“Look in my pack,” he said. “There’s a pack of cigarettes and some matches. Help yourself and throw it to me.”
They sat where they were, facing each other, contented and refreshed, and they smoked.
A few days before, he had seen the fat man for the first time. The young man came down a road in the mountains with his pack and roll on his back and his rifle slung over his shoulder. It was toward evening and he came on a gang of prisoners working on the road. First he saw the guard with a shotgun, sitting on a canvas camp stool under a khaki umbrella, his pith helmet propped back on his head, his shirt open all the way down the front. Then he saw the prisoners nearby. In their gray uniforms, in the clouds of dust their picks and shovels stirred up, they themselves seemed to be composed of dust, walking and working piles of animated dust. He had the feeling then that if either he or the guard—who nodded with just a slight tip of his head to salute their mutual freedom—that if either one of them took a deep breath and blew, the whole gang of prisoners would disappear into nothing and nowhere like a dandelion or a thistle weed. The prisoners did not stop working as he passed between them—they were on both sides of the road—and no head raised, no eye, accusing or pitiful or serious, met his. He heard a kind of low moan or sigh which, as he listened, he took to be a song.
He had nearly passed by them when he encountered the fat man. The fat man came out of the bushes onto the road, bearing a wooden water bucket, and his uniform was astonishingly clean. He set the bucket down and unfolded a large colored handkerchief on the road in front of the young man, without a word offering him for sale some of the things which the prisoners had made—rings made out of toothbrush handles, bracelets made of bent spoons, and even a drawing or kind of painting on a piece of white cloth, made with ink and clay and some sort of coloring, maybe the juice of wild berries. It showed Calvary with Christ crucified between the two thieves, and, as the young man stooped to look at it more closely, he smiled to see that the artist had lavished most of his detail and color and attention on the thieves. They were naked and identical, crudely done, but clearly the same man, based on some real flesh and form. The Christ was eyeless and vague as a store-window mannequin. The young man almost decided to buy it, but when he rose to ask how much it was worth, he saw that the man’s eyes were looking past him, fixed with a kind of obsessive glint on the high-powered rifle. He dropped the cloth from his hands and stepped past the fat man, touching him flank to flank for one instant, feeling the heat of his body, smelling his short, sour breath.
That night he slept on a bedroll, alone in the deep woods. Near dawn he woke from a bad dream, a dream of running from something, a dream where gates and doors refused to open and all roads were a treadmill in reverse, to see the fat man standing over him holding the rifle. In the faint first light that came through the gloom of trees he could see the fat man smiling. He rose, still half asleep, and picked up his pack. The fat man motioned with the rifle, and he walked off into the woods with the fat man following close behind. Later in the gray deceptive light of dawn, a light like a splash of dirty water, they first heard the dogs.
Now the fat man was sitting by the ruins of the fire, the tin corpses of their meal. He was blowing smoke rings, large ones with little ones inside.
“I just thought of something,” the young man said. “You could’ve killed me. You could’ve killed me right at first while I was still asleep.”
“Sure I could,” the fat man said. “But what good would it do me?”
“You could’ve sneaked away. I could have slept right on and just woke up without my rifle.”
“Maybe so.”
The young man put his cigarette into the sand, buried it neatly. He was, even now, dirty, unshaven, hatless, tired, surprisingly neat for a man out of doors.
“You were just scared,” he said. “You were too scared to run away alone.”
“Maybe,” the fat man said, equally thoughtful. “Maybe that’s the case.”
“You would’ve killed me, but you were scared. You would’ve left me alone, but you were scared.”
“Maybe that’s right.”
“You know one thing I can’t stand about people—or maybe I ought to say one of the things I can’t stand—it’s fear. People who get scared make me sick.”
“You don’t scare? You weren’t scared when you woke up and saw me there?”
“No, I wasn’t scared.”
“You would’ve been wise to be a little bit scared. Somebody else might have killed you.”
The young man shrugged. “Well, here I am. I got the rifle, and I’m not any worse off for a walk through the woods. What about you? You ought to be scared now.”
