by Alex Taylor
“I want you to go find him,” she implored.
“Beam’s not even mine. Mine ain’t never drawed breath one in this world. But you want me to go out and stick my neck on the chopping block for him. Ain’t that pretty?”
Derna stared sharply at Clem, who sat hunched over the table, taking long heavy gusts of breath.
“Shit,” he finally said after a few moments, raking his chair back suddenly from the table. “Go out and find him? That’s what you want me to do?”
Derna nodded.
“If Loat don’t kill him, they’ll put him in prison,” said Clem.
“Not forever. Not if it’s like you really say. Not if it was all just a bad accident. He’ll get out if that’s true.”
Clem said nothing, gazing off into the white haze of the room. He felt diminished, his form reduced to the mere jack-scrabble of denim and hearsay, a rumor of a man who had loved a woman with all the sad implacable wrong of his heart, who had loved her even though she had been a whore and had borne the children of other men.
When he put his eyes on her again, she saw his great vault of sorrow, and knew he would do what she asked.
“Go out and find him, Clem,” she said. “He’s your boy as much as he is mine. He never belonged to nobody but me and you.”
Clem stood up quickly, the chair clattering to the floor behind him, and went over to Derna. She put her arms around his neck and felt the stumble of his heart through the faded work shirt he wore, and smelled the dirt and mud and sweat on him. It seemed as if his very scent, his aroma of harshness and hard living, was what she had clung to all these years rather than the man.
“I shouldn’t have sent him off like I done,” he said, his voice nearly a shudder.
“No.” She stroked the back of his neck. “But you can go get him now. You can go get him and make it all right.”
He bent and rested his head against her cheek. “We should have told him,” he said. “We should have told him he had a brother.”
Derna took Clem by the arm and led him to the table where she sat him down carefully, the tremble of his fingers in her own like the quiver of a startled bird. She went to cabinet and took down a bottle of Wayfaring Stranger and poured him three fingers in a coffee cup. He drank it down and his cheeks reddened as if he’d been a long time lost in the cold.
Derna stood by his Clem’s side and thought of her children, Beam and Paul, the one she had clung to, and the other that she had surrendered out of fear. She remembered Paul being wrinkled and knobby as an old sweet potato when she took him to her breast, and now he was gone and she felt his loss squirming in the crook of her arm, nuzzling her flesh until it seemed like the very clutch and flutter of her own heart.
He’d been only two years old when she left Loat. “You can leave if you want,” Loat had told her. “But you’re not taking this boy.” He sat in the glazed wooden dark of his house, holding Paul in his lap, the boy suckling a piece of horehound candy and watching Derna where she stood quiet in the lit frame of the door. She held her traveling bag and the day blew cool against her legs that were bare below her skirt hem.
“I can’t go without him,” she said.
Loat shook his head. He drew a knife out of his pocket, unclasped it with his teeth and laid the blue iron blade against Paul’s cheek.
“How about I cut one of his eyes out,” he said. “Would you still want him then?”
Derna stood silent.
“Or maybe his tongue.” Loat yanked the child’s mouth open and held the knife against his lips until he began crying, brown dribbles of horehound candy slipping down his chin. “He couldn’t talk to bother you then. Maybe you’d like him better that way.” His great joy would’ve been to slice the boy up into tiny pieces and feed him to the catfish in the river. She saw that now, remembering that day from so long ago. And she’d left. Maybe more to save herself than the boy. Or to at least spare herself the sight of what Loat would turn the boy into. She couldn’t say for certain.
Clem turned the coffee cup in his hands. “I’ll go find Beam,” he said, standing slowly. “I guess that’s what all is left for me to do.”
He took the truck keys from their hook beside the door and jostled them like a pair of throwing dice. His eyes were wild now, and Derna stood backed against the counter again, looking off absently into nowhere, her bare feet scratching against the linoleum.
“You don’t have to worry,” said Clem, opening the door. “I’ll go get him back again.”
And then he left.
Derna heard Old Dog moan to life out in the yard, the tires scooting through the gravel as Clem reached the river road and then the noise shrank away to a low whine and then nothing and she was alone in the hot kitchen.
