by Alex Taylor
The day was warming steadily, and the light sliced down from the poplar boughs overhead in sharp obliques that stood amid the trees like corbels of fresh blown glass. The hay field Beam had crossed at dawn colored quickly, the shorn fescue turning a stubbly blond as the dew burned away. There was no wind and somewhere, very distant, Beam thought he heard a highway.
“What is this place?” he asked.
The old man turned and regarded him, his eyes like two holes awled in leather. “This place don’t really have a name,” he said.
“Well what’s it close to then?”
“The Opins farm. Their old home is just over this rise here. Course there ain’t been no Opins round these parts for thirty years.”
“I think I hear a road.”
The old man nodded. “You would. Can’t hardly stand nowhere in this country anymore without hearing one. People are always after it, ain’t they?” The old man looked at the soil beneath the oak log and shook his head. “Whatever it is,” he added.
Beam strained to listen. He heard a truck, the steel belts of its tires coughing on the road’s rumble strip. “What road is that I’m hearing?” he asked, pointing through the woods.
The old man wiped a hand over the log, clearing a place for himself, and then sat down with a grunt. The slight paunch of his belly pouted over his belt. “That’d be the Natcher Road,” he said. “It goes on many a several mile between here and wherever it is you’re going to.”
Beam stood and hoisted the duffel onto his back. “I got to get on to that road,” he said.
“What’s your hurry?” The old man’s eyes gaped at Beam, as if he couldn’t believe what he was hearing. “It’ll still be there in the morning. You can sit a spell, can’t you?”
Beam shook his head. He sensed that the old man was lonely, as he knew most old people were, but he didn’t have time to chat. It was impossible to know who might be looking for him and he wanted to put as much distance between himself and whoever it was as he could.
Beam cinched the duffel’s straps tight over his shoulders.
“I best get on,” he said quickly.
“Well, you might be back around sometime,” the old man replied. Beam gave a slight nod and then tramped off through the trees that stood still and quiet in the vaporous light, his shoes snapping over windfall branches and crackling leaves. He did not look back.
Reaching a clearing, Beam came to a house that must have once been the Opins place. The peaked roof reared through the branches of blight-killed elms, and the tin peeled back in spots to reveal the black rotted joists and rafters underneath. Jonquils grew in green clutches of stems beside the footstones, their yellow petals long wilted away for the year. Beyond the house was a barn with a gambrel roof and slouching walls, and at the far edge of the grounds sat a crumbling smokehouse.
Beam crossed through what once had been a yard. Rusted paint cans and food tins were strewn in the sorrel, and pokeweed grew beside a stoop rock limed with bird shit. Sections of the porch boards were splintered or missing. Water plinked somewhere and wind flumed through the windows that stood glassless and black. The sky grew suddenly overcast so that the abandoned farm appeared like a landscape charcoaled and grim.
Beam took hold of one of the chicken-leg support posts on the porch and pulled himself onto the boards, which grieved his weight with a low moan. The hinges were empty of a door and he walked through the front entrance, his boots knocking against the dusty puncheon floor.
Save for mounds of dried possum scat, the house was empty. The fireplace held brass andirons and cold ash. The large hearth had been built from smooth fieldstones, and water had leeched down the chimney to draw finger streaks in the soot. Beam stood beside the hearth and ran his hands over the rocks, listening to the wind tremble in the flue. He imagined what it would be like to be lord of this manor, the fire crackling on cold evenings as he stood sipping straight bourbon from a highball glass, musing quietly on wealth and the wild straying ways of life and how easily a man could descend from the height of joy into the chasm of misery like a spider falling on a single thread of silk.
He was running his hand along the ridged slope of the fieldstones when he heard the hissing. A kind of gravelly snarl leaked to him from one of the back rooms, and he followed the sound down a hallway into what had perhaps once been a bedroom. In a corner of the room, two vulture chicks lightly downed with white fuzz sat on the floor blinking their black leaden eyes at him. They lifted their wings and hissed raggedly when he stepped closer into the room, but they were still fledglings and could not fly. A stink of putrefied meat suddenly rushed at Beam so that he staggered back to the doorway clutching a hand to his nose.