“I’m scared.”
“If they take you back, they’re going to take the bullhide to you. They’re going to lock you in a sweat box for a while, and when you come out—if you come out—you’ll never be a trusty again. They’ll have you swinging a pick, full-time, in the hot sun.”
“I can’t help being fat.”
“You make me sick to my stomach,” the young man said. “Bury that stuff.”
He pointed with the rifle barrel to the two cans, and the little can, so cleaned inside they shone, and to the ashes of the fire. The fat man kneeled and scooped a hole in the sand. He buried the cans and the ashes under a little mound.
“What did you ever do to end up in jail? What did you have guts enough to do?”
Still kneeling before him, the fat man laughed.
“I got involved in this rape case. I mean, it wasn’t exactly rape when it happened, but it was her word against mine.”
“I might have known it would be something like that. What were you doing before you got into trouble?”
“You might say I was a kind of a traveling preacher. I had the power of healing, too, for a while. But the Lord took it back from me.”
“A kind of a hypocrite would be a better word for it. Preach one thing and practice another. And then get caught in a rape.” The young man laughed.
“You don’t allow much for other folk’s weakness.”
“Why should I?”
“Listen, the Good Book says we supposed to love each other. Now, if you love somebody, you surely going to have to tolerate a little weakness.”
“I’ll give it right back to you,” the young man said. “The Bible says love thy neighbor as thyself, right?”
“That’s right.”
“Well, then, Mr. Convict Jailbird Fatman—”
“I got a name.”
“Well, I don’t want to hear it,” the young man said. “Now, my point is this. If you don’t love yourself, then what?”
“Oh, you bound to love yourself.”
“Just suppose you don’t. Just suppose for the sake of arguing that you hate yourself.”
“I don’t follow you,” the fat man said.
“If you hate yourself, you got the right to hate everybody else in the world.”
“I don’t understand what you’re talking about.”
“The hell with it,” the young man said. “Let it be.”
Just then, far off, faint in the waning afternoon, they could hear the belling sounds of the dogs. The sounds were far behind them, but they could tell that the dogs were on the right trail. They stood up simultaneously and stared at each other, unsmiling.
“I guess you better get started,” the young man said.
“You going to let me go? You going to let me be?”
“You better get going before I change my mind.”
“Ain’t you coming too?”
“For God’s sake why?” the young man said. “I’ve gone along far enough with you.”
The fat man stood, head down, shifting his weight from one leg to the other like a small boy. When he looked up again there was a shy womanly softness in his face. He fumbled in a pocket and pulled out the cloth he had offered for sale.
“You can have it,” he said. “I did it by myself, color and all.”
He spread the cloth on the sand, smoothed it, then he turned and began to wade across the stream.
“You better go with the water a ways,” the young man said. “So they’ll lose the scent.”
The fat man nodded without looking back. He went downstream awkwardly, wading in the knee-deep water, picking his way among the rocks. Once he stumbled on a wet stone and fell, but he struggled up to his feet and kept going.
“You hypocrite bastard!” the young man yelled after him. “You’ve still got the knife.”
The fat man stopped. He still did not look back, but he nodded and reached in his pocket for the knife.
“You can have it back,” he shouted back over the noise of the water. “I don’t need it. I’ll give it back.”
“Keep it. Go on and keep it now!”
Then the fat man started to run in the water. The young man stood up. He dug the butt of the rifle into the hollow of his shoulder, sighted down the barrel, and fixed the gray diminishing back of the fat man in the tense slim V of the front sight. He took a deep breath, let out a little, and then held the rest. The barrel was steady. Gently he took up the slack in the trigger and began a smooth squeeze. He saw the fat man twitch and tumble with a great white splash, and then he heard the sharp report of the rifle thunder in the ravine and echo, dying away, in the woods. He heard the little chink of the ejected shell as it bounced off a rock by his feet. He stooped and policed it up, buried it under the sand. He picked up the picture and folded it and put it in his shirt pocket. Then he walked back to the pine tree and sat down and closed his eyes, listening to the dogs as they came, waiting.
