Father and Son

by Larry Brown

  “How you like my dog?” he said.

  “Looks like a shit-eater to me. Where’d you get that bag of bones?”

  “He ain’t no shit-eater,” Virgil said. “That’s a pure-blood registered Redbone. He’s Purple Ribbon bred, by God. That there’s a good dog.”

  Glen picked up his coffee and sipped on it and said, “Good for what? Run rabbits probly. He’s pore as a damn snake.”

  “He just needs a good wormin. I’m gonna worm him soon as I get me some worm medicine. Clean him out good he’d gain some weight.”

  Glen shook his head and made a face at the puppy. The puppy stretched his legs out on the porch boards and yawned before he lowered his head.

  “What do you want with a coon dog? You ain’t no coon hunter.”

  “He’s just company,” Virgil said. He made a little motion with his cigarette. “Gets kinda quiet around here sometimes.”

  “Did you drink up the money for Mama’s headstone?”

  Virgil raised his eyes. “Who said I drank it up?”

  “Nobody. But I know you.”

  Virgil turned away from him in the chair and watched the dog. This was no time to tell him about his mother. Not with him already starting in like this.

  “You ain’t even gonna say you sorry are you?”

  Virgil didn’t look up. He couldn’t reason with him. Not when he got things in his head and kept them that way. It wasn’t any use to try. He was worn down and he’d had a long rest but now his rest was over and he didn’t know if he could take this all over again. Even Theron would have said enough by now. If he knew what he’d gone through. Did the dead see? Did they know? Did they take pity on what the living did? Did Emma?

  He turned back around in the chair and got up.

  “I’m gonna go up front and watch TV and lay down. I don’t want to get into it with you. Whether you believe it or not I’m glad to see you.”

  He put his cup in the sink. The puppy raised his head and looked at him, then sat up and pulled a hind foot to his head and started scratching his ear. Virgil glanced at him and walked out of the kitchen and up the hall. He thought he’d watch a little of the church music on television. He didn’t go to church except for funerals but he liked to turn it on on Sunday mornings and not be completely heathen. The television had a tall wooden cabinet and a round screen about a foot in diameter. He turned it on and sat down on his chair right in front of it and waited for it to warm up. Saturday afternoons he got the Slim Rhodes show out of Memphis with Dusty Rhodes and Speck Rhodes. He liked to sit there and have a drink and listen to that before he went down to the VFW.

  He heard Glen come into the room behind him but he didn’t pay any attention to him. The picture was starting to come on and it was rolling. He got up and opened a panel in front and adjusted a knob until the picture settled down. Some choir was singing. He sat down. Glen sat down on the couch with his coffee.

  “Your mama used to like this show,” Virgil said.

  Glen didn’t say anything. Virgil wished he’d just stay in the kitchen if he was going to be hateful. The choir finished its number and the camera moved to the preacher. Virgil laced his fingers across his stomach and stretched his legs out.

  “What you want to watch this crap for?” Glen said. “All that fucker wants is you to send him some money.”

  “I don’t send him no money. I just watch him preach.”

  “Why don’t you see if there’s some cartoons on?”

  “They don’t show em on Sunday mornin.”

  “They used to.”

  “They don’t no more.”

  “Turn it over on another channel.”

  “I want to watch this.”

  “I want to see if the goddamn cartoons is on.”

  Glen got up and moved toward the television and Virgil started to get up but then decided he’d just let him see for himself. Glen flipped the channels, bent over the set with a cigarette hanging from his mouth. More preaching. More preaching. Bugs Bunny.

  Glen settled back on the couch.

  “Told you.”

  “This is my TV,” Virgil said.

  “This is Mama’s TV.”

  “It’s in my house.”

  “This ain’t even your house. Uncle Lavester give you this house.”

  “It’s mine, though.”

  “Yeah, till he dies and Catherine decides to boot your ass out. Then where you gonna stay?”

  Glen turned his attention back to the set and Virgil watched him watching it. Then he got up and walked back to the bedroom.

