The Long Home
Page 16
Buttcut looked at his watch. “You want to go a dollar partners on the pinball machine? I got a date directly but we still got time.”
“I reckon not. All they do is eat my money and leave me broke.”
“Hell, son, you got to know how to make em walk and talk. I’ll do the playin, all you got to do is set back and watch.”
He gave Chessor a dollar and adding one of his own Chessor exchanged them for a roll of nickels. It was an experience to watch Buttcut play pinball. He talked to the machine, cajoled it, swore at it. He caressed it, fondled it, fell upon it with his fists when it did not do his bidding. Leaning across it he coerced the rolling, gleaming balls to the pockets he wanted, his enormous frame thrust across the machine like a lover. Ultimately he beat the machine two hundred forty games and checked them off for twelve dollars. “Walkin and talkin,” he said gleefully, counting six ones onto Winer’s waiting palm.
“I believe I am part of the pinball machine,” he said. “There’s one in the family tree somewhere. I come in and seen one slippin out my mama’s back door. Listen, I got to pick Sue up. You want me to drop you somewhere?”
“No. I’m not going anyplace in particular. I just came out here to kill some time.”
“Find you a girl. You ought to be able to pick one up after the picture show lets out.”
“I may do that.”
“I’ll see you then.”
After Buttcut went out Winer finished his Coke and carried the check to the counter and paid. He went out as well. He stood for a moment uncertainly before the plate glass window of the restaurant and then he went on up the street.
Sam Long was about to close up when Winer got there. The store was bare of customers and even the old men had been rousted from their benches. Winer wondered idly did they have homes, where did they go when the store closed. Long was sweeping about the coalstove with a longhandled broom.
“What can I do for you, Youngblood?”
Winer laid four ten-dollar bills on the counter. “I’ll give you the rest of it next week.”
Long leaned the broom against the counter and came around behind. He began to fumble through dozens of ticketbooks.
“Don’t worry about it, boy. I wadnt dunnin you exactly. I just knowed that Huggins feller and I thought it might be somethin you didn’t know was going on.” He made the deduction from the books and handed Winer a receipt. “I don’t want you feelin hard at me. I always appreciate your business.”
“I don’t feel hard at you,” Winer said. He pocketed the receipt and started toward the door.
“Come back now,” Long called.
It grew cloudy and more chill yet and a small cold rain began to fall, wan mist near opaque in the yellow streetlamps. He walked past the darkened storefronts with their CLOSED signs and sat for a time on a bench in the poolroom. He thought he might see someone he knew or wanted to know but he did not. Outside he stood momentarily beneath the dripping awning then went on down the street. Before de Vries’s cabstand he stood as if he were waiting for something. The thought of going home depressed him but the thought of not going did not cheer him appreciably. He stared out at the wet street and the ritualistic cruising of the cars. Once he recognized Buttcut Chessor and his girlfriend and he lifted a hand but Buttcut did not see him. After a while Motormouth’s trickedout Chrysler drove by then circled the block and passed again. This time it stopped, the springloaded antenna whiplashing soundlessly in its socket.
“Hey, Winer. Seen any women?”
“Just from a distance.”
“What you been doin tonight?”
“Running with the crazy folks,” Winer said.
“Hell, let’s run with a few more. I’ve got a sixpack or three in here with me. I’s just fixin to go out and see these women I know. You want to ride out with me?”
Winer considered his options. “Why not,” he said. He got into the car. “Drive down by the tieyard. I’ve got some stuff in that old Buick I need to pick up.”
Down fabled roads reverting now to woods Winer felt himself imprisoned by the dark beyond the carlights and by the compulsive timbre of Motormouth’s voice, a drone obsessed with spewing out words without regard for truth or even for coherence, as if he must spit out vast quantities of them and rearrange them to his liking, step back, and admire the various patterns he could construct: these old tales of love and betrayal had no truth beyond his retelling of them, for each retelling shaped his past, made him immortal, gave him an infinite number of lives.
They drove through a land in ruin, a sprawling, unkept wood of thousands of acres, land bought by distant companies or folks who’d never seen it. Yet they passed unlit houses and old tilting grocery stories with their rusting gaspumps attendant and it was like driving through a country where civilization had fallen and vanished, where the gods had turned vengeful or perverse so that the denizens had picked up their lives and fled. Old canted oblique shanties built without regard for roads or the uses of them, folks for whom footpaths would serve as well. Dark bulks rising out of the mouths of hollows, trees growing through their outraged roofs. Old stone flues standing blackened and solitary like sentries frozen at their posts waiting for a relief that did not come and did not come. Longdeserted ghostroads, haunts of homeless drunks and haphazard lovers.
“I thought nobody lived here in the Harrikin anymore.”
“They don’t hardly.”
“I can’t say I blame them. How far is it to where these women you know live?”
“I don’t know. Eight or ten mile. Open us up another one of them beers.”
The road worsened until in places Winer only suspected it was a road, faint vestigial imprint of where a road had been, narrowing, choked by the willows lowering upon it and always descending, Hodges riding the brakes and gearing down, until it was a wonder to Winer that folks still survived in so remote an area. They forded nameless shallow streams, wheels spinning on slick limestone, slid lockwheeled on into brackenencroached darkness, darkness multiplied by itself so that you would doubt the ability of light to defray it.
