by William Gay
“Throw you a change of clothes in a suitcase,” he told her. “Long as you’re already dressed up we might as well go somewhere.”
“Go where?”
“You’ll see when we get there.”
“You think I’m going anywhere at all with you you’re badly mistaken.”
“Get it packed or you’ll by God go without it.” Hardin turned on his heel and went through the long front room just as Pearl came through the door. She stepped aside to let him pass and then stood there watching Amber Rose and Amber Rose watching her, but neither of them spoke.
Winer smelled strongly of Old Spice and he had something on his hair that plastered it gleaming to the contours of his skull and he had on a new white shirt. One long room of the honkytonk had been sheetrocked though not yet plastered or painted. A bar was aligned against the narrow end of the room and tables and chairs were spaced about the floor. Winer passed through the doorway and into the sounds of Saturday-night merriment as though he were accustomed to it and seated himself at one of the bright new stools at the bar.
“Lord God, Winer,” Wymer said. “You smell like you broke a twenty-dollar bill in the barbershop and had to take the change out in trade.”
Winer gave him a small, tight smile and sat absentmindedly tapping a halfdollar on the bar. “Let me have a Coke, Wymer.”
Wymner set up the bottle but refused the coin. “Pearl’s givin it away tonight,” he said wryly. “Everthing’s on the house.”
“Do what?”
“Hell, yeah. She’s pissed at Hardin about somethin and she’s already give away enough beer and whiskey to give the whole county a hangover.”
“What’s she mad at Hardin about?”
“You’d have to ask them. They don’t tell me their business.” He stood unsteadily, arranged his thin hair with his fingers to cover his bald spot. His small eyes flitted drunkenly about the room as if Hardin might be crouched behind a table watching. “They got me right in the middle,” he complained. “He’s gone off God knows where and all I know for certain is he’s goin to have a shitfit when he does get back. I just may be somewheres else when it happens too…He keeps talkin bout this Mexcan feller he’s bringin up from Memphis. I guess I’m out of a job anyway.”
Winer drank Coke. “How about you go to along with her? I thought you were workin for Hardin.”
“I don’t know who in hell I work for. Right now I’m workin for that 30-06 she throwed on me a while ago.”
“I see,” Winer said though he didn’t. He arose with his bottle. “I’ll see you.”
“You better drink up while it’s free. You won’t never see this again in your lifetime.”
“I got to get on.”
He crossed onto the porch and knocked on the door, the screen rattling loosely on its hinges.
“Who’s there? Get away from that damned door.”
“It’s Nathan Winer. Can I see you a minute?”
“What do you want?”
“I just need to see you a minute.”
After a time he heard her get up heavily and he heard her mumbling to herself or another. The door opened and she stood leaning heavily against the jamb. He could smell the raw-whiskey smell of her and her sweat and the curious volatile smell of her anger.
“What is it?”
“I just wanted Amber Rose,” he said. “We were supposed to go to the show in Ackerman’s Field.”
“Well, she ain’t here, Nathan. She’s gone off to Columbia or somewheres with Dallas.”
“We were supposed to go to the show. She said she wanted to.”
“Dallas didn’t say for sure where they were goin or when they’d be back.” She drank from an upturned bottle. Lowered it and reached it toward Winer. “Get you a little drunk there.”
“I wouldn’t care for any.”
“Here.” She took the Coke bottle from him and filled it to overflowing from the bottle she held. “Come in and set awhile with me. We’ll wait on em together.”
“No, I may wait out in the car awhile. I got me a car.”
“Say you have? That’s real nice, Nathan.”
“We were going to the show in it.”
“Well, I don’t know where she is.”
“If you were guessing what time would you guess they’d be back?”
She pondered a moment. “I’d guess when I seen them comin,” she said.
Sometime in the small hours of the night he sat on Weiss’s couch drinking strawberry wine. He sat in silence with the thin crystal goblet balanced on his knee.
