Joe

by Larry Brown

  “Aw.”

  “But I ain’t scared of the sumbitch and never have been. And I’ll whip his ass if he fucks with me. Again. If he ever. Fucks. With me. Again.”

  Then why don’t you do it stead of talking about it? the boy wondered. Drunk talk’s all it is.

  After an hour or so they turned onto a dirt road, the entrance to it overhung with great leaning trees and vines, the shade deep and strong like a darker world within the outer, a place of cane thickets and coon dens and the lairs of bobcats, where the sun at its highest cast no light over the rotted stumps and stagnant sloughs. The trees that bordered the road and spread out across the land beside it had closed their tops together, so long had they stood there admitting neither light nor shadow of hawk nor the blue smoke of chain saws. Old timber, and magnificent, the bark worn slick on the cypresses from the constant track of coons and the black mud richly marked with the feet of the things that lived there. They went down the road past the posted signs and stopped on a wooden bridge. Russell got out.

  “I’m ready to go home,” Gary told his daddy.

  “Well, I ain’t. They ain’t a goddamn thing at home.”

  The boy sat on the seat for a moment and then slid out the open driver’s door. He was tired of sitting cramped up and he wanted to stretch his legs. Russell was weaving on the edge of the bridge, waving a stream of his own into the stream below. Gary stepped to the edge and stood looking down. The water was twelve feet below, a thin trickle sliding over holes in the clay bottom where tiny fish hovered. He looked at Russell. He was pissing and holding a beer can straight upside down against his mouth.

  Gary didn’t know where he was and he was hungry and he knew there was no telling where they would wind up. They’d taken a lot of turns and gone over many roads and this place didn’t look familiar. He saw the moccasin, immobile on the bank among the dried sticks and shriveled roots, a phantom appearing out of nothing. Without thinking he reached for the largest rock he saw and heaved it over. It made a great splash. Russell surged back and wavered on the precipice of the single two-by-eight that formed the border of the bridge and then, standing there with arms waving, dropped his beer and fell and caught himself by his arms and chin, hanging off the wood.

  Gary went to him and grabbed the back of his shirt. Then he reached lower and caught his belt and heaved up on it.

  “You little motherfucker,” Russell said. Gary turned him loose and stood up. He looked at the hands clutching so desperately the splintered wood, the fingers so splayed and vulnerable, the nails just begging to be stomped.

  “Goddamn, boy, what’s the matter with you?” said Wade. He knelt and hauled on the back of Russell’s shirt.

  “Help me get him up.”

  “Let him get up by himself.” He stood back and watched Wade trying to pull him up over the edge. Russell clawed at the boards, his chest, half-emerged, his eyes wild and his hands waving and slapping hard at the wood. He came shaken and panting onto the bridge and finally lay with his feet hanging out over the empty air but for a moment, and then he got up and took three fast steps and slammed the boy against the truck.

  “Boy, I’ll slap your face,” he said. Wade didn’t say anything. Gary looked at his father but he wasn’t even looking at them. The boy tried to move, but there wasn’t any use. The hands clamped on him were hard and ungiving.

  “I ain’t done nothin to you,” he said. “Turn me loose.”

  “I seen you laughin at me.”

  “I wasn’t done it.”

  “You throwed that rock at me.”

  “I throwed it at a snake. I wasn’t throwin it at you.”

  Gary pushed one hand off him and jerked the other shoulder away. Russell shoved him hard and he fell to the bridge. Wade was drinking a beer and looking off into the trees as if this magnitude of land were his and he was pondering its worth. No help from that quarter, never had been, never would be.

  “You a lyin little son of a bitch. I think I’ll just throw your ass off in there and see how you like it.”

  Gary kicked at Russell at first while scooting backwards. But then he turned over and came up and they met beside the truck. Twice he was slammed against the quarter panel. He pushed, blind, striking blindly. Russell laughed at him. He was being slapped and, after the first blow, he couldn’t even see where the hands were coming from. He didn’t know where his father was and he didn’t know why he wasn’t helping him and more than anything he was afraid he was going to cry. He did the only thing he could do. He spied a rock between his feet, one about the size of his fist, and he bent over and seized it and drew back and delivered it to Russell’s forehead. A steer in the killing pen goes down no sooner. He thought he’d killed him. A little droplet of blood squeezed out of the cut and ran down one side of Russell’s nose. Gary stood over him. With his foot he rolled him over to send him for good into the creek. But the old man walked over with a hand up to halt him.

  “Here now,” he said. He pitched his empty can into the water below. While his son watched he robbed the still figure, turning out the pockets and taking the money. Russell lay on his back breathing raggedly, air and blood snuffling and mixing in his nostrils. The boy stood watching as his own breathing gradually slowed down, as his heart ceased its thumping. He heard the sounds his father was making in the truck after he turned away, but it wasn’t until the old man started walking up the road without waiting for him to follow that he looked and saw the pockets of his parent crammed full of beer and the neck of the fifth of schnapps in his hand.

