by Larry Brown
“I used to go over there some,” Virgil said. “I ain’t been over there in a while now. He still got that monkey?”
“Yessir. He was settin right there on the bar the other night. I’ve heard that thing would bite you if he don’t like your looks. He didn’t pay no attention to me, though.”
He stopped the car in the grass and shut off the motor. He pulled the keys out and said, “I’ll be right back.”
Virgil lit his cigarette and looked at the woods lining the road. He’d squirrel-hunted all through here when he was a boy. He had a mule he used to ride over here. He’d tie him to a tree and find his way back to him at dark and ride him home with the stars shining. This road was nothing but a wagon trail then. Cars would get mired on it and mules would have to pull them out. That was when he first met Mary. He still remembered how she looked then, how she’d wear a ribbon in her hair when she came to meet him under an old oak that had been gone for many years now. The trunk lid went up, then it slammed, and the boy came back around with two beers in his hands. He got in and handed one to Virgil.
“It’s cold,” he said. “I hope you like Pabst.”
“This is fine, thanks. You got an opener?”
“Yessir. He give me three I believe.”
He found one in the glove box and opened the cans. Virgil took a sip and it tasted cold as ice.
“Damn,” he said. “That’s pretty good.”
A car came by that looked like Jewel’s. He looked down the road where it had gone and thought about the things Glen had said. But it was out of his hands. Never had been in them.
“Yep,” the boy said, and cranked the car. “You want to ride around awhile? You got time?”
“Sure,” Virgil said. “I got plenty of time.”
The boy grinned, gunned the motor, and they swung out into the road. Virgil couldn’t help but smile, watching him.
Clancy’s old pickup climbed the dusty hill through stunted pines and snarled growths of honeysuckle and briars, bumping along in low gear over the rough spots and whining past the dump where Rufus threw their garbage to keep from hauling it off somewhere. Clancy had already raised his own children and they were scattered now to Chicago, Flint, West Texas, and Tampa. His pickup had some wire chicken cages in the back end that were rattling around and he’d thrown some milk crates back there for Lucinda’s children to ride on to church. His shoes were shined and he had on his tie and a starched white shirt, a snap-brim hat he’d paid eighteen dollars for in Memphis. The crease in his trousers was sharp and defined. He’d dusted off the seat and slid the jumble of tools to one corner on the floor before he left his house and he wasn’t early, so he couldn’t figure why Lucinda would be sitting on the front porch the way she was in her robe instead of being dressed for church. He pulled up in the yard with the chickens scattering and clucking and the dog barking in the dust. He switched the key off. The door didn’t have a handle on the inside, nothing but an open panel that revealed the simple mechanism of the window and the sheet of glass itself that rested within it. He reached out for the door handle and pushed it down. The dog came up waving his tail as he got out. Clancy was a patient man but he was getting close to sixty, and the first emotion he felt was a quick nagging one of aggravation that they weren’t ready. He put out one hand to keep the dog from jumping on him as he stepped over the tree roots and the chicken shit and the pine needles that formed the yard.
“I thought y’all gone be ready,” he said, and then he took a good look at his sister’s face. She was wringing a grimy piece of tissue between her hands and swaying a little, back and forth, and she wouldn’t look at him. She’d been crying and she was crying still. The screen door pushed open a crack and a small face peered out.
“Shut that door, Queenola,” she said, and the small face withdrew. Inside a shriek of laughter that didn’t sound quite right, rising boys’ voices, rapid running steps. Clancy stopped on the first step, leaned over, and grabbed a post and eased himself up on the porch.
“What’s wrong now,” he said.
She slowly turned her face to him. “He ain’t come home.”
Clancy lowered himself into a chair and sat gingerly, leaning forward. He took his hat off and with a handkerchief he pulled from its safekeeping inside mopped at his face. He sat there holding the hat and the handkerchief.
“Huh,” he said. “Where then reckon is he?”
“I know where he’s at. He still down yonder.”
She tipped her head toward the wall of pines that rimmed the north side of the house. The noise of the children inside dropped to silence and he looked through the screen door to see them grouped in a dim huddle, listening.
“Well,” he said. “What you want me to do?”
“Go down there and see. I’ll send Derek down to the road.”
He sat there and looked out across the yard. He put his handkerchief back inside his hat and put his hat back on.
“Well,” he said. “I don’t reckon we goin to church.”
He raised himself from the chair, leaned forward for the post, eased down the steps. For a moment he stood in the yard and looked at her. He remembered the night she was born by the light of a coal-oil lamp in a blood-soaked bed where his mother screamed curses down on the house and damned his daddy for ever putting it in her. Then he went to the truck and got in. The chickens scattered again, feathers fluttering and settling in the little dusty clouds they stirred.
Clancy had never been to Barlow’s but he knew where it was. His drinking days were long over, his people had their own places anyway, up in the forests and back roads of Stone County, little roadhouses where the Kimbroughs and the Burnsides played their guitars on the weekends and rocked the old buildings until dawn.