And then a huge shape fluttered into the room’s empty window. There was a brief stalled moment of shock as Beam stared at the buzzard, and then it launched itself at him, its wings buffeting his head as he ran down the hallway, the bird vomiting on him until he fled from the house and sprawled face down in the dry grass of the yard.
Beam rolled onto his back. The sky was a white patch of rain clouds. He began to drag the puke from his hair so that he appeared like a strange creature birthing itself, the vomit draping him in a foul amniotic sheet. He sat up, and the smell caused him to retch violently upon the ground. When the spasm passed, he managed to stand and spit.
The buzzard looked down at him from its perch in one of the blighted elm trees, its wings spread in black cruciform, its feather tips glistening in black dihedrals so that it appeared in the pose of one gifting silence unto the world, its red nodulose face jerking wildly.
Beam stared back at the bird for a few moments. Then he wandered away into the trees again. When he stopped to look back, he could see nothing of the house. A halo of vultures circled above him in the blank sky.
VII
THURSDAY
For close to an hour, Beam had waited in the rain at the edge of the Natcher Road, a few cars and cattle trucks the only traffic that had passed by, all of them ignoring him. His hair dripping, his clothes damp against him, he had nearly fallen asleep when a Peterbilt with a blown tire slumped onto the shoulder a quarter mile down.
Beam raised himself from the guardrail where he’d been sitting and hurried to meet the driver as he stepped down from the cab. Strangely, he was dressed in a tailored three-piece suit of navy blue, though he wore a pair of scuffed steel-toed boots. When he moved to inspect the blown tire, he had a slight limp that caused him to list to one side, the thin blades of his shoulder bones scissoring under the taut fabric of the blazer.
“I guess you picked up a nail or a screw there, didn’t you?” said Beam.
The trucker spun and glared at him. His face was puckered slightly, and he wore a coating of pomade in his blonde hair, which was flung in a loose marcel over his scalp, a few curled strands hanging in dirty ropes over his ears and down his neck.
“Now see, that’s not it at all,” he said. His eyes were a dim blue color and they seemed to jump around a bit inside his skull when he spoke. “These tires are too bald to be driving on.” He reached a boot out and kicked at the blown radial. “I’ve been telling Lawrence to put another set on, but he don’t listen to me.”
Turning to Beam, he said, “What happened to you anyway?”
Beam pushed his thumbs under the straps of the duffel. He was suddenly unnerved by the trucker, who seemed to pay the rain no more mind than if it were a slight breeze. He didn’t even blink as the water collected on the thick batts of his eyelashes and dripped onto his cheeks.
“Ain’t nothing happened,” Beam said. “Not to me.”
“You sure don’t look like somebody that ain’t had nothing happen to them.”
“Other than getting rained on, I’m fine.”
The trucker adjusted the lapels of his blazer and sniffed the air. “Do you smell something?” he asked.
Beam thought of the vulture that had spewed on him. He’d hoped the rain had washed some of the stink away, but it hadn’t.
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“No,” he said. “I don’t smell anything.”
The trucker turned back to regard the limp tire again. “I smell something,” he said. He kicked the tire and the rubber flapped loosely on the alloyed wheel. “Can you hoist a jack?”
“Sir?”
“I asked if you could hoist a jack. If you can fit my spare on, I’ll give you a ride to wherever it is you’re going.”
“I didn’t say I needed a ride.”
The trucker spat through a space in his teeth. “Oh, I guess you just enjoy standing on the shoulder of the highway with that canvas bag in the rain.”
Beam looked up the highway to where the rain passed in wind-tossed swarms over the graying slope of the hills, and shrugged the duffel from his shoulders. “Where’s your tools?” he asked.
The trucker gestured toward the cab. “In there,” he said. “Under the sleeper bunk, you’ll find my box and the jack.”