GOOD-BYE, GOOD-BYE, BE ALWAYS KIND AND TRUE
AT FIRST Peter Joshman hadn’t known what to make of it all, how to take it. In the beginning came the scouts, surveyors, and engineers, crisp in khaki, their white pith helmets shining, driving state-owned trucks and jeeps, and supported by little galaxies of rodmen and assistants in T-shirts. They came to look at the lay of the land, studied it, measured it, marked it, and departed. Then (and it was not long afterwards) came the axes and chain saws, the bulldozers, and the dynamite. They shook the earth and rattled the windowpanes, jarred cups and glasses on the shelves, troubled old things from their accustomed places and left behind them a clay-colored raw swathe cut through the intense monotonous green of the pinewoods and across the field from west to east, like a new scar, so close he could have thrown a stone from his chair on the porch and landed it in the center with a little puff of dust. After that big machines, the rollers and levelers and graders, hurried through the early spring, smoothing the wound that had been made in his field of vision. There were men in khaki and explorers’ helmets again, overseeing, writing and writing on their clipboards, and there were the young men, all lithe arrogance and bronzed bravado as, shirtless in the Florida sun, wheeling their huge machines, laughing brilliantly and shouting profanely at each other, they created a dusty chaos.
Inevitably convicts from the State Camp followed, sweating men, black and white, in gray prison uniforms with their shovels and rakes and pick mattocks, working slowly forward day by day along the smoothed earth, spreading gravel and finally the asphalt (that smelled at first good enough to eat), all under the scrutiny of the squat, relaxed, almost motionless guards who peered squint-eyed from beneath broad-brimmed hats into the glare of light studying the work, cradling their shotguns lightly in their arms like living things. One of the convicts, a trusty probably, had come to the house for a bucket of water and Peter Joshman jabbed with his cane in the direction of the pump.
“What’s a man like you doing with a walking cane?” the convict asked him. “You ain’t that old, is you?”
“I’m a wounded man.”
“Somebody shot you?”
“Sure they did,” Peter said. “In the War. I got a wooden leg, but you wouldn’t know it.”
“No, you wouldn’t to look at you,” the convict said. “Now you got it made, though, huh? Sit on your ass and draw a government pension.”
“This here’s my son-in-law’s house,” Peter said. “This here is his farm. I can’t do no heavy work. I can’t do much of nothing but sit in my rocker and watch things.”
“Well, you going to have something to look at from now on with this new highway.”
“I don’t know as I can get used to what they done.”
“Hell!” the convict said, moving now toward the pump. “After a while you can get used to most anything.”
“You don’t have to like it though,” Peter Joshman said, laughing, surprised to hear himself laughing out loud like that. “No sir, you don’t have to like it a damn sight.”
They poured sweet thick asphalt and they rolled it and leveled it, and soon it was really a road. Pretty soon the tourists would be coming down it, making a shortcut to the East Coast with its splendid beaches, sun and waves, and the sand as white and fine as sugar there. Peter sat in his rocker, gripping his heavy cane with knuckles whitened from impotent anger, and saw them finish up the job. Some people seemed to like it fine. The children, his grandchildren, and all the devious wolf pack of them from the other farms around, ran when they could with shrill excitement—like a flock of little birds, they were so swift and aimless—around the fringes of all the action. They would be happy to see all the cars come by. And up at Evergreen, the nearest crossroads town, the gas-station owner, the storekeeper, and even the preacher took it for a good sign that now they were going to have a real paved highway passing through. His son-in-law, S. Jay, took it badly. They had gouged out a piece of his land, split one field in two, and though it meant some cash money for him, it meant fencing, too, and crossing the highway to do his work.
“What good does it do me, anyhow?” S. Jay grumbled. “I never go to the beach anyway, except on the Fourth of July.”
“Get a new car, Daddy,” the children hollered and pestered. “Get us a new car.”
“Sure,” he replied. “And while I’m at it I might just as well buy me a patch of ground on the moon.”
