“I got a secondhand Police .38 Special here. It’s pretty old and wore out, and I’ll let you have it for ten dollars.”
“Is that the best you can do?”
“Oh, I got better pistols than that.”
“I mean the cheapest.”
“Afraid so.”
“All right, I’ll take it,” Red Leland said. “Give it to me.”
Wayne Estes turned around, bent his clean, white-shirted sweaty back, and opened a drawer. It was bulging with old pistols—an Army .45, a snub-nosed Banker’s Special, some long-barreled target pistols, even a little lady’s pistol, shiny and nickel-plated—all with tags on them. He found the .38 and put it on the counter. Red Leland made no movement to reach for it, to touch it, to examine it, so Wayne Estes picked it up again, untied the string around the grip, and let the tag flutter away out of sight behind the counter.
“You want some shells for it?”
“Just give me a load,” Red Leland said. “I ain’t planning to use it but one time.”
Very slowly, taking his own time about it, Wayne Estes walked the length of the aisle behind the counter, opened another drawer, rummaged there, and returned carrying a small squat box, heavy in his hand for the size of it. He counted out six shiny bullets and put them in a straight row next to the pistol on the counter.
“They cost thirty cents each.”
“That’s a lot for such little things.”
“That’s the price.”
“Okay,” Red said. “Load it up for me.”
He broke open the barrel and placed the shells one by one in the cylinder. When all six were neatly, cleanly in place, he snapped it shut again and put the gun back on the counter. Red Leland fished deep in his pockets, and then his hand appeared clutching a soiled crumple of bills. He counted out twelve one-dollar bills and smoothed them, put them in a pile. Wayne Estes handed him the pistol, and his whole hand closed over the shape of it, loose and easy, as if he’d just picked up a rock to throw. The two men stood staring at each other, unblinking, and Wayne Estes’s smile slowly waned, grew faint, vanished at last like a forlorn ghost.
“Well …?” he said finally.
“I still got twenty cents change coming.”
Wayne Estes chuckled, shook his head, and tilted back for a wide-mouthed laugh.
“I’ll be damn,” he said. “I’ll just be damn. I clean forgot about your change. How about that!”
He hit the cash register, and the little bell that tolled for all his sales, rung over this whole county’s needs, desires, and sometimes luxuries, chimed liquid and clear like birdsong in the hushed room. He gave Red Leland two dimes, and then the man and the fat boy, hand in hand again, walked slowly out of the store. Just at the door the boy snatched for his freedom, failed, and started to scream as the man took up the whole weight of him, arms and legs flailing vainly like a beetle on its back, carried him to the truck, sat him on the seat, and slammed the door to.
“Well, now,” Wayne Estes began, but ceased there as Red Leland loomed again in the doorway, framed now by the brilliance of the Saturday afternoon outside, his shadow spreading in a wide quick stain on the floor.
“Where does he live?” Red Leland said.
“Who? Where does who live?”
“The teacher.”
“What teacher? Who are you talking about? Which one?”
“Never mind,” he said. “Let it be. I’ll find him all right.”
This time they waited until they heard the growl of the pickup’s engine and then the soprano noise of its tires as it rounded the next corner down the block much too fast before they all began to talk at once with a sudden inexplicable rising like the sound of a field of insects at twilight.
John Pengry sat cross-legged in a bathtub of cool water reading a book. There was an old-fashioned electric fan, big, black, strutted like an early airplane, standing on the toilet and it stirred the lukewarm air around him, each turning troubling the pages of the book. John Pengry was a small, slight man with the pinched, bony face and darkly shining eyes sometimes seen in pictures of desert fathers or the fakirs from the East, ascetics, hermits, some of them saints, those few who have been for a long time alone in some naked landscape, companioned by a cruel sun, the chill darkness, wild beasts and voices, utterly comfortless, yet strangely tempted beyond all telling or believing.
He lived alone in a rambling frame house at the edge of the town. He was alone now since his mother had died and his sister Louise had left—God alone knows why, at her age—to live in New York City.
