The Heaven of Mercury

by Brad Watson

  Junius stepped onto the porch, a stout man with an egg-shaped head gleaming in the porch light, toting a shotgun at the ready. When he saw Finus approaching at the edge of the grove by the highway, he hollered at the dogs to stop, raised the gun to a level above Finus’s head, and fired. He was a tough old man but he did not shoot to kill, he’d long ago had enough of killing. The gun was shooting dove load. One pellet dipped away from the rest like a dove itself and flew into Finus’s right eye. It felt like a grain of sand flung in a gale.

  After Finus stopped screaming and the dogs had been put up, Junius helped him into the house and laid him on the sofa in the parlor.

  Junius said, -Son, you’re lucky about that eye. He leaned forward to peer at it, then straightened up. -It don’t look so bad. I could’ve killed you if I’d wanted to. No riffraff is going to presume to win my son’s fiancée in a goddamn poker game.

  Finus, though in pain, managed to get out, -Well, sir, what about the fool who would put her up in the kitty?

  -Earl loses his temper, don’t think straight, Junius said. He sat in a chair next to the sofa, a stout man with a little tuft of graying hair on the top of his bald head, looking at Finus with small, glassy eyes.

  -It’s a bad marriage, Finus said. -She doesn’t know what she’s doing. He knows every one of those whores by name.

  -Hear tell it wasn’t just him by himself out there at Marie Suskin’s, speak of your attitudes toward females, Junius said. -My own opinion is every good woman could use a weekend in a whorehouse. And what was he to get if he won?

  -Just to keep her. I had him down.

  -Boy’s no gambler, Junius said.

  Junius left the room and came back in a minute with a cold wet rag for Finus’s eye. He sat down, produced a worn deck of playing cards, and began to shuffle them on the coffee table between them. Finus held the cold rag to his eye, which was throbbing now and still hurt like hell. There was a sound been digging at him, tic tic tic, and when Old Junius pulled his pocket watch from the fob pocket in his vest it got much louder, TIC TIC TIC TIC, and when he put it up it was back to tic tic tic. Finus stared at where the chain disappeared into the folded generosity of the vest around old Junius’s girth.

  -What kind of cards was y’all playing? Junius said.

  -Stud, Finus said. -I was winning.

  -Let’s see how you do with one eye then. He dealt onto the coffee table. -You win, I tell Earl a deal’s a deal and maybe he ought to think about calling it off, marry a woman better suited to him. I win, you buy me a drink next time we meet up in town and forget this foolishness.

  The vast absurdity of the whole situation just then swooped down on Finus, and he was aware of the old man patronizing him. He sighed, said, -You want to go that route, I’ve already won her.

  Junius ignored him, a placid look on his hamlike face. He dealt each of them two down and one up. Finus showed a two, Junius a queen.

  Finus looked at him. Junius was without expression. He dealt two more each, up. Finus had his two and an eight and a jack. Junius had his queen plus an ace and a seven. They checked their cards. Finus squinted his good eye, saw a queen and a three. A pain shot through to the back of his head and something throbbed on the top of it. He tapped the table. Heard a tic tic tic tic. Junius dealt them each two more facedown. Finus checked his last cards. A queen and a two. Pairs of queens and twos, then.

  -Just this hand? he said.

  Junius nodded.

  -Nothing to do but show them, then. Hearing in the silence that tic tic tic. He showed his two pair.

  Junius turned over his cards. Full house, three aces and a pair of queens.

  -All them queens, sitting pretty high in the deck.

  -Make it bourbon, old Junius said. He stood up to leave the room. -I’m hungry now.

  A car roared up into the yard outside and in a second Earl banged in the door, stood there lean and wild-haired, and pointed at Finus.

  -You son of a bitch, I’m going to kill you.

  -Let it go, now, son, Junius said. -Man knows he’s beaten.

  Earl looked at his father, then at Finus.

  -What happened to his eye?

  -I winged him, Junius said. -Now go outside and cool off. I’m handling this.

