Stories of Breece D'J Pancake

by Pancake, Breece D'J

  “Take me with ya.”

  “Sure,” he said for the sake of play, and stepped out into the creeping shade of morning. Somehow he thought of how fine he felt in a new way, a knowing way.

  It was nearly nine when Enoch came in. Bo lay on a crawler under Beck Fuller’s Pontiac, draining excretions from the crankcase and twisting a filthy rag around the grease tits to remove warts of clay.

  “Be a damn sight easier on the lift,” Enoch grumbled. Bo avoided the hole. He was forbidden to use the lift.

  He scooted the crawler into the light, shoved his welder’s beanie back, and studied Enoch. Everything in the man’s posture had slipped to the lowest support. His jaws drooped, dragging the scalp tight on his close-cropped head. His belly pulled the same way against whatever power was left in his shoulders. All of this converged on his khaki pants, making the cuffs gather in little bundles at his feet.

  “Don’t mind the work. Only thing doin’ all momin’. Where ya been at?”

  Enoch lit a cigarette. “Checkin’ out a wreck. Dawn Reed and Anne Davis went off the road up by French Creek Church. Car rolled int’ the creek. Found ’em dead ‘smornin’.” He smiled at Bo, but Bo did not smile back. “Wasn’t they ’bout your age?” he sputtered.

  Bo stood up and brushed his jeans. “Jesus, yes. I go to school with ’em. Drunk?”

  “Don’t know yet. They was full of water. All scrunged up like raisins.

  “Hey, her car was an Impala. I dropped it up to my house till the state cops are done with it. I’ll sell ya parts real cheap. It ain’t the same year as yours, but you could—”

  “No thanks.” Bo’s stomach contracted, his nose, ears, and hands felt cold. Enoch cocked his head in wonder, took another draw from his cigarette, and turned away.

  “Yer crazy,” he said, turning back. “Just nuts. They—are—dead. Got that? Don’t need no car no more.” He turned again to ward off fury. Bo traced a stick figure in the Pontiac’s dust with his finger, then wiped it out again. Another preachin’, he thought.

  “I come in here ’smornin’ to get that miner’s Dodge out,” Enoch said. “Them tools was ever’where. You wasn’t nowhere. Sleepin’? Sleep more’n ya work. Snuck in t’ put ’em away while I’s down to the station. Figger Bill wouldn’t tell me you’s at that whore’s house?”

  “She ain’t that,” Bo whispered, looking for something to throw at Enoch.

  “She ain’t, huh? Well, how do you think she got that boardin’house? Bartram didn’t give it to her—she blackmailed ’im for it the way she done them other guys in Charleston. You stay clear of her, Bo, she’ll ruin ya.”

  “Don’t tell me what to do,” Bo shouted.

  “I gotta watch out for my interests. You work for me, you stay outa that house.”

  “I quit!” he shouted so loudly his throat hurt. He threw his rag in the barrel for effect, adding, “I got enough on you to earn my keep without workin’.” Half out the door the lie frightened him; he wanted to turn back, blame Lucy, and keep his chance to leave forever. You blew it, something whispered, but pride pointed his way outside.

  Inside, Enoch worried. Bo was probably lying. But what if he knew about him and the boys and Dawn? He looked up the road, but Bo was walking too fast to catch on foot. Enoch ground the wrecker to a start and whirled off up the road.

  As the wrecker pulled up beside him, Bo set his jaw in silence. He looked at Enoch, and the flabby jaws said, “Git in, Bo, we gotta talk.” Once he had Bo inside, Enoch let the subject of blackmail sleep, and went on with his sermon:

  “I know’d your daddy. That’s why I give ya this job. You’re a good mechanic, but you proved you ain’t no man by walkin’ out on me.

  “I tried to be good to ya. Let you use my tools on yer car, even teached you how to be a mechanic… but I can’t teach ya how to be a man.”

  “Try treatin’ me like one,” Bo hissed.

  “All right. You want to work? Your daddy wouldn’t want me to let ya after the way you acted. I’m sorry to his memory, but I’ll let you come back.”

  Bo looked out on the broom-sedge slopes. He could swear his daddy’s ghost answered, “Yech.”

  “All right,” said Enoch. “Tonight we’re goin’ fox huntin’. I figger yer daddy woulda took ya by now.”

  Bo hated fox hunting, but nodded and smiled. He wanted his job; he’d need a stake.

