The Heavenly Table

by Donald Ray Pollock

  “Hard to say,” Cane said. “At least the bleeding’s stopped for now. That’s the main thing.” He stood up and took a drink from the whiskey bottle, then passed it to Chimney.

  “What about the bullet?”

  “It’ll have to stay. We start diggin’ around for it, we might make things worse.”

  “Well, I don’t reckon it matters much. Hell, Bloody Bill carried fifteen or twenty around inside him, and it didn’t hurt him any.”

  Cane was quiet for a moment, then said, “You do know somebody just made him up, right?” It was a question he’d thought of asking several times over the last couple of weeks, whenever his brother spoke of Bloody Bill as if he were a real person, but he’d kept putting it off, partly because he feared what Chimney’s answer might be, and partly because he wasn’t sure it made any difference in the long run anyway.

  “Course I do,” Chimney replied, handing the bottle back. “I’m not that fuckin’ stupid. Still don’t mean it can’t be true. The ol’ boy that wrote the book had to get his ideas somewhere.” He sat down and leaned his back against the wall, looked over at Cob passed out flat on his back on the floor, breathing loudly through his mouth. “You and me was lucky, wasn’t we?”

  “What, that we didn’t get shot?”

  “No,” Chimney said, “that we weren’t born like him. I mean, hell, even if he lives, he don’t have much to look forward to, does he?”

  “I don’t know,” Cane said. “Before the old man died, he was probably the happiest one of us.”

  “Only thing that proves is how dumb he is.”

  Cane shook his head and took another drink, then capped the bottle. He debated if he should remind Chimney that the only reason they were in this predicament in the first place was because he’d insisted on stealing a few cans of beans instead of paying for them, but decided that keeping the peace was more important right now. And besides, if Cob lived through the night, tomorrow Chimney would probably be bragging on him for being such a tough bastard. “Well, what about you?” Cane asked. “What is it you look forward to if we get away with this?”

  “Me?” Chimney said. “I’m gonna drink and fuck and carry on for ten or fifteen years, then meet me some nice girl and settle down. Maybe have a couple brats.”

  “Ten or fifteen years?”

  “Sure,” Chimney said. “Shit, I’m only seventeen.”

  “Well, that’s true.”

  “How about you?”

  Cane hesitated. He was sure his brother wouldn’t understand what he looked upon as a life worth having, but what did it matter? Hell, they could all be dead tomorrow, and all of their dreams gone with them. Pulling a cigar from his pocket, he lit it, then said, “I remember one night we was walkin’ through this town with Pap. I think it was in Tennessee. I was maybe fifteen, I reckon. Cold, rainy ol’ night. We were hungry as hell, been on the move all day. We passed by this big house that was all lit up inside, and I saw a man leaned back in an easy chair with his feet propped up by a fire. And on the wall behind him was more books than I ever imagined there was in the world. Rows of ’em. Then some woman came into the room and—”

  “What’d he do then?” Chimney asked. “I bet he fucked her, didn’t he?”

  “No, it wasn’t like that.”

  “So was she too old or ugly or what?”

  “Like I said, it wasn’t like that,” repeated Cane, regretting now that he’d even mentioned it in the first place.

  “What the fuck?” Chimney said. “A bunch of books and some puss walkin’ in on ye? That’s as crazy as Cob and his heavenly table horseshit. I don’t know about you sometimes, brother.” He moved over to the empty window frame and peered out at the dark tree line across from the house. “Better go ahead and get ye some sleep. Sounds like you need it. I’ll keep the first watch.”

  Cob came to the next morning, a bit surprised that he wasn’t still on his horse. He tried to raise up, but he’d never felt this tired in his life. He saw Cane sitting on a warped and splintered wood floor covered with dust and grit and purplish balls of coon scat, his back leaned against the wall, reading one of the newspapers Chimney had taken from the store. A small pile of feathers from where a bird had been eaten by some animal lay over by the entrance to the other room. “Where are we?” he asked.

