Father and Son

by Larry Brown

  In the bedroom he picked up the gun by the stock and slipped the shells in one at a time, pushing them up with his thumb. He checked it one more time to see that one was in the chamber, then turned off the light and went back up the hall.

  In his sleep, his father looked like some huge broken mannequin. Glen studied the gun in his hands and remembered when it used to hang above the kitchen door. It had been in canebrakes and the deep jungle woods of coons on steaming nights with spotted dogs leaping and howling and trying to climb the trees with their toenails, men standing in water amid cypress knees, men with flashlights in their hands searching in the vine-choked growth of leaves and poison ivy above for two red eyes. It had been in river bottoms on mornings when ice cracked underfoot and the sudden yammering of dogs came through the woods gaining decibels and the deer broke free from the cover and rocketed forty feet in a second. It had been held beneath beech trees on foggy mornings when the squirrels moved and shook the dew from the branches or paused in profile to hull a hickory nut with their rasping teeth, little showers of shredded matter pattering softly down through the leaves to scatter on the forest floor. Or mornings when nothing came and the cold was a vivid pain that held him shivering in its grip and the gun was an ache in his naked hands where he sat huddled with misery in some gloomy copse of hardwood timber.

  He cocked the hammer now and swung the barrel up to his father’s head and held the black and yawning muzzle of it an inch away. He tightened his fingers on the checkered pistol grip. The old man slept on, father and son. Some sense of foreboding told him to pull back and undo all of this before it was done. Yet he put his finger on the trigger, just touched it. He already knew what it would look like.

  Virgil moved in his sleep, made a small sound almost like a cough. The puppy whined outside. The house was quiet but for that.

  He raised the barrel and caught the hammer with his thumb and eased back on the trigger, letting it down. He went out the door, lighting a cigarette, hurrying.

  Sometime during the night somebody had pinned the monkey to the bar with an ice pick through the thorax and it lay there atrophied with its palms upward like Christ in His final agony. Several people had put out cigarettes on it. Somebody had bought it a drink. Somebody had cut off its tail.

  Barlow had two whores and an old fisherman left. The whores were trying to get the fisherman to put them up in the hotel in Pine Springs but the fisherman had to go fishing at six in the morning and Barlow was getting tired of hearing about it. He’d sent Rufus out to the road with the garbage and now Rufus came back through the door and walked straight to the bar.

  “Somebody out by the road,” he said.

  “Who?”

  “It look like Glen Davis. Can you pay me?”

  “Pay you?” Barlow stirred himself erect and glared at him. “Goddamn. Pay you?”

  Rufus nodded. “It’s been since last Friday.”

  Barlow reached over for a fifth of Wild Turkey and poured some in his glass. He reached into a tub of ice at his knee and dumped some in the whiskey. He pointed.

  “You see my damn monkey?”

  Rufus looked at the thing with distaste. “I see him. He ain’t gone bite nobody else.”

  “He bit you one time, didn’t he?”

  “That’s right, he did.”

  “I bet you ain’t even sorry the son of a bitch is dead. Are you, Rufus?”

  “Naw. I ain’t sorry.”

  “You probly glad the son of a bitch is dead. Ain’t you, Rufus?”

  “That’s right, I am.”

  “Well I ain’t,” Barlow said, and threw back about half the drink. “You sure it’s him?”

  “I know it’s him.”

  Rufus watched the people in the bar and leaned his elbows next to the whiskey. He leaned a little closer and lowered his voice. “I’ll go eat me some supper. I’ll come back later but I need to get paid fore I go home.”

  The whores and the fisherman were still arguing. Barlow looked at the monkey for a while and then opened the register. He went into the tens and pulled out five of them and folded the money and passed it to Rufus, who stuck it in his pocket and then slipped out the side door with one high backward wave of his hand.

