Joe

by Larry Brown

  He stepped into the bathroom and took a washcloth from the clean pile of towels in a chair and soaked it in hot water and washed the blood off again. It looked as if the wounds had scabbed over lightly once, but he’d torn them loose messing with the dog and with her. Now they bled freely, clear fluid seeping with the blood. She came to stand beside him and watch him watching himself in the mirror. His face was on backwards and the part in his hair on the wrong side. It made his face look twisted. She touched his shoulder. There was a Polaroid picture lying on the vanity and she picked it up and looked at it. Somebody who looked a little like him, only twenty years younger, with the sides of his head almost shaved, in a coat and a tie, holding a pretty girl in a white dress by the arm. Old happiness ingrained on their faces as they smiled at the camera, the future a bright promise on that day long ago.

  “This is your wife,” she said. She touched the picture almost reverently and put it back down. Then she moved it, so it wouldn’t get wet, as if that time could be preserved by the image of its past existence.

  “Was. Has it stopped?”

  She looked at his neck, at his arms.

  “Yeah,” she said. “I think it has.”

  “Good. I ain’t got no more Band-Aids, anyway. I was gonna go uptown after some but I never did go. I had me a few drinks and laid down. I should’ve went on.”

  “You want me to go get you some?”

  “Naw, hell. I don’t guess. If I could just get it to quit bleedin it’d be all right. What was it you wanted to ask me?”

  “Nothin,” she said quietly. “It don’t matter.”

  “Hell, tell me.”

  “We just thought you might want to go out. She’s wanting to meet Randy. We thought you might know where he is. He wasn’t at home.”

  “You didn’t have to come back here to ask me where he is. What else you want?”

  She turned away from him and looked out at the black night beyond the back door. The little shed and the junk scattered around it were illuminated in the cold glow from the yard light.

  “Frank’s back. I don’t want to stay at Mama’s.”

  He stopped what he was doing and looked at her. Looked at her hair and her back and her tight jeans.

  “I thought she run him off.”

  “She did. Two times. He called her beggin the other night and she told him he could come back if he’d leave me alone. He promised. I got my stuff and left.”

  “Why don’t she just shoot the son of a bitch?”

  “Aw, she says it ain’t his fault and all this shit. Says I go around in front of him half naked and he can’t help it. Every time I go in a room I look around and he’s right behind me.”

  “He’s wanting to fuck you.”

  “Hell. I don’t know what for. You just as liable to walk in the door and catch em on the couch going at it as not. I’m sick of it. Sick of her, too.”

  He stepped back into the bedroom to pick up his drink but it wasn’t in there. He got another drink of her beer.

  “Well, they’s another room here. You still work up at that cleaners?”

  She turned around with her hands in her pockets.

  “Yeah. I wouldn’t need it long. Just till I save some money and get me an apartment. Or a trailer. I won’t be no trouble. I won’t tell her where I am.”

  He shook his head. “Shit. She’ll know where you at.”

  “Who’s gonna tell her?”

  “Don’t nobody have to tell her. She’s called over here before looking for you. Wanting to know if I’d seen you.”

  “What do you tell her?”

  “I don’t tell her nothing because I don’t figure it’s none of her damn business. Hell, you’re twenty-one, ain’t you?”

  “Three more months.”

  “Well. You old enough to where you can do what you want to.”

  “He’s liable to come over here.”

  He laughed. “I hope to hell he does. I don’t know why your mama supports the sorry son of a bitch. Long as I’ve known him he ain’t never held a job. I put my old lady through a lot of shit but I always had a job. She’d have put me down pretty damn quick if I hadn’t.”

  She’d been standing in the hall talking to him and now she came in and sat on the bed. She leaned up and got her beer and held it between her knees with both hands, watching him going through the closet.

  “I don’t want to get you in any trouble,” she said.

  “You ain’t gonna get me in no trouble. You got a car, ain’t you?”

  “Yeah. That’s mine out there.”

  “You got to carry her back home tonight?”

  “Cathy? Naw. She’s got her car uptown. I just have to take her to town.”

  He found another old shirt and put it on and closed the closet door.

  “Why don’t you let me ride up there with you, then, drop her off and take me to the drug store? I got to get some stuff to put over this. I’ll ruin my sheets and everything else. All my shirts.”

  “You got it,” she said. She got up from the bed and went to him. “I didn’t know nobody else to ask.”

  “Hell, it’s all right. You welcome to stay over here.”

  She kissed him, but he just patted her on the ass and gently pushed her away.

  When they got out to the car, he made the other girl get in the back seat with the dog.

  “Y’all start coming over here regular,” he said, “you better get to know him.”

  They went back by Henry’s for the deer meat, but she wouldn’t go in. Cars and trucks were wedged against each other in the tiny yard with no possibility of exit for those hemmed in against the porch. They sat in the dark on the front seat for a few minutes while he tried to identify the vehicles of enemies who might have reason to challenge him in his weakened state.

