by Larry Brown
“Just stay in here. You got that?”
The man eased himself to rest against the back of the seat and his eyes were hooded and dark and they mocked Bobby. “I need to get some more clothes,” he said. “You said you’d let me get my clothes.”
“I will. I’m gonna have a look around first. You stay in the car. You hear?”
“I hear.”
“I can always handcuff you to the car if you’re thinking about running.”
The prisoner looked away.
Bobby got out and took the keys with him. The sky was beginning to cloud over and a small wind was whistling through the tops of the pines. He stepped around the stuff in the yard and walked over to the door. He looked at the concrete blocks stacked there and went up them cautiously and glanced back once at the prisoner before he tried the knob. It turned stiffly in his hand and he stepped into the trailer.
The first thing that hit him was the smell. Mildew and rot. The floor was buckled and water stains in strange brown shapes had spread out over the ceiling. The furniture was piled high with clothes. It was damp in there and a small puddle of water lay on the floor. He stood in the middle of the living room for a moment. Beneath the couch he spotted something and he went closer and then knelt and reached under it for the thing that lay there. It was a child’s shirt, spotted with dried blood. He smelled it but it had no odor at all. He laid it aside and stood back up. There were rooms at either end and he went down the narrow hall with a vague distress consuming him. He didn’t want to be in this place, neither as visitor or intruder. He kept thinking of the children.
His boots pressed spots of water from the soiled carpet in the hall and he stopped at the back door to look and see what was out there. A small pane of glass was set into it and he looked through it to a bleary world outside. There was a loose aluminum knob set into the door and he twisted it. The door was jammed in its frame and he had to push hard on it. The top sagged out but the bottom was hung up on the threshold. He pushed harder and it wobbled open and he let it sway away from the trailer. There was an odd light in the woods out there. He looked down but there were no steps. The ground was two feet below the floor. He left the door open and went on down the hall.
A bathroom with no door was on the left. He studied the rusted tub, the torn shower curtain. A few cans of shaving cream and some shampoo and soap were on the sink. Wet towels were piled up. The commode was leaking and water had pooled around it and run down the hall and he was standing in it. He moved out of there and walked into the bedroom. It was dark in there, the windows shuttered against the light with venetian blinds. A rumpled bed dusted with cigarette ashes, record albums on the floor, and a player set on top of a dresser whose drawers were hanging open. He looked behind the door and the shotgun was leaning there in the corner just where they said it would be. He picked it up. The gun was rusted and the stock was full of scratches. He found the release and pulled down on the slide to see if it was loaded. It was. He pumped the slide three times and the shells kicked out and landed on the floor with small clatters. He stooped and picked them up, turned them over in his hand in the dim light. Birdshot, some green, some red. He put them in his pocket and cleared the action on the gun one more time, looked into the chamber to see that it was empty. Then he put it back where it had been and moved the door over it. He stood there listening but he heard nothing.
The open back door was letting light into the hall and he walked back to it and grabbed hold of the door frame and took a long step down into the backyard. The woods were close and he could see more junk scattered down through there. An old Dodge car was resting in the weeds and he walked over and looked inside. The seats had rotted and the hood was up and the motor was missing. He glanced up. Clouds were pushing fast across the sky and he heard a low rumbling.
There seemed to be some kind of path down through the woods, not exactly well worn, more like a trail. He looked back up the hill. The door was still hanging against the outside wall. He eased into the woods. Evidently people had used this place as a dumping ground for years. The stands of scrubby trees were littered with the cast-off items of so many households, cardboard boxes of Mason jars and old crates, broken washing machines. He moved past these things and watched the ground for snakes. Little oak trees with their broad leaves carpeted the ground, thin pines swayed in the breeze, nests of honeysuckle and vines tangled with piles of wooden skids. The ground was still damp from the rain and he stepped around the holes of water, trying to keep his feet dry. He kept glancing back at the trailer until it was out of sight and then he went deeper into the woods. He walked and walked, remembering what they’d said. There was the white stump. And then he saw it: a low mound of earth on the other side of a pile of downed timber, fresh spadings of earth still in chunks with bits of shattered rock embedded in the blue bits of clay. He walked closer to it until he stood over it. It was such a small thing. He went to his knees and started digging with his hands. The clay stuck to his fingers. No worms had turned in this earth.
He knelt, unmindful of the wetness that was spreading over his knees, and he began to breathe a little harder just as Byers had, and it was not lost on him. When his hand struck a bone he stopped. Leaned back on his haunches with the gun hanging heavy at his side and raised his face to the sky that was swirling and arguing with its own elements and closed his eyes for a second. A thunderbolt barked far off. A dry rumbling cracking that seemed to be heading his way with one purpose and that to split the heavens open and devour him and everything in the world that was under it. He could hear it forming up in the distance and thunder building on thunder and it began to rain. He took his hat off and let the drops pepper his shoulders, his forearms. He sank his fingers back into the cheap and worthless red dirt and it rose up between his knuckles as he pawed it back or cast it to one side or the other. The cloudhead moved above him and the trees swayed hard in the wind it brought and the noise like a long sighing rose up all around him.