Where the woods fell away the ground leveled out and Winer could see the sky again. The rain had ceased and the clouds had broken up and a weird, otherworldly light from the stars lay on the land. Here buildings clustered together, yet still empty, unlit. They passed great brick furnaces brooding starkly up out of the fields attended by purposeless machinery black and slick with rain, silent. The roads intersected here and the car rattled over a railroad crossing where trains did not cross anymore.
“Right about here,” Motormouth was saying to himself. Past a house indistinguishable to Winer from any of the others the car slowed to a crawl, Motormouth peering across Winer toward a lightless building that looked like an old schoolhouse save the yard was cluttered with the deceased bodies of automobiles so dismembered they appeared autopsied. Motormouth blew the horn one short burst but did not stop. They accelerated and drove around the curve past the house.
“We’ll go down here to the lake and turn. Time we get back she’ll be out by the mailbox and waitin.”
“She? I thought there was more than one of them. Women, you said.”
“Well, yeah, that’s want I meant. Her and her sister.”
Winer had long since stopped believing anything Motormouth said but he did not want to get out here. Wherever here was it was mile from anywhere he had ever been and he had not seen a lighted house, a telephone pole. He guessed wherever he was was better than sleeping, these days he had come to feel that life was spinning past him, leaving him helpless. Sleep only accelerated this feeling of impotence. While he slept the world spun on, changed, situations altered and grew more complex, left him more inadequate to deal with them.
Where they stopped by the lake’s edge there was a pier extending out into the water. Past it under the still sky the water lay motionless as glass. It was a lake of india ink, the dark water tending away to nothingness where lay no shoreline, no horizon, just the blueblack
mist above it where his mind constructed miragelike images that were not there. In the night it seemed to go on forever and this to be the point where everything ceased, land’s end, everything beyond this uncharted.
Motormouth lit a cigarette, arced his match into the black expanse of water. “This used to be a good place when I was a kid. Use to be kept up and you could swim in it. Now it’s growed up with some kind of chokeweed and a man’d have to swim with a stick in one hand to beat the cottonmouths off. You see that bluff down there?” He pointed westward along the waterline to where a shapeless bulk reared against the heavens. Jagged slashes of trees serrated its summit and above them hung a wirethin rind of brasscoloured moon. “That’s a old quarry, like a big cave. It used to be the whitecaps’ headquarters, them nightriders used to meet there fore they’d raid somebody. Now it’s road goes in, and a turnaround. Folks parks in there and screws, or used to. I guess they still do. I used to bring the old lady out here fore we got married. It’d be hot, July or August, we’d swim awhile then go back in there. God, it was dark. Black as the ace of spades.” His voice grew rueful, coarsened by the hard edge of the past. “Them was the good old days,” he finished. “Whatever luck I ever had just dried up and blowed away.”
Winer did not immediately reply. He stood silently staring at the dim outline of the bluff within which the whitecaps had met, in his mind he could hear the horses’ hooves click steel on stone, hear the vague, interweaving voices through pillowcase masks. In some curious way he felt pity for Motormouth but at the same time he felt a man was accountable for what he did and he felt a man made his own luck. He thought of Oliver. William Tell Oliver seemed the only person he knew who was at peace with his own past, who was not forever reworking old events, changing them. “You talk like a ninety-year-old man getting ready to die,” he told Motormouth. “All you need is some kind of a change.”
“Let’s change our luck right now,” Motormouth said. “Let’s ease on back up the road.”
He drove a little way past the house and stopped the car. They did not have long to wait. Almost immediately footsteps came up behind the car. Winer turned. In the pale light a heavyset black man was coming alongside the car. He swung a shotgun in his hand as casually as if it were an extension of his arm. “Lord God,” Winer said.
“Hey.” The black man was at the window. He leaned an arm on the roof, peered in. Motormouth leapt wildly in his seat, then appeared frozen, his right hand on the ignition key, his left on the steering wheel. “Hey there,” he said. Winer slid down in his seat and stared down the starlit road, dreaming himself speeding along it, all this forgotten.
“What you whitefolks wantin out here?” Light winked off a gold tooth, the eyes seemed congested with anger. There was no deference in his manner, the hour and the place and sawed-off shotgun seemed to have precluded all need of it.
“We—” Motormouth’s mind reeled far ahead, constructing in one quantum leap an entire scenario, characters, dialogue, events. In that instant of its creation it became truth to him, absolved him of all wrongdoing, all evil intentions, and he became confident of his mission.
“We was a bunch of us foxhuntin down here the other night,” he said easily. “We was runnin several dogs and one of em ain’t come up yet. You ain’t seen a strange one around here, have ye?”
“What kind of a dog was it?” The man’s face was close to Motormouth’s and Winer could smell raw whiskey on his breath. Suddenly the night seemed volatile, unpredictable, events were swirling like liquid, waiting for a pattern to coalesce.