  “I won’t be but a few minutes,” he said. It was more like thirty. But later, in bed, he told her that he couldn’t go in and not speak to anybody. He didn’t tell her that he’d taken three hundred and twenty dollars out of the game during the time he was there. He didn’t tell her about the eyes that shifted in the smoke when he walked in, the shadowed figures and drinkers spread out along the walls who paused in the moment a hush fell over the room. They saw him bleeding from the four holes and not a man asked the cause of his ills when he squatted with the money and the dice in the circle of light on the floor, the old boards and dust, the false teeth in his head gleaming like bones and his eyes bright with pain and liquor. He won the money and nobody asked him to stay and try to lose some of it back. But he thanked Henry for the tenderloin and even tried to pay him for it.

  She was on her side now, breathing lightly and slowly with the glow from the yard lights coming through the crack in the curtain. Her long brown hair spilled in a rush over the pillow and under her back. He pulled his deadened arm out from under her neck carefully, and she mumbled something and drew up into a ball. He didn’t wake her getting up.

  The dog raised his head from where he lay on the carpet in a dim pool of light. Joe didn’t turn the lamp on. He turned on the television and left the sound low and groped around in the half dark until he found the whiskey bottle and propped it between his legs on the couch. The dog lowered his head to his forepaws and lay still on the floor. The red glow of Joe’s cigarette lived and died in the darkened living room. And the next morning she found him there, naked, sprawled beneath the faded bedspread like those revelers of old in cracked paintings whose names or makers she’d never known, would never know.

  The boy was up and about with first light, creeping softly among the sleeping members of his family. He collected the scattered and crushed beer cans from where they lay in whatever places they’d been thrown and carried them outside and added them to the growing pile. The squirrels at the fringes of the yard clattered the pine bark with their claws at the sight of him and hid themselves on the off sides of the trees before clambering away over branches still wet from the rain. He was soaked to the knees after one trip throu
gh the yard. Beggar-lice clung to the cloth of his jeans in mats. He stepped back inside long enough to take just one of the frosted cakes from inside the safe. He looked at it for a moment. His little sister was in the corner next to Fay with a fishing seine thrown over her, her thin dirty legs drawn up almost to her chest, her hair in lumps of dust and spiderwebs and the tiny turds of mice. He took another package of the cakes out and went to her and eyed the old man in deep hibernation on the bed of leaves he’d made. The father had spent a half day gathering the leaves and had enlisted the little girl to help haul them up from the hollow in garbage bags recycled from the county Dumpsters. Don Shelby would shoot to kill if he could find them now. Fay was flat on her back with her head on one side, her hand drawn up over her eyes as she rocked and moaned through the bad dreams she made in her mind.

  He shook his little sister until she woke. She seemed startled to see him there. With a finger to his lips for caution he showed her what he had in his hand and then slipped the little cellophane package beneath her minnow net and stood up and made motions with his hands. She stared dully at him, uncomprehending. But when he went out the door, she was sitting up and tearing softly at the plastic with her fingers, a silent child.

  A path led down through pine woods. It was an old path in which needles had settled over the years, just the faintest impression of a trail. Soon he was out of sight of the house and treading quickly past an old cairn of rocks that he’d already dug among and abandoned. Such an abundance of squirrels fled before him that he wished for a gun to help stave off starvation. Some of them didn’t know what he was and clung to the sides of the trees, barking like tiny dogs. To these he held out a finger and said pow silently. They inverted themselves and stood head-first and watched him go, their black eyes bright and hypnotic after him. He went down to the creek and stepped into the rock beds, where a thin trickle of water coursed musically over the shattered stones and fell from bench to bench ever lower into the hollow. A weak sun was trying to break through the tattered clouds. He probed into the clay banks with a long stick, testing for snakes, watchful of where he put down his feet. He’d seen the copperheads before, dull slow things brown as the leaves they pressed their cold bellies against, no more noticeable than the bark of one tree in a forest of trees. His eye caught a flicker of movement ahead and he walked closer to see a box turtle with patterns of yellow sunbursts on its back like the imprint of a kaleidoscope. He tapped the stick on its shell and watched the legs and head shoot inward and the door on the front of the lower shell come up like a drawbridge and close with a long slow hiss. He went on.

  At the bottom of the hollow he turned west, keeping his feet out of the wet ground that seeped moisture in a wide track, going along beside it to a narrow wash that even in summer’s months was never dry. He could see the springhouse now and he walked on up to it, a ramshackle structure long rotted and all but obliterated by wind, sun, rain and time. The delicate latticework lay soft with mold on the ground, the posts that once held the roof leaning inward across the pool. The boy knelt on one of the three wide flat stones covered with lichen and green with moss. From the center of the spring came a soft undulation that rippled the surface gently and kept grains of sand in motion, ceaselessly turning and resettling on the clean bottom. He bent and touched his lips to the water, much the way some foraging animal might. It was sweet with a faint taste of iron and so cold it made his teeth ache. There were two six-packs of beer in the bottom of the spring, the blue of Busch slightly distorted beneath. He drank again and caught his breath and then wiped his mouth and sat up and crossed his legs on the stone. The cake was a little stale, the icing partly melted from where he’d held it in his hand. He ate his breakfast slowly, looking around at the birds flitting and singing in the awakening woods. The spring sang to him a low and throaty warble. He wiped his hands on his pants when he’d finished and knelt once more and drank, then stood up and turned and stepped away from the spring.

