloody hands.
Some sob or strangled cry jerked Sutter’s head around and he stared in momentary confusion. He seemed to have forgotten all these folk. Who they were and where he was and what was his purpose here. They were aligned against the wall like spectators at some perverse bloodsport that had gotten out of hand and when he advanced toward them with the dripping knife he moved upon a wall of stricken eyes.
Well, Granville’s got a bad name, but he never done nothin to me, a man named Tarkinton said. He opened the door of the coalstove to spit, then slammed it to. Fact was I always sort of liked him. You’d not know it by the name he’s got around here, but he didn’t like nothin better than playin a joke on somebody. Me and him was sort of runnin mates when we was young. He hadn’t been in this part of the country long when we took up together. We used to drink a lot of whiskey, run a lot of women. Trouble was he caught most of the women, and I wound up drinkin the whiskey.
He’d do anything, Granville would. He was crazy about tricks. He didn’t like nothin better than to get a big joke on somebody, though even back then they’d get a little out of hand at times. He’d lean a little heavy. He never knowed when to quit. I had this old halfgrown bobcat one time. I got it with the notion of makin a pet out of it, but hell, they wadn’t no pet in it. It was bobcat through and through. It was I reckon born mean and determined to stay that way. I had to keep it chained up, Sam, you remember when I had it.
I finally got tired of feedin and waterin it and it watchin me like it was just waitin for a chance to take my head off, and I told Granville one day, I believe I’ll just turn this son of a bitch aloose. Take it way out in the woods and let it hunt its own feed and water.
Then this idea hit Granville. He had this big old suitcase, and he got a bottle of paregoric or some kind of dope at the drugstore and he fed that bobcat some in a bowl of milk. It never did go plumb out, just got drowsy enough so’s we could get it stuffed down into that suitcase. It was a right tight fit.
He drove out on 48 and pulled off in a logroad and set thatsuitcase in the middle of the highway. We had a pint we was nippin along on, and we laid out in the bushes to see what would happen.
That old bobcat had done come to itself and it was wanting out bad. That suitcase would growl and jump a little ever now and again and finally it fell over on its side. After a while this car come by. It went by the suitcase and stopped and come backin up real slow. Carload of them Beech Creek boys. This old boy named Wymer got out and grabbed it. He was lookin all around, he figured it’d lost off somebody’s truck and they’d be comin back after it. Thought he’d found somethin. He jumped in the car with it, and they hadn’t went fifty feet when the brake lights come on and they locked her down and stopped right dead in the middle of the road and all four doors flew open. All hell broke loose, you never heard such squallin and takin on. They run clean off in the bushes in as many directions as they was folks in that car, and they wadn’t dodgin nothing, they was just ridin over halfgrown saplins and headin out, and you could hear brush pop a quarter mile off.
Directly this here bobcat eased out just as lightfooted and calm as you please. He looked all around and highfooted it toward the Harrikin and that’s the last I ever saw him.
When Tyler reached the first scattered houses of the town a wan sun stood at midmorning over the bare winter trees. A pale band of lighter sky lay above the horizon and the air felt like snow. Where the city limits sign was he halted and sat on a bank watching off toward the spare outposts of commerce as if he were of a mind not to go on. He felt he’d been so longin the Harrikin he’d lost touch with the doings of these more normal folk and the way they’d grouped themselves together here in this outpost with houses leant one atop the other seemed a strange way to live. But at length he unfolded himself and went on, the rifle yoked across his shoulders and forearms dangling.
He was constantly looking about. He was looking for Sutter, and Sutter was the last thing he wanted to see, but he had to look anyway. No one who looked like Sutter and no one with a curious eye for him, and this suited him just fine. He unyoked the rifle and went along swinging it gently at his side.
The first thing he came upon was a restaurant named the Snip, Snap & Bite Café. Nearly empty. A bald man mopping the counter with a rag. Smells of grease and frying bacon and coffee. His mouth watered.
Hey, you can’t bring that thing in here.
Do what? He blinked and looked down at the rifle. He’d forgotten it.
