by Larry Brown
She didn’t realize all that. She didn’t realize what all he’d been through. She didn’t have any idea because nobody had ever told her because he’d never told anybody and the only other one who knew it was dead. Rotted by now. And not even a damn flower. It hit him that what he ought to do was just stop the damn car and turn it around and go over there and just kick his ass. He should have unloaded the damn gun. If he was going to load the damn gun and go out there and see about his damn chickens then he should have unloaded it when he came back in and he probably would have if he hadn’t been drunk but he hadn’t and how was he to know that it was loaded, it never had been before.
He remembered what he had said: “If you don’t go out there and feed them damn chickens, I’m gonna blow your damn head off.”
He remembered what Theron had said: “I done told you I’ll go feed em in a minute.”
Sitting there eating his breakfast. Chopping his eggs up the way he did and sprinkling black pepper all over everything and wiping his nose with the back of his thumb and biting into a biscuit and ignoring the gun that was leveled at his head while the same old screaming and arguing went on up in the front room.
“Feed them chickens.”
“Fuck them chickens.”
“I’m gonna tell Daddy you fucked a chicken.”
“You better put up Daddy’s gun.”
And then when he pulled the trigger, expecting it to click.
He shivered again thinking about it and drank from the beer and wobbled over the road trying to see where to go. Things were getting really blurry now and hard to see but he didn’t think he had a whole lot farther to go and he thought he could make it if he could just keep it in the middle of the road. Keep it between the ditches. That was all you had to do. A lot of people didn’t know how to drive drunk and they were the ones who caused all the wrecks. It wasn’t that he was so drunk when he ran over that kid, it was simply the fact that the kid ran out in front of him and he didn’t have time to stop. It happened too fast and he thought it would have happened if he’d been drunk or not because you couldn’t do anything when a kid ran out in front of you like that. Little bastard ought not been playing so close to the road and his parents should have been watching him a little closer or his grandparents or somebody should have been watching him and at the very least they should have told the little fucker not to play so fucking close to the fucking road cause that’s where the fucking cars were. Dumb parents was all it was. Couldn’t even watch a kid long enough to keep somebody from running over him.
Bad breaks Bobby Blanchard said. What did he know about bad breaks? He’d been born with a silver spoon up his ass and had good clothes and lunch money and a nice car waiting at the curb to pick him up after school everyday. Him and her both. Having to look at them all the time and see her sitting on her stool at the front of the class like she was as good as anybody else but people just didn’t know how she was, what she’d done, what a whore she was. She could fool some people but she couldn’t fool him. Couldn’t fool his mother either. She told him where he went, who he saw, how long it had been going on and still was probably. She needed her ass whipped too. Or worse. That breeze when it came in the windows lifted the edges of her dress where she sat on the stool and he could almost look up in there and see where his father had been.
When he came to the car was still running. It was up against a tree and the lights were shining and the beer was still between his legs. He lit a cigarette and looked everything over with a kind of calm detachment and a feeling of omnipotence. No problem that could not be solved. The lights were bright in the dash and the gas gauge was sitting below empty. He found the door handle after a few tries and opened the door. When he stepped out, the sky was dusted with specks of white light. He used the left front fender to guide himself around there to where the damage was. His hand found the spotted chrome rim of one headlight and he stood there, smoking, sipping his beer, looking at the front bumper, the tree that had ground itself up against it. He was in somebody’s driveway, who knows whose?
He got down on one knee next to the hood and looked at it. Somebody had made a mistake and evidently they had made it at the factory where the car had come from and it was funny he’d never noticed it before, the big emblem with the V8 hanging upside down.
“Drunk motherfuckers,” he said, and stood up.
“Whew,” he said.
Back the son of a bitch out of here. What did they mean having their goddamn driveway here? He looked up at the lights of the house on the hill. They probably needed a good talking to. But Jewel was waiting, still waiting beside that light, baby he’s coming, he’s coming baby but the Ford Motor Company has fucked up his car and it may take a few minutes.
He got back in and revved it up. He lifted his right hand in one motion and revved it up. It didn’t move. Damn tree had it. He felt around on the floor with his foot for the clutch in some dim memory of remembering and pushed it in. He shoved his hand up. He let his foot out. A tire whined and the car backed away from the tree. Tiny bugs warred in flames of dust.
He got it pointed straight and backed out into the road once more. The gas gauge was flat on the bottom. Could he make it over for one more love? He could walk if he had to. He could swim if he had to. He could do anything he had to to get over there one more time.
He sang a little dirge:
All the little devils
up against the wall
yellin kill him Paw
fore he fucks us all.
A long time later, or so it seemed, he came to in a yard. He was on his back on the wet grass and the sky above him had not changed. He rolled over onto his side and looked at the car. A bush was hanging out from behind the back wheel. He found an empty beer bottle in his hand and lifted it and sucked at it, but nothing came out. The world did not love him and he knew it. He sucked at the bottle and then he laid it down.