  Cane looked up. “Some old house we found.” He set the paper aside and picked up a canteen.

  “So them men quit chasin’ us?”

  “Maybe,” Cane said. “We ain’t sure yet.” He held the canteen to Cob’s lips with one hand and lifted his head with the other.

  “Where’s Chimney?” Cob asked after he had drunk his fill.

  “I’m right here,” Chimney said. Swiveling his head to the left, Cob saw his other brother squatted down, looking out the front window. Beside him was the rifle they had stolen from the storekeeper. Other guns had been placed on either side of the door, and a wad of bloody rags was tossed in the corner.

  “How long we been here?” Cob said.

  “Since last night.”

  “Boy, when I first woke up, I thought for sure we was back at the shack on the Major’s place.”

  “Yeah,” Cane said, glancing around. “I guess it does have the same ambiance.”

  “Ambiance? I’ve heard that word before, ain’t I?”

  “Sure you have,” Cane said. “Remember that line in the book about Bloody Bill? Talkin’ about the sportin’ house? ‘The elegant, subdued ambiance of the gilded room was—’ ”

  Then Chimney, still staring out the window, cut in and finished the sentence: “ ‘…suddenly shattered by the forced entry of a lustful, liquor-soaked Bloody Bill, his side-arms rattling in their tooled-leather holsters and his gold tooth gleaming in the light from the candelabras like the rarest of Satan’s jewels.’ ”

  “What the heck does ‘gilded’ mean?” Cob asked.

  “Well, I think it’s like ‘shiny,’ ” Cane said. Then he remembered the story he’d come across in the paper. “Hey, listen to this.” He commenced to reading aloud about a night watchman in Savannah who claimed that he fired six rounds point-blank into one of the Jewett Gang, the chubby one with the moon head, and watched as the criminal laughed them off as if the bullets weren’t any more lethal than mosquito bites or the good-night kisses of some sweet, innocent child.

  “Damn, I wish it were so,” Cob said, craning his neck to look down at his throbbing leg.

  “Jesus Christ, we never been within a hundred miles of there our whole lives,” Chimney complained. He walked from his post at the window over to the coffee pot sitting at the edge of the fireplace. Although Cane was usually against risking the smoke of a fire when they had men trailing them, Chimney had let him sleep all night, and he didn’t have the heart to tell him no when he said he’d like a cup of coffee. “And where do they get the rest of that bullshit? Skeeter bites. Fuck, look at him. He’s lucky that ol’ boy back there couldn’t shoot worth a damn or we’d probably be a-plantin’ him right about now.”

  After that, they lapsed into silence, listened to the snake slither around inside the walls. Cob dozed off again and Chimney went out to check on the horses. Cane opened the newspaper, and on the third page he found an article about German soldiers roasting young children over a spit for their dinner in some place called Belgium. He shook his head when he finished reading it. At least he and his brothers weren’t the only ones being lied about.

  28

  JASPER CAME INTO the Blind Owl right after Pollard opened up and stood by the door with his hand on the handle. “What the fuck do you want?” the bartender asked. He was wiping out some glasses with a rag he’d blown his nose in a few minutes ago, setting them on a shelf under the bar. Unlike the cook who strives to maintain a semblance of cleanliness in his kitchen for the most part, but occasionally can’t resist sticking a dead fly or two in some whiny customer’s meal, Pollard didn’t discriminate; in one way or another, he passed on a taste of his grossness to each and every o
ne of his patrons.

  “It’s about your outhouse,” Jasper said. “It’s runnin’ clear over in Mrs. Grady’s yard, it’s so full.”

  “Had a couple boys in here last night had the flux,” Pollard replied. “They musta filled it up.”

  “That’s what you said last week,” said Jasper.

  “So?” Pollard said. “I can’t help it they came back. What do you want me to do, start turning payin’ customers away just cause they got the runs?”

  “Well, you got one week to get it cleaned up, or the city’s gonna take action.”

  “What the hell’s that supposed to mean?”