  “What we gonna do with him?” he called.

  Wade didn’t look around when he answered, just kept walking.

  “I ain’t doin nothin with him.”

  “We gonna just leave him?”

  “You better get the fuck away from him.”

  He looked down at Russell and saw the wisdom of this. But what of the future and the chance of meeting up with him again? It wouldn’t be his father. It would be him.

  After a while he went after the old man, keeping his distance, the bag of cans he retrieved from the back end rattling faintly against his leg.

  Joe wouldn’t let Curt sit on the front seat when he took him home. He made him ride in the back where the hands rode. After he left Curt’s house, his arm started to hurt a little more, but he knew that was shock wearing off, knew it was natural because he’d been shot once before, with a .22. It was hurting like hell by the time he pulled up in front of his own house. He took the whiskey inside with him.

  With his chest naked and the bloody shirt in the trash, he faced himself in the bathroom mirror and surveyed the damage. Two in the neck, one in each arm. Puckered and swollen craters of flesh, the blood already black deep in the meat. He picked up the whiskey off the vanity and took a drink. His face was unmarked and he couldn’t imagine all that missing his head, three loads. The ball in his left arm lay blue against the skin, having come from behind, and it was the size of a pencil eraser and very hard. The two on the outside edges of his neck had passed through. He dabbed alcohol over the wounds, front and back, and stoppered them with Band-Aids.

  It was sort of like being shot with an arrow in a Western. Home surgery was required. His knife wasn’t sharp enough. He took it out and tested the edge with his thumb and put it back in his pocket. The piece of lead moved around under the skin of his left arm when he put his finger on it. There was a peculiar feeling of fever in both his arms. He felt around on the other arm and couldn’t feel anything. There was just the hole in back. He found a hand mirror of Charlotte’s and held it over his shoulder, looking at the wound in the mirror. He turned the bottle of alcohol up over it and doused it thoroughly. It burned a little and then quit.

  He had to go back to the kitchen to find the tape and he had to look in three drawers before he found it, some half-inch stuff he’d bought a long time ago for masking a car’s windows. He wrapped some of it around one side of a new double-edged razor blade and then he held himself still before the
mirror. The blood started as soon as he began to cut, and he had to blow it out of the way, to see where to put the blade. The pellet looked to be just under the skin but it was actually in the muscle. He cut with the grain, separating the fibers of his body, tensing his shoulder as much as he could in the hope that it would pop out. But he had to widen the hole and grit his teeth and close his eyes sometimes as he bore down on it, until he felt the steel meet the lead. Then he squeezed it like a pimple, the black ball tearing itself out of the wound and forcing the tissue aside until it slid all slippery and skinned to the surface, where he picked it off with his other hand and held it in his palm. A little piece of lead, badly misshapen. He threw it in the trash.

  He stood and let the blood flow for a while, then took up the bottle of alcohol and upended it against his arm, sealing the mouth of the bottle with the muscle of his bicep. Tiny boiling clouds of blood entered the bottle and he watched while the alcohol slowly turned pink. When he’d stood it for as long as he could, he took the bottle down and wetted a washcloth and bathed the blood off his arms and chest. He patted around on the hole with a dry tissue. The flesh around the lips of the wound was puffy. He put Band-Aids front and back.

  The whiskey still stood on the sink beside him, and he picked it up and drank some of it, then shivered and shook his head. Blood was seeping out around his bandages. He turned off the light in the bathroom, staggering a little, and took the bottle with him. It wasn’t even dark outside yet. There was no way he could go to town, bleeding the way he was. It would ruin another shirt if he put one on. He lit a cigarette and opened the back door and looked out into the woods behind the house where a matted little copse of honeysuckle surrounded the remnants of a treehouse he’d built once, now only rotten boards hanging from rusty nails. If he killed Russell they’d send him back. This time they’d keep him until he was old.

  He called the dog a few times but he didn’t come. He heard somebody going down the road on a three-wheeler and he looked past the corner of the house to see who it was. Some kid, his hair flying, who lived up the road toward London Hill.

  He went into the kitchen and mixed a drink and sat down on the back steps with it. By dark he’d mixed two more.

  He was on the couch with some music playing low when he heard the car pull up and stop. He lifted his wrist. Nine-thirty. A car door slammed, then another. He heard the dog growling under the house and he got up stiffly and went to the door. He called to the dog to be quiet when he saw who it was.

  “Shut up,” he said. “Y’all come on in.”

  “Will he bite?” one of them said. They were standing in the yard, just beyond the dim light cast by the living room lamp.

  “He won’t while I’m out here. He better not.”

  The dog rumbled a low warning in the dark beneath the porch. They didn’t come any closer.

  “Hold him, Joe.”

  “He won’t do nothin.”

  “I’m scared of him.”

  “Why, hell.” He went down the steps and squatted on the concrete blocks and whistled at the dog, trying to calm him down. “You better shut up under there. Y’all come on. He ain’t gonna bite you, I promise.”