Sorry, he said. He went back out onto the sidewalk. He looked all about. He felt strangely dislocated, his vision darkened, the edges seemed to burn. There wasn’t any
thing to do with the gun. He went back in.
It ain’t working right anyway.
Oh, all right. Open the bolt and stand it in the corner there by the hatrack. Just don’t club nobody with it.
He commenced with coffee thick with cream and sugar while sunny-side-up eggs and country ham fried. When they came he finished them clean, chasing down the last bit of runny egg yolk with a triangle of buttered toast. He ordered another side order of toast and pear preserves and morecoffee and a glass of orange juice for his thirst. When he ordered this last and finished it and wiped his mouth with a napkin the counterman was regarding him with something akin to admiration. Tyler himself had begun to feel downright expansive and a warm sense of wellbeing comforted him.
Could I bring you somethin else?
I reckon that ought to do me awhile. How much do I owe you?
He paid and pocketed the change. Where’s Sheriff Bellwether’s office?
In the courthouse basement, less they moved it without tellin me. That’s where it’s always been.
He got the rifle and went out. He looked up and down the street cautiously, like a man sweating in the last card in a poker hand. Ordinary folk going about their business. Their very ordinariness reassured him. The dull day-to-day routine of life seemed suddenly very dear to him, for it was something he had lost. All these rustic folk with their complacent faces seemed to dwell in the happy-ever-after end of a fable. He took a deep breath and held it a moment. He could feel his heart pounding in his chest. All he had to do was make it a block and a half to the courthouse. A cripple could do that, a blind man tapping with a cane.
Old men like fragile statuary were already set about the courtyard benches for such faint sun as there was. They looked up expectantly as Tyler approached, as if he might do something interesting to break the monotony that yawned before them, but when he didn’t and just strode purposefully on, their eyes dismissed him and they went back to the nothing they’d been doing before.
The courthouse was a square twostory brick building. Theboy looked up. Windows on the upper floor were barred, and Tyler wished he might see Sutter’s face peering down at him. The words covrt hovse were chiseled into a great concrete lintel set above the double door. He turned the corner and there was an iron railing round a set of concrete stairs descending to the basement.
An old grandmotherlike woman sat on a bench like a sentinel guarding a palace door. She wore an anklelength dress and men’s brogans broken out at the side and a ratty plaid shawl wound about her ample shoulders. She watched him out of the folds of the pokebonnet she wore tied beneath her long chin and from behind dimestore shades with tortoiseshell frames.
He had a hand on the cold metal railing.
She rose at his arrival as if she’d been awaiting him. Sonny boy, she said. Her voice was an ingratiating whine, and it grated on his nerves like a fingernail dragged across a chalkboard.
He turned. Yes, ma’am?
I need a little help, she said. I sure wish you could do me a little favor.
I’d like to but I’m in an awful hurry. Maybe I could when I get done with the sheriff.
He was on the first step. The steel-reinforced glass door lay in shadowed sanctuary.
It ain’t much, she whined. Won’t take you but a minute. I’ll give you a dollar.
Once more he turned. I really can’t. He started down the stairs.
My old man took and died, she said, and I ain’t got nobody to do for me but strangers. It’s awful to be at the mercy ofstrangers.
He stopped.
And me about blind on top of it.
She was just not going to let up. All right, he said. What is it you need done?
Not much for a big strong young man like you, she said. Just load a sack of cowfeed in the trunk of my car for me.
She had turned and was hobbling away. Tall old grandmother with broad humped shoulders. Confident of him now, she didn’t even look back. He followed.
Where is your car?
Down by the tie yard.
They passed under casual eyes that remarked them without interest. The railroad then and a sulfurous pall of coal smoke and tackier houses with black faces pressed against the glass to mark their progress. Old blownout automobiles enshrined on tieblocks while poisonoak crept their rocker panels. Surly watchdogs watched from chains with cartire anchors, and one chained to a clothesline followed them to the end of its tether with the chain skirling on wire then sat on its haunches and watched them go.
I don’t really understand this, the boy said. Would they not load the feed for you where you bought it?
The boy at the store had a bad back, Grandmother said.