It was hard to get up on his knees but he did. Dogs barked far off. He knelt at the edge of a gravel drive where a house sat a few dozen feet off, looming a strange subdued white in the dark. Open windows and a black porch. The house of his loved one now wrapped in slumber. It would be okay to wake her now. She had rested, waiting for him. And maybe dreamed.
He got up onto his feet and bent over for a moment. Touching his head almost to the ground. Then he did a kind of flip and was lying again on his back. Where was the whiskey? Oh God, left behind at the house. Did she have anything to drink? Would she mix him a drink? He remembered the small clipped black hairs on the backs of her thighs. When she put him in her mouth he said he was in heaven but he went to hell and stayed for a while and he didn’t want to go back because they don’t treat him nice like she does, gives her magnificent tits to his mouth and the milk that spurts when she squeezes the nipple kneeling over him while the baby sleeps.
He got up to the door and it was black and inside there was no noise. A pair of chains where a swing had hung. A pair of tennis shoes. A slight wind blowing that heralded maybe at long last the coming of rain. The clouds were drifting across the stars in dark bunches and he attempted some way inside the house. The door was locked and he knocked softly. Maybe she waits in a dream of screaming sex. The times he’d rocked on her like that, the way her eyes looked big enough to fall into and rimmed with something like tears and the whimpers she made and the soft animal sounds that had no description to them, so natural and pure they were. He knocked at the windows on the front porch and made his way past the swing chains and no lights came on inside. Like a cat burglar he dropped off the end of the porch into the flower bed and crept softly around the side of the house, looking for her bedroom window. House-creeping with a hard-on. He would go to her where she lay sleeping and lift her nightgown and she would awake pleasantly surprised to find him buried deep within her, orgasms beginning to melt the insides of her, how she’d moan. A shuffling curmudgeon hand-walking past the windows and tripping on the bricks she’d hauled from a dump and made her flower beds w
ith one sunny May morning.
“Jul,” he said, and then he said it again, flat, tuneless, devoid of emotion: “Jul.”
The windows were open to her room and he could look through the screen but everything was black inside. He panted that same litany to the screen but no light came on. Nothing to do but go on in there. Welcome at any hour. He knew that.
Something told him not to do it but another thing did and he got his pocketknife out and unfolded the blade. It wasn’t very sharp but he hooked the tip into the edge of the screen and began sawing away at it, working his way up. The stars were still up there and he mused as he worked on how pretty they were, how they should have been lying out on a beach blanket on a fern-covered forest road somewhere or on the beach at Sardis or anywhere that would be better than this, her in, him out, having to saw his way inside to her as if she were a prisoner.
He got it ripped out of the right side and then it was too high over his head for him to reach the top of it. He gave it a good pull with the knife in the other hand and the whole thing ripped away from the window frame. It fell to the ground. He looked at the knife and then folded it and put it back in his pocket. Time to get in there to the lushness of those loins. He lifted one knee first, but it didn’t reach the sill. He thought maybe he should just turn around and boost himself up onto it. There wasn’t any glass, was there? Not cut your ass to ribbons, what blood there’d be then. But probably not as much as Theron had coming out of his head. That boy had a lot of blood in his head. Poured it all over the kitchen he did, up under the chairs and down beside the door and out onto the porch so that they had to use mops and buckets and all that water in the buckets was bloody and they had to keep wringing the mops.
He lifted the other knee up. It didn’t reach either.
“Well fuck me nekkid runnin backwards.”
He ended up hoisting himself in on his belly and rolling onto the floor. He imagined himself soundless although one of his feet kicked a tall floor lamp and made it sway. On his hands and knees he crept to her bedside and laid his hand on her hip atop the covers. She moaned in her sleep and turned over. He felt around for a while, couldn’t tell which end was which, where the important stuff was. And then he felt something next to her, a small body, complete with hair and legs and arms. He felt the hair and knew who it was. It caused him to stop quite suddenly.
He drew back. He could see her head on the pillow and the way she was balled up in her sleep. A light snoring that sawed through the black room. And he had not forgotten those nights nuzzling at the breasts of his mother long after he was too old to and the mammoth heat that came from her body and it soft, warm, the milk that came and how she rubbed him and held him close to her whenever the other side of the bed was empty, which was often. He said he was fishing. She said different. That whore of his, that’s where he goes. He remembered how she looked when she was stretching in front of the window, the nightgown pulled right across the top of her, the thin morning light coming through the fabric of her gown so that her legs were planted like tree trunks for just one moment and her toes unpainted and cold on a linoleum floor.
He sat there on the rug for how long he didn’t know, just listening to them breathe. Little breaths and big breaths, the faint smell of the shampoo with which they’d washed their hair. Little toys and stuffed things scattered all over the room. After a while he turned his head and saw the cat watching him, crouched in the corner like a speaker or a bookend, down on its legs. Not like a dog that would bark. Just a hateful thing with eyes that seemed to pierce the gloom and bore into the depths of his soul.
