test

by test

  The kitchen light is on and she watches the woman making dinner. Thin radio music coming out through the thwopping blades of a window fan, the smell of onions. The woman moves from the sink to the stove to the cupboards like a person who believes she is alone. Now and then she speaks, neither to

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  herself nor to the cat who sits on the table''Don't forget the butter," she says, "and the plate." The cat watches in that predictable way that cats watch, twitching its tail, indifferent, detached.

  Her name is Maria, she is a widow, and this is all Luster knows. Almost all. Sometimes late at night she calls on the phone. Neither Luster nor Crawford knows how the widow got their number, their names. How does anybody know anybody else in this country? It's old country, but people come and go. Luster has heard that the widow's house was in her father's family. She came here with her husband to retire, and then he died, and now the woman stays, alone and unknown, because the house is hers.

  She calls them late at night, like a drunk. One of them throws off the sheet and goes in to catch the phone. Usually it's Luster. And she listens to endless monologues, about the rabbits the woman had as a child, the unusual color of the walls in a motel room where she stayed once with her husband. Trying to name those memories.

  Now as Luster watches, Maria empties a pan onto the plate and sits down to eat with her back to the window; Luster sees only the back of her head, gray hair tangled at the crown, a small, rigid head balanced like an egg above shoulders as knotty as gate posts. Luster is seduced by the quiet order of this life. This awful life.

  When Maria offers spoonfuls from her plate, the cat refuses by closing its eyes. She gets up and goes to bring another glass of water to the table, and the cat suddenly stops twitching its tail, perks its ears even more stiffly upward, opens its eyes, and looks directly out the window at Luster.

  When she is done, Maria puts her dishes in the sink and turns off the kitchen overhead light. For a moment, the tip of a cigarette moves, as if alone. Luster feels that she might lose her balance, though her feet are on the ground.

  Then the screen door opensthe cricket sound of the hinges and crying springand she steps onto the back porch. In her hand is an oily glass of water, the only hint of coolness in this moment of her watched life. And Luster drifts, she sees the moment play itself out slowly like a slow song, like a season, like a story she is trying to imagine:

  In a few minutes the woman will go back into the house, back in to whatever is or isn't there. In the meantime, her feet will remain planted here on the years-ago painted planks of the porch. The back porch where everything should be quiet and cool, but where the leak water has dripped a hole in the planks and now all is dry, and the scars where the men dragged the washing machine across into the kitchen are deep in the wood. And the chinaberry tree that gives no shade, not even a moon shadowwhen it put on berries its leaves gave all their strength, and now they hang weakly among the wrinkled berries, things about to evaporate; and beneath the tree is dust, the roots scratched bare by the dog, and now the dog lies among the feathery rootlets imagining that he is cool-

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  ing himself, but he pants, and he is as hot and dry as the galvanized chain that attaches him to the tree. The woman, Maria, is craving a dragging down; even as she drags on her cigarette, she wants to be dragged into the dust, where she can imagine like the dog that she is cool and in love again, where there is no stopping for caution or for cleanliness, where there is no stopping to brush your teeth.

  But she remains, foot planted on the porch. And Luster crouches around the corner beneath the window, wondering and unafraid. In the moonlit yard is a corn cob, forever attacked and scratched by hens.

  The oily glass of water, tossed at the heat-drunken dog beneath the chinaberry tree, is no substitute for tears. And the boards of the porch creak as Maria steps back through the already-slamming screen door and disappears into the bleak shelter of the house.

  And somewhere inside, the life goes on; in or out, on it goes. The crickets take up their fiddles and bows, and the night is deadly full of their racket. The moon comes out again through the low horizon clouds and then plunges again into the clouds, again and again racing down, poking its blue face again and again at the earth. Luster watches this dance, leaning against the house now, waiting for nothingthe old back and forth, front and back, head and tail, face and ass. But there are no equal opposites, there are only continuous surfaces and continuous dreams, each becoming the other, and the next. And the dashed glass of water is no more and no less kind than the flicked cigarette that lands in the dog's fur. And the dog, who smolders beneath the chinaberry tree, and then flames briefly and gloriously into the night, is no more and no less bright than the sun and the moon and the woman waiting alone through the shabby night.

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  Luster comes back across the pasture in the night, slowly, like a small swimmer, back as if from sleep, into their moonlit bedroom. She watches Crawford sleep, his hair black, his skin pale in this soft light, bedclothes thrown off because of the late summer heat. She moves carefully into the bed.

  "Are you breathing?" she says.

  "What's wrong?" he says.

  "Nothing," she tells him. She wonders. The bed sinks beneath her.

  "Where've you been?" he says.

  "Walking in the pasture with no clothes on."