After a spell, she turned to the window that showed the lawn and the landing running down to the slow brown river that looked thick and almost like rubber in the heat of the day. Beyond it, the flats spread out to a rise of black hills flung against the sky like blood, and some deep part of her knew that they were old hills there, older than all the small struggling life that lived in them, or had ever lived in them, the land itself ancient beyond all measure and remote beyond all reckoning.
XIII
FRIDAY
Beam hadn’t realized how hungry he was until he began to eat a can of Vienna sausages that Pete gave him. He quickly finished all of the salty links, chasing them down with lukewarm water from the milk jug. When he was done, he poured some of the water over his head, scrubbing away at his matted hair, peeling the dried flecks of blood and buzzard sick from his scalp.
Pete sat against the elm log eating slowly at his own can of sausages. When he was finished, he tipped the can back and drank the vinegar and wiped his chin, then sat the can carefully in the grass beside the one Beam had thrown away.
The day was grimy hot. Yellow jackets hovered and trembled beside the empty sausage tins. The sunlight hummed. Off in the graveyard, grasshoppers and snake doctors fluttered. Blackbirds scattered over the sky like tossed soil. Pete and Beam sat sweating beside the fire that had deadened during the night, a thin blade of smoke rising lazy and scant from the charred wood.
Beam drank from the milk jug again, poured the last of the water over his hands and ground them together, then dried them against his jeans. His head felt better now and he was certain that none of his ribs were broken.
“I need to be getting on,” he said.
“Where to?” Pete asked.
“I don’t know.” Beam gave a little shrug. “I just need to go.”
Pete chuckled and shook his head. “Not a cent to your name and there’s a good number in this land that want to do you harm and you aim to leave?”
Beam lifted himself off the tarpaulin and stretched his back and legs, feeling the blood rush back to place. Stiffness settled on him like a yoke, but he knew he could walk it out.
“You better not go,” Pete said. He tilted his head back and shut his eyes against the sun falling through the cedars.
“What else I got to do?” Beam asked. “Sit around a graveyard and wait for them to come bury me?” He began to pace around the campsite, stamping restless through the grass. He was glad Pete had helped him—he’d likely be dead if he hadn’t—but he also felt a bit riled that he was now beholden to the old man. For most of his short life, he’d worked at keeping his ties loose. Once a man began to gather obligations, things became cluttered, and he wound up staring at the walls of a prison built by his own hand.
“Well, go on, then.” Pete answered. “I ain’t your mother and I’m not gonna try and stop you.”
Beam looked down at Pete, his gray whiskered throat damp with sweat, his cheeks reddening with sun. Then he looked at the graveyard. A narrow lane of shallow pea gravel, its berm choked with smartweed and sorrel, curved off through the stones.
“Highway out that way?”
“It is.” Pete waved a hand at the weedy road leading away from the graves.
“Well, I�
�m gone.”
“There’s your way,” Pete said.
Beam nodded and began walking, kicking up tiny puffs of dust. He hadn’t gone twenty yards when he heard the chuggle of an engine crawling up the road.
“Somebody’s coming,” he said.
Pete struggled up, dusting his lap free of sausage crumbs. “Sounds like they are.”
“We got to hide! They’re coming right now,” Beam exclaimed. But there was nowhere to run—the country surrounding him offered no quarter and he could only squirm by the dead campfire, waiting for the car to come up the lane.
It was a long primered LTD, its muffler fussing, the gravel knocking against its fenderwells. The car’s vinyl roof was peeling and the windshield was smeared with bird shit and bugs. Behind the wheel sat a woman. She drove the car up the lane and parked beside Pete’s truck. When she stepped out, Beam saw that she was older, but still firm in her flesh, her clean white thighs descending from the cutoff denims she wore, her faded blonde hair tied behind her neck in a sharp neat ponytail. She wore sunglasses and sneakers. A cigarette burned between her long pale fingers.
She stopped a few feet from the campsite, took a last draw from her cigarette, and flung it into the weeds. Her lips were unpainted and thin.
“I saw it plain this morning that it was up to me to find you,” she said to Pete. “Don’t you ever think to pick up a telephone?”