That was a strange thing. They had come straight home, just the two of them, from the funeral, and they were standing together, still dressed for it, still wearing their hats, in the living room. The light there was dusky and submarine, filtering through the drawn blinds and the green shield of potted plants on the windowsills. And at that moment it was as if neither of them possessed any substance, any flesh or blood or bone, as if they existed only by virtue of the vague light, as if they were floating, bodiless, amid the crowd and clutter of her furniture and her things. He felt as if the light was passing through them both like an X ray and as if for once they were entirely composed of it, of sourceless broken light and tiny dancing dust motes. He imagined that if he shut his eyes and held his breath, he’d vanish, leaving the room with all its things and all the plants—so many of them, so huge and ungainly, hedging the windows—forever as it was, sealed like a tomb. It was so quiet that he fancied he could hear those plants breathing.
“You better see to getting yourself a maid,” Louise said. “Someone who can keep things clean and do a little cooking for you.”
“If we get a maid, whatever will you find to do with yourself?”
“I won’t be here anymore,” she said. “I’ll be leaving tomorrow for New York City. Of course you’ll want to stay.”
How long she might have harbored such a notion, even secretly saved for it, it seemed, for she had never asked him for money, not for the trip and not once since she had gone, he could only guess. That she was in good health and working he knew from the crisp, formal letters he received from time to time, on holidays and private occasions. He replied always with long letters full of nothing but the news of the state of things in the house. There was so little for him to write her about. Whether or not she was happy now where she was, he did not know. The only thing he was certain of was that she had been right, that it was she, not he, who had been freed by that death. It had not occurred to him then or since to protest that he, too, had done his share of service and ought to be entitled to a life of his own as well.
So he stayed on, custodian to his mother’s distant trophies of an imagined (for him, anyway) past life, a random accumulation of odd things like the shells, broken or whole, the starfish, the strange growths and creatures left on a beach as a mute signature by the retreating tide. He remained in the rude country town that they (his mother, Louise, and himself) had never even belonged to or acknowledged. Though his father had been born there, he died before John Pengry had more of him to remember than the rough skin of a large face that loomed over him like a hairy full moon, grinning, the harsh laugh, the strong warm hands in which his own child’s bones felt frail and small as a bird’s, and the mysterious rich odor of his breath which John Pengry was to learn years later was only the smell of strong cigars.
Forsaken by all his blood, living and dead, John Pengry remained. He hired a colored woman to come from time to time, to clean and dust, to take the white covers off the furniture in unused rooms, to throw open windows and let in light and air enough to sustain the house until her next visit. He watered the plants, which grew enormous and unkempt, a jungle of them now. He wound and tended the grandfather’s clock—his great-grandfather’s in fact—and he kept the solemn, familiar pictures of his ancestors in place, straight on the wall. Soon the cleaning woman was lost too. When, by an accumulation of chips and cracks, by the misplacing and rearranging of objects, it was appare
nt that she could not humanly perform her duties without a careless disinterest, he took over all the functions of maintaining the house, at least the interior. He didn’t care how it looked from the outside. From then on he lived completely alone.
Of course he could be seen twice a day during the school year coming and going from the Seminole Grammar School, where he was the teacher of the fourth-grade boys, neat and clean, but clearly eccentric, dressed in an old-fashioned way with a high shining starched-stiff collar and, too, just a little absurd, with one of his father’s suits luffing around his skinny frame like a sail in the wind. And on Sunday mornings he went to early service at the Episcopal Chapel (for this was not an Episcopal town), taking his place always in the same back pew, to kneel, to rise, to sing with the others, and to walk forward, like a man in a dream, to partake of the Holy Communion.
John Pengry was not insulted, injured, or offended by anything that happened out there, beyond the walls and windows of the house. He taught, well enough, a whole generation of interchangeable little boys, aware of them chiefly as faces which shone and wavered in front of him like a field of wildflowers in the wind. Annually he introduced them to the mysteries of long division and to some of the secret things of this earth—how coal comes to be, and where lies in dark splendor the Caspian Sea. He dealt out to them the necessary, conventional, two-dimensional figures from history like a hand of cards. He encouraged them in penmanship and led them in singing. Teaching to earn a living, to maintain himself and the house, troubled him very little. Afterwards it always seemed that he had only dreamed it. He thought of it as wholly unreal. He was a ghost teaching ghosts.