“Big black-and-tan. Had a tore ear and a collar on it said its name was Ridgerunner.”
“I ain’t seen no such dog.”
“Well. It was right up the road there.”
“You sure it wadnt a scrawny old white hound with some yeller up and down its backbone? That’s about as strange a one as I’ve seen tonight.”
Motormouth swallowed visibly. “No. It was a black-and-tan.” He cranked the car and the black man stepped back. “You ain’t seen it I best be gettin on. I’d appreciate if ye’d keep ye eyes open for it.”
“You lookin for a fuckin dogcatcher you in the wrong neighborhood,” the black man said.
“Well. We’ll see ye.”
Winer looked back and the man was standing in the middle of the road watching them go, the gun still slung at his side.
“That uppity black son of a bitch,” Motormouth said. “A little more and I’d’ve had to get out and whup his ass.”
“How much more could there be?” Winer wondered aloud.
He spent the next three days and nights at Motormouth’s house. Monday morning Hodges drove him to Hardin’s and picked him up that afternoon after work. Monday evening they arose from the supper table to see a police cruiser halt in the yard. A deputy got out with a folded white paper in his hand.
“More Goddamned papers,” Motormouth said. “Goddamned divorce papers and peace warrants and now here comes some more. I reckon they must’ve moved her in a desk and chair in that judge’s office so she’d be handy when the notion struck her to swear out somethin. She ever gets caught up I reckon that whole courthouse bunch can just lock up and go to the house.”
They stood in the cool dusk while Garrison read Motormouth this news. It was that he had been evicted. His wife owned this house and she wanted him out of it. She wanted him out yesterday but perhaps today would serve. “Well, Goddamn,” Motormouth kept sayin in put-upon tone. The deputy read on. When he had finished he had Motormouth sign the paper and he handed him a copy and got back in the squad car. “I’ll be back in the mornin to make sure you’re gone,” he warned.
“I never doubted it for a Goddamn minute,” Motormouth told him.
The car drove away. Motormouth sat on the edge of the porch in a deep study of his options. They seemed to grow more limited day by day. “I know where there’s a good place down by the river,” he finally said.
With full dark they went with all they could stuff into or lash onto the Chrysler. Mattresses clotheslined athwart the trunk. A dining table tied atop with legs stiffly extended upward like some arcane beat rigid in death. Trophy of some surrealistic hunt. Refugees. A family of Okies displaced in time as well as location. Like a rolling trashdump they went bumping down a logroad alongside the river to where the spring floodwaters had deposited an almost intact cabin in a grove of trees. The log cabin sat canted against a giant hackberry, its floors perpetually tilted. Damp odors of other times, other folks, who knew who? Doris loves Bobby, the wallpaper said. They set up housekeeping in this crooked house. Luxuries abounded, here were bricks to bring the cots to a semblance of level. That night they could watch the stars through the roof where the shakes were missing. Music from the car radio, old songs of empty beds and thwarted dreams. When the radio was turned off there was just the placating voice of the river.
They were still there Thursday when Bellwether found them. Bellwether came down through the damp beggarlice and blackberry briars with an aggrieved look about him. He stopped by the fire where coffee boiled in a pot and began to pick Spanish nettles from his clothes. His khakis were wet almost to the waist. He hadn’t known about the road, he had come up the bank of the river and he was not happy. It was Winer himself he sought.
“You a hard feller to find.”
“I didn’t know I was lost.”
Winer was alone. Fearing more papers or something that required his presence before an oaken bench Motormouth had faded back into the brush. But Bellwether had not even inquired after him.
“Well, you may not be but your mama thinks you are. She asked me to try and find out where you was.”
“I haven’t broken any laws I know about. And if she wanted to see me I was working right up the road at Hardin’s.”
“There’s nobody accused you of breaking any laws. I told you I was just doin a favor for your mama. She said tell you to come home. She wants to see you about somethin.”
“What?”
“Who said so?”
“I just said I’d try and get word to you. What you do is your business.”
“Well. Thanks for telling me anyway.”
“You goin down there I’ll run you by. I told her I’d let her know if I saw you.”
“I’ll just have Motormouth run me down there after a while.”
But he didn’t. It was the weekend before he went and that was a day too late. There wasn’t anyone there at all.
4
Winer and the girl were standing in a corner, hidden from the house by the weatherboarded walls.
“Why would I want to do a thing like that?” she asked him. “I’d be liable to get caught.” She seemed to be teasing him, everything she said had an ironic quality as if she were reserving the right to take back anything she said.
“So what if you did? What is he to you? It looks to me like anybody could slip out of a honkytonk for a few minutes.”
“I can’t .”
“Can’t or won’t?”
“Anyway, why should I have to slip out and meet you in the woods? Why can’t you get a car like anybody else?”
“Well. I got my eye on one. I just wanted to see you.”
“Then I guess that’s your reason.” She smiled. “Have you got one for me?”
He leaned and twisted her face up to him. She didn’t resist. He could feel her hair around his fingers, the delicate bones beneath her ear. She opened her mouth beneath his. Her breath was claim and sweet. She leaned against him. “You know I want to.”