  When he had finished servicing Beck’s car, Bo washed his hands, lit a cigarette, and waited to become hungry. Enoch had said he would be back, but Bo was glad to be alone.

  Dawn and Anne were dead. He boiled memories of them in his mind. Dawn was chesty and popular. She was dumb, but smart enough to act smart. Bo respected and spoke to her. Anne was built so slightly she always wore white blouses so onlookers could tell she had a bra, and therefore something to hold up. Her only friend was Dawn, her only beauty was in her eyes. She’d never stare down a husband, Bo thought, so maybe it’s best. Dawn brushed against him a lot, not always so he would notice, but enough to make him wonder what she had meant.

  Bo leaned his head against the red battery-charger and closed his eyes on Dawn’s memory, while a vision of Lucy rocked smiling in his brain.

  He saw a clapboard house, worn silver by weather, now glistening in the sun. He felt the intruder-sun on his head and the power he loved coax him toward the cool shade of the house. He saw movement up the moss-green sandstone steps, across the grooved porch-floor, and through the screen door. In the cool dampness of the linoleum living room, his cousin Sally stood; her hair pressed in ragged bangs on her forehead, the rest pinned loosely behind. Little chains of grime made sweaty chokers around her throat, but she looked cool and remote as she moved toward him and took his hand. “I don’t love you,” he said, viciously. Images soon ran together in flesh tones, and he awakened.

  The dream had excited him as the cold August rain blowing through a porch might break the monotony of heat and pleasure-chill his blood. He searched for a reason for the dream. Maybe, he thought, I made it up. Maybe it happened.

  Hunger drove him beyond Enoch’s Law, and he ran quickly to the dinette. The door was locked, so he dragged himself to Brownie’s, where he bought cheese, crackers, pork-rind snacks, and two Big Orange drinks.

  “Dolla-fourtee.” Bo handed the old man the money, tore into the cheese and Big Orange. “Don’t eat it here,” Brownie added, bagging the lunch.

  Bo sat outside the garage in the cold sun and ate. He watched the Duncan sisters as they sat by their window and watched him with peeping sparrow-eyes. When he had drained the last Big Orange, he felt a wickedness rise in him as he chucked the empty bottle at the Duncan house, and he smiled to see them retreat behind their curtains.

  Enoch returned at two-twenty, found Bo asleep against the battery charger. Cuffy had suggested cutting Bo’s throat, and now was the time, but Cuffy was not around, and Enoch was not a cutter of throats.

  “Wake up, Bo, goddammit, wake yourself up.”

  “What?”

  “Look, I’m goin’ to get the dogs. You lock up at three, an’ be on the road afront of your house by six. I’ll get ya there.”

  “Who alls comin’?” Bo yawned.

  “Cuffy an’ Bill an’ Virg Cooper.”

  “Cuffy an’ Bill don’t like me,” he warned.

  “Don’t be a smart-ass an’ they will. Dress warm, hear?”

  Bo nodded, thinking, son of a bitch.

  He waited until Enoch’s wrecker silhouetted the grade and passed over, then he locked up and headed for Lucy’s. She sat alone reading a magazine and looking day-worn. Maybe she caught a man, Bo thought, but he threw her back. Over coffee he poured out his roil of sickness, hate, and confusion. Soon they were wrestling with the go or don’t-go of the hunt.

  “Bo, ya drive people off an’ dump ’em. Go ahuntin’—they’re just tryin’ to be good to ya.”

  He looked up sternly. “You don’t kick a dog in the ass then give ’im a bone.”

  Then with a
sudden fervor: “Maybe I could take Daddy’s forty-five automatic.”

  “Can’t shoot foxie, Bo,” she warned. “Be nothin’ left to chase.”

  “I know,” he said, as if a veteran of hunts. “I just want to show ’em I can shoot. You know, plug some cans.”

  “Make damn sure them cans ain’t got legs,” she grinned.

  He gulped his coffee and left so quickly he forgot to leave his tip.

  The clay trail from the secondary to Bo’s hillside house was worn a smooth red in the center, bordered with a yellow crust. He followed the path into the perpetual dusk and sweet-chill of a pine grove. There the path forked, one toward the garbage pile, the other into a clearing where the house stood, rudely shingled in imitation-brick tar paper.

  The clearing was scattered with pin-oak and sugar-maple leaves lodged in fallow weeds. The sugar maples blended their colors to camouflage the undying plastic daffodils his mother had planted around the porch.