  “Well, well,” Barlow said in a quiet voice. There was a little shelf right beneath the register that had been specially built. He eased out the gun and opened the cylinder and checked that all six chambers were loaded. He did these things unseen, below the level of the bar. It had been a slow day anyway. The Corps of Engineers had opened the gates of the dam at Sardis and people were yanking the catfish out around the clock. He spun the cylinder and closed it, then cocked the weapon and held it on the fat whore, who looked at it and saw it like a snake coiled at her elbow.

  “Get the hell out of here,” he said. “Git.”

  They cleared out fast. Their cars cranked outside and gravel crunched under the tires. He heard them leave and then there was nothing but silence. He lifted his drink and held the pistol. He listened hard. A few minutes passed. He thought he saw movement on the porch and he raised the pistol and pointed it. There was only silence. The lights were on all around him. He jumped up to knock them out with the barrel of the pistol and the window exploded in upon him.

  Glen waited in the weeds for the longest time. He saw Rufus come down the drive with the garbage in the truck and he stepped back out of the headlights’ glare but maybe not far enough. Rufus got out of the truck, dumped the garbage, came back. Glen thought about shooting him then, even drew down on him for a moment, then realized he couldn’t do it and pulled the shotgun down. He watched Rufus drive back, saw him walk in, saw him talking, saw him leave. Straight across the cotton patch walking. Then the other cars left. He lay flat while they drove past.

  The dogs said nothing as he came up, just moved out of the way, tails down. He stepped soundlessly up on the porch and moved toward the window as Barlow raised the pistol. He stepped back and Barlow reached up with the barrel as if to shoot out the lights a few feet above him. He stepped back in front of the window and cocked the hammer and let off the first shot, which pulverized the window and blew Barlow back against the ranked bottles behind the bar and shattered the mirror. Barlow hung there for a second, then his gun hand came down and a bullet blew by Glen’s ear. Glen pumped his and fired and pumped it and fired and Barlow fired a shot into the floor and sagged down out of sight. A shard of glass swung, tinkled, fell.

  Rufus had a small shack across the bottom and up the hill and he had a regular trail that he used to go back and forth from his house to the beer joint. The trail wound beside a big cotton patch and through part of a pasture and there was a footlog he used to cross a shallow creek where bullfrogs sat and sang and he was jogging like a dog now in a slow lope, his feet raising dust in the black air. There was a ridge off to the southwest that was covered with pines and as he ran he could see the porch light from his house shining between the trees. He slowed to cross the footlog and hushed the singing frogs and turned up the hill, his tennis shoes dropping softly in the needles and on the little stones that littered the path. He ran easily, breathing steadily, the sweat coiling down his back and his arms slowly pumping. His dog yapped once and growled and he yelled for it to be quiet as he drew nearer. At the crest of the hill he slowed to a walk and put his hands on his hips. He could see Lucinda on the porch still shelling peas. She’d been there all day and there was some ungodly number of peas in a washtub beside her.

  He walked up to the porch and stood there for a second. She didn’t look up.

  “You still shellin them peas?”

  She sat with her dark legs spread and a big dishpan nestled in the hollow sling her dress made between her massive thighs. She was throwing the hulls into some grocery sacks scattered around her.

  “Ain’t had nobody to help me,” she said.

  “What about them younguns?”

  “Them younguns in the bed.”

  Her lower lip was pooched out and she gave a
n enormous sigh but her fingers never stopped their steady motions. He knew she’d heard the shots.

  “What’s all that mess down there?” she said.

  He turned his head and looked into the black woods for a moment.

  “White folks’ business,” he said, and stepped up on the porch and went inside. The dog came up out of the yard and climbed the porch and sniffed at the peas and sniffed at the hulls and then it sniffed at Lucinda’s bare toes and licked one of her feet.

  “Git on outta here you old soup bone,” she said, and the dog sat. Rufus came back out with a glass of iced tea and sat down on the top step with his pipe and a small tin of Prince Albert. Lucinda sat there shelling their peas.