He turned in at the sign, having made a short but bumpy journey around the base of the ridge that Rufus and his family lived on, traveling the main highway briefly and rocking along with cars passing at what were reckless speeds to him. These young people driving so fast scared him. The road to the joint was littered with beer cartons and trash, the sides high with weeds. There was a curve in the road and he slowly rounded it and saw the place sitting there in a grove of pines, a highly polished black car pulled around to one side. He slowed and shifted down. He felt bad already, had begun to know something inside himself like grief. It just felt like trouble. His old truck ground to a halt and he sat there looking everything over before he killed the engine. Now that he was here he didn’t know what to do. In the yard it was quiet but on the highway behind the joint the cars were flying by, trucks with their heavy loads whining. He got the door open and stepped down from the truck, holding on to the door frame and slipping off the seat to stand in the heat still watching. He heard a murderous low growl that reached cold fingers into his heart and found a big snarling hound crouched within thirty feet of him, its tail tucked and all the hair on its back standing up. As he watched, another one joined it and they began to stalk toward him like lions, with their unwavering eyes fixed firmly on his.
“Lord have mercy,” he said, and turned, trying to get back in the truck and almost falling, but he made a lunge and got in and pulled the door shut. He kept a pair of pliers on the dash to roll up the window but the spline gear of the window mechanism was worn from just that type of use and it slipped first in his hands and then under the pliers as he worked feverishly at it, the dogs up against the truck now, acting crazy and growling. He got it up halfway and then leaned across the seat and rolled the other window all the way up. It sounded like the dogs were circling the truck, making ragged sounds of wet rumbling in their throats. He’d never seen dogs act so. He’d been bitten by white men’s dogs and white men had been bitten by his, but he had never questioned it and even understood it. But there was something wrong with these two besides the fact that he was black. These two were ready to kill somebody. Anybody.
Maybe if he were younger, or maybe if he were younger and had a club. But two at once. He’d never seen rabies but h
e didn’t think it was that.
One of the hounds reared suddenly against the window and Clancy was faced with its terrible white fangs and maddened eyes and the drool it slobbered on the glass as it snarled and glared at him. He pulled back from it. He didn’t think it could get in. It stayed there for a while and it began to whine a little, licking at the glass. After a bit it dropped back to the ground.
Clancy hauled out his pocketwatch and looked at it. Church was going to start in twenty minutes but that didn’t matter now. He felt kind of embarrassed. More than anything he wanted to see Rufus walk out that front door that was standing so wide open and if he was drunk it would be all right, he’d take him on home and put him to bed. He’d done stuff like this himself a long time ago and a young man was entitled to some mistakes. Just as long as everything was all right. But the reason Rufus wasn’t going to walk out that door was the reason the dogs were acting the way they were. He wondered if maybe he should just crank his pickup and turn it around and drive out of here, go over to Mr. Wylie’s store and use the phone to call the sheriff. And what would the sheriff do? Come over here and shoot these dogs? Or would he just hear an old fool babbling about some dogs keeping him in his truck at a white man’s beer joint and making him late for church and hang up on him? But it was simple, really: he couldn’t leave and he couldn’t get out. He had to do something. If something was wrong with Rufus, he had to do something. Rufus wasn’t home so something was wrong with Rufus. The simplicity and the puzzlement of it played around and around in his head but he couldn’t figure what move to make. The main thing was to see about Rufus without letting the dogs take him down, because if they did … What was wrong with them dogs?
He couldn’t even hear them now. He knew they had to be lying in front of the truck. Just waiting. He couldn’t get out and he couldn’t leave. If that log wasn’t lying in front of the truck, he could turn the truck sideways somehow and get up close to the porch, maybe get in that way, make a jump for the door … but the log was in the way. And the window was blown out.
Old fool, he told himself. Rufus in there and you got to do something. That window blowed out the way it was, Rufus probably dead in there. Do something, but what?
There was that jumble of things on the floorboard of the truck: a tattered pair of leather gloves, some braided wire, a claw hammer with one broken claw, loose nuts and bolts, a sack of fence staples. He didn’t see anything for a weapon but the hammer, and if they both came at him again, same time … it was pitiful to be old and still scared. But Clancy had been scared just about all his life. The white man. The uncrossable lines of things you could do and things you couldn’t. The water fountains and the bathrooms and the places to eat. He’d been born in 1906 and the old men from the old war still sat around the stores and talked when he was a boy. He’d seen hangings, the corpses of men burned alive. One of his uncles had been run down and caught by a bunch of white men because a white woman said he hadn’t tipped his hat to her on his mule. He’d never seen that uncle again and he’d been scared of things like that all his life and now just when it looked like things might be going to change, now when the president himself had helped get that colored boy into school over there at Oxford, here he was faced with this. Two dogs belonging to a white man. It didn’t seem right. And he didn’t have anything against the dogs. It wasn’t their fault that they were owned by a white man who owned a place he had to get into. They were just living on the place. They were just in their dogs’ way looking after what was theirs and they were scared because of something that happened and he hated to have to do it but he needed to get out of the truck and go in there. He couldn’t leave. And he couldn’t get out if they were going to take him down.