The silence seemed distilled, pure, silence augmenting itself. The walls were listening, the room hushed and waiting. In this silence he seemed receptive to all the world of experience, sensation multiplied by sensation rushed to him as if he were attuned to a vast stream of data bombarding him from every side. He drank from the wineglass and he could taste the musky heat of the berries, feel the weight of the sun, detect the difference between sunshine and shade smell the strawberries and their leaves and the earth, see dry fissured texture of last year’s earth, the serried grasses, the minute but vast life that flourished there. Laughter, conversations he was too weary to listen to funneled into his ears. He had heard all the words anyway, only the progressions had changed. He could hear Hodges’ voice, its halfcocky whine torn between bullying and wheedling, he could hear Amber Rose’s soft ironic voice and smell the clean soap smell of her, hear the rustle of her clothing. He could hear Weiss’s clipped and scornful cadence. The dark oppressed him. This dark house of stopped clocks and forfeit lives and seized machinery. Here in the weary telluric dark past and present intersected seamlessly and he saw how there was no true beginning or end and all things once done were done forever and went spreading outward faint and fainter and that the face of a young girl carried at once within it a bitter worn harridan and past that the satinpillowed death’s head of the grave. He rested his head on the couch arm and he could hear Weiss and his wife talking, hear all their lives flow past him like a highway he could enter and depart at will. He heard her asthmatic wheeze and the shuffle of her bedroom slippers and the click of the little dog’s claws on the tile and he got up. He drained the glass and set it by the couch. He went out into the cold night without looking back.
Cold dreary days now of winter in earnest and every day it seemed to rain. A cold, spiritless rain out of a leaden sky and he used to sit and watch out the weeping glass but there was nothing to see save brittle weeds and the coldlooking dripping woods. Water freezing on the clotheslines, a gleaming strand of suspended ice.
There seemed to be nowhere he wanted to go and no soul in all the world he wanted to talk to. He’d sit by the fire and try to read but the words skittered off the page like playful mice and he thought he’d never seen grayer or longer days.
On this gray, chill Sunday there was an air almost pastoral about Mormon Springs, an air of pause as if time must be given to ponder the events of Saturday night. Or respite to gear up for the week ahead. There was a hush here, a silence that seemed to gather about the pit. Winer kicking through the beerbottles and cigarette packs and the random debris of Saturday night seemed somehow resolute, calm, he seemed to have broached some line he’d never expected to and made a decision he was at peace with.
Sleepy Sunday windows, no one about save a drunk dozing in the backseat of a parked car. No smoke from the flue of Hovington’s house. Winer went on past it and past the bundled bricks and to the unpainted boardwalled honkytonk and went in.
A trio of silent men sat before the hushed jukebox like worshipers at some fallen or discredited shrine and they glanced up as Winer passed and approached the bar and then they looked away. They had the strangely attentive attitude of men listening to music no one else can hear.
Hardin sat on a stool at the bar. An enormous dark man sat on the next stool over and neither of them seemed aware of Winer. Winer stood awkwardly awaiting acknowledgment and he felt dazed and sleeprobbed and he could smell his own nerv
ous sweat. Hardin was drinking some dark liquid from a glass with icecubes in it and when he drained the glass he set it atop the bar with a small liquid rattle of ice and sat staring into its depths as if he read the configurations of his future or someone else’s there and they did not please him.
“What do you want, Winer?”
“I want to talk to you a minute by yourself.”
“Anything you got to say to me can be said right here. I don’t believe you know this feller here. Winer, this is Jiminiz. I brought him up from Memphis to help with my light work. Jiminiz used to bust heads in the meanest whorehouse in Beale Street and I reckon this place is goin to seem like a vacation to him.”
Jiminiz turned a dark, moonshaped face toward Winer but made no further overture and there was no look at all in his eyes. His white shirt was open to the waist and his chest and belly were laced with a scrollwork of old scars. His smooth black hair was shiny with brilliantine. Winer noticed that the collar of the white shirt was soiled. There was an air of violence constrained about him, he was mantled with a flimsy and makeshift indolence.
“Winer used to be a pretty good feller till he got him a little pussy,” Hardin told Jiminiz. “Then he just flew all to pieces. Don’t know who his friends are anymore. Just can’t keep off that old thin ice.”
