The bottle of whiskey rolled out from under Hurry’s shoe. He motioned with his index finger a plea: Come here.
He turned to face the collective blur and pointed at the ground that held him. But the men clung to their laughter and pointed at him. The voices swiveled with profound digestion. His hand out, forward: he wanted to say, Salem, Salem’s dead.
But the moon caught it. The whiskey laid the tongue down.
A murmur.
He breathed inwardly, and his head and face struck the wind of illusion: he groveled, stepped forward into the blur, as if to grab hold. Salem, Salem’s dead, he whispered.
But no one heard.
He seemed to the men around him to stand in one place, one hand reaching out in the depiction of a dirty gardenia. Go home, Hurry, said Hoover Pickens. Go home.
Look at ’m. Weak.
The word panted and dove into the face of Hurry Bullock. His mouth fitted the symptoms of a stroke: the divided line faltered, a perpendicular beam of saliva spilled out.
He lifted his finger in the direction of the blur and weaved forward: Salem, he whispered … Salem’s dead.
His head lowered, he turned to the empty ground and exploded with laughter. He ran his finger down the bone of his hip and came up again, as if he had been drowning the whole time.
The laughter shattered his lung. He peered down at the earth—something said of sleep, a man upon waking—his hand lay flat on his belly. The temperature and pulse of a moan wept in the organ.
He wandered through the mouth of the barn: he swallowed, patted the hem of his larynx. Suddenly, he took part of the moon blood, his vertebrae erect.
When a man is drunk, a precise and particular image carves upon him the magnetism of his ill-belonging to anything else in the world. Hurry Bullock—the whistling sound—the bottle of whiskey had been pushed farther into the dust; he sent it sputtering with announcement and circled the air with his fingertip, winding it down, winding the tune of the echo down until at once his thumb and index finger drew a unanimous bridge—both together silently, a stroke of telepathy.
The image stood before him: Adam.
Adam was the precision—the thing he could not blur—and he grew closer, closer toward him, and he knew that it was Adam. They were conjoined, the moon blood took the bone, the face of the shadow.
Hurry Bullock: I done come to, he said.
When he said I done come to, he meant, of course, that now, now the world had let him in it and he could see the image, no longer a mirage of weak and insidious laughter, clearly in the full skirt of his eye: he stood as if pleading for Adam to take part in the responsibility that he had just then … possessed.
His vertebrae had come out of alignment with his hipbone.
And then, the shot fired, his finger on the trigger and the howling rung in his eardrums, he pulled back and the howling of Midnight ricocheted in the moaning lung.
Hoover Pickens was in the barn showing Gill Mender the archival packages retrieved from the corpse of the wheelbarrow. There it was: the brown envelope.
For Sonny.
Hoover Pickens mocked: For Sonny. For Sonny. He had become a replica of the memory, the free and automatic white men who aped, as he, the mannerism—the striking bone of the Neanderthal—the dead nigger.
The vulnerability of his lying in the dust had not occurred to him: Hoover Pickens had crushed the footprint of the doctor—of Adam—in the dust with archaeological distortion, a willingness to forget.
Isn’t this proof that I’ve lived long enough to hold it? He set the brown envelope to the light of the lantern and then toward Gill, as if to say: Look what I’ve done.
Gill partook of the scene. He rotated the blade of his shoulder with an expression of repulsion: the navigable vein of Hoover Pickens’s jugular pulsated under the lantern. Gill’s finger slid down into his pocket—a box cutter from the train station—he could slit his throat.
But yet he stood and held the brown envelope: For Sonny, he mocked, and Hoover Pickens stirred with laughter, the jugular protruding outward in the season of the once-muted room: he held his stomach, his hand ahead of him and up to his head, primitive.
He appeared suspended, hung by the esophagus, the muscle of his forearm spiraling under the shirt, near the elbow. The energy of the room held him in it, and awkwardly, he thought of Adam, the horse, as if this were the bait of his suspension.
You done it, he yelled. Oughta seen ’m. Downright proud.