It wasn’t that hard, really, not as hard as he’d thought it might be. He put the gloves on and took the pliers and twisted a short noose from one end of the wire so that he could make a sort of slipknot and when the dogs came snarling and snapping to the window he slipped the noose around their necks one at a time and hauled them strangling and screaming to the one-eared claw hammer and delivered the killing blows, blood running from their ears and their limp bodies underfoot when he stepped from the truck to see at last whatever in the world had happened to his brother-in-law.
• • •
Later in the day there were people standing in the yard wanting to buy beer, the ones who had come early, before the law blocked the road off, parked in their cars and pickups with cane poles sticking out the back ends of trucks and out the windows of cars with all the gear of fishermen, tackle boxes, minnow buckets, coolers, and chain stringers. There were two hearses since there were two funeral homes involved, one in the county and one in Pine Springs, shiny old Cadillacs with twelve-ply tires and white satin curtains and gleaming dusty hoods. The dogs were there in their dried blood like sleepers, flies clambering over them and busily depositing their larvae, a quick hatch coming in this weather. There was one minor altercation between a deputy and two drunks who became irate when they found they couldn’t buy any beer today. They were told to either be nice or leave and one did leave but was arrested for drunk driving before he ever made it back to the highway. The other one said something witty to the deputy and was clapped quickly in irons and taken to a patrol car and, when nobody was looking, rapped professionally upside his head with a heavy slapstick and rendered meek as a lamb on the stifling backseat of the cruiser. Smart motherfucker should have keep his mouth shut.
There was much speculation among the spectators, it was a robbery, it was a crime of passion or a crime of drink, the dogs had been killed first, the dogs had been killed last. They could see the window shot out so most figured it was a shootout.
The sun rose higher and those onlookers with enough sense to stay out of the way moved back into the shade of the loblollies to view the proceedings from the relative cool of that vantage point, where they were comfortable with their cigarettes and the occasional snuck slurp of a saved-over beer retrieved from the melting ice of their coolers.
The deputies moved in and out of the building with bags of equipment and cameras and wheeled gurneys and as they worked their militarily pressed tan wool shirts sported dark wet circles beneath their armpits and across the center of their backs. The sheriff stayed inside.
When the investigation was complete, when the photographs had all been taken and the shotgun shells gathered and all the evidence dusted for fingerprints, there was a general huddle of licensed officials near the front door and the first body was brought out. It was wrapped in white sheets like a body prepared for burial at sea and they did tilt it slightly bringing it off the porch into the full glare of the sun so that the large patches of blood were very bright and wet with a kind of patina showing as they carried it across the yard to the opened door of one of the waiting hearses. The spectators noted that that one went to the white funeral home. All hands returned to the bar. They stayed inside so long it was openly speculated that the law might be having a cold one themselves.
The second body was brought out much like the first with the exception that all the bloodstains were concentrated on what was left of the head. The black embalmers received this one in their hearse. For a while the deputies stood around. Then they went back in.
The last victim was not brought out on a gurney. He was carried in a cardboard box that had formerly housed twelve fifths of Austin Nichols Wild Turkey, 101 proof. This small and hairy primate was placed on the backseat of the sheriff’s car and the driver of that vehicle finally emerged dressed in a white sport coat with a brown fedora, leading an aged black man in handcuffs by the cloth of his sleeve. He was placed in the backseat and the doors closed upon him.
The procession pulled out, lights winking, radios squawking, and it wended its way out of the yard and around the curve and up the road toward the highway, toward the distant whine of the trucks on the bridge that spanned the Potlockney River, the final destination of the little tailless gnome that lay stiff on the floorboard of t
he sheriff’s car, and that could not speak for the innocent either.
It was still hot in the kitchen and Jewel put the dinner dishes in the sink to wash later. She hadn’t slept well after Glen left and four o’clock in the morning found her at the stove in her robe, frying chicken. What remained of it was lying on a plate now over a cold burner. She set a few glasses in the soapy water and looked out the window to check again on David. He was in the swing that Virgil had hung for him and his cat was sitting there as usual, watching him. She ran some more hot water over the dishes and filled her glass with iced tea again. Sometimes there was a breeze out on the back porch and she thought she’d go sit there for a while. She needed to talk to Glen and she needed to talk to him soon.
There was a little clump of trees in the backyard near the fence, an old picnic table back there, a mildewed hammock hung from two of the trees. The yard was small and neat with flowers and a vegetable garden, tomatoes, some corn, a few clean rows of purple hull peas. She chopped the grass on weekends in her swimming suit, barefooted, dust coating her red toenails.
She sat down in a rocker that had been her mother’s. Some sweat had beaded at her temples and she mopped at it with the back of her hand and eased back into the chair, rocking a little, watching her son.
“You want some Kool-Aid?” she said.
“No ma’am,” he called, and kept swinging.
She thought about all those people watching yesterday, knowing about Glen, knowing about David. She hated that she’d cried.
She had on a pair of short shorts and she raised her feet and propped them on a post, pushing herself back and forth slowly with her toes. A breeze blew gently, cooling her.
“You have to take your nap after while,” she said.