  “I told ye before, they’re gonna start fining ye,” Jasper said. “Three dollars a week.”

  Pollard’s fat face turned crimson and he threw the rag down, started to come around the end of the bar. “I’ll tell ye what, you little bastard, you turn me in, I’ll—”

  “Mrs. Grady’s already done that,” Jasper blurted out. “I’m just deliverin’ the message.” Then he fled out the door and sprinted a block down the street before he slowed down. He hadn’t trusted Pollard since the night a few years back when Itchy brought him to the Blind Owl to buy him his first beer, and then proceeded to get loaded himself, as if it were his birthday and not Jasper’s. He’d always felt guilty about leaving the old man there that night, but he could hardly keep his eyes open after finishing off the second mug of First Capital somebody forced upon him; and besides that, within minutes of their arrival, Itchy had started pursuing a gray-haired crone dressed in a long shift sewn together out of a couple of mismatched parlor curtains. The next day, when he didn’t show up to help clean Mrs. Fetter’s johnny out, Jasper went on the hunt of him. Not finding him at home, he walked down to the bar and asked Pollard if he had any idea where he might have gone.

  The barkeep had glanced up briefly from the newspaper he was reading, then turned a page. “I think he left with that ol’ hag he was playin’ kissy-face with.”

  “Any idy where she lives?”

  “No, but from the looks of her, I’d say she lives under a bridge somewhere. Like one of them trolls. Hell, she might be cookin’ him up in a pot right now, though I can’t imagine that ol’ fucker would be very tasty.”

  “Well, what time you figure—” Jasper started to ask.

  “Jesus Christ, you little shit, I’m not his goddamn babysitter,” Pollard yelled. “Now, unless you want a drink, get the fuck out of here and quit botherin’ me.”

  After checking the rest of Itchy’s usual haunts, Jasper had gone back and finished the job at Mrs. Fetter’s. He didn’t have any choice, really; the woman’s daughter was getting married over the weekend, and they had promised that the shithouse would be in tip-top shape for the guests. Just by luck, Paint Street was closed off at the paper mill because of a gas leak, and the only way to get through to the dump with Gyp and the honey wagon was to take the alley that ran behind the Blind Owl. And that’s how he finally found Itchy, an old tarp slung over him and beaten to a pulp just a few feet from the bar’s back door. Jasper had taken him back to his own house, put him to bed in his mother’s old room. Doc Hamm did his best to patch him up, but it was touch and go there for a while. For the entire four days he was unconscious, Jasper never left his side except to feed and water Gyp. And then, on the fifth morning, the old man opened his eyes and asked for a drink of water. He never did remember anything about that night, though Jasper was fairly certain he knew what had happened, and it didn’t have anything to do with a troll camped out under a bridge.

  After the sanitation inspector delivered the warning and ran out the door, Pollard locked up and went to the back room to check on the man he’d had chained to the floor next to his cot for the past four days. He’d pried his nose off with a bottle opener an hour ago; and he sat down on the bed and told him it wouldn’t be much longer, that he was going to finish him off with an axe tonight. He went on talking, though he wasn’t sure the man was capable of listening anymore. “You make number seven,” Pollard said. “A lot of people consider that a lucky number, but I bet they’d change their minds if they saw you right now, wouldn’t they?” He lingered awhile longer, eating a can of bully beef while he looked over his work. Then he went back out front, served a few drinks to some winder boys getting primed to start the second shift over at the paper mill.

  As far as the man in the back room went, he’d been beyond caring after the second day in the chains. His name was Johansson, and he was a carpenter from Indiana who specialized in fine joinery and loved to square dance, but after tonight, he would just be a pile of dumb pieces. Around three or four in the morning, Pollard would bag up everything he wasn’t keeping and carry it over to Paint Creek. Standing on the bank shaking out the bloody burlap sacks and watching the slop float away in the dark water, he would picture some of it making it via the Ohio all the way to Cairo, Illinois, and from there down the Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico, the soft parts eventually passing through a hundred fish guts, the bones scattered perhaps as far as the cold, deep Atlantic. And for just a few minutes, with the stars ticking in his ears like bombs and the air rubbing against his skin like sandpaper, he would find himself slowly building to an ecstatic orgasm, as if some beautiful angel was reaching down out of the heavens and touching him with a knowing hand in all the right places.