  "Really?"

  "Yeah," she says, looking over at him. His eyes are closed and Luster can see a smile.

  "That's lovely."

  She waits for a time in the dark.

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  "I've been over to the widow's," she says.

  His eyes are still closed. He waits, silent, the darkness lying between them.

  "I watched her burn her dog," Luster begins.

  The bed moves; he shifts to listen. "What?" he says. She tells him the whole senseless story. And then he wants to hear it again. He always wants to hear her stories again.

  "Do you think she's crazy?" Luster says.

  "What was she wearing?"

  "Nothing."

  "You're lying," Crawford says finally. "She didn't burn the dog."

  "She was wearing a blanket," Luster says.

  Later he dreams about his childhood friend, a boy they called Fish because he convinced Crawford and his younger brother that swimming was a matter of sucking in huge gulps of water. "Like a fish," he told them. "That's all a fish does."

  In the dream, Fish rides across Crawford's pasture on a burning horse. The other Fish, the real one, bottom-upped a Thunderbird and drowned in Runningwater Creek.

  Here they lie, Crawford and Luster, sleeping, sucking life from the night around them. Their bodies rise and fall, gently, sheltered beneath the moonreflecting roof, anchored to the earth.

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  Joe drives his Buick relentlessly through the country. The swaying needles of the dashboard gauges follow the curves of the road, confirming the motion of the landscape, warning of nothing. The day rushes toward him: hill and woodland, creek and curve and dirty weeds, the smell of heatshadow patches flash and fade. Behind the speeding car all dissolves into a boiling fog of dust; ahead, wide country begins to open. He is lured forward by each new swell, each new curve, lured by simple lust to see the next and the next, his thoughts galloping ahead of the Buick, his dusty past yapping at the tires like a mongrel dog. And from time to time he leans his big face out the window to get the smells of the land. The air informs him. He knows he is close to the promised land.

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  From her kitchen window, Luster can see all the way over into the black woods across the river, far beyond the puny trail of dust that rises now and again from the roadso far over that the trees become not trees but a continuous rough and nappy mat covering some secret or abandoned part of the earthand beyond the corner of the lowest field, where the river makes its hard bend to the north, she sees the bright water. Back on thi
s side of the lowland, the hills come up in careful stages, rolling toward her easily in long folds, one into the other, like

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  muscles, or bedsheets in the morning. The land is in motion beneath her, slipping ever so gently. A small, shiny lake is caught between two of these folds of the earth, and nearer the house several thickets of cedar stand on outcroppings of chalk from which the dark earth was allowed to wash away in the times of cheap land.

  Behind her, she hears Myrkle's daughter slopping the string mop in and out of the steel bucket and then swishing it across the brick floor of the kitchen. The noise is buoyant, tireless, like the sound of the oceancollapsing, collapsing, and ever lifting its huge weight to collapse again. Luster wishes for the ocean, that child's place. Used to be, when she was a girl, Bud and Judy took her down to Biloxi every summer. Late on those Friday nights they took off south in the Plymouth, through the heat and cricketsMacon, Shuqualak, Wahalak, Scooba, and Meridian, and down into the pine woods. It all seems one long trip now: years compressed into a child's night in a broad back seat: exhaustion and exhaust fumes, Bud stopping somewhere south of Laurel and the hissing sound of his piss leaking onto the road bank, and when the Plymouth moved off again Luster watching the moonlight walk through the palmetto swamp, and ahead dawn and the car pulled down on the hard sand, hot sleep and flesh and ribbons of paint peeling from the flank of the Plymouth where hot exhaust leaked against the metal. Bud and Judy's sweaty tattoo lips kissing on the front seat.

  Now Luster is dribbling Three Roses whiskey into a coffee cup. She moves and the earth moves. Earlier this afternoon Crawford and Tonk drove the yearling cattle over into the ravine. She watched the stupidly awkward animals stretch their long necks and hurtle toward the lake, and then turn, at what seemed the moment before they would plunge into the water, and sweep out of sight beyond the thicket.

  And now, away off, Luster sees the horses, running wildly, their riders bent like boys against their necks. Up and up the hills they come, disappearing into the shadowy cleavage where one hill lies against another, and then reappearing larger, nearer, until she can see the horses heaving against the earth and against the heat, running with their ears pinned, running with their hearts. And then nearer, the riders, Crawford and Tonk, lanky, one white and one black but both dark now against the white horizon, girthed to their animals and stretching forward, grinning like mischief and death, thrusting themselves into the last few yards of the race to the corner of the house.

  Then they are past and out of sight. Luster backs away from the window, breathing out a long, held breath, the clap of the hoofs and the throaty grunts of the winded animals coming to her like afterthoughts, like recent memories. They'll ruin the horses. What will be lost? Everything.