The lightning moved in and it began to arc down to the land. He heard a bolt explode nearby. He felt that he was about to be struck and with one quick movement he stood up and unbuckled the gun and pitched it away running and dove to the ground and in the report and clash that followed, from one corner of his eye, he saw a tall pine tree illuminated in a bright flash of blue light, a halo of electric fire, and the bark sliding away in curved shells as the resin boiled out in black bubbles and slid hissing down the white pale length of the naked tree all bent and smoking and its limbs in ruins.
He lay on his face in the mud with both hands over his ears and thinking his eardrums were burst while from the sky a torrent of water settled over him and poured down into every inch of ground. It poured ceaselessly and it roared with a sound that drowned out every nuance of hearing he might have had left. He stood up in the midst of it and saw the water flowing into the shallow depression he had made with his hands and he moved toward it even in the midst of what was coming from the sky. Little rivulets of packed dirt were shearing away from the edges of the hole and mud and water were being borne away down the hillside and while he stood there half blind and near deaf he saw the thin bones coming yellow into the gray light and the femurs rising out of the sludge and the hips and what lay there was not over two feet long. He staggered through the soggy leaves and recovered his gun and strapped it on and didn’t look anymore. He found his hat and went back up the path as the storm began to move away, the rumbling fading, the lightning spearing down to the earth at other points, a dying message talking, God uneasy, maybe, but he’d seen all he needed to.
Dripping onto the soaked carpet at the back door he stood poised and listening for the repeat of a small noise and when he turned the barrel of the shotgun was looming up and the clenched hands still bearing the handcuffs were what he looked at before the face, the finger on the trigger, the other hand gripping the shotgun just short of the pump slide, and then he looked at the face, the wet hair hanging down into the smiling eyes and a single drop of
rainwater depending from the chin and it seemed to happen in slow motion, how the barrel moved up and how he looked deep into the black nothingness contained there and peered up almost detached into the eyes that smiled and then the finger bent and the firing pin snapped on the empty chamber and all the light went out of those eyes. He would remember it for years, his own gun coming into his hand, the rustle of the leather against the steel and the horror in the eyes that had fixed on his when he brought the heavy revolver up and leveled it, that moment so quiet and still when they both listened to the chamber rotate up as he cocked it and how the little black iron tooth moved back under his thumb with a dead dry click.
The gun did not waver as it moved toward the face and it was almost comical the way the eyes crossed to try and keep that small black bore in focus. But Bobby didn’t laugh. In that tiny second when he decided not to kill him he became very sad.
“You’re under arrest for murder now, you son of a bitch,” he said.
Jewel got to work early and let herself in through the back door that faced the alley where the delivery trucks parked, putting the key into the lock over the hasp and swinging the hasp back and going into the kitchen. It was dark until she swung the door back and propped it with a brick. She hooked the spring into the screen door and let it close.
She set her purse on a table and went to the wall switch and turned on the lights. They hummed and blinked a few times and then came on all over the ceiling. She made some coffee and went out to the front where the same quiet lay over everything, the dark tables and chairs, the ceiling fans hanging still and dusty.
One by one she raised the blinds in the windows and looked out onto the street. It was cloudy and the pavement was wet. She called back the night and the crashings of thunder and the intermittent flashes of light, the bristles of his jaw, the gentleness of his hands. How soft his words in her ear and the things he had said. Those wasted three years, all that time waiting because she’d said she would. If Glen came by now she’d have to think of what to tell him. She couldn’t let things go back to the way they had been. When that time came she’d have to be strong enough to send him away, to tell him that it was over, that she had to think about David. She had to think about the rest of her life.
She unlocked the front door and turned on the lights in the front room. Customers would be coming in by eleven and the phone would start ringing for orders before long. She went to the grill and turned it on, walked back to the kitchen and put on a fresh apron and started getting things from the coolers and freezers. It helped to keep her hands busy with things, to work, to get started on the day and not worry about what might happen later or what he might do when he found out. Too much time had gone by. She had wasted too much of her life on him already. She had to let him go.
When she walked out to the front to draw herself a Coke from the fountain there was nobody sitting at the counter but Glen. She stopped suddenly. He didn’t look good and she could tell he’d been drinking by the way his eyes were. And he was just sitting there with his hands folded together as if he had been waiting for her to appear.
“Well,” she said, and went to the rack of glasses and got one and reached into the bin and scooped it full of ice. She could feel him watching her as she filled the glass from the dispenser. She didn’t know what she was going to say, but she turned around to him and set the glass on the counter and crossed her arms.
“You want something?”
He pulled his hands apart and watched the counter for a moment, then looked up at her.
“Cup of coffee, maybe?”
“Okay.”
