Joe

by Larry Brown

  “You come back,” he said.

  In the countryside by nights without the moon, there sometimes roamed an indigent, a recycled reject with eyes sifting the dark and sorting the scattered scents, walking beside deep hollows and ditches of stinking water. The hours he kept were usually reserved for the drunk and the sleeping. With his sloe-lidded eyes that in the daytime tried to hide from the sun, he spied treasures all over the land. No thing unlocked was safe from his grasp, he who could squat in the road and talk to the dogs and still their dying growls, all save one.

  With his myriad transactions he would convert these Troy-Bilt tillers and battery chargers and bugwhackers to a small amount of money and show up at the store wet to the knees and clamoring for Pepsi and peanuts, tomato juice and Alka-Seltzer. He went in on John Coleman one day with a fistful of food stamps. The old storekeeper was lying back against a pile of flour with a book in one hand and a cigar in the other. He had gone to sleep, and now came a crafty assassin and thief whose feet toed soundlessly over the worn and creaky boards. The hand with the cigar had come to rest against his stomach and he held the book to his chest, his snores long, sonorous, drafty. He’d once drunk three big Pepsis poured into a pot on a dare of not stopping and all but died from it, long before rumors of war, before the talk around his father’s store altered from general topics and became focused on one thing: war. He had been reading about the fallen on the field of Shiloh and about the retreat into the Hornet’s Nest and about the bullets in the orchard cutting the peach blossoms like falling snow. He could only shake his head over it, a war like that, that long ago. But he had been drinking that morning, as he did some or sometimes many mornings, and the heat and the beer and the book had done him in.

  Wade crept about the room and eyed the register warily, ready at any moment to assume the position of a customer just entered and just as surprised as the one he feared might wake. He reached out and tapped his knuckles on the glass pane of the candy case. He rapped three times. The slow sighing and tuneless whistling sawed through the air. He took two steps closer to the counter, then stood finally with his hand on it, regarding the merchant caught in his dreams. John Coleman’s neck was wrinkled like a turtle’s and a slow pulse beat steadily at the corner of his jaw. His glasses had fallen sideways on his nose and he appeared old, weak, vulnerable. But there against his leg lay an automatic pistol blued with rust, close to hand, the snout shiny with age and use. Wade put both hands in his pockets and nudged John’s foot with his toe. The eyes opened like a child’s with no sleep in them, and the first thing he did was straighten his glasses.

  “Ho,” he said, and he got up, the hand trailing the pistol now by his leg and behind the counter where it was placed in some strategic spot not known to anyone but himself.

  “I hate to wake you up,” Wade said.

  “I wasn’t asleep. Just had my eyes closed. What can I do for you?”

  “Aw, I just need to look, I reckon.”

  He was eyeing the shelves, gripping with his hand in his pocket the wad of food coupons he had taken off the dead black man. He looked over the shelves and noted what was there, the bags and boxes and brightly colored cans. Nothing was marked, for the old storekeeper kept the prices in his head. If he didn’t know the price he would immediately name one. He gave credit to the reliable and the unreliable alike, slow to ask for payment, didn’t really need it. On the pagan holiday a masked drunk stooped, smiling, behind the counter, wearing a plastic face, the lights out, hearing the tiny cautious steps outside the door, the cars idling, the parents watching as the little ones came inside. He always lit a coal-oil lantern and set it in the floor. To the young it gave an awesome quality to the room, small glints of shine on the shelves, fearsome shapes behind the stove. It was one of their favorite places to go. He’d hear them stop, hear them whisper to each other, gathering their courage. He’d let them say it three times before he leaped out with the flashlight, a white-haired frog with wings of hair on the sides of his head ratted up with a comb, cackling like an insane rooster. He loaded up their bags and they came back every year until they were too old to come in costume any more. And he would not even touch one of these that he had so badly desired to sire. He could only watch them grow from year to year, become men and women over and over, send their own inside for trick or treat.

  “What you need?” he said to Wade. He was sure now that the one rumored was in fact the same. There was no smile on his face, nothing but a hard glare.

  “Aw, I’m just lookin,” he said. He stepped to the shelf and hefted a can of Viennas. “How much?”

  “Fifty-five.”

  “Goddamn, you high, ain’t you?”

  “You don’t like the price go buy it somewhere else.”

  Wade got three cans. He got three packs of cigarettes. John saw that he was shopping and stepped behind the curtain and opened the refrigerator. There was a bottle of Jim Beam half full in there, and he tilted it out and took the cap off and turned a good drink down his throat. He stuck an eye to the crack in the curtain and watched Wade slide a flat tin of sardines down in his overall pocket. I got my goddamn eye on you, he said to himself. Then he got another drink. He wanted something to chase it with then, so he brought the whiskey out and set it on the counter and came around and went to the drink box. From an eye corner Wade watched him get a small green glass Coke, open it on the box and drink about half it. Then he watched him walk over to him and reach into his overalls and take out the sardines and put them back on the shelf.