Pete spat into the dirt and toed the spot with his boot. “Why waste a quarter? I knew you’d figure it out.”
“Not before I had a healthy dose of worrying.” She rocked her head toward Beam. “Who is this you’ve taken up with?”
“That’s Beam Sheetmire,” Pete said.
“The one runs the ferry on the Gasping?”
“That’d be him.”
The woman looked at Beam. “You sure ought to be sorry then,” she said to him.
“Why’s that?”
“Anybody would have to be sorry to run around with the likes of this old man. He’s liable to make you just as sorry as you want to get.”
“Don’t listen to her,” Pete said, smiling at Beam.
“What kind of trouble have y’all found that you’ve got to lay out here in this boneyard?” the woman asked.
Pete scrubbed his jaw whiskers. “Got in a little scrape over at Daryl’s. Things got a might hairy so I thought it best to hide away for a time.”
“Christ Jesus.” The woman shook her head.
“Beam,” Pete said. “This is my daughter, Ella.”
“Hell, don’t tell him my name,” the woman said. “I don’t want him to know me.”
“He’s all right.” Pete waved a hand at Beam. “Other than being young without hardly no brains squirming in his head, he’s pretty good. Takes a beating right well.”
Pete and Ella laughed together.
Beam looked at the car. The keys were still in the ignition, and he thought of jumping in and driving away from this place with its slouching graves and slick heat, beating a path to other towns where no one knew him well enough to laugh at the things he’d done.
“Drove by your house this morning,” Ella said.
Pete bent and picked a piece of gravel from the ground and juggled it between his brown palms. “How’d it look?”
“Same as ever. Likely to fall in with the first hard wind. Anyway, it’s still there, if that’s what you’re asking.”
Pete took his cap off and smoothed the damp loose strands of hair back over his scalp.
“I figured them to burn me out.”
“Really? You must of put on a real show then if you’ve pissed Daryl off that much.” Ella crossed her arms over her breasts. “What do you want to do?”
Pete sniffed the air, which smelled of gasoline and warm vinyl. “Best get on back to the homeplace, I’d say. Maybe they don’t want this boy bad enough to come looking for me. Least we can go there for a night. Resupply. Head out in the morning if we got to.” He turned and began packing up his possibles, the cans and jugs clattering together. He slung the pack over his shoulder, scraped the campfire with a cedar limb, raking the embers cold, and then started walking toward his truck.
“You sure you want to go back home?” Ella asked. “Might not be a good idea.”
“Just follow me on down,” Pete said over his shoulder. “What can they do to us?”
“Oh, I don’t know.” Ella shrugged. “Shoot us and throw us down a mineshaft, maybe. Cut us into little pieces and feed us to a bunch of hogs. Burn us alive. You want me to go on?”
Pete gawked at her. “How the hell you think of this stuff?”
“I watch the news.”
When he reached his truck, Pete opened the door, slung his pack in and sat down. “Well, I don’t look for it to be too awful bad,” he said out the window. “Besides, Loat thinks I’m touched so he’ll leave me alone.”
“What about Beam, here?” she asked. “Is he coming with us?”
Pete shook his head. “Naw, he ain’t coming,” he said. “Claims he’s fed up with this country. Wants to hit the road and take off for Hey-Hirah.”
Ella shook her head. “Well, if that’s the case I say leave him to it.” She walked back to her car and settled herself behind the wheel.
Beam watched all of this with a kind of frozen amazement. Were they really going to leave him here, in this ragged spot where the trees loomed sepulchral and cryptic, where the dark came slithering out at night and where light was hard to come by during the day?
“Hold it,” he shouted. “Y’all ain’t just going to leave me here, are you?”
Pete slapped the truck’s steering wheel. “Hell, Beam, I thought you were putting out for sea, way you talked.”
Beam gnawed at his finger. “No,” he said. “I don’t want that.”
“Leave him here,” said Ella. “Maybe if he sulks out here with the buzzards for awhile, he’ll learn how to act.”
Pete looked out at Beam, standing beside the mute campfire. He cranked his truck and the engine prowled beneath the hood. He waved a hand.
“I ain’t gonna whistle for you like a dog,” he said. “If you’re riding, get in.”