Then how the hell did it get to the tieyard? he wondered to himself. He didn’t pursue it, for he had come to suspect the workings of the old woman’s mind. Perhaps his own as well.
The silence between them deepened as the road they trod narrowed to a footpath bowered by winterbare sumac. He and Grandmother walking in a fairytale wood, but a wrong turn has been taken somewhere, for nothing seems rightabout any of this. The very light had altered, darkened as if for an early December dusk. Behind them a car took the railroad crossing fast and its mufflers opened up fullthroated then the siren came on, laying wail on fading wail on the belabored countryside. He wondered if it was Bellwether and he’d missed him. There was a leaden weight on his heart.
The silence seemed interminable. To break it he asked her back, What did your man die of?
She didn’t hesitate. The syph, she said.
The what? He had skipped a step, he’d misunderstood, his ears were failing him.
The syph, she whined. He come down with it and it drug on and turned into the drizzlin shits and he just wasted away.
He figured somewhere in these territories there was an enormous madhouse whose keeper had thrown up his hands in disgusted defeat and flung wide the portals so these twisted folk could descend like locusts on the countryside.
Why, you’re crazy as hell, he told her.
I got to stop and pee, the old woman in the nightmare snickered. You wouldn’t sneak a peek at a old lady peein, would you?
I’ve got all the craziness I need, Tyler said. Carry yours on somewheres else, and you can load your own damn cowfeed.
They had come to a cleared area where stacks of crossties were drying. Beside a tiestack a black Buick Roadmaster sat cocked outward bound, gleaming in the frail sun, luxurious, profoundly out of place.
Tee hee hee, Grandmother said. Grandmother’s back had begun to shake with uncontainable mirth and she was making sniggering, chortling sounds, and she was trying to stop but she couldn’t. When she turned her face was congested withlaughter. She grasped her sides and burst out laughing, pounding her thighs with her palms. Then instantly the look of revelation on his face seemed to sober her for a hand snaked out and an iron grip clamped his throat and a broganned foot kicked the rifle away. It clattered somewhere behind him. They locked and swayed for a moment in a broken ballet, then she tripped him and fell across him in parodic lechery. Brass knucks slammed his temple hard and the world darkened and tilted on its axis. When it righted itself the face was very close to his own. The tortoiseshell shades hung by one earpiece and the pokebonnet was comically askew.
I got you now, you little son of a bitch, Sutter said.
Tyler tried to twist his face away but Sutter hit him hard in the mouth and Tyler didn’t know anything for a while.
He awoke to a dull throb in his temple and to music. Singing and some rhythmic accompaniment. A jouncing over rutted roads and the roar of an automobile engine.
…and I wound up her little ball of yarn, the voice sang.
A radio then. The Grand Ole Opry perhaps.
It was just two weeks from this I went out to take a piss,
And I found myself a burden of great pain,
For it had been to my mishaps I had caught a dose of claps,
And I’ll never wind that little ball again.
His jaw hurt and an incisor lay on its side in a position it had never been before. It hurt when he worried it with his tongue but he couldn’t stop worrying it. He wondered if Sutter had brought the rifle. If he had more than likely it was in the back seat. Maybe there was a chance he could whirl suddenly and grab the gun and twist the door handle and just jump. There was an even better chance that when he whirled for the gun Sutter would coldcock him with a fist as hard and big as the end of a locust fencepost, and if there was any way around it he didn’t want hit again. Then he remembered the gun didn’t work anyway, and he debated just jumping. He thought when the timber thinned sufficiently he’d make a leap for it and try to land on his feet and just keep on hauling. With an eye toward this, his right hand crept on his right thigh toward where he knew the doorhandle was. An inch, no more. Again. Creepmouse, creepmouse.
Don’t even think about it, Sutter said. Move it agin and I’ll leave you a bloody stub to jack off with.
He knotted his hand into a fist and it just lay on his thigh.
Sutter went back to singing. The wreck on the highway. Whiskey and blood run together, but I didn’t hear nobody pray, sweet Jesus, I didn’t hear nobody pray. He had a tuneless monotone of a voice and the whipping of the brush did not match this song as well. Where are we going?