  Earl stood there staring at him, then at Finus, for a minute. Then turned around and went back outside.

  -Where is Birdie? Finus said to Junius then.

  -With her family, by the grace of God I suppose, Junius said. -Her mother took her back home this morning, didn’t want to spend her last night away from them. They’ll bring her over for the wedding tomorrow at noon. He took a half-smoked dead cigar from his jacket’s handkerchief pocket and lit it with a kitchen match. -With family is where she belongs, you ask me. Earl’ll never be happy with that girl.

  -Why don’t you just tell him that? Finus said.

  Junius puffed the cigar and waved the match out, tossed it into the fireplace.

  -Nobody could ever tell Earl anything, he said.

  In a little while Finus’s father came out in his car and took him to the hospital. He would keep the eye, they said, but it would be slightly defective, a spot or a blurry patch in its vision.

  -I won’t ever see properly again, Finus said.

  -You’ll see well enough, old Dr. Heath said. -You’re lucky. Man chases a woman into the path of a shotgun and comes out alive has got something to ponder. You ponder it, son.

  The afternoon after the incident, he awakened in the hospital to see his father standing at the foot of his bed, wearing his business suit with the watch chain hanging from the vest pocket, which caused him to sense a peculiar gloom. His father’s hair was slicked down as if he’d just arrived at the office and Finus could smell the hair oil. With his long bony nose he looked like an oiled blackbird. He pulled the chain and extracted his gold watch, looked at it. He put the watch back into his vest pocket, straightened the vest. Finus cocked his head to listen, but this watch was silent to his gauze-covered ears. In addition to the patch over his eye, the entire top of his head was wrapped in a bandage—he’d suffered a concussion when he was pitched from the car.

  -I’m going in to work, his father said. -You rest around the house, if you like, after you leave here. But don’t speak to me again until you can resolve not to act a damn fool in public. I’ll not tolerate that kind of behavior in my family.

  Finus started to protest, then just said, -Yessir.

  His father squeezed the bridge of his nose between finger and thumb for a moment, then released it. He looked out the hospital window, and seemed to Finus to have a sadness pass over his features. Outside the window it was a Saturday, and a few motor cars and some supply wagons in from the country passed by on the street, the shod hooves of the dray horses and mules clopping in the still, heated air. It was hay-cutting time, and where they had come from, where his father had grown up, tractors droned and mower blades clicked in the air domed high, blue-hazed, and empty.

  -Do you really love that girl? his father said.

  Just the question itself caused a wave of heat to rise from Finus’s spine into his aching head. He was haunted by the night at the Potato Ball, when he actually had her for a moment in thrall to the idea that he loved her, and that she should throw off Earl, and how he’d backed down. Jesus Christ! What had that been? What had caused him to hitch his emotions and blow his chance at happiness?

  -Yes, he said to his father, I think. He felt overwhelmed. -I don’t know what I think anymore.

  His father looked at him a long moment, made a face and looked away out the window.

  -I tell you, son, he said. -It doesn’t pay to bank too much on the rightness of one woman or another. It’s all a difficulty, in the long run. He looked at Finus, picked up his hat.

  -It’s not for me to tell you not to follow your heart, but I can point out this girl is simply not available to you. And you are still just a boy, whether you like the idea or not. I want you to go off to the university, make so
mething of yourself.

  Finus said nothing for a minute. Then said,

  -You know I’d rather just stay here and help you run the paper.

  -There’ll be plenty of time for that, you still want to after college.

  His father shook his head.

  -What about that girl you been seeing, now? What are you doing with that poor girl, if you’re so in love with this Birdie Wells?

  Finus frowned and looked away.

  -Well, what? his father said. -You think you can just jack people around like that, play with them like that?

  -I’m not doing that. We just run around together some, that’s all, he mumbled. The last thing he wanted to think about right then was Avis Crossweatherly, with her determined if low-key tendency to attach herself to his arm somehow whenever they all went out in a group, and often when he was planning to head somewhere alone.