  Bo panicked when he saw the shedded skin of a copperhead on the porch steps, then laughed at the dusty suggestion, bounced on it daringly, and up to the porch. he opened the whining screen door, burst the jammed wooden door open, and heard his mother: “ ’Sat you, Bo?” He remembered how she used to call him her “only Bo.” As a boy he had liked it; now it made him shudder. But it didn’t matter; she no longer called him in that fashion.

  “Yeah, Momma.”

  As he washed his hands at the sink, he looked out the kitchen window at the heap in the backyard. It was slowly becoming a ’66 Impala again. “Like gangbusters,” he had said to Lucy, then asked himself, “When?” Turning his attention to his soap-lathered hands dissolved the question, but another sprang in its place: Why not use Dawn’s car as a parts department?

  He tried to find peace in cooking, but while he chopped potatoes and onions into the skillet, he heard his mother stirring in the bedroom. The aroma of pork grease had reached her, and she shouted, “Smells good.” Instead of answering, Bo turned to sawing chops from a whole loin. These he fried also, not turning them until the blood oozed out and turned gray in the skillet.

  His mother slipped into the kitchen with short, uneasy steps and dropped into the cushioned chair by the table. She had been resting. The doctor told her to rest eight years ago, when her husband died. Miner’s insurance paid her to rest until the rest sapped her strength.

  She leaned a tired, graying, but still-brown head of hair against the wall, and let her eyelids sag complacently. She wore two print cotton dresses—one over the other. Two-dress fall, Bo thought, means a three-dress-and-coat winter.

  Bo put the food on the table and was about to shovel pork into his mouth when his mother asked for her medicine. “It’s in the winder above the sink.”

  “Has been for eight years,” said Bo, scooting his chair out. As he gathered the bottles of colored pills, his glance went once again to the car. The tires were flat.

  “I need my medicine,” said his mother, while mashing her food into a mush between the fork prongs. She spoke over a mouthful: “When you gonna junk that thing like your Momma ast?”

  “Never,” he said, setting the bottles and himself at the table. “Probably die workin’ on it. Enoch’s got…” He did not want to mention the wreck at supper.

  “Enoch’s got what?”

  “Got some parts, but I need more.”

  “It’ll get snakes next spring.”

  “It al’s gets snakes, and I al’s run ’em off. Now will you leave my car be?”

  “TV movie looks like a good ’un tonight,” she said in penance.

  “Gotta date at the dance in Helvetia.”

  When the supper dishes were finished, Bo dressed quickly while his mother rested from the walk back to the bedroom. Once wrapped, he slipped to the hall closet and took the .45 from its hatbox. He checked the clip: it was loaded with brightly oiled brass shells. The gun even smelled good. Shoving the weapon into his pocket, he shouted, “Night, Momma,” and heard her whimper instructions as he closed and locked the door.

  The sun was not setting, nor was it seen. It hid behind the western slopes so only a hint of sun rose upward, firing the ridges with a green fire, and leaving everything in the hollow a clean, cold shadow. Bo knew a freeze was coming. It was too cold to snow. He would have to go now.

  Bo watched the trees and houses go by as he only half-listened to Enoch’s chatter about his two blueticks, Mattingly and Moore.

  “Now Matt, he knows how to run, but Moore can figger if a fox is throwed the pack and he knows just where to look for him.”

  Bo thought: “I shoulda stayed and watched that movie. Wish Spanker hadn’ta run off. Couldn’t stand to be tied up, though.”

  Houses and tales drifted by. Bo looked back at Matt and Moore, wobbly legged and motion sick.

  “I was younger’n you the first time my daddy taked me ahuntin’.” Enoch shifted down, and the transmission rattled like a bucket of chains. “Got drunk on two spoons of shine an’ half a chew. Man. That was a time. Sittin’ back… listen to them ol’ honkers, and sittin’ back. I growed up quick. Had to to stay alive. You ever know my daddy?”

  “Nope,” said Bo, thinking, wonder what that movie was.

  “Your daddy knowed ’im. Meaner’n a teased snake. Got me laid when I’s eight. Took me t’ a house in Clarksburg—ol’ gal said I couldn’t come in—so he left me in the car an’ went back with a tire tool—then he come an’ got me an’ showed me that ol’ gal an’ her man conked out on the floor.”

  “Musta been some excitement,” Bo said, looking at the patterns trees threw against the sky as the truck passed.

  “Yeah, an’ that ain’t all. He taked me t’ this room an’ busted in on this gal an’ made her lay real still till I’s finished. Then she called Daddy a SOB cause all he give her was fifty cents, an’ he knocked her teeth out.”