  His shoes were sitting beside a chair and he sat down to put them on. Glen was laughing up front. He wished he’d just go on and leave, let him alone. He tied his shoes and got up to comb his hair. There wasn’t much black left now, just a streak here and there. It didn’t take long to get old and he wondered where all the time got to. Like the war. It seemed so far back but still so close. It didn’t seem possible for that much time to have passed and left him like this. All the stuff you were going to do tomorrow turned into today’s stuff. You could screw around all your life and it looked like he had. Glen was right. He didn’t even own the linoleum he was standing on.

  The closet was still full of Emma’s clothes and he pawed through the hangers on his side, looking for a clean shirt. He thought he’d just get out of the house for a while, maybe walk over to the store. His leg felt okay today and he liked to get out whenever he could. Sitting around the house got old.

  He found a shirt that wasn’t too dirty and he put it on and buttoned it up, tucked the shirttail inside. His money was on the dresser and he stuck it in his pocket. When he went back to the living room, Glen was still sitting there, watching a commercial.

  “I’m gonna walk down to the store,” Virgil said. “You gonna be here when I get back?”

  “I don’t know.” Glen didn’t look up, just sprawled there on the couch in his bare feet.

  “Well. I’ll see you sometime.”

  “Right.”

  He went on out the door and the Redbone came trotting around the corner of the house to meet him.

  “C’mere,” he told him. The puppy followed him over to a little tree by the end of the porch and Virgil bent to pick up a tattered dog collar that was wired to a piece of Emma’s clothesline. He put the collar around the puppy’s neck and snapped the clothesline into an eye hook he’d threaded into the tree and left him there. There was a pan of water with a few dead bugs floating on the surface and the shade of the porch was close enough for him to get in under it if he wanted to. He glanced up at the house. The television was still going and he could hear Glen laughing at the cartoons again. There wasn’t any need in talking to him.

  The heat seemed to turn up a few degrees as he walked the dirt road. Deep green ridges lay thickly wooded in the distance and cows stared at him from behind their fences as he went along. The cotton was tall everywhere in spite of the dry spell. Once in a while a vehicle passed him, folks dressed up and going to church in their pickups and rusty cars, rattling through the gravel and spreading a cloud of light brown dust that washed over him and went into his nose and settled over the ditches and roadside grasses. He was a man seen often walking at odd hours of the night or day and those passersby mostly ignored him as he did them.

  On this fine day the pale clouds hung far and near in their slowly changing shapes, now flat and unbunched or colliding softly as the sun rose higher and gaining height, folding and refolding their masses to recombine in new banks that climbed the sky and built and drifted. He walked beneath the sky and on top of the land, a tiny figure moving like an ant.

  He was sitting on a stump at the corner of a property line where a big sycamore shaded his cigarette-rolling when a ’54 Chevy sedan came easing around the curve just above an idle. The car had originally been blue and white but now it sported a red front fender and a green hood. Above the grill a chrome-winged nymph leaned swimming into the wind. Virgil licked the length of his paper tube and
stuck one end into his mouth as the car jerked to a halt beside him and died.

  “Good God,” he said. Woodrow was grinning behind the steering wheel. His teeth were splayed out in front but only two or three showed. Virgil crossed his legs on the stump and leaned one wrist on top of the other. “You out mighty early.”

  “I ain’t been to bed yet. We went huntin last night and I just got in. I lost old Nimrod and I still got Naman in the backseat. Come on and get in, where you headed?”

  “I’m just out for my daily exercise,” Virgil said. He got up and stepped across the shallow ditch and walked around behind the car. In passing he looked in at what appeared to be an enormous dead Bluetick stretched out across the backseat, all four legs straight out, huge feet. He opened the door and got in the front seat and rolled the window down.

  “Old Naman’s plumb give out,” Woodrow said. “He run a coon for three hours straight by the watch. He was still treein his ass off when I finally put the leash on him. Here, get you a drink.”

  He held up a half pint of whiskey. Virgil took the bottle and looked at it.

