The Coldest Night

by Robert Olmstead

  Chapter 8

  DEEPER INTO THE SOUTH they descended, riding over the dissolving ammoniac land, its smells of sawdust and urine, past deserted shacks and abandoned stations, churches fallen in on themselves, sawmills, outhouses, bayous, piney woods. In the trembling heat, he felt their longing and rapture, their ruin, their persuading death. All day he was haunted by the morning’s sudden turn and return. All day was humid and the throb and stink of decay gathered as if from the entire earth. The lush and flaring grass of the planted levees, the radiating, suspiring earth rising and sinking.

  At a little store they stopped for gasoline and a pack of cigarettes, the hand pumps shaded by cottonwoods, the fluff of their catkins filling the air. Beyond the highway, past the brake fern was mud and muck and wetness. Little boys were swimming in the still water flats and when they stood they were naked in the unclear light of the brilliant sun. They held aloft the fish they’d caught, fat and alive.

  Inside the little store, its floor skiffed with sawdust, the old woman at the cash box was black, her skin almost purple, her eyes milky white and shaded blue as a robin’s egg. Behind her were broken cartons of Camels, Chesterfields, Kools, and open packs she sold by the cigarette. There were dusty bottles of Four Roses whisky and gallon jars of pickled eggs and ham hocks and sausages. A crutch hung by the door. In the shadowed back was a propped-­up billiard table with three mahogany legs and leather pockets. Other blacks, men in their shirtsleeves, sat under the waves of a slowly nicking ceiling fan. They looked to be eating from a platter of chicken livers and drinking out of jelly glasses they filled from a stoppered jug.

  A girl wearing a pink cotton blouse came in with a bucket of ice.

  “Come here, girl,” one of the men said, and when she was near he handed her a silver dollar.

  A man with a cardboard suitcase bound with baling twine stepped up and asked him which way he was heading. He was long boned and as if built of pipe. On both cheeks he wore perfect scars that ran to the corners of his mouth. Henry told the man he was headed south and the man smiled and his scars rose and slowly he shook his head.

  “No. No. No,” he said as he conducted the air with a shaking hand. “That is the wrong answer,” he said, and the other men laughed and guffawed.

  As they came out of the store they were offered and declined the fish the boys had caught, moist in a bucket under a gunnysack. Mercy handed them a few dollars anyway and told them they could sell their fish to someone else.

  The evening was a cloudless sky and the setting sun cast a bluish twilight on the land as they traveled an endless cut through piney woods beside railroad tracks. Overhead was a hot starry night and the white strip of highway seemed to glow in the bending light.

  To the west the clouds were gray over gray and a mizzle-­rain began to fall in the shineless black. Henry pulled over for a spell. He felt alone and he felt the loneliness of responsibility. Mercy stirred in the seat beside him.

  “Hush now,” he said. “You sleep while I rest a minute.”

  He let his head back and closed his eyes. The sound of an automobile at high speed woke him, the driver blaring his horn. The darkness was thinning with the climbing moon, the windshield wet with rain and fogged with the rising mist. The cottonwoods seemed waiting and unwhispering in the hot air. To look back was to lessen a sense of belonging where he was. He thought of the knife and pistol in the bottom of his satchel. When he awoke again she was looking at him. She stuck out her tongue and crossed her eyes.

  The mist had filled the pockets and there was a great winding sound, a bore of sound, and when the train came it came right at them and she screamed before it bent off. It was as if the bluish fog clung to the roaring clatter and hiss of steam the engines poured. They drove on until they saw lights and bumped across the tracks and stopped at a motor court, its neon sign flickering in the darkness.

  “This morning about broke me,” he said as he kicked off his boots. The miles he’d driven still thrummed in his hands and arms and his thoughts could no longer be restrained.

  “Don’t talk about bad things. Talk about good things.”

  “You don’t want me,” he said. “I don’t have anything.”