  -Mind that’s all it is, then, his father said. -These things have a way of getting serious on a man before he’s aware of it. Especially if his head is lodged far up into his ass.

  He picked up his hat from the chair and walked out.

  Later that afternoon Avis Crossweatherly came into his room and stood at the foot of his bed. Though she was a tall girl with a narrow and somewhat flat face, hence the kangaroo jokes people made behind her back, she had a noble nose, which helped somewhat in close quarters to give her an odd kind of beauty. Though later Finus would think she’d never resembled her hard old father as much as she did in that moment. The old man was a self-made hardscrabble cattle trader whose only words to Finus when they would go out to his farm to ask his permission to marry (a moot point, her being a month or so along, pure ceremony) would be: -Have you any money in the bank, then? And when Finus said, -Yes, sir, a little, and business is pretty good, the old man nodded, said, -All right, then, and the two of them sat there on the porch for another ten minutes with the old man rolling cigarettes and smoking them and saying not another word until Finus got up, joined Avis, who’d been standing in the front yard holding her purse and pair of white cotton gloves in her hands, and left.

  At the hospital, Avis was wearing a green dress, a green hat, and her white gloved hands held the handle of her white leather purse before her. Finus, surprised to see her there, didn’t know what to say.

  -How are you feeling? she finally said.

  -Well enough. They say I’ll keep the eye.

  She stood there saying nothing, until Finus filled the silence and answered her unstated question with a lie about a bachelor party that got out of hand. Her face was like a nickel Indian’s set in stone.

  -Where was the party?

  -Out at Urquhart’s, he said. -We were shooting tin cans, drunk.

  She stared at him a minute.

  -Was Birdie there?

  He shook his head. -Home, getting ready for the wedding.

  In a moment, she nodded. Then she looked to see if the hospital-room door was closed, and walked over to his bedside.

  -I know how you feel about Birdie, she said.

  He didn’t reply, but looked away with his uninjured eye. He heard her sigh, and then in his good eye’s peripheral vision he saw her white-gloved hand reach over the hospital sheets, and to his astonishment he saw and felt it press gently against his groin, find his prick, and give it a gentle but firm squeeze. And what he couldn’t believe, in the context of the moment, was that under her strong fingers’ gentle pressure he responded like a bull at stud. He looked first at the hand, at the bulge of sheet beneath it that was himself, and then at her face, which wore an enigmatic expression of mischief and tenderness, something he’d never seen in Avis’s features before.

  -You’ll get over her, she said then. She brought her gloved hand back to its demure position on the handbag. -I’ll help you, if you like.

  It was a spell, in spite of his somewhat passive resistance, that would last through a strung-out period of dating some seven years in length, and through a long and unhappy marriage, and more than thirty years would pass before he would truly escape it. It was a moment that precipitated what he came to see as a long journey through a tangled wood, all as if in a semiconscious dream, a pretension of life. He would walk through it like a ghost, present but unaffecting of others, there but stirring no other’s blood aside from in memory, a softening shape about to molt and pass into what passed for the spirit, a free traveling current or pulse in the passage of time.

  Giddyup

  THE DAY BIRDIE WELLS gave in to Earl Urquhart, she and her friends had picnicked at the river in Finus Bates’s father’s old 90-T Overland. The car got stuck in a mud hole and trying to push them out Finus was covered head to toe, Pud up there trying to drive and slinging the mud all over him. Finus came around and hugged Birdie, shouted, -I love you, Birdie! and everybody laughed because she had mud on her clothes exactly in the shape of Finus Bates, according to Pud, and they all made him go back and jump in the river before they’d let him back in his own car to drive them home.

  Earl’s car sat parked on the lawn in front of the gallery at her house. Pud and Lucy jumped out and ran into the house, but Finus grabbed her arm and said, -Birdie don’t go in there. Let’s ride around a little longer.

  -Well I got to go in, she said, we were supposed to be home an hour ago. She turned to look at Finus sitting there behind the giant wheel of the Overland, looking like a pouting little boy. -Well maybe you do love me, she teased. -Are you jealous?