  “I wish you’d git some other place to work,” she said. “All them drunks down there. He don’t do nothin but lay drunk hisself. Don’t pay you nothin.”

  Rufus was loading his pipe. “I know it,” he said. He got it loaded and pulled a kitchen match from his pocket and struck it on a board beside him and lit the pipe, drawing deep on it, holding the flame over it, until he shook the match out and dropped it in the yard. He reached into his pocket and pulled out the money and kept ten and handed the rest to her. She took it and looked at it. He puffed on his pipe and scratched the back of his head.

  “Is that it?”

  “That’s it.”

  “Huh. You think we gonna feed them younguns on that? You bed not go back down yonder tonight neither. You hear me?”

  Rufus didn’t answer. He had heard the separate and distinct concussions of the pistol and the shotgun as they spoke to each other. It was plain to him that the shotgun had spoken loudest and he knew he had to go back.

  The door was open and the lights were on when Rufus mounted the porch. He looked past the dead monkey whose fur was speckled with glass dust, tiny points of light shining, saw the blood on the wall and the holes in the wall and the shattered bottles and mirror. He looked at the front of the bar and saw the splintered wood. There was no sound and he began to wish he had listened to his woman.

  He went forward into the room on quiet feet, but he was very conscious of the noise he made as the floorboards creaked. The register was opened and robbed, the chrome clamps that held the bills pressed down all standing straight up. He was afraid to lean over and see what was behind the bar because he knew already what he would find. Knowing didn’t help because he still had to look at him, so he looked. Barlow was on the floor behind the bar. He couldn’t see all of him. He could see the bloodied sleeve on one arm, and part of his bloody head, and one twisted leg.

  A board groaned behind him, a chair kicked over.

  Rufus froze and said, “I don’t mess in no white folks’ business.”

  A strange moan came from behind the bar. He heard with full clarity the cocking of a hammer, the thin tiny click that was loud in that hushed place, like the tick of the clock in your room just before sleep.

  Barlow’s eyes were full of blood and he couldn’t find his gun. Things were still dripping on him and he could feel the blood cooling on his clothes. Blood sucked in and out of one nostril with a little congested sound. Some splinters on one of the boards were digging into his cheek, but he didn’t move. He heard the door open, the steps come closer. He lay still, his eyes open. He held his breath.

  Something hard prodded his shoulder, his head. He felt two feet straddle him. Then the bell on the register rang and he heard the drawer roll open, the flicking of the little metal arms, the feet removing themselves from over him. The lid on one of the coolers opened and somebody lifted a beer out and didn’t close it. He heard the bottle being opened, a long sucking bubbling. Must have really hit the spot. Then the steps moved away and around in front of the bar and off to the left of the door where one table sat back almost hidden in a corner. He let his breath out. His fingers explored the sticky wood but still they felt no weapon and he was weak and laboring by now to breathe so he concentrated on lying still and listening. For a while there was nothing to hear, but then a chair creaked, a body settled. The light was bright over him and it was a puzzle to him how he knew that.

  His last thoughts were memories, a time in 1956 when he got two flats on his car and had to walk four miles. He stopped at a house for a drink of water and a blind old man was there on the front porch in a rocker. The blind man wouldn’t talk to him. He asked for water and the old man simply lifted his hand and pointed to a log shed beside the house. There was a pump with a long handle in there and a sluice and some canned goods arrayed on shelves. It was cool and dark in there and on a stone slab stood a quart fruit jar of water with which to prime the pump. It primed easily: he could remember the water welling up out of the earth into the pipe and rising up from the spout into the sluice and cascading down the trough, clean, clear, cold. He bent his sweating face to the water and drank long from it, wetted his head and his neck and hands and arms. In the deep shade of the trees in the yard he looked around. There were birds and a breeze. Sanctuary. He thanked the old man before resuming his walk in the sun but the old man only sat there with his opaque eyes and his impassive face like somebody made out of wood.