“We could set up a stand by the road,” his wife (old Peter’s daughter) said. “We could make money selling garden vegetables and fresh eggs.”
“This is nothing but a long lonely stretch of straight road,” S. Jay answered. “Those folks won’t even slow down. They got something else in mind. Fresh vegetables! Eggs!”
“Well, it’s an idea.”
“Won’t anything come of it. Who’s going to build you a shack to sell from?”
“And maybe the children could sell ice-cold lemonade.”
“Lemonade!” S. Jay snorted. “Oh my God! You don’t know nothing about this world, nothing at all.”
Still, Peter thought that they ought to do something. It’s hard, it’s wrong even, he thought, to sit still and watch a great change, something new and something that will never, in one lifetime, be the same again, and not give at least a signal or a sign of approval or discontent. When the cars at last began to come, shiny new ones, and he could see the bright relaxed people in their bright unlikely clothes heading to and from the ocean, hear radios playing, hear the rhythms of their voices and occasionally a burst of their laughter, then he suddenly felt better about the whole thing. That was entirely different, a road with people on it. Suddenly everything was happening. He’d hear them coming, and they’d flash into his view, and tires humming or purring or swishing, and the sun exploding in little balls of brightness off the gloss and chrome of auto bodies, and, for a fabulous instant, he saw them in profile, lean as arrows in flight, going or coming, framed against the green pines, the rich green fields they crossed.
It came to him that he ought to participate, share in some way in the appreciation of that hurtling unbelievable moment of gleaming speed. He wanted to offer his benediction. So, he had the boys, his grandchildren, move the rocker out into the front yard, close to the road, under the shade of a mulberry tree where he could wave at them and they, seeing him, could wave back. They smiled and laughed, s
houted or waved in solemn silence, and the children, the children always seemed to catch his signal and return it.
S. Jay was a little angry, even a little ashamed.
“It must be nice,” he said, “it must be mighty nice to have nothing to do with yourself but sit by the side of the road and watch cars go by.”
And Peter Joshman, in spite of himself, sensitive of his position as a paying guest in the house, lonely, too, fell upon self-pity grimly:
“Lose your leg sometime and see how much you like it.”
“S. Jay don’t mean any harm, Daddy,” his daughter said. “You know how he is.”
“Never mind about that leg,” S. Jay said. “I don’t grudge you a thing. But it seems like you could find something besides just sitting and waving at strangers. What do those folks mean to you anyhow?”
“They cease to be strangers when I see them pass by.”
“Listen,” S. Jay said. “Those folks are laughing at you. You’re a joke.”
“It don’t do nobody no harm,” Peter said. “It does me a whole world of good.”
“It isn’t even good for you, Daddy,” his daughter said, siding at last with her husband. “You ought to sit in the shade of the porch, at least.”
“They won’t be able to see me from the road.”
“Well, why don’t you hang up a sign or something?” S. Jay said. “Run up a flag.”
“Don’t laugh at him, Jay,” his daughter said. “It’s wrong to make fun of an older man like that.”
“He makes fun of hisself.”
Still, it was S. Jay who put the notion in his mind. Why not sit comfortable in the shade of the porch and still have a way to communicate with them, the drivers and the riders? How to do this, with wit and wisdom, was his problem. Wisdom, yet; for what stranger, moving however swiftly over whatever strange or alien landscape, where he knows no one, owns nothing, between departure and arrival, is not touched, deeply, by a salute, a sign of some kind coming from a stranger by the road saying I acknowledge you as flesh and blood, as a creature of dust and breath like myself. Saying to himself like the children, his grandchildren, saying to himself, to be truthful, like the song they always sing at the end of Sunday school—“Good-bye, good-bye, be always kind and true.” But to say this with wit because (and Peter Joshman knew this, though often irascible, embittered too, and, like everyone, self-pitying) he knew that any shared truth needs a disguise. Laughter will do. Otherwise, like Adam and Eve without the wit of fig leaves, the naked truth would shame to the quick.
Evening Performance Page 20