  As they stepped closer the dog was a white flash rocketing from under the house. They dropped their beer and tried to run but he nailed Connie and she fell. He had her boot in his mouth, but Joe grabbed an ear just as the dog tried to go up her leg. He pulled the ear taut and doubled his fist and gave him a lick on the side of his head. The teeth clicked like a steel trap as Connie snatched her foot away and got up.

  “Son of a bitch, what’d I tell you?” he asked the dog. The dog tried to pull away from him toward the girls. They picked up their beer and stepped past him and went into the house and shut the door. The dog had his belly low to the ground, straining, and it was all Joe could do to hold him. He hit him in the head three times. The dog just closed his eyes and took it.

  “When I tell you to shut up I mean shut up. You hear me?”

  The dog straightened and stood balanced on all fours and looked at him, his gaze clear and level and his eyes untroubled. He licked the hand that whipped him, then turned his head and stood watching the house. Joe turned him loose.

  “You go get under the house and you stay there. Go on, now.” The dog walked away until he was once again a white blob and disappeared into the gloom by the steps. He settled there, invisible, a pale guardian who never slept.

  Connie had her boot off and the leg of her jeans pulled up when he went in. Her friend was on the couch beside her, her face a little strained with fright.

  “Did he get you?” he said. She shook her head.

  “I think he just bruised it. It didn’t break the skin.”

  “Hell, I should have held him, I guess.”

  “What if you hadn’t been here?” the other girl said.

  “If I hadn’t been here,” he said, looking carefully at her, “you wouldn’t have no business in my yard.”

  “I ain’t hurt,” Connie said. She pushed down the leg of her jeans and started putting her boot back on. “We come to see if you wanted to drink a beer. What you got those Band-Aids on for? What you been into?”

  “Nothin,” he said, and got up. “I’ll be back in a minute.” He walked down the hall to his bedroom and took an old work shirt out of the closet and put it on. They were talking in low voices with their heads together when he went back into the living room, but they pulled apart and smiled at him.

  “What are y’all up to?” he said.

  “We just been riding around,” Connie said. “We didn’t know if you’d be home or not.”

  “I didn’t mean to be,” he said. “Who’s your friend?”

  “This is Cathy. She lives down at Batesville. She knows Randy.”

  He looked at her again. She was thin and had long black hair.

  “I don’t really know him that well,” she said. “I just know who he is. I see him sometimes out at D.J.’s”

  “You do? I don’t never see him. Tell him his daddy said hi next time you see him.”

  “Okay. I will.”

  “Is he still over there in that trailer on old Six with them other boys?”

  “I think he is. We was supposed to’ve gone to a party over there a couple of weekends ago but we didn’t go. This girl I was with had a wreck.”

  “Aw.” He got up and took his glass to the kitchen and started mixing another drink. “Anybody get hurt?”

  “No sir.”

  He looked at her and then grinned at Connie.

  “I mean, no. She was fixing to drag this boy and run into him. But they got us for dragging. That’s why we didn’t get to go.”

  He went back to the chair and sat down again.

  “Don’t you want one of these beers?” Connie said.

  “Naw. I drank some beer this afternoon. I don’t want no beer. I was just about asleep when y’all pulled up.”

  “We didn’t mean to wake you up.”

  “It’s all right. It was time for me to get up anyway. I’m glad he didn’t hurt you. Usually when he gets ahold of something he won’t turn loose.”

  “What kind of a dog is that, anyway?” the girl Cathy said.

  “He’s a pit bull, ain’t he, Joe?”

  “He’s half pit bull. Half pit bull and half treeing walker. Why his ears look like they do. I meant to have em trimmed at the vet’s when he was a puppy but I never did.”

  “He’s big,” the girl said.

  He lit a cigarette and Connie opened a beer. He wondered why she’d brought somebody with her and knew she probably wanted something.

  “Can I talk to you for a minute?” Connie said.

  “Talk.”

  “I mean . . .” She moved her head slightly toward Cathy.

  “Oh. Well, come on back here.” He got up and she followed him down the hall to the bedroom. He sat down on the bed and she shut the door.

  “What you want?” he said. “A quickie?”

  She sm
iled and slid down over him, pushing him back on the bed, running her hands over the mat of hair on his belly. She kissed him, but he turned his head away suddenly and coughed.

  “Damn,” he said. He put his fist over his mouth and coughed and coughed. “Shit.” He wiped his mouth and sat up and took a drink of her beer. “I got choked for a second. I got to quit smoking one of these days.”

  “You all right?”

  “Yeah.” But he could feel the blood running under the Band-Aids, and when he looked, he could see it. He got up and stripped off the shirt and wadded it and threw it on the floor. The Band-Aids were peeling loose.

  “What happened to you?” she said.

  “Don’t worry about it. I’m just gonna get a bath cloth and wash it off. I’ll be right back.”