  “I have been waiting for someone to come along and it may as well be you,” she whispered. Her voice was warm and honeyed.

  “Don’t be funny,” Henry said.

  “I would be so lonely without you,” she said.

  “No,” he said.

  “Don’t get sore,” Mercy said.

  “We never really got to know each other,” he said.

  “We know each other.”

  “What about you? Where are you getting to?”

  “I don’t think about it like that. No, I don’t.”

  “What did Walter say?” he said after a while.

  “He said he’d manage and we were to have fun.”

  She slipped her feet from her sandals and put them in his lap where he held her dusty ankles and dirty feet.

  “Take your clothes off,” she said, and when he did she slid her hand inside his thigh.

  “I want my baby back in my arms,” she said.

  “You’re already aswim with me,” he said.

  “I know,” she said. “I can feel it,” and she moved as if the feeling went through her body. Her body contracted and released and she squeezed his thigh and he could feel her nails.

  “You want it now?” he said.

  “Anytime,” she said. “Always.”

  He hovered over her, her eyes a distant gaze, empty and blissful. She told him the day had been a very long time and then she licked her tongue over his nipple. The bed began to shake and there was a roar, another long northbound freight rasping the tracks, the train shuddering to a stop. Then he spent himself and felt within the collapse of his spending.

  “That’s a bull’s-­eye,” she said.

  In the morning they stepped again into the tangled land, and wet and radiant, the morning’s purple horizon. They were parked beside an abandoned depot where the earth was strewn with oil drums and tipped-­over milk cans, broken crockery, rusted-­out washtubs, a snake. He suddenly flashed on a vision of disaster: women weeping and children and men dying, and it filled him.

  “Henry,” she said. She was shaking him by the arm, her silver bracelets jangling. “Henry, what’s come over you?” she said. This day she wore a starched white dress and twine sandals and smelled of talcum.

  “Nothing,” he said. “I am okay.”

  “You look like you seen a ghost.”

  “Let’s get out of here.”

  He unlocked Mercy’s door and opened it for her. He unlocked his own and set the pistol in its cloth bundle on the floor behind his seat.

  The clammy mist turned crimson. Mercy propped her feet on the dashboard and wiggled her newly painted toenails. The air was heating and the day was like the two halves of what you are and they were split open like a chest with no attending surgeon to hover the interior.

  Chapter 9

  THERE WAS WHERE THEY’D been and there was where they were going and Henry was haunted by the feeling this was the last of all roads on earth and if not for the two of them, then surely it would be the last for him.

  “I like being this close to you,” Mercy said, clasping his arm as he drove the long highway parallel to the great river.

  He was tired and wanted to sleep. He wanted to harbor. He thought how he wanted to finish his days on an island some distance off any coast on any ocean and to die by the roar of the sea and let it wash his body with its sand bearing water over and over.

  “I belong to you,” she said, impatient and wanting him to talk. “There just isn’t any two ways around it. You are mine and I am yours.”

  “I am a fool,” he said.

  “I love fools,” she said, swinging her legs across his lap and her arm at his neck, “because they believe that anything can happen. I am about sure I was made for you.”

  She wondered aloud on what it w
ould be like where they were going. They’d take their meals on an iron balcony and eat above the airless streets below. There would be the smell of flowers under the balcony. Everyday would be a parade of sorts: beads and balloons, straw hats, plastic windmills, bubble pipes.

  “How about saying a road prayer,” she asked, yawning and stretching. He nodded and so she prayed into his ear that they would have very good weather and have a safe journey and arrive soon and then she said her amen and then she said, “Please, God, watch over us.”

  She let herself back to sleep on the seat, her legs in his lap and though he wanted sleep too and was dreadfully tired, he could not sleep because he was driving and did not want to stop. He was going to a place where he had never been before and for him it was like the cord of fate.