Beam nodded and lifted himself up into the rig. The cab smelled of mildew. Sprouts of smoke grew from an overburdened ashtray, and there were maps and stray porno magazines strewn over the dash. In the sleeper cab, he found the metal tool box and a huge bottlejack that had been spray-painted silver. He gathered these implements and stepped down from the rig.
The trucker sat on the guardrail rolling a cigarette. He licked the paper, flashed a Zippo, and then smiled through a veil of smoke at Beam as he approached with the tools.
“Let’s see what kind of hand you are tire changing,” he said.
Beam silently sat the tools beside the burst radial and set to work. He took a four-way wrench from the toolbox and budged the lugs with it, then slid the jack under one of the rig’s tandem axles, smelling the black scorched stink of diesel and road tar. When he’d jacked the axle, he sat on his rear and, grasping the tire with his hands, slowly moved it off the spindle, using his toes for leverage. When he had the bad tire off, he unsettled the spare from its carriage under the trailer, and placed it flush over the greasy spindles before torquing the nuts into place with the tire wrench. He lowered the jack and stood, wiping his smudged hands over his jeans.
“Care for a smoke?” the trucker asked.
Beam shook his head. “No,” he said. He stepped back and looked at the trailer with its greasy coat of char and road residue. “What are you hauling?” he asked.
The trucker thumped the cherry from the end of his cigarette and then tossed the butt away. “Suits,” he answered.
“Suits? What for?”
“All occasions.”
“I guess I’d have to say I never wore one,” Beam said.
The trucker gawked incredulous. “Say you never did?”
Beam shook his head. “Not that I can recall.”
“Now see, we can fix that.” The trucker stood up from the guardrail and wobbled off to the rear of the trailer. “Come here,” he called, lifting the trailer door.
Beam walked to the back of the rig. Its interior loomed in cavernous dark, but the gray light filtering in revealed the first rows of plastic-wrapped suits hanging like cocoons, their sleeves pressed and freshly cleaned, cufflinks winking asterisks of light.
The trucker climbed into the trailer and disappeared. Beam heard him rummaging through them, the plastic crackling and breathing, and when he reemerged and stepped down onto the gritty shoulder, he was carrying a brown worsted suit folded over his arms.
“This one here looks like it’d fit you,” he said. He made to hold the suit against him, but Beam backed away quickly.
“I don’t want to wear any suit,” he said. “I’m fine in the clothes I already got on.”
The trucker dangled the suit from his fingertips. “You don’t look fine,” he said.
“Well, I don’t intend to put on any suit.”
The trucker shrugged and tossed the suit back into the trailer. “You’ll wear one someday,” he said. “Whether you intend to or not.”
“No.” Beam shook his head slowly. “I don’t believe I will.”
The trucker shrugged again and then reached up and yanked the trailer door closed and secured the latch.
“It don’t matter at the moment,” he said. He turned and walked back to the cab. “Come on. We’re going.”
Beam walked around the trailer to the rig’s passenger door and pulled himself inside. He settled the duffel at his feet and rolled the window down and rested his arm on the sill. The rain had stopped, and thin yeasty smears of mist spumed over the treetops and the highway. The trucker fixed himself behind the wheel, cranked the engine over, and the rig quivered to life, the stack pipes croaking diesel smoke. He turned to Beam, his eyes grayed in the dim of the cab as if taking cue and color from the glum weather outside.
“Where is it you’re headed?” he asked.
“Wherever,” said Beam. “As far as you’ll take me.”
The trucker nodded once and put the rig in gear. “Now see, that’s just fine,” he said, pulling out onto the highway.
VIII
THURSDAY
It was still early when Derna left in Old Dog. She followed the river road out of the bottoms and drove slowly, leaving the emerald flats of corn until the shade of the hardwoods covered her so that she traveled through a murk stretched cool and thick over the highway. From a thermos, she drank warm sassafras tea and she briefly played the radio until it grew tedious and she flicked it off so that only the clatter of the truck’s engine filled the cab.