Here in this house, where he sat in the tub enduring the hot still Saturday afternoon, was as much of reality as he could bear. And it was with real ghosts, the ghosts of his great-grandfather, that he wrestled. It was with them that he argued or conversed. They were his only friends and enemies.
He stood up, tossing the book aside, and he took a towel off the hook and dried himself. He put on his mother’s silk dressing gown, a fragile thing of pale pink, furred at the neck and the cuffs, and he walked out of the bathroom leaving the tub still filled with cool water over which the fan, still running, cast a regular, rippling breeze. In the living room there was a round miniature of his great-grandfather done in pastels. It showed, crudely, a face like his own, the same nose, the same pinched cheeks and high cheekbones, thin sandy hair, the same dark shining eyes. But for the careful pointed beard, it might as well have been a portrait of himself. Except for the difference, the enormous difference. John Pengry stood looking at it for a while, then he went across the living room to the yellow china humidor where he kept his cigars. He took one of them, twirled it in his palm, bit off the end, and lit it with a kitchen match, deeply inhaling.
The thing on his mind was his great-grandfather’s hat. It was not that his great-grandfather had been a man of great success as a planter, so successful, indeed, that a portion of his riches somehow survived the War and the Reconstruction, endured even the careless bravado of his grandfather and the reckless spending of his mother’s older brothers, so that now a small part of that original still rested in the bank untouched; for he would no more take it or draw from it than he would sell the house and auction its contents. It was not exactly, either, that his great-grandfather had been modestly celebrated as a man of action, one of those around whom legends and stories circle like a magic ring of doves; nor that all of John Pengry’s life his great-grandfather, in reality a small man like himself, had towered so tall over all of them, casting a shadow like some smiling giant in a children’s tale. What troubled John Pengry was his great-grandfather’s hat. And, too, the manner of his death, not the facts, but the manner of it. The hat, one that rested, sacrosanct in a glass case in the living room, one that he had been as a child forbidden to touch, had been the cause of his death. It was a gray, wide-brimmed Confederate officer’s hat, but it had been greatly altered by women and it bore a burst of ribbons and tassels (they were faded now, pinned around the crown like a dim rainbow); and it was plumed with a high, foolish shock of feather, the feathers, he had been told, of rare, exotic birds. That plume, once bright, still stood up high and straight. In the crown of the hat there was a hole the size of a quarter where the bullet that had killed him entered. Inside it still had dark stains from his blood. The hat had come back to the family after he had fallen, had been brushed and cared for and kept safe under glass. But, John Pengry wondered, what kind of abandon or buffoonery had possessed the man to wear a hat like that in a war? How had he lived as long as he did wearing it? And what, after all, did it mean, that kind of rashness, except that he must have known that the hat would remain long after his bones were powder, to be attended to, to trouble and perplex his seed like a kind of curse or spell until the last of them were gone from the light to dust too?
John Pengry, puffing on his cigar, standing there in his mother’s pink silk dressing gown, carefully opened the forbidden case and removed the hat. He placed it on his head and, catching sight of his image in a mirror, cocked his head this way and that, like a child at a costume party.
Red Leland stopped the pickup truck in front of a sprawling, sagging frame house, so weathered it seemed paintless, set back a way from the street on a lawn as shaggy and wild as a bearskin. Azaleas along the edge of the front porch grew in a crazy tangle of green, and there was a large swing on the porch, hanging by only one of its chains, lopsided. He climbed out of the cab and walked part way up the lawn. The fat boy sat in the cab looking straight ahead. Red Leland began to call softly. He called in a steady, singing monotone, and getting no answer, seeing no sign of anyone, he moved closer and called louder. After a little while the front door opened a crack and around it appeared a thin face, intent and curious like a squirrel’s, and above the face perched the most amazing hat that Red Leland had ever seen.