  There was a little white marble marker set in a clearing fifty yards away, a place kept free of vines and creepers for reasons he didn’t know. Fan-shaped plants with thick green blades like knives were planted in a circle around the grave. He stood there and looked at it for a while. The marker was no bigger than a cereal box. He wondered why they’d chosen to bury him here, alone with the animals and the snakes and the deep green shade. Maybe only John Edward Coleman knew, ten years old for an eternity, dead and asleep with the worms these seventy-nine years. Perhaps he’d played here. Or died here. An old man now, Gary thought. If he’d lived that long.

  He’d brought his little sister down and showed it to her and told her it was a grave and that there was somebody buried here, but she’d only looked at it. He could remember a time when she’d talked, but it had been a long time now since she’d said anything. If she cried there were only tears. In happiness only a smile played from her mouth. And few of those here lately.

  He walked on, wandering aimlessly. He jumped a deer once, but there was only the brief flash of a long white tail bounding away through the trees and then it was gone. The timber here was second growth and sparse, not like what was close to the house. Fire had swept over it a long time ago, yet some of the trunks were still blackened. He came out on a bluff that overlooked a section of cane and thickets, the low tops showing in the distance more timber and a lazy coil of black smoke from a house somewhere just beginning its burn to the ground. Along the edge he walked, stopping to run his hands over the old knife scars of names and dates healed almost unreadable in the bark of a giant beech riddled with squirrel dens and half toppling out over the void below. A hollow tree, it was once burned on the inside by squirrel hunters, the flames from the bed of leaves running up it like fire within a flue. He looked up into the top branches. A fat coon stared down at him from a fork, then put its hands over its eyes and turned away, an obscure lump of fur residing most peacefully this fine spring morning.

  He walked a fallen log on the ground and then walked it again, holding his hands out from his side and then stepping down. He turned.

  They emerged slowly in the distance through the slanted trunks and matted tangles of briers, slashing doggedly at the trees and the nets of vegetation hung like the giant webs of spiders across their paths. Faint cries could be heard. They were a group of seven or eight black men, with their shirts tied around their waists, some with flashing silver tubes in their hands and some with bright orange, all of them spread out arms’ width apart and traveling slowly to the trees, then around and around them, stabbing and slashing. He sat down on the log and watched them come. When they were almost abreast of him, he could see that there was one who moved among them holding plastic jugs in his hands, attending to them when they called out. They were shouting back and forth to one another things he couldn’t make out, only a word now and then. Then, as he watched, the one nearest him threw up his hands and screamed. They all ran at first, scattering in all directions, but then they came back cautiously, tiptoeing over the wet leaves until they congregated at one spot on the ground and drew close in a circle and then with short cries and hysterical abandon began hacking and beating the spot with their sticks and poison guns, darting in and out like dogs on a bayed bear. They were all talking and shouting at the same time, a hoarse chorus of curses that echoed and disturbed greatly the solitude of the woods, and they seemed frantic in their fear of whatever lay so helpless in the face of this ferocious attack. Demented John Henrys beating something into the ground. When they finished with it they seemed still reluctant to approach too closely. One of the men thrust at the thing with a long stick and picked it up, and the boy could see the white belly of the snake rolled over on the stick and the twin lengths of its body hanging down either side. They shouted. The man flung it down and they beat it some more, the sticks whacking on the ground in relentless unison and sounding strangely hollow on the earth. They dragged it around on the ground some more and pushed its head into the dirt until they seemed to be satisfied that i
t was dead.

  The boy sat watching them on the log and wondered at what they were doing in the woods. There seemed to be no logical purpose to their work. They were still grouped in a cluster, lighting cigarettes and jabbering loudly. Some of them had even squatted down when a white man came up behind them and said something. They turned and he said something else and came over to them. They pointed to the snake. He looked at it and stepped closer and took hold of its tail and pulled it out and studied it. He said something and they laughed. Now they began to stand up one by one and throw the cigarettes down and disperse back into their loose ranks. The man stood with his hands on his hips watching them and fished a cigarette from his pocket and lit it. With his hand on a tree he leaned and watched them go past. The boy could see a little white cloud of smoke hanging around his head, the grips of a pistol sticking out of his back pocket.

  The man turned when he heard the boy coming down the bluff and he waited until he’d reached the bottom and made his way over to him.

  “Hey,” Gary said.

  The man nodded, still leaning against the tree, studying him. There was a look of tolerant amusement about him. He wore a black cap with CAT written across it in yellow letters. He had a big diamond ring on one finger.