An old way led her to the place she sought. At first, she thought she wouldn’t remember how to get there but then it all came back to her, up from the country of farm-loam into a bulbous knot of hills smelling hot with morning, onward past slumping barns and trailers sulking in sedge grass, limp wire fences torn loose by the winds, then coasting by the sawmill where mounds of dust stood like melted tallow on the sludgy black ground, the men pacing to work as the light fled down about them in a tremulous spray, a few lifting hands to her as she drove past.
At a small gas station, she stopped and bought cigarettes and a ham sandwich on light bread with mustard, which she ate in the truck while sitting in the parking lot, her hands trembling some as she lifted the food to her lips. When she was finished, she brushed the crumbs from her blouse and went on to the place she’d never forgotten.
The house had been repainted a faint blue. It sat above the road amid pin oak trees, and the tossing shadows of the leaves made it appear to wobble like a mirage.
She pulled into the yard and parked beside Loat’s Cadillac. He owned two, a white late sixties model, which was the car sitting in the driveway, and a powder blue one with tailfins. Owning two Cadillacs wasn’t a display of wealth on Loat’s part, but a manifestation of his superstitious ways, as he wouldn’t drive the white Cadillac at night, believing that riding in a white car after dark could invite madness or even death. He was full of such beliefs. He checked the cycles of the moon, thumbed through almanacs for cures and ways to read the weather for sign of things to come or the whereabouts of things passed on from this world.
Derna hadn’t minded his penchant for what many considered nonsense because Loat was a man others respected and feared and he seemed at first to be the everything she’d often dreamed of while growing up poor and hungry in the mud hills. But all of that was before. Before she took to drink and became a whore out at Daryl Vanlandingham’s bar, before she’d learned what Loat really was.
She exited the pickup. A collection of rusted box springs leaned against the north side of the house, and lengths of mirrored glass had been nailed to the wall in various spots. Derna adjusted her hair in the mirrors as she approached the porch, then rose up the rock stoop and onto the boards, her black plastic shoes worrying tiny eddies of dust around her ankles.
She moved to knock on the screen door, but instead stopped and turned to look at the yard. It had been mowed, and the smell of bruised grass hung damp and sweet on the air. Beyond the yard lay Loat’s garden, tended and firm with stalks of corn and caged tomato plant
s spread down the lengthy furrows, along with several hills of potatoes whose leaves showed the white powder of Sevin dope. There were squash and okra, as well as a trellis of half-runner beans and a row of peas. Loat had strung a dead crow from a cane pole in the center as a deterrent to others of its kind, and the bird dangled by a single foot, its splayed black wings glinting with blue-black iridescence.
Derna remembered standing on this porch while evening plummeted to earth and she listened to the cars brushing by on the highway beyond, wondering if one would take her away. Of a night sometime, she would stand there until Loat found her and led her by the hand back to the house, his voice far off and subtle as he placed her again on the old mattress ticking in her room, the creak of the springs as they bore her sleepy weight like the sound of a stone sliding perfectly flush against other stones, a thing being guided into its exact slotted place.
“Found your way back didn’t you, Dollbaby,” she heard Loat say.
She turned to find him standing in the doorway just behind the storm screen, which made his features grainy and blurred. He opened the door for her and she entered. The house flexed dim around her, the only light what seeped in through the curtained windows. Immediately, she smelled the dogs.
“What about your hounds?” she asked.
Loat raked the hair flush over his scalp and smiled as he closed the door behind her. “They ain’t here,” he said. “Presto’s taken them out to run a few rabbits.” He moved away from the door and stood back to regard her, looking her up and down as if trying to reckon a price, his dentures set in his bottom lip and his hands stowed in the back pockets of his trousers.
“You look good, Dollbaby,” he said. “Considering what all you been through here lately, you look real good.”
“I see you painted the house blue,” she said.
“Some time ago. I forgot it’d been that long since you been out.” He walked deeper into the living room that was empty save for a ragged Lay-Z-Boy recliner and chewed Naugahyde footstool. “Come on in here to the kitchen. We’ll sit a spell.”