Beam hurried to the truck, glancing at Ella idling in her LTD. The look she gave him was fierce and ironhot.
Once the truck reached the highway, the world became walled off by thin elms and poplar trees. Beam rode in quiet, waiting to come to the next place he would have to leave.
XIV
FRIDAY
In the late of the afternoon, Loat fished himself from a strange bed and sat on the mattress staring at his feet, white as streaks of paint on the walnut floorboards. The whisky he’d drunk the night before boiled up into his throat raw and scorching, and he swallowed it down again. Beside him, the girl rolled onto her stomach. Her snoring quickened sharp and brittle, and a pair of flies crawled through the peroxide blonde tangles of her hair sprawled across the pillows. Lifting the sheet, Loat stared at the teeth marks he’d left on her buttocks, red and threaded like the seams of a baseball, and he shook his head and laughed quietly.
But when he thought of Derna, the laughter died out of him. He recollected her browned wavy flesh, the slight pout of her belly, her eyes staring over his shoulder as he bent between her thighs, and something about the hiss of her breath drying the sweat on his skin while he rode her down into the sour mattress made his heart tremble wickery and frail. She’d brought several ghosts with her when she’d visited his house, and now they stood at his back in a crowd.
Breathing deep, Loat caught the stink of the room, like the inside of a dry cistern, rusty and tarnished. He coughed into his hand and strode naked across the room to the dresser against the wall where a fifth of Lord Calvert sat. He took a long drink and shook the burn away. Beside the bed was a small porcelain wash bowl full of water, which he dipped his cock into, the first cold shock making him shiver before he let the piss go. The water glowed golden before him, a drop of blood clinging to the brim of the basin. Suddenly
, a sharp pain cut through the small of his back, and he had to steady himself against the dresser until it passed.
Shaking himself dry, Loat found his pants and shirt on the floor and dressed himself slowly in the drear light of the room. His Remington .45 lay on the dresser. He flipped the cylinder open, checked the cartridges glinting in their chambers, then snapped the cylinder home and stuffed the gun into the elastic of his Hanes, the barrel cold against his groin.
His boots slouched by the door. He struggled into them without sitting or retying, stamping his legs deep into the soft mealy leather, rocking a wild shadow out onto the wall greased with sunlight leaking through the curtained window. His straw hat hung on a bedpost. Lifting it up, he stroked the brim clockwise, a morning ritual taught to him by a dimly remembered uncle as a way to ward off thoughts of death. His fingers whispered over the straw and he circled the brim twelve times, a half-day’s revolution, massaging out the grim dreams that might assail him.
He settled the hat over his head carefully, watching the tilt of it in the dresser mirror. He’d long been a studier of signs, a watcher of skies. All his family seemed touched by such gifts. His father, a man dark and thin as a riding crop, had been the one to tell him the way of careful eyes. When he was a boy, Loat had stood on a ridge of black trees in a dawn broken gray and cold as the old man had pointed out the tremble of ants, the quiver of pine needles, the catch of a note in a warbler’s throat, and announced that it was all the melody of the future, that what was to be could be foretold and even changed if one knew how to cipher the song. “These are the ancient tones,” he said. “You learn them like you know your own name.” And Loat had, through years of the old man bursting into his room in the night, drunk and angry, roughing him from sleep and yanking him into the kitchen to read a scattering of eggshells, to prod and dig through a cup of wormy earth, to tongue the pith of a turnip and say what the taste meant.
His father lost his eyes for ciphering in later years, or so he said. The woman gone—where to? who could say?—and his life a flume washing him into the gullet of death, one day he needed Loat to study a tapeworm the dog had vomited up, to say what its writhings were—rain? flood? ruin?—to make the day yet born to stand shivery and wobble-kneed before him. “What’s it say? Read it, boy!” The old man shouted, pushing Loat’s nose toward the slick, bisected worm as it twisted and suppurated on the walnut tabletop. “What’s to come? What’s the worm say?” Loat tried to read the sway and shiver of it, but his eyes were bleary from sleep and his father was shouting and he couldn’t say for certain what anything meant at such a dead hour.