She had to go back to the kitchen for it, through the double doors and past one of the stoves where an old black crone named Nell was mindlessly stirring something in a big pot with a long wooden spoon. A couple of the cooks had come in and she was glad she and Glen weren’t alone. She got a saucer and a cup and a spoon and filled the cup with coffee from one of the urns and carried it all back out front and set it before him, slid over the sugar shaker and pulled a tin of milk from an icebox below the counter. She watched him tend to his coffee. He swung the spoon back and forth in it for a long time.
“How you been doing?” he said, and took the spoon out and laid it down.
She leaned back against the table she used to fix the hamburgers and studied him. “If you’d come around you’d know how I’m doing.”
“Yeah, well, I hate to have to get in line.”
He picked up his coffee and sipped it, set it back down.
“I saw you come by,” she said. “You been watching me. I don’t like it. Did you cut that hole in my screen?”
“I don’t know what you’re talkin about,” he said, and kept his eyes on his coffee.
“You’re lying, Glen.”
One of the cooks came to the doors and poked her head out and watched what was going on and then withdrew.
“What the hell does she want?” he said.
“Why don’t you look at me, Glen? Where you been since Saturday night?”
He gave a little shrug and turned his head to one side, then looked back.
“Just around. Hell. I’ve had things to do. Looks like you have, too.”
“You’re talking about Bobby?”
“Who else would I be talkin about? I come by to see you and he’s over there. You think I’s gonna stop?”
“Somebody come in my house and I called him,” she said. “We wasn’t doing nothing but talking.”
“What you two got so much to talk about all of a sudden? But I don’t guess it’s all of a sudden, is it?”
It hit her then what he had done, how he had looked at a thing and decided what it was. He had probably driven around thinking about it while he was drinking and brooded over it. She’d spent enough time with him to know how his mind worked. No grudge ever forgiven, no wrong ever allowed to be righted. And he’d always hated Bobby. But none of that was her fault. All that had happened a long time ago.
“You think I been slipping around with him behind your back, is that what you think?”
“How the hell would I know? I been gone three goddamn years, remember?”
“I ain’t forgot where you been,” she said. “What you think I been doing but raising David and working here and waiting for you to get out and come see me?”
“I come to see you.”
“You think one hour in my bed makes up for all that? What do you reckon I say to that baby when he keeps asking where his daddy is?”
He picked up the coffee and she stepped back in case he decided to throw it on her. But he just lowered his head and took a sip of it. She could see dirt under his fingernails. His hair hadn’t been combed and there was dried mud all over him.
“What have you been doing, Glen?”
He didn’t give her any answer for that. It was rumbling thunder outside and the air had darkened again. Cars were going along the street with their wipers sweeping at a misting rain that had started falling. Behind her was a clatter of things in the kitchen and the cooks talking, a radio playing with muted and indistinct voices. It was time for people to start coming in.
“I done told you I don’t want to get married,” he said. “It ain’t nothin but trouble and I don’t want no more of it.”
“And where does that leave me and David?”
“I don’t know,” he said.
She had her answer now, but she’d always known what it would be. She walked a little closer to him.
“I don’t want you to come around no more, Glen. You don’t care who you hurt and you don’t care nothing about me. David either. All you want is one thing.”
“Same thing he got?”
“That ain’t none of your business.”
“You probly been fuckin him the whole time I was gone.”
She felt the hot rush of blood wash up through her cheeks.
“That’s a lie,” she said. “I waited on you. But I want you to go now. I got to get back to work.”
He didn’t get up, only sat there staring at her with the same look she had seen him use on other people. It was a bad thing to see it turned on her.
“You ain’t nothin but a goddamn whore,” he said. “I bet he ain’t even mine.”
She thought of all the nights with him and the years that were now thrown away so fast that they were worth nothing. She didn’t want to cry in front of him, but if he didn’t leave soon she was afraid she would. He didn’t even look the same now. His face had thinned and the way he was looking at her caused her to start to back away from him, her hand going out to find whatever she might use to defend herself against him because he was getting up from the stool and bending over the counter with a hard glint coming into his eyes. She had seen it once before, on that summer night so far back, when he had moved toward Frankie Barlow with the knife in his hand and murder on his face. The voice that came out of him was more of a hiss than words.
“He’ll be sorry,” he said. “And you will, too.”
“Get out of here, Glen. Before I call the police.”
She started to move toward the telephone and when he saw that, he stepped down from the stool and turned away and started walking out with a quick step, not looking back. The door slammed hard and then she couldn’t see him anymore. She walked to the counter and picked up the cup and the saucer and the spoon and carried it all back to the kitchen and set it down gently in the sink. Outside she heard a tire squeal, a horn blare. She stood there at the sink and just looked at the wall for a little while. Nobody said anything to her. The radio was still playing and steam was rising from the big pots on the black iron stove. After a while she went back out front and leaned against the counter, waiting for the first customer to come in. It was still raining and in the distance she could hear the storm gathering in a voice that was low and angry.