  Hours later, it was nighttime again and the moon was rising just over the trees and darkness was coming on when the Mercury started to overheat. Mercy came awake, wiping the sleep from her eyes as the automobile coughed and slowed. A strap on her dress had fallen from her shoulder uncovering her breast. She held her hands to her chest and had begun to shiver. He pulled her close to his side.

  “Why are you shaking?” he asked her. “Are you cold?”

  “It is the presence of God,” Mercy said. “He was here.”

  “I don’t think God has ever been to this place.”

  “God is ever’where,” she said.

  “My mother told me it was God created us because he was lonely. They say he was like a beautiful jewel and he wanted to be appreciated and so he created us.”

  “That is a very pretty thought.”

  “I do not think she meant it to be.”

  She looked at him as if he were a mental, so he agreed to consider more seriously the existence of God and suggested that God could perhaps make a modest first step by curing what ailed the Mercury.

  “He doesn’t mind you,” she said. “You go ahead and play all you want and he’ll just play right along.”

  The Mercury juddered and lurched and with each lurch his blood quickened. Henry thought if worse came to worst, they could walk away from this automobile. They could unscrew the license plates and throw them in the swamp. They could take Mercy’s suitcase from the trunk, and his satchel, and hitchhike out of there to anywhere but where they were and disappear into the darkness. But they continued through the night, the automobile overheated more and more.

  “We are soon to be broke down,” Henry warned Mercy, slow as child talk.

  “I want to get a room,” she said, “and go to sleep in a nice soft bed. Then I want to get up and have a bath and a nice breakfast.”

  “We are a long way from anywhere,” he said.

  “Who cares?” she said to the windshield. She turned to look out her side into the blackness that was no longer rushing by but was slowed to pulse and night heat as they lurched along.

  “I want you to tear my clothes off,” she said.

  “You’re just trying to cheer me up,” he said.

  “You know what I want,” she said. She was getting sulky and was determined to have her way. They were bound by the need that comes when you are the only two left and you are bound by decisions you cannot change, cannot even remember making.

  “I want you to keep doing what you started,” Mercy said.

  He held to the wheel with both hands. He thought, how to say the words, how to tell her the confusion in his mind.

  “I do not want to make love or whatever word you call down.”

  “What do you want?”

  “I want everything.”

  “For that, I’ll promise you anything,” she whispered. “But you will have to do it now.”

  Henry jammed his foot onto the accelerator and they pulled off the highway across a creek and limped into an open field, the transmission screaming with melting heat. They stopped in the darkness where deer picked up their heads and flared away to the forest. He lifted up her dress on the front seat and it was as if big stars were bursting inside his head. They fixed to each other in the darkness and he wished that tonight was all the healing and the blessing a body needed and had been promised these thousands of years.

  They unfurled a blanket in the grass under the smoky moonlight, under the black sky and the ink black clouds, and he got a hunger for food and a thirst for water but also a feeling of never wanting food or water again. Their skin went cool in the wet air and their bodies were slick with sweat.

  She took his hand and held it to her body, moving it from place to place, and he felt the rise and seep of her body’s sweet waters, the fast blood inside his own body and for a moment they were as close as the hand to the water it passes through.

  “Will you make love to me again,” Mercy said, scratching her nails at his back.

  “That’s not what this is anymore,” he said, but she was still coming on, still driven by whatever she could possibly do that would make her a part of him. She propped her bare heels on the high round of the tire and cocked her pelvis in the air. She dragged his thigh under her wet ass to hold her up.

  “I think you struck bottom,” she said in her plaintive voice, and she placed his hand in the wetness between her legs like it was a little bird fallen from its nest.

  “I hope so,” he said, and he had the idea he was taking them into hell. He was the rock and he was rushing to the bottom and she was tethered to him and he was drowning them down deep in the water.

  “Henry,” she whispered, and he pulled her tighter and tucked her in alongside him, sad for how much he needed her and did not trust her. He felt like a child in bed come from nightmare. He was alone with her with this broken-­down automobile on the earth of a southern field and she had come from her father’s house and it seemed so long ago when they first set out.