  “You holler at me when you get through,” John said, and he went back behind the curtain. Wade stood stunned. He didn’t even try to use the food stamps. Half drunk like he was he just walked out the door.

  When John Coleman stuck an eye to the curtain there was nobody standing inside. He came on out. There was no money on the counter. He locked the register, then unlocked it and rang it open. The money was packed in there, stuffed tightly, the tens, the fives, the ones. He slammed it shut and locked it again and got his pistol and put it in his pocket and went outside. The screen door slapped shut behind him. He strode quickly between the whittled benches and past the square red tank coated with oil and insects, with the pump handle on top to dispense the kerosene, and stepped over the board the red sand was shoveled against and walked to the middle of the road and faced left. There was nothing beside the slow figure going down the road trying to open a can of Vienna sausages except two houses on the right and an abandoned one on the left and Mr. Frank’s barn that might or might not have a cow in it. He pulled the pistol from his pocket. Then he looked at the store.

  “Well shit,” he said. He rushed back inside. The whiskey was sitting on the counter where he’d left it. He rushed back outside. Wade had become a small target but an immobile one, his fingers holding each juicy sausage and moving them into his mouth rapidly. John Coleman in his sixty-sixth year jacked the action back on the Llama and let it fall to, slipped the safety and aimed. Nora Pinion, horrified suddenly, almost pulled up for some gas. Wade leaped when the first bullet furrowed the asphalt and droned off heavily into the catalpa trees on his left. He spun, and the second bullet sprayed his leg with supersonic grains of sand.

  “Goddamn,” he said. He could see the storekeeper, slightly squatted to steady his drunken hand, drawn down on him at the top of the hill. He raised his hands and everything fell out from under his arms. He hadn’t thought to get a sack. The voice drifted down to him, slow, clear: “You bring that stuff back up here.”

  Wade gathered his purloined goods with one hand, one hand in the air. He wanted no misunderstandings. By the time he got back up to the top of the hill, John had put the pistol away. He held the door open for Wade and Wade marched to the counter and put two cans of Vienna sausage and three packs of crackers on the counter, the crackers broken, crumbled inside the cellophane, not desirable but edible.

  John Coleman walked behind the counter and unlocked the register. He stared across until Wade unloaded the cig
arettes.

  “Don’t come back in here,” he told him.

  The word traveled fast, it seemed. One fine morning the boy woke on the quilt he used for a bed and lay turned on his back to hear the live things around him: the wasps buzzing busily overhead in the hot air in their obscure comings and goings; the jays outside his window screaming their curses to the squirrels that shook the branches and the dew from them as they scurried about; the far-off voices of other birds deep in the woods and the high thin piping of tree-frogs so loud and ventriloquistic they could never be found. The sun was shining on him through the window and it became too hot to sleep any more.

  He got up and put on his clothes and went through the house. The little girl lay like one shot dead, and his father and his mother were nowhere to be seen. In the pie safe and on shelves nailed together from boards there were cans of soup, dry rice, Granola bars. He got a Granola bar with raisins and almonds and munched it while scratching himself and wondering where his parents could be.

  Going down the road later in the hot morning sun, he passed a field of hay being baled. There was a flatbed truck inching along the rows of hay, and men were walking beside it throwing the bales up to another man who stacked them behind the cab against a high wooden wall. He stopped in the dusty roadside weeds to watch them labor. Already the heat made the toiling figures hazy and vague in the distance. He could hear faint cries, the revving of the truck motor from time to time. The baler was working along with a steady drumlike sound, the red machinery pushing each bale out in stages until it leaned toward the ground and fell off the chute and another appeared behind it to follow.

  He lifted a finger and drew it across the beaded sweat on his brow and flung it to the ground. He saw what looked like a boy his age and studied him. The boy was having trouble with the bales. Twice he saw him drop them. Once he broke the strings on one and the man on the truck yelled down something to him. They moved in a palpable mist of heat under a disastrous sun amid clouds of chaff. Gary tossed his can sack into the ditch and stepped down after it. He found a sagging place in the wire and stepped over the top strand.

  He had to follow the truck for a while because it didn’t stop at first. On the ground were two old black men and the white boy. A white-haired man at least sixty was on the bed of the truck. A hard unfriendly face, a visage carved from burnt leather looked out from under a shredded-straw cowboy hat that held his face in shade. Gary kept trying to talk to him, but he kept looking around and going back to catch the bales. Finally Gary ran and caught the back end of the truck and swung himself up onto it. The old man leaned around and hollered into the window and the truck stopped.

  They all turned and looked at him. They had on long-sleeved shirts and gloves. Their faces were encrusted with bits of hay and they were wet with sweat. The boy he’d been watching was red in the face and looked ready to drop. It looked as though they were putting on the first load.

  The old man was chewing tobacco and now he leaned his head over the side of the truck and spat and hit the webs of his thumbs together twice in the gloves. He didn’t look happy.