Jiminz seemed not to have head but after a time he said, “Pussy warps a man’s head worse than codeine ever did.” His voice was mellifluous and touched with a soft Spanish lilt. “I guess next to gettin caught pussy has caused me more trouble than anything else.”
“I want to see you outside,” Winer told Hardin.
“I look just the same in here,” Hardin poured Jack Daniel’s into a glass, sat turning it on the formica, studying the series of interlocking rings the bottom of the cold glass made. “All this old shit keeps buildin up,” he said. “One thing after another. Seems like ever which way I turn I got folks snappin at my heels and worryin me. Well, I ain’t never been one to put things off. I believe if somethin’s bothering you cut it out right at the start. Be done with it and get on to somethin else. Now, me and Jiminiz aims to set some folks straight. So why don’t you just ease out of here?”
“I’m goin to see her.”
“Goddamn it, Winer. Does it have to be spoonfed to you a word at a time? I’ve got money tied up here. I’ve bought her clothes and fed her and by God raised her and now you think you’ll get her off somewhere and get her to thinkin about dishes and baby buggies and such shit and it all goes out the winder. Like hell it does. Folks around her beginnin to think they can shove me this way and that and I reckon I’m goin to have to bang some more heads together. They think I’m mellerin down or somethin. But we’ll see. Now, pick up that long face and that draggy ass and get out of my place. I’m sick of it, do you hear me. You and your money ain’t no good in here.”
“I’ll tell you what, Hardin. Why don’t you put me out?”
“No, you won’t tell me what. You won’t tell me jackshit. I’ll tell you what. I don’t have to put you out. I told you Jiminiz does my light work. He’ll have you out of there so fast all you’ll remember about it is how bad it hurt.”
Winer was watching Jiminiz. The man sat cupping a tiny shotglass of bourbon in his hand. He seemed unaware that he was under discussion. But Winer wasn’t really seeing him, he was seeing the long, slow days of Indian summer, days of dreamy peace, the rafter going up in the heat of the sun, the feel of the icy fruitjar against his face. The ebony fall of her long hair against the whitewashed wall. The way his arms were thickening day by day with the raising of the heavy oak timbers and the smell of the hot green wood curing in the sun. I can do it, he was thinking. The tenseness left him, he stood loose against the bar, light and arrogant on the balls of his feet.
“Take me out, Jiminiz,” he said.
Jiminiz smiled a small, onesided smile. “I don’t work for you,” he said. “The man pays me off on a Friday gives my orders.”
Hardin stood watching Winer and something in the boy’s posture or in his face was evocative and recalled to him another who had snapped at his heels long ago. He knew by the way he was standing what was on his mind and he could see the imprint of the knife through denim and he thought in wonder. The same knife. For a millisecond the past seemed to engulf him, as if old deeds were never done and over with and there were things that must be done in perpetuity. As if he must go on forever taking this selfsame knife away from folks.
“He’ll have a knife,” he said tiredly.
“He won’t use it,” Jiminiz said offhandedly. “I’ve seen a thousand of him.”
“Then take him out,” Hardin said.
Jiminiz drained his shotglass and set it aside. “Easy money,” he said.
Winer waited. When Jiminiz approached him he swung as hard as he could at the calm, dark face. Jiminiz ducked and Winer felt his fist glance off the slick black hair and his momentum carried him sideways. Jiminiz straightened and positioned his feet and though his fist seemed to travel only six or eight inches before it struck Winer’s ribcage, Winer felt his lungs empty in a sharp explosion of pain and he went reeling backward.
The covey of drunks flushed like startled quail when Winer struck the table. It overturned and he fell in a cascade of playing cards and falling glass and the drunks erupted from toppled chairs and developed a simultaneous interest in what lay beyond the door. Winer got up on all fours slowly shaking his head from side to aside like a bear set upon by dogs. He was trying to breathe. His breath whistled eerily in his throat and the room seemed to have tilted to a forty-five-degree angle and poised there, Winer waiting for the furniture to slide sideways and pile up on the left periphery of his vision. Marvelously defying gravity and tilted as well, Jiminiz was crossing the room toward him, his fists cocked. Behind him a tilted Hardin watched as if this were all beyond his interest.