  “It’s awful early,” he said. “But I reckon I will.”

  He twisted the cap off and turned a good drink down his throat. Woodrow cranked the car and pulled it down into low and they crept off. He got up a little speed, shifted it into second, and left it there. Virgil took one more drink and then capped it and put it on the seat between them.

  “You headed the wrong way, Woodrow. I was gonna walk over to the store.”

  “I’ll run you by there. I’m just out lookin for old Nimrod.

  “Where did y’all turn out?”

  “Hell.” Woodrow hung his arm out the window and pointed. “Five or six miles from here. I reckon he jumped a deer. He may be in Stone County by now for all I know. I just thought he might be out on the road somewhere. If I can find the son of a bitch I’m gonna sell him.”

  “I thought he was a good coon dog.”

  “He is when he runs a coon.”

  Virgil smoked his cigarette and flipped the ashes down the outside of the door. The car smelled like wet dogs and spilled whiskey.

  “I saw your boys yesterday,” Woodrow said. He had the habit of poking the black lens of his eyeglasses once in a while as if to see better. His hammer had tried to drive a nail that glanced off a sunny roof on a summer day. Virgil had seen that gray and vacant eye.

  “You did? Where at?”

  “They come in Winter’s and stayed a little bit. I spoke to em. Is he glad to be out?”

  Virgil scratched his leg. He drew on his cigarette and rested his elbow on the window frame.

  “I can’t tell if he is or not. He’s over at the house when I left. I spect he’s still pissed off at the whole world. He always was.”

  Woodrow steered the car carefully down the sandy road and through curves laned with thick timber, a lush canopy overhead that was a haven for squirrels and birds.

  “Did you tell him about his mama?”

  “Naw. I was going to but he started in on me about her not having a headstone. You can’t talk to him when he gets like that.”

  “What’s he gonna do about that youngun?”

  “Probably nothin.”

  “Let me pull over up here and see if I can hear anything out of old Nimrod. He’ll tree a squirrel in the daytime ever once in a while but he’s probably asleep or headed back home by now.”

  Woodrow eased to a stop in the middle of the road and shut off the car. Virgil took the last drag from his smoke. He let it drop out the window and glanced over his shoulder at the hound on the backseat. There was only the rise and fall of his ribs to mark any life within him. The motor ticked and popped. Virgil leaned his head out the window and listened.

  “You ever killed any squirrels with him?”

  “A couple. He’ll tree possums too. He’ll run the livin shit out of a fox.”

  The woods were mostly still. There was a weak wind high in the very tops of the oaks and hickories. A crow called once in the distance. A tree frog sang. The sun dappled patterns of light and dark over the hood. There was the barely audible bark of a dog somewhere far off and muted in those wooded hills.

  “Damn,” Woodrow said, and leaned back in the seat from where he’d been cupping his ear to the world. He pointed toward the back of the car. “He’s back over there on Miss Hattie’s place, sounds like. Let me turn this thing around.”

  He started the car and drove up to the place where a grassy old logging road met the one they were on. He stopped there and turned around, going back the way they’d come, still moving at a crawl.

  “I wish he’d just sit down and talk to me some,” Virgil said. He looked at the whiskey on the seat and turned his head away from it. “I reckon he’d rather watch them damn cartoons.”

  A big doe bolted from the undergrowth and cleared the road in one bound, a long flow of bunched muscles sailing over in a gray flash. Woodrow had made to touch the brake but said Damn softly and kept going. They both looked after where the deer had penetrated the solid wall of leaves without a sign but for one single quaking frond.

  “I wish I knew what to tell you,” said Woodrow. The car rocked and swayed a little on its bad shocks as he sped up and shifted into third. “Maybe after he stays home for a while he’ll appreciate it. You think it did him any good?”

  “I doubt it.”

  The trees began thinning a little as they went on and in places it looked as if a bomb had been dropped except for the lack of any craters, the land open and catching full sun and dotted with stumps and shattered tree trunks, the tracks of dozers that like some gargantuan beast had devoured the shade. Then the woods closed around them again.