“Come on out. I want to talk to you,” he said.
“Oh I can’t,” the face replied. “I’m not dressed to come outside.”
“Come outside now or I’m coming in.”
“In that case …”
John Pengry walked out the door and stood at the edge of his porch looking at the tall, wild-eyed country man. The tall man, blinking, looked back at him, studied him for a moment, then he walked briskly back to the parked pickup truck.
“Is that the man?” he said. “Are you sure that’s the man?”
A boy looked at John Pengry and nodded. The tall man came back toward the house. John Pengry watched all this and wondered.
“I’m going to kill you,” the man said.
Dazed by this, John Pengry merely nodded.
“You know why? You know why, don’t you?”
“I don’t believe I’ve ever laid eyes on you before,” John Pengry said at last. “I’m afraid I don’t know you.”
The tall man whirled and ran back to the truck this time. He snatched the fat little boy from his seat and ran back, dragging him along behind at arm’s length.
“You know the boy, don’t you? You recognize him?”
“No, I’m sorry, but I’m afraid I don’t. Little boys all look alike to me.”
“You teach him. He’s my son.”
“Oh, I see.”
“Well, now you understand why I’m here.”
“I’m trying to, but really—”
The tall man seized the boy and pushed him forward to the edge of the porch. He seemed to be a very fat little boy.
“Look at him.”
“I’m sorry,” John Pengry said. “I seem to know them when I’m in class, at the schoolhouse. I can remember them there. But here, out of the right context, so to speak—”
“You mean you don’t even recognize him?”
“Please be patient with me,” John Pengry said. “I’m doing the best I can.”
“You made a joke about my boy,” the tall man shouted. “You made some kind of a joke about him in front of the whole class. He come h
ome so choked up and ashamed he couldn’t even talk. I’ve taken about enough in this world. I’ve followed the paths of righteousness as near as I could, and the Lord has chosen me for my share of tribulation. But the Lord couldn’t have meant for my seed, my own flesh and blood, to be laughed at. He give me affliction. He give me troubles. He give me this little fat boy for my only son. But this last, this making jokes, is more than a man can bear.”
“I’m sorry,” John Pengry said again. “I don’t recall doing such a thing. But if I said or did anything foolish or wrong, you’ll have to forgive me.”
“You don’t even recall it?”
The tall man raised the pistol that he had been carrying in his right hand and pointed it. It was curious, John Pengry thought, that he felt so light-headed that he wasn’t even afraid.
“I say I apologize for anything. I apologize for everything I’ve done and left undone,” he said. “It could have happened. Sometimes I’m not really responsible.”
“Take off that hat.”
John Pengry shook his head, feeling the weight of the feathers.
“Take off that hat. I’ve stood for more than enough from you.”
“Go ahead and shoot if you want to, but I won’t take off this hat.”
“Great God Almighty!” the tall man yelled. “I ask you for a sacrificial lamb and you send me a lunatic.”
Then the tears began streaming down his face. He closed his eyes and pointed the gun straight into the blue heart of the sky and fired it six times, wincing at each shattering report. When he had finished firing, he threw the gun away. It soared brightly into the maze of azaleas and disappeared.
“I might have known I wouldn’t do it when the time came,” he said. “The hand of the Lord is on me still.”
He took up the little fat boy in his arms like a baby and carried him to the pickup truck. He didn’t look back. He climbed in the truck and drove away.
John Pengry locked the front door behind him. He tiptoed into the living room and peered through the camouflage of plants, holding the venetian blind aside, watching the pickup truck dwindle away down the long dirt road to the country, a furious roll of dust pursuing it. He thought he’d better wait until after dark to go out and hunt for the gun. It certainly was curious. He would mention it the next time he wrote a letter to Louise. In the meantime he might just as well climb back in the tub and cool off. In any event he would not put the hat back in its glass case. He’d want to have it handy in case those two came back.
Evening Performance Page 13