Winer got up clutching a chair and when he threw it Jiminiz just grinned and fended it away onehanded and kept on coming. Winer stiffened and hit Jiminiz in the belly with his right and crossed with his left and a slight shudder ran through Jiminiz and then he hit Winer full in the face.
Lights flickered in Winer’s head and he hit the floor limbernecked with his head slapping the hardwood flooring and they flickered again. Perhaps he dozed for a moment for when he came to himself Jiminiz was standing over him with look of infinite patience on his face. Winer was lying on his back and he rose to his elbows and lay staring out across his prone body. Nothing seemed to have changed. The chairs were still scattered and the table capsized and Hardin still sat on a stool drinking. Winer had fallen in broken glass and his arms were bleeding.
Then Hardin spoke. Winer could hear him though there was a roaring in his ears like far-off water. “Mark him up a little,” Hardin said. “Mess them smooth jaws up. Ever time he looks in a shavin mirror I want him to remember how sweet that pussy was.”
“Then let him get up,” Jiminiz said. “I don’t like hittin a man already down and I don’t like hittin a man already out on his feet and don’t know when he’s whipped.”
“He’ll get up,” Hardin said contemptuously. “You couldn’t keep him down with a fuckin logchain. He ain’t got sense to lay down and quit.”
Winer was trying. It hurt him to move and it hurt to breathe and it hurt to talk. “You better make him kill me,” he said. “Because if I live you won’t. You’re a dead man.”
“I know the words to that old song,” Hardin said. “I’ve heard it often enough.”
“You gettin up or stayin down?” Jiminiz asked.
The price he paid was dear but Winer got up. There was blood welling in his mouth and his eyes had a slick, shiny look like glass. For a few moments he managed to evade Jiminiz but the Mexican moved like a boxer, graceful despite his size, feinting, jabbing through Winer’s flimsy guard at will. Winer sat down hard with his vision darkening and the last thing he saw was the dark bulk of Jiminiz coming on and Jiminiz hit him some more but he had stopped feel
ing it.
The water had turned red. Winer squeezed the washrag out in it and went back to cleaning his face with the pink cloth, studying his cut in the mirror.
“Who was it done it? Hardin?” Oliver sat straddling a ladderback chair, his dead pipe clutched in his teeth.
“He subcontracted it out to some Mexican.”
“Mexcan?”
“Some bouncer or something brought up here from Memphis.”
“Big feller?”
Winer was gingerly daubing his face with alcohol. “I hope I never see one bigger,” he said. “But it wouldn’t have mattered anyway. I had some idea I was tougher than I turned out to be.”
“I seen you come by the house right slow driving like a drunk man. I knowed you wouldn’t be drunk so I figured I might ort to step up here and see would you live. Do you reckon you will?”
“I expect so.”
“You shore ain’t goin to be much in the purty department for a good long while.”
“I never was anyway.”
“Looks like you may have ye a scar or two to remember that Mexcan by. What’d he whup you with? A stick of stovewood? Or a choppin axe?”
“I think he had a ring on and he sort of twisted his fist when he hit me.”
“Boy, I just don’t know what to say. Goddamn it, there just ain’t nothin to say. You ort to go to the high sheriff. Bellwether’s a fair man, what I hear.”
“Hardin’d just swear I started it. Which I did. He gave me every out there was and I just wouldn’t take them, I had Pa’s old knife and I was going to cut one or both of them. Then he chopped me right good in the ribs and all my intentions just few away.”
“You think you’ll be all right?”
“I hurt too much to think. It must he stove in my ribs or something.”
“Let’s get in ye car and try to make it in to see Ratcliff.”
“I’ll be all right in the morning.”
“Lord God, boy. Now ain’t nothin to the way you’ll feel in the morning. I remember one time I got locked up in Nashville for a public drunk and a pair of the blueboys played around with me for a while. I went to bed feelin purty good and when I got up next day I fell right flat on my face. I hurt in places I didn’t even know I had…Say what did yins have ye falllin out about anyway?”