Gill was no longer in the archival room, but stood clean of the lantern and watched as Adam, doused in moon blood, walked up to Hurry Bullock and spat in his face.
chapter twenty-seven
The cold nipple stood erect from her gown.
Lenora Bullock’s face turned toward the window, her arm above her head, as if she could not decipher, even in her dreams, the throbbing birthmark from the perishable resistance of her own temperature: the moon stood in the room, silently chirping above the house, as if it knew the calamity of her breathing.
Hurry Bullock was cold tonight: he lay there beside the missis, her nipple frozen.
The loose hair of her head hung down over her shoulder where she had trained it to suit her slumber, hung there and rose as she breathed on the breast of her pale body: he could have taken her now, as she slept, woken her from the category of her quiet position.
But no, he would not wake her. He would lie there, listen to the breathing of this creature, as she lay there with him—of all the hims in the world—and was.
By some uncertain cause, there is a moment when a man turns to the sleeping wife beside him and is so offset by her sleeping that he cannot maintain the matter of his thinking, when it seems she is only a measuring rod of which to adjust his failure.
And yet it was she who had adjusted.
He could wake her now, if he wanted.
She was so vulnerable, so destructible: it was her face, the indescribable one that seemed so perfect in its caged bone—there was no moving muscle, no sound coming out.
Thus, he wanted to wake her, wanted her to say What is it? So he could emit some sort of power, tuck her language down, down into the caged bone.
Hurry Bullock was alone in the world.
He could not sleep so peacefully as she.
His finger drifted toward the nipple: he pinched it.
But she did not say What is it?
She only whispered, Hurry?
Two people—lying down together—indeed, whisper one to another and yet inwardly into the gut of a rising cloud: the vertical position of slumber, the him and her, stirs with transparency the naked and battered eardrum.
When she said this, Hurry?, she now seemed to him eponymous.
The scent of the train station—she was dirty when he found her, dirty, and the debris of her bastardism was thrown about her face and hair.
It was no wonder he pulled out: dirty women bleed into their babies. The thought carried, shifted throughout, and he could only imagine a Bullock floating in the debris of the embryonic fluid, the face molded and corruptible like the jagged edge of a blur.
She again whispered, Hurry?
He turned, without response, away from the cold nipple, the indestructible breathing, and wished, if ever a time, that he, too, were dead.
chapter twenty-eight
Now, you, too, must.
Earl Thomas could not think of dying now, when he knew how alive he was.
Night had come: his face darted in the moonlit wood—the shadow of the news he bore shattered the bone of earth beneath him.
Now he had come to the wheelbarrow, propped there in the woods by Hoover Pickens or Hurry Bullock or one of the other free and automatic white men, and remembered the bloody head, the nailing shut of the upper and lower mandible, the eye.
Of the things he’d heard, the swollen torso was what shook him.
The buzzing rigor mortis: the battered bird had been dragged here, the shoe slipping out from his foot, and he could hear it,
the buzzing maggot of the corpse, the final moan parting, with conclusion, into the mouth of the Mississippi.
The moon struck the wheelbarrow and Earl Thomas equally. How innocent it looked, the thing that carried the dead, as if weeping from its own metallic throat the announcement of the weighted blows it had brought to and forth stained upon its character the aura of solitude.
Earl Thomas, the moon burning, lifted the index finger of his free hand and touched the singular parallel bar of the handle. His head forward with intimacy, there seemed to live within him a disturbing rattle of echoes, altogether and unified, one sound and one blood, the discriminatory yelling of the murderer: Nigger, you’re dead.
He let go of the parallel bar and drew his fist together and upward into the living sound of the crowd—like electrification—and pushed through it and was pounded upon, pounded about the face and head and the conclusive and weighted blow of the vertebrae that at once paralyzed him, his arms, legs, numb in the bladder of voices around him.
Earl Thomas, you’re a dead nigger, said the voices. And you know it.