  Enoch laughed wildly, but Bo only smiled. Old Man Enoch was dead, but the rumors of strangers’ graves found in pigpens still grew.

  “When’d ya git yer first?”

  Bo told the afternoon dream as a fact, adding color and characters as he went until he was only inches out of shotgun range when “the sweet thing’s old man cut down on me with his sixteen-gauge.”

  “Damn, who was she?”

  “Think I’d tell you so’s you could go an’ tell on me an’ get me killed?”

  “Just never figgered you for the type. Guess I been takin’ you all wrong.” Enoch added in consideration: “Yer pretty slick.”

  Once they topped the hill, small slashes of light broke through the trees; enough to see rabbits and the road without headlights. Bo was about to mention his gun, but they pulled so quickly off the timber trail, he forgot it. The truck rumbled into a small room in the forest: it was walled with trees, hearthed by a pit of cold ashes, and furnished with broken car-seats. Now, Bo thought, climbing from the truck. Now loose. Alone. Smell power in the air—smells like good metal in temper. Dawn never brush against me again. Alone.

  “Git some firewood,” Enoch ordered.

  Bo swung around. “Look, I work for you from the time I git there till when I leave. You want somethin’ t’night, better ask like a friend.”

  “Cocky, ain’t ya?”

  “I gotta right.”

  “You ain’t actin’ like a man.”

  “You ain’t treatin’ me like one.”

  Bo and Enoch combed the littered hill for shed-wood and abandoned timber.

  Two miles beyond, an owl watched a meadow from the branches of a dead hickory tree. Hidden in the underbrush, the fox watched the owl and the meadow. Both saw the rabbit meandering through the dying ironweed and goldenrod, and both waited for the best condition of attack. When the moment came, the owl was on wing before the fox had lifted a pad.

  The wind changed, and the fox changed cover while keeping close watch on the feasting owl. The fox crept carefully, judged the distance to the nearest cover, then rushed the owl with a bark. The bird flew straight up
in alarm, aimed at the thief, and dropped, only to bury its talons in ironweed and earth. Fox and prey were under cover, leaving the bird robbed and hungry in the silver dusk.

  Bo built a fire while Enoch tended the dogs. Mattingly and Moore sniffed the air as they overcame their sickness. They pranced and bit the chains as Enoch checked their feet for stones or cuts. As the fire came to life, Bo felt a baseness growing within himself, felt he knew the forest better than the man with the dogs, and, for a moment, wanted to run into the darkness.

  Bill began to honk his horn at the foot of the hill and continued to honk his way up the hill trail. The dogs barked from the pain in their ears. “Drunk already,” Enoch shouted, laughing. Under a persimmon bush, the fox gnawed rabbit bones and rested, pausing between chews to listen.

  The truck lunged into camp; Cuffy fell out, the other men stumbling behind, leaving the frothing dogs tied to the bed of the truck.

  “What the hell’s he doin’ here?” said Cuffy, pointing at Bo.

  “I invited him,” Enoch said.

  “Hey, Enoch,” shouted Virg, looking from man to dog and back again. “You an’ Matt are beginnin’ to look alike.”

  Cuffy sauntered to the fire, took the seat opposite Bo, and they eyed each other with disgust.

  “Wha’s Nutsy doin’ here?” he taunted.

  “I like it here,” Bo fired back.

  “Don’t git too used to it.”

  Bo left Cuffy to join the group.

  “B’god, don’ tell me that dog can run,” Enoch yelled at Bill.

  “Bender’s the best runner. Bet he sings first and leads ’em,” Bill answered.

  “I’ll bet on Moore to sing out first,” said Bo. “And Bender to lead.”

  “Least you got half a brain,” said Bill.

  “How much?” asked Bo.

  “Dollar.”

  “Done,” said Bo. Enoch bet Bill on his own, and they shook hands all around before releasing the dogs.

  The men brought out their bourbon, and Enoch gave Bo a special present—moonshine in a mason jar. Then they retired to the fire to swap tales until trail broke.

  From his post in the brush the fox could hear sniffing searches being carried out. Dabbing his paws in rabbit gore for a head start, he darted over the bank toward the hollow. Queen, Bill’s roan hound, was first to find the trail. Instead of calling, she cut back across the ridge to where cold trail told her he was prone to cross. Moore sang out lowly as he sniffed to distinguish fox from rabbit.