  He wished now for another drink of that good water. He heard somebody come in and he moaned, couldn’t help it, heard Rufus say he didn’t mess in white folks’ business and then he died.

  The night was cool now and Glen had all the windows down so that a steady breeze blew through the car. It was a little past midnight.

  He drank from a warm beer and eyed his speed, not hurrying, not weaving, just going on home. The road swarmed with bugs and the night spoke to him in the voices of frogs and crickets. The black water alongside the road lay still and choked with bits of driftwood and empty beer bottles whose necks leaned out above the surface debris of twigs and bark, the trash thrown from passing cars.

  He stared at the road that unfolded before him, guided the car gently around the curves and past the lightless houses where dogs slept too and over little railed bridges barely wide enough for two vehicles to meet. A quarter moon rode high and pale among the stars that showed their cold fire through the black infinity that stretched above the trees, their dark green tops wheeling past the windshield.

  He slowed, checked his mirror, slung the bottle out, and turned onto a sand road that wound for miles through a vast forest of pines and oaks and the gullied wastes of loggers, splintered remnants of saplings leaning at crazy angles, past sleeping hulks of machinery, John Deere, Massey-Ferguson, going slowly, the tires whispering in the sand, the road turning and rising into hills and ridges where there was no traffic but himself. There was one beer left on the seat and he groped about on the dash for the opener and held the car to the road with his elbow while he pried off the cap. He tossed it out the window and took a sip from the bottle, shifting his left foot around on the floorboard and then resting the bottle between his legs.

  He drove unmolested through those quiet increments of the night to the edge of the forest and onto a blacktop road, turned at the mailbox, and eased up the drive to halt in front of his father’s house, where he pushed off the headlights and killed the ignition. Long moments there on the seat with the blackness looming through the glass and his hands shaking just a little. The dim light in the front room beckoning him to rest from his labors. He could not see his face in the rearview mirror, could not see what his eyes thought. He got out and took the keys to the back of the car and unlocked the trunk. The bulb in the trunk was burned out but he could see the shotgun across the spare tire. He picked it up and closed the trunk and went through the dark yard, up the steps and into the house through the torn screen door. He stopped in the living room suddenly. The television was still on and Virgil had turned onto his stomach in his sleep. The Redbone puppy still whined at the back door. He walked in the half dark back to his old room, leaned the gun in the corner, and undressed quickly. He hadn’t slept in this house in a very long time.

  He could smell the must of the sheets when he pulled the covers back, bu
t he slipped in under them and turned the pillow over and punched it with his fist and put his head down on it. The house was quiet. He could see the dim glow of the television up the hall. There was a scratching at the back door and then some more whining and finally toenails clicking over linoleum. He raised up in the bed and saw the puppy slink up the hall, tail slowly wagging, and disappear into the living room. He lay back down and closed his eyes still working the pump slide in his mind’s eye, still hearing the silent explosions in his brain, wondering if he’d be able to get to sleep. But after a while the puppy came in and nosed at him and he didn’t know anything about that.

  Morning. Bobby fanned at a fly that rose from his cheek and opened his eyes and looked at the green walls around him. He sat up. His back was hurting from sleeping on the couch again. The clock on the wall showed 6:15. His boots were on the floor beside the couch and he pulled them on and got up. There was a small bathroom just outside his office and he went in there to look in the mirror. He needed a shave, always did. He turned the water on in the sink and ran his comb under it and started running it through his hair. A door opened somewhere in the jail and then closed.

  “That you, Jake?”

  “Yeah,” came the answer. “Good mornin.”

  “Mornin. We got any coffee?”

  “I’ll make it. You been here all night?”

  “I laid down about two.”

  He put his comb back in his pocket and went into his office and opened the top drawer of his desk. There was an electric razor in there and he plugged it in next to the lamp and started shaving. After a while Jake came to the door with a paper cup of coffee and leaned in the doorway. “How come you to spend the night?”