He wanted now to turn back, back to Emma New, and await the yelling of the crowd, but the thing he had been sent to do hung over him—sharp and viscerally—that he must, for Emma New, for Sonny, take part of the blade, the perforated stench that had come and returned men like him swollen and lung-pregnant to the earth.
Of course, he knew that it was neither earth nor wheelbarrow to blame.
He held on to the envelope and again ran through the eye of the forest, until at last he reached the house. A slow breath parted in the wind.
He was a man, had always been.
Now he was in it. He held on to the envelope and saw the first step, the open door, the pale fabric of the bitter gown that hung in the house: the woman—her face up to the window—paused in her locality. A crooked line bled through the center of her scalp. Her hair, uncombed and dirty, was without poise and sat on the bed of her shoulders amuck.
She had not whispered Hurry? by reason of her nipple being pinched.
She had fallen out of a dream, spilled forward beneath the sheets, a self-inflicted wound of which she had meant to call to and forth the face of the term: Father?
She spoke: That you, Hurry?
Now she stood in the door and saw, with shock, the depth of her questioning: she had rehearsed it subconsciously … if a nigger ever come close to her, she would … she would do something wonderful, take a knife and … she could not remember.
A bitter paragraph of confusion shaped itself around her.
And yet she was unafraid.
I … I … said Earl Thomas, the envelope in his hands. I come to help.
The wonderful thing she would do somehow stood in the distance, but then she hunted it down in her head—something else—and opened the screen door of the house, wiped her hands on her gown, and slapped his face.
She trembled with exhaustion, the shock and bold nature of his coming there so close with no one left in the house but her and her alone.
He began to speak.
She spat in his mouth.
He swallowed it.
Her own cruelty caused him to forgive, when she appeared so hopeless, pitiful, never knowing. He lived within her all the while.
An atmosphere of fragility soared above the burning of his face.
He looked down at the envelope and opened it, whispered.
Why do you search for me? read the letter. I am already in your bones.
When Lenora Bullock heard this, a fever shook her, the terrifying line in her head, the thought of being a a a …
In her delirium, her mouth parted, as if she had been lying in the morgue—dead and frozen—the paternal whisper of the jungle blood and bone wove a beast around her: Ape, it said. Ape.
Earl Thomas had reached the wood, disappeared.
The letter was at her feet: she knelt down beside it, this thing that held and spun her out of normalcy, and turned to the letterhead, Vital Life Office.
It was then that she fainted on the porch of the house.
The dust went up her nose, staining the flesh of her birthmark. She lay there for a time, the hairs of her head jostled about, until the dust grew unbearable.
She began to cough.
When she fully came to, she opened the door of the house.
There, on the mantel, lay the pistol, as Hurry had left it.
With urgency, she ran toward the barn, climbed the ladder up to the second tier, the third, and leaned her head in to the pistol—the nose hidden beneath the earlobe—she grinned and then … then the sound of the bullet shook her head, causing it to turn as she fell from her place.
The ground caught her.
She broke a rib, the bone shook her gown.
The pistol had fallen out of her hand: a little bit of her brain oozed out onto the shoulder, blood spewing forth from the edge of her jawbone.
Hurry Bullock had come from the morgue.
He heard the shot and ran up the stairs of the house, no Lenora, and down again to the silent window that had not long ago held the warm matter of her face.
The empty house, the silence of things unbreathing and motionless, settled in his stomach: he paused near the table and looked down beneath him—a thread had come loose from her gown and pointed eastward.
It lay upon the palm of his hand.
Only he stood in the room and only he had done it.
With uncertainty, he faced the mantel: the pistol. Gone.
The thread, loose from her gown, floated amid the revelation.
Hurry Bullock had begun to weep: he opened the door and revisited the steps, the rushing out of Lenora, and found her lying, the brain oozing out behind the earlobe, the forehead, and turned her over with his full hand.
Now that he could no longer touch her, he—himself—seemed extraordinary, the dotted scope of a figurehead.
He walked backward, away from the gown, the gunpowdered stain of the pistol, and hollered. But the hollering had come to a halt.
Someone had crept up behind him, knocked him unconscious.