  “I do love God,” Mercy said, “the way he made everything.”

  “Please hush,” he said. “Not now. We have to get up and get in the automobile. I’ll find us some water for the radiator.”

  In the trunk he found a gallon can and went down the road bank to fill it with the brackish water of a stagnant slough. When he returned, he unlatched the hood and slung it open. In the darkness, he located the radiator cap and twisted it. Instantly, from the depths of its coils, there came a great burst of steam and boiling water that spewed flat and then blew forth.

  I have just been stupid, he thought as the radiator’s hot geyser burned his arms and galled his naked chest and then caught the side of his face.

  Chapter 10

  ONE EYE CLOSED AND would not open as he stepped back and tumbled in the bracken. He screamed from the scalding water on his skin like something raw and unformed and mortally wounded. He got himself up and ran to the water’s edge and threw himself in.

  There was a great splash and flounce of water when his body hit and his mind blacked and then went red, and then slowly the world came to him and he was surfacing and spitting slimy water from out his mouth and nose. She was down on her knees, waist deep in the water, and she was holding him up.

  “Let me go,” he croaked, and every time she did, he put himself under again and felt for rocks and weeds to hold so she had to fight him to pull him back to the air he hated.

  “Are you okay,” she kept saying, and he could tell she was unhappy with herself for saying such, but she could find nothing else to say to him. “Henry,” she cried, “let me help you.”

  Finally the burning dulled and was no more than another worst pain he’d ever experienced. He crawled on his knees, panting with one fixed eye. He hobbled, dazed and clumsy, and she kept a shoulder under his arm, saying they needed to get to a hospital, but he told her no to that as he lurched and staggered.

  They filled and capped the radiator and the engine started. She had to drive because he couldn’t see well enough. They entered the highway again and after a few miles came to a little gas station and grocery store. Mercy banged on the door until a light went on and an old man shuffled from a backroom, dragging his sus
penders onto his shoulders. She bought gas and oil and a sealing mixture to pour in the radiator. She bought a salve that promised to relieve the pain of scalding burns.

  Shirtless, Henry lay back in the passenger’s seat and she spread the salve on his face and chest. However hard she tried to hide her concern, he could tell by her face that he was badly burned, but for the moment he was soothed.

  This time he slowly uncapped the radiator under a clutch of rags. It was not so fierce as before, but its heat was terrifying. He poured in the sealing mixture and more water. He replaced the cap and slammed shut the hood.

  “You need to see a doctor,” she said. “It is what you are supposed to do.”

  “We can go now,” he said. She hesitated until he said, “Now, God damn it,” and so she drove while he navigated.

  Hours later, they chugged into the outskirts of New Orleans and the headlights raised up shacks and shotgun houses. The houses were small and well tended and inside each was a darkness more black than the night itself. The automobile was breaking down again, becoming noisy and recalcitrant and soon would be of no use to them.

  “Henry,” she said. “I know where I am. We’re almost there, baby.”

  It was then he began to cry silently. It filled his throat and caught there. Inside him there came thousands of breakings and tightenings. Inside him, a noose cinched taut and he felt for breath.

  When he awoke they were parked and she was in the backseat sleeping beside him. He put his arm around her and she curled and folded inside his hands.

  “Are you ready for again?” she said, her stirring at his side making his burns go hot.

  He made a laughing sound and gathered her ardent turning body in his arms, the touch of her burning him, and hove up on his knees as if to pray, as if he were the last man in the land and she were this woman under him, the last female of his kind and half of him was on fire again. He wanted to be so good when he felt so black inside.

  She lifted her dress up over her hips.

  The soon-­to-­be light was still off in the east and inside his hands he held her ribs, the swoop of her white spine. She reached back between her legs to where they fit and sighed and said his name again and again.