  -I am, Avis said, her arms crossed. Then she tried to smile. -I’m jealous you got a man like Earl Urquhart in there just waiting to see you.

  -Ooo, now, the others said, listen at Avis! Finus turned and gave Avis a curious look.

  Birdie jumped out, and they all waved and hollered to her as Finus drove them away, scowling, looking back at Birdie as she went up the porch steps.

  In the parlor Earl was dressed for Sunday, hair oiled and parted down the middle. He held a bunch of wildflowers she recognized from the patch they’d just driven by coming from the river. She’d even pointed them out and said Look how pretty, though it was just false dandelions. From the center of the yellow blossoms rose a stem of purple phlox he’d apparently found somewhere, and he didn’t seem to notice its sap leaking onto his fine suit pants. When he stood up to greet her she said, -Did you have an accident? He looked, flushed, and saw it was the flowers then and laughed. She liked him in that moment, shouldn’t have let on, for then he wouldn’t leave that day until she agreed to marry him, no matter how many times she said she didn’t want to, he was just crazy, followed her around the house, onto the porch, out back to the pasture where they kept the horse, would even have followed her down the woods path if she’d taken the chance and gone there. He was like a pesky fly or gnat in the shape of a man, swat and miss and he’s right back again. So finally it was almost like she promised to spend the rest of her life with him just to get rid of him for the time being.

  It was later that night when she was in bed and Mama came to stand in the door, looking at her in that way, that she realized what she’d done.

  Not long after that her grandfather, ancient one-armed white-bearded sweet Pappy, took her out into his garden, where he liked to walk with her and tell her stories. Everyone said the war had made him a little crazy, though she didn’t think so. There they were in the pale gloaming, supper done. He took hold of her arm and looked at her in that way that used to scare her, like he wasn’t looking at her but at something in his mind. -When I was a scout in the war, he said, one evening like this I came upon a Yankee soldier alone in the woods and laying on the ground.

  -What was he doing? she said.

  -Something un-Christian, Pappy said. He looked at her oddly. -I can’t tell you.

  -Was he hurting somebody, or something?

  -No, he was alone. He was committing a sin, is all I’ll say. But I could not blame him, it was war, though I thought it strange.

  Her scalp and the back of her neck prickled, though she dared not pursu
e it but vaguely. Suspected she shouldn’t. She could hardly believe Pappy was even telling this story.

  -Well what did you do?

  -I laid my musket down and knelt there to say a prayer for him. He was God’s child, though a Yank. Well when he was done sinning he looked up and seen me and jumped, but I had his musket laid next to mine. I said, Don’t be afraid, I won’t shoot you. I took him back to camp and they shipped him to a prison in Georgia after asking him some questions.

  -What kind of questions?

  -Oh, about his company, what he was up to.

  -Did you tell about what he was doing?

  -No, it was a private thing, I respected that. I said he’d been asleep.

  She could picture this Yankee soldier lying down on the forest floor and doing something to himself, something almost but not quite unimaginable. Her Pappy standing by, not her Pappy yet, a young man.

  -Well it’s a strange story, Pappy. I don’t understand it much.

  He looked away. Later she reckoned he was trying in his strange way to tell her something about men’s desires, how strong they could be, how they could be twisted into something awful, but in her family they simply didn’t have the words, trusted to God you might say for all that.

  She wouldn’t have known a thing about sex if it hadn’t been for Pud, four years younger than her but would try anything. Put herself to sleep every night giddyupping, she called it. Would put both hands down there and rub herself, and say, It feels so good!, not a care in the world what anyone would think. Pud, stop that! she would say, and Lucy would bury her face in the pillow, screaming in a funny way. But then Birdie caught not only Pud but Lucy herself doing it one night. Lucy! Of all girls. As soon as Birdie walked into the room and saw them, each in her own little bed, Lucy screamed and ran out of the house and into the yard, they had to go fetch her from the crook of a mimosa tree, sitting up there like a little skinny monkey, making mournful monkey sounds. They talked her down.