  29

  THE POSSE FROM Russell, their horses wrung out and the last of their liquor gone and the storekeeper getting on their nerves with his countless retelling of his brazen confrontation with the outlaws, returned to town two days later, half drunk and empty-handed. No sooner had the bleary and disappointed clerk walked into his house than his wife showed him a new poster issued just that morning stating that Kentucky was upping the reward for the Jewett Gang an additional five hundred dollars. “God Almighty,” he said, “I better go get the boys rounded back up.”

  “Now wait a minute, Wilbur,” she said. “Why let any of those fools have a share of it? There’s only the three of them, and you done winged the one, right?” She grabbed his hands and looked pleadingly into his eyes. “Just think about it, the new life all that money could buy.” He stood for a long moment looking past her out the window at his brood of rickety brats playing listlessly around the front stoop. One of them, his namesake no less, was eating dirt again, and he was the healthiest one of the bunch. How would he ever pay Mr. Haskins for his rifle when he couldn’t even keep his own family fed? He remembered again what the sonofabitch had said as he strutted out the door: “That’s between you and this Mister feller you keep going on about.” His wife was right. To share an opportunity like this when he was in such wretched straits would be downright madness. Townsfolk would talk about him for years, about how he went back out on his own to hunt the bandits down that very same afternoon, barely taking the time to swallow some cold hash and trade in his old plug for a fresh one at Jim Flannery’s livery, talking gibberish about having an important appointment at some crossroads somewhere.

  —

  IT WASN’T LONG before the Jewetts were on the move again. Hardly believing his luck that he’d found them, the storekeeper had managed to get within a hundred feet of the house before Chimney spied him over the rim of his coffee cup through the porch vines. Now he lay sprawled in the mass of rosebushes around the well, his spectacles still cocked crooked on his face, a .303 bullet from the Lee-Enfield having split his brave but foolish heart into two nearly equal pieces of pulpy muscle. He had toppled into the briars just as a light rain began to fall. Cane and Chimney then circled the perimeter of the property searching for other members of the posse, but all they found was a lone horse covered with sores tied to a tree fifty yards into the woods. The animal had been on its way to the glue factory when the clerk rushed into Flannery’s yelling that he needed a new mount. “Not worth keeping,” Chimney said, looking the spindly nag over. He pulled off the saddle and bridle and cut it loose. Then they headed back to where the dead man lay. Inside one of his pockets
, along with a handful of shells and two dirty hoecakes, they found the updated wanted poster.

  Cane kept glancing up to scan the tree line as he read the latest offer. They were now accused of three times as many murders as they had actually committed, and robbing twice as many banks. As if that wasn’t bad enough, the torching of an old folks’ home in Gainesville, Florida, and the vicious defilement of two virgin sisters with a wooden crucifix outside of Waynesboro, Virginia, had also been added to their list of crimes. He folded the paper and stuck it in his pocket. The rain picked up a little more. “I’d say we better get out of here tonight,” he said. “If some damn store clerk can find us, it’s hard to tell what’s comin’ next.” Passing Chimney one of the corn cakes, he started to bite into the other one before he realized what he was doing. He slung it to the ground and stepped on it; and for a brief second he was recalling the time that Pearl stomped Chimney’s biscuit on the floor, not long before he passed.

  “But what about Cob?”

  “Don’t have no choice,” Cane said. “We’ll just have to take it slow.”

  Chimney stuffed the corn cake into his mouth and bent down to pry the Winchester from the clerk’s hands. “I think I’ll hang on to this.”

  “Jesus Christ, brother, we already got enough guns to start a goddamn army.”