And, too, the night woke like a running, ill-fated beast, and Gill woke with it, leading Hurry Bullock’s horse through the forest’s opening until the Pickens’s house burned in his head.
The moon, with its round and full belly, shone acutely—a blunt stroke of light darting out—and gazed upon his entire purpose an exaggerated beam; it struck the anatomy of his face, pointing downward with its fingertip an abbreviated, piercing moan.
Gill had come to a stop, looked up, up to the window where Adam was, and seen him peering down on him.
The stench of Lenora Bullock lay in the fabric of Gill’s clothing: the oozing out of her brain on her shoulder, the bullet cascading through her birthmark.
Hoover Pickens stood in the mirror of his bedroom: he stepped backward, away from the shifting disease of his body, as if by doing this, he could adjust, abandon the sickness, give it away to reflection.
But he could not.
His finger rose in midair, following a hallucination, a dotted line woven by the shattered lung, the fever. All this time he had been laughing singularly.
No one had ever joined him. Not when it was his own body and spirit that had done and lived with such violence that it swelled in his esophagus and moaned when he moaned in the morning time.
He had lived a duration of many years within a destructible village, a calling out of the breath to distort, disfigure, the things of the world and the God they belonged to.
There would be no sunlight in this room now, nothing to strike the wrist, no other creature to join him in the perpendicular beam of the house. It was nighttime. And the moon had grown tired of his kind.
He paused, D. D. Pickens looked upon him with a surrogacy. Whatever was it that had brought them together? What thing had they been strung upon, separate and unapproachable in the room?
Or perhaps, in her stance, she knew more than ever that she had always been,
that they, together, had always been dirty and without, without anyone or anything to draw them closer in this room or another, this one or the pitiful orphanage of a train station.
She lifted her hair from her shoulder in his presence, walked toward the window where the cracked fissure lay parallel to the whisper she had committed herself to, and turned with her nude and exasperated body: What do you want? she asked.
Hoover Pickens, as he had been so tired tonight, stepped forward and back again, away from her and the cracked fissure, as if now that he had been faced with his own questioning, he could not bear it, did not want it living in his mind: he stepped forward again, peeled the sheet from the bed, and clothed her with it, but she did not hold on, she let go of it and he turned aside, his face anew, and altogether gazed upon a distant, conclusive matter that belonged to him and solely him.
Weak? she asked.
But then he heard the horses, Blade and the others let go from the barn, and pushed her aside, looking down below … Blade was saddled, Adam roaming around in the dust aboard him, kicking up the moon glow, the dust baiting upward, away from the … he ran down the stairs, out of the house, and amid the running horses, his hands beckoning to Gill: What’s done it?
The horses rippled around him, Gill pulled on his reins, signaling to Adam: Lenora. She’s dead.
Hoover Pickens paused, closer to Gill: Dead?
Gill nodded.
Everything spun so quickly about, the words, Lenora. She’s dead. That Hoover Pickens kneeled to the ground, his hand balancing the root of the announcement.
Then, then what … then, he stumbled through it and wanted to ask where Hurry was and who done it, but his wind left him.
Adam stood next to Blade now.
Gill jumped down, let go of his horse, and handed Hoover Pickens the letter: that nigger, Earl Thomas … he’s who done it.
Hoover Pickens took the letter and stepped toward the lantern on the breakfast porch, D.D. in her gown near the window. He saw the heading, Vital Life Office, and read the opening space of the line: Why do you search for me? I am already in your bones.
With this, he thought of Curtis Willow, the night of the dragging and how arrogantly the nigger spoke, aloud and between the blows of him and the other free and automatic white men, and the letter drifted from his trembling hand, and thus the rage of his brow landed evenly with the wilted expression of his lips, and at once he ran up the stairs of the house, braced himself in his Klan suit and hood: another thought plagued him—the morning he pinned Earl Thomas down at the Pauer Plant—he stood before the mirror, recited the constitution of the free and automatic white men, Some nerve, he whispered, and struck it.
A Killing in This Town Page 12