  Myrkle's daughter bends double, wringing her dirty mop into the metal bucket. The girl has left a dry island where Luster is standingthe rest of the

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  kitchen shines like fresh perspirationthe cool odor of brick. Luster leans and kisses the girl, and she speaks to her: "Odelia."

  In the past, evil seemed a sinister and invisible diseasethe sound of a single coughing calf coming across the hills at night, the unplanted crop, the interest on their bank notes mounting darkly against them. Again Luster feels the seductive motion of the earth beneath her, and she reaches for the table. She is ashamed, and she finds no relief. Meanwhile Odelia moves forward, bluntly and smoothly like a fish.

  Then Crawford comes in at the back door. Here he is. And behind him she sees Tonk Myrkle, a stick of a man, sucking a cigarette, his black face disappearing into his jaw socket with each drag. And the smoke comes out, and there is his face again. And Odelia, standing like that over her mop. Something important is happening. Crawford knows this, too; he stands grinning, his hair wild. What can she expect of him? What does she expect? But the silence, the stillness must run its course. And they wait.

  Tonk Myrkle and his daughter are here like witnesses, not to a crime, but to their lives. "Here they are," the witnesses might testify at any moment. "Here they are; their lives are happening." And after they are gone, after the farm has been sold, the tales Tonk and Odelia will tell of their livestales told over long hours, told with beer breath, told to women and men who have already heard again and againthe stories becoming part of the landscape, evidence of passing, like the automobile down there among the cedars, rusted and shot full of bullet holes, fading with days and weather. They will be a long time gone from this place; they will be forgotten soon enough.

  Luster is wearing only a shirt. She could lift it over her head and lie down naked on the cool bricks, and they could take their pleasure like punishment, she and Crawford, take their false penance here in front of the witnesses. The story would be over. She is astonished at their life together.

  She goes to the bedroom and pulls her pants on. She tries to imagine the moments Tonk and Odelia will remember, the moments they will tell again and again. The men and women at the Bull Cafe will remember them carelessly. But Luster buttons her pants, as if this is the only thing happening.

  Now she grabs a side of the bedclothes and pumps them once, so that they buoy with air and come back down to the bed slowly; she smooths the thick spread toward the pillows with her forearms.

  Myrkle's daughter stands in the bedroom doorway, Luster's dark shadow. "Mister Crawford say . . ."

  "What is it, Odelia?"

  "He say him and Daddy out to the truck."

  Luster finishes her work. "It doesn't make much sense, does itmaking up the bed?"

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  "People got to do," Odelia says, her typical wisdom.

  Luster kisses her again. "We'll be good tonight."

  And then they are in the pickup, Luster between Crawford and Odelia, and Tonk next to the door, the little dash-mounted fan blasting breathy air into her face, the bite of the Three Roses gone now, but resting somewhere. Tonk smells of salt and of sour oats. The hot outside air comes toward them like the road and divides before themfrom the corner of her eye, Luster sees the fringes of the hot, stirred air fluffing the dust-powdered bushes along the sides of the roadbut she looks ahead now, as if for some new road sign pointing toward occurrence, her confidence in the moment slipping.

  The evening will begin and end with beer sucked from long bottles. Pleasure has become habit.

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  Some ways ahead, Joe's Buick rockets down the dusty road. On and on he passes, past thicket and gully and abandoned silo. Past thin Leota, walking fast. Past the Bull Care where three men turn quickly into the parking lot, throwing beer cans to the heat, throwing bits of dry gravel from beneath the rolling wheels of their car to ping against the tin wall of the cafe-shack.

  And inside, the band is warming up for the long Saturday evening; two men playing guitars, another with a horn, playing without style, as if this were part of their punishment. Inside, long-faced men and women tell stories and lies. But Joe passes on, heading directly for the land he intends to buy, looking for the place where he will begin his glorious new life. The cloud of dust behind the Buick rises, like a message, hundreds of feet into the white sky. Beneath this fading cloud, Crawford and Luster and Tonk and Odelia make their evening journey to the Bull Cafe.

  On the long rise before the abandoned church, the pickup coughs and digs into the road like a tired mule. From the crest of the hill, scraps of music come to them; they roll easily on down.

  The saxophone player blows into his dented horn, his song like something learned in the metal-walled classroom of a vocational school, a song to be dismantled like an automobile engine. Voices call to them from the dark edges of the roomthe crack of pool balls, smells of dirt and cement and metal. Later Crawford holds beer bottles to his ears and invents the music: noise, landscape, motion, and human touch. Tonk and Odelia dance, incestuous and chickennecked, like interpreters of the song.