He got up after a bit, after he’d thought about everything, and quietly slid across the floor and over to the window, where he eased himself out and went across the grass to his car. It was cooling in those early morning hours, the motor not even ticking now, the car just sitting there laden with dew. He swiped his hand across the hood, lifted it to his mouth, licked at it.
He got in and the car started. He pulled on the lights and swung out of the yard, the headlights sweeping the side of the house and a small white face coming suddenly to the window to lie vanquished by the passing beams and left behind, on down the road where they lighted an owl perched on a fence post, a frozen and then bounding rabbit, a slowly trotting cow loose from somebody’s pen with her sharp hipbones and her mouth trailing a mix of grass and weeds and stems.
Bobby woke early. The sun was not yet up but it was daylight. In his mother’s yard the trees were standing still under their burden of leaves and the grapevines at the side of the house were likewise laden with their clusters of fruit. All of it standing in a kind of gray mist that was neither light nor dark but a halfway meeting of the two, and it felt already that the day would be hot. He turned over with his eyes open and put his head back on the pillow.
He heard Omar bawling. He heard a rooster crowing. He thought about the ham and eggs his mother would fix for him and he thought about how good it would taste, the salt on the ham, the rich yolks in the eggs. Toast with butter melting on it or biscuits with strawberry preserves. That was the last thought he had before sleep claimed him again, just before his mother knocked on the door and told him not that breakfast was ready but that Jewel was on the phone, saying she needed him, and for him to hurry and get over there.
He walked around the house a couple of times, looking here, putting his hand there. She was still shaking, sitting on the front porch, drinking coffee and smoking one cigarette after another. The tracks in the flower bed were plain, the prints of feet sunk deep in the soil and the dirt on the windowsill and the dirt on her rug and her floor that he could see standing there looking in the window. He went back around to the front, carrying the piece of screen in one hand.
He tossed it down on the porch and looked up at her. She had her robe on and she was barefooted and lovely and now he was scared and mad.
“And you didn’t hear nothing?” he said for the second time.
She just shook her head and sipped at her coffee without raising her face. The boards around her feet were littered with cigarette ash and she’d even thumped some on her robe.
“Well hell,” he said, and stood looking at the side of the house. He looked at the drive. There was a beer bottle out there and he walked over and picked it up. He held it in his hand and studied it while she watched him from the porch. He turned the bottle upside down and not one drop came out of it. It didn’t make any sense.
He walked back over to the porch and set the bottle down. There was nothing else that he could see, just the bottle and the screen and the tracks. He sat down on the top step and stared at the yard.
“Why don’t you get David to come out here?” he said. “I want to talk to him.”
Behind him the chair she was in creaked.
“I don’t know if I should, Bobby. He’s scared enough already.”
He turned and looked over his shoulder at her.
“How do you expect me to do anything if I don’t ask some questions?”
“He don’t know nothing. He didn’t move until the car started.”
“You mean he just laid there?”
“That’s what he said.”
“Well bring him out here. I can’t believe you didn’t wake up.”
“I can’t believe it either,” she said, and she got up and dropped her cigarette into one of the flower beds. Then she went to the screen door and called for the boy. She waited there for a moment and he came out in a pair of red shorts and eyed Bobby warily, looked at the gun. He sidled up against his mother’s leg and hung one hand in the folds of her robe.
“Hey, David,” Bobby said gently. “Come on over here and set down with me for a minute.”
Still the child hung back. She bent over him and stroked his head and told him it was all right and then gave him a little push. Bobby held his arms out to him and he came over and sat in his lap. Bobby put his arms around him. He picked up one of his hands and looked at it, turning it this way and that, and then
he looked at his face. That small version so much like him sitting there on his legs, the same hair, the same nose and eyes. Jewel sat down in her chair and leaned forward with her chin in her hands.
“Did you sleep good, David?” he said.
The boy shook his head. He wasn’t looking at Bobby. He lowered his face and watched something on the ground.
“Did you get woke up?”
The small head nodded.
“What woke you up, David?”
He looked up at Bobby and squinted in the early morning light. “Somebody.”
Bobby just held him. The thought of them lying in there like that. Not even a dog around the place to bark.
“Did you see the car, David?”
“Yes sir.”
“Could you tell who it was?”
The boy looked at his mother and she put her hands together. “It’s all right, David. Talk to Bobby.”
The boy shook his head.
“Can I eat now?” he said.
“Sure you can,” Bobby told him. He picked him up and set him on the porch. The boy went back inside the house and closed the screen door softly. She waited for a moment, until she heard him move toward the back of the house.
“You think it was Glen?” she said.
“Who in the hell else would it be?”
“It could have been anybody, Bobby.”