  “What you want?” he said.

  “You need any help?”

  The old man looked dubious. He leaned back against the wall of hay and looked out over the field. Most of it was still in long raked piles all over the ground.

  “I reckon we can handle it. Throw that damn bale up here, Bobby. What you waitin on?”

  The boy on the ground had been listening. He was chubby and soft-looking. He bent and grunted up with the bale and said, “Well, you stopped.” He just barely got it up over the edge of the bed and with a herculean effort at that.

  “I’ll be goddamned,” the old man said.

  A sharp voice inside the truck said a name.

  “Well, any damn body fourteen year old ought to be able to pick up a bale of hay. Give it here.” He snatched the bale off the bed and threw it over his head into place and then glared down at the boy. The boy wasn’t looking at him. He was walking ahead. The two ancient blacks were each standing beside a bale but the old man didn’t yell at them. They were both older than he was. One of them had a solid white eye and wore glasses, the lens cracked over the bad eye as if in simultaneous injury.

  “I just thought you might need some help,” Gary said. “Didn’t figure it’d hurt nothin to ask.”

  “You ever hauled any hay?”

  “Yessir. I’ve hauled a good bit.”

  “Where at? Who for?”

  “Well,” he said. “I ain’t never hauled none around here. I’ve hauled a bunch in Texas. I hauled all one summer down there.”

  The old man worked his cud and looked at Gary’s thick little arms and legs.

  “Can you throw one up on the truck?”

  “Yessir.”

  “Let’s see you throw one then.”

  He got off on the side of the truck and walked to the bale nearest him. He bent his legs and muscled the bale up against his chest and walked to the truck with it. It was seventy or eighty pounds, felt like. He tossed it up over the side onto the stack and all the old man had to do was hit it on the side and settle it straight. He looked down on him.

  “How old are you?”

  “Fifteen, I reckon. I’m just little for my age.” He was looking up and shading one hand against the sun in his eyes.

  “You gonna work in that?” He was pointing to the black T-shirt Gary was wearing.

  “Yessir. I ain’t got no other shirt with me. It don’t matter.”

  “That hay’ll stick you.”

  “It’s all right. I’ve hauled in a short-sleeve shirt before.”

  “You ain’t got no gloves.”

  He worked his fingers open and closed once. “My hands is tough,” he said.

  “Well.” He called down to one of the black men: “Come on, Cleve.” Then: “All right. Get over here on the left and maybe you can help this boy keep up. We done had to crank the baler out twice cause he couldn’t pick em up.”

  “Yessir. Thank you.” He walked behind the truck and the old man leaned around the hay. “Let’s go,” he said. The gears clashed as it went into first and the truck started rolling. Gary walked fast alongside it and hurried on to the next bale, going by the fat boy who barely got his on before the truck moved past. When it came by Gary he handed a bale up to the old man. When he went by the cab again, he saw a woman with a straw hat behind the wheel, a brown stain of snuff on her chin. She had both hands in a desperate clench on the wheel, with the truck crawling about two miles an hour. The old man cursed every time the fat boy tried to put one up.

  “How much does hay haulers make in Texas?” he said.

  Gary handed another one up to him and he turned and stacked it. “It just depends,” he said. “Who you work for. I worked with a bunch of Mexicans one day and got two cents a bale. I never did go back and work for that fellow no more, though.”

  “Well,” he said. “I pay a nickel a bale and dinner. That all right with you?”

  “Yes sir,” he said. He could already envision the feast. “How much we gonna haul today?” He was working and hurrying and throwing the bales up while they were talking.

  “They’s another field down yonder,” the old man shouted. “Other side of that creek. See yonder?”

  Gary looked. He could see a pale green square of flattened grass shimmering in the distance.

  “We got another truck comin after dinner and three more hands,” he said. “We gonna haul till dark if we can. You think you can stand it?”

  “I can stand it,” Gary said. The baling twine had already made deep red lines in his palms. He hurried ahead and picked up a bale and stood waiting with it.

  “Uh uh,” the old man called. He put it down.

  “Now see there. You havin to pick it up twice. Don’t pick it up till the truck gets to you. Wait on the truck.”

  “Yessir.”

  “Now, come on with it.”

  He tossed it up.

  �
�I thought you said you’d hauled before.”

  “I have. It’s just been a while.”

  “How much of a while?”

  “Aw. A year or two.”

  “Well. It’s all the same. In Texas or Missippi. All you got to do’s put it on the truck.”

  He walked past the other boy and stopped beside him just as he was starting up with a bale. He was bent over from the waist, his back bowed.

  “Use your legs,” he said.

  The boy looked at him. He was white around the mouth.

  “What?”

  “Use your legs. Don’t pick it up with your back. Look here.”

  He bent over a bale with his forearms resting on his thighs. “See here?” He raised the bale with his arms like a weightlifter doing a curl and straightened his legs at the same time. When he came erect the bale was at chest level. When the truck passed he threw it up.