  They drove into a deep hollow with a sharp curve and met a pickup right in the bottom of it. Woodrow steered carefully on the very edge of the road, gravel rattling against the underside of the car, rocks flying into the ditches. Virgil looked out and saw a six-foot pit alongside them. It was bone dry and coated with dust, littered with scrubby weeds and pebbles. Up on the banks the remnants of old fences hung on some of the trees. The road was washboarded in places and the car bucked hard when they ran over it, the windows jarring as if they would break in their frames. Virgil looked over his shoulder but it wasn’t bothering the sleeping hound.

  “How’s your puppy?” Woodrow said.

  “He’s all right. I need to worm him sometime.”

  “I got some over at the house I can let you have. If we catch old Nimrod we’ll take him and Naman back over to the house and put em up and feed em and I’ll let you have some of it.”

  “I appreciate it, Woodrow.”

  “You in a hurry to get to the store? It ain’t much further over here to Miss Hattie’s place.”

  “I ain’t in no hurry.”

  They came down out of the hills and rattled along a steep cut that had been graded with mule-drawn equipment back in the thirties and they leveled out in a small creek bottom where cotton was planted. Big patches of it stretched away to stands of trees and the sky opened before them boundless but for those trees, a deep blue where hawks feathered the thermal drifts or rode low over the fence rows or perched on posts holding lengths of barbed wire along the road. They went over a shallow branch by a shoddy bridge floored with timbers that rumbled loosely under the tires of the car.

  “Ain’t you glad you don’t have to pick that cotton?” Woodrow said.

  Virgil nodded, watching it, the sun warm on his arm where he rested it on the window frame.

  “Yep,” he said.

  “Did Glen have to pick any?”

  “He ain’t said. I guess he had to do whatever they told him. Said he couldn’t sleep at night for all the noise.”

  They were on a pretty good road now and Woodrow sped up a little, raising a dust cloud behind them. They went a long way across the bottom and Virgil pulled his makings out and rolled another smoke.

  “You been up all night?” he said.

  “I sle
pt a little right before daylight. I had a fire built to keep the mosquitoes off me and I curled up next to it for a while.”

  They started slowing down just before the crossroads and Woodrow came nearly to a stop, glancing both ways before he turned to the right and went on along another short straightaway and climbed a hill. Virgil lit his smoke with the wind flaring the flame. At the top of the hill Woodrow slowed the car, shifted down, and turned onto a side road past planted pines and a few old abandoned houses. They went across a wooden bridge and through a cattle gap and out into a pasture full of wildflowers that brushed at the sides of the car. He stopped near a line of sweet gums that bordered the creek.

  “Let’s see what we can hear now,” he said.

  Virgil sat with his legs crossed and listened. The wind was delicately wafting the heavy branches of the gums and the leaves shimmered a little, rested, then lifted in brilliance again. A cow bawled up near the barn and they could hear a tractor running somewhere. But no dogs barked.

  “I’ll be damn,” Woodrow said. “I would have swore he was right in here somewhere. Let’s get out and walk down here where we was last night.”

  They walked and walked, Woodrow cupping his hand around his mouth once in a while and hooting for the dog. It was pretty there along the creek and Virgil could see a distant herd of black cows resting under a clump of oaks in the middle of the pasture. They stopped after a bit and squatted on the ground. Woodrow called the dog but there was just the wind blowing to answer.

  “Well damn,” he said. “I hate to go off and leave him. I know that was him. Hell, he may be headed home by now.”

  “That’s a pretty good walk.”

  “Main thing I’m scared of is somebody’ll pick him up or he’ll get run over by a car.”

  Virgil got up and walked over to the nearest tree and started taking a leak. He tried to read something carved into the tree but time had rendered it into a mottled scar in the bark. It took him a long time to finish and only when he was sure he was through did he tuck it back inside and zip his trousers. It always took longer now than it used to.