by Gil Brewer
“Al,” she said, “I want you to know something. I’m not going to chase after you any more.”
“That’s why you came to Pine Springs? To tell me that?”
“Maybe I did.”
“Well, now you’ve told me.”
The sun was very white in the sky, the sky blue and without a cloud. But the wind was brittle with cold. And what she’d just said was making me a little sick inside.
“Al, did they really mess up your house? I mean, is it really bad?”
“Bad enough. What did Sam have to say about it?”
“I’d rather not tell you. It would only—”
“Tell me!” The way the words came out jarred me a little. I held to the rim of the car door, watching her.
“This is the Welch farm, isn’t it?” she said.
“What did Sam have to say?”
“I just came from trying to see Jeannie Hayes.”
I took my hands off the rim of the door.
“She’ll be there later this afternoon, if you’d like to know.”
“Noraine,” I said, “what do I have to do to—”
“Nothing. Forget it. Sam and I went to a movie in Westfield last night. Then he took me for a drive along the river and down to Riverton. We went to a night club. He’s not at all like the farming folk who live around here.”
“Isn’t he?”
“Nope. He sure doesn’t like you much, though. Nobody does, Al, nobody at all. Did Lois like you?”
“She loved me like crazy,” I said. “She was a tiger.”
“Sam took me home last night—I mean, to his home, up on the hill. He has a cozy place, hasn’t he? Not rich, but real cozy.”
“Isn’t Sam a little old for you?”
“He sure doesn’t act old. Not a gray hair in his head, either.”
“So long, Noraine.”
“Al? I’m awfully sorry about your dog—the way that was. Sam told me about that. He said it was awful, too.”
“He did, eh?”
“He seemed to think it wasn’t the thing to do. He said the people are down on you—they just don’t want you around.”
“You finally giving me up for Sam?”
She started the Ford. “It’s really too bad,” she said. “I like it here in the valley. It’s too bad we can’t talk about things, isn’t it?”
“A dirty shame.”
She put the convertible in gear and tore off up the road.
I stood there in the middle of the road in the wind, staring after the convertible, a black spot slowly growing smaller until it vanished.
The Maples. The sign above the entrance was black on white with some dried leaves and snow caught along the top. It was a tall two-story house, flush against the side of a clay hill that thrust perhaps twenty feet above the roof and the smoking chimney. The front of the place was about ten feet off the road and there was no grass.
Through the door, I stepped into a barroom. Booths, a brown linoleum floor, an array of old-looking bottles on unpainted shelves behind the bar. An ancient jukebox solemnly eyed the room. Lace curtains puffed draftily on the windows and somebody rocked in a chair upstairs, or something.
There was no sign of anybody.
I went up to the bar and climbed on a spindly, tall stool. I sat there. The rocking continued overhead. Two cars whisked past outside.
I coughed loudly. Nothing happened. There was an oilstove against the wall at the far end of the bar. I went over and turned it up a little, returned to the stool. The stove began to roar and light beat brighter and brighter through cracks in the tinny sides of the door. I tried to stare the stove down. After all, it was only a stove. Small tongues of flame speared through the cracks. The black curl of stovepipe began to rattle.
I went over and turned the stove down a hair, went back to the stool. The fire slowly began to die. Finally it went out. Cold swept into the room. I went over again and started the stove up, got the indicator set just right—the way it had been when I came in.
“What’ll it be?”
A ratty-looking woman in black slacks and an old football sweater stood in a narrow archway behind the stove.
The rocking had slowed down overhead.
“What’ll it be?” she said.
“You have any port?”
“Red or white?”
“Red, please.”
She got it, poured it, stood there looking at me. Black hair like long dirty fingers coiled lovingly around her stringy throat.
“That’ll be a quarter.”
I placed a quarter on the wood and shoved it toward her with my thumb. She took the quarter, dropped it into a pocket in the sweater. Then she walked out from around the bar, down the room to the front door. She stood there, looking out at the highway, holding the heavy sweater up on her waist so I could see her hips.
She turned abruptly, looked at me, came over to the bar and struck the wood with the palm of her hand. There was a gum-ball machine on the end of the bar and the little door popped open, the pink gum-ball bounced out, struck the bar, bounced on the floor and rolled under one of the booths. She hit the bar again. But no more free gum.
“Damn him!” she said.
“Jeannie Hayes around?”
The woman raised her eyes to the ceiling. The rocking was very fast. Then it ceased abruptly. The woman sighed, walked past me, muttering, “Jeannie, Jeannie, Jeannie,” and vanished through the archway.
I sat there. The wine was all right.
The clock up over the bar read quarter to four. It was darkening fast in the room. Outside, beyond the lace curtains, it looked cold and gray. Somebody stepped through the archway.
“You were asking for me, honey?”
She wore a Chinese kimono. It was rather startling. She was very pale, and she looked younger than she really was—the same way Lew Welch had. They both must have been in their early thirties in order to have worked at the bank before my father died, held down the positions they had. I had never before seen Jeannie Hayes.
“I’m Jeannie,” she said. She moved toward me along the bar, tentatively. She rapped each stool with her fingertips as she moved along, looking directly at me. “I don’t believe I know you,” she said. “Do I know you?”
There was a sheen of drying sweat on her face, her eyes clear and dark, her lips a tired pink. She moved in and stood close and she smelled of perfume. She leaned back a little and put her hands on her hips, the thin cloth of the kimono taut around her. She was a lot of shape beneath the kimono. The kimono was blue and white and very thin. She hooked one leg over a stool, kept the other one on the floor and watched me.
“Who told you my name?”
“Lew Welch.” I told her who I was and what I wanted.
“Oh,” She took her leg off the stool, touched my arm with her hand, leaned against me, then turned and walked over to one of the booths. She sat down heavily and glanced toward the archway as a man stepped into the room.
The man came to the bar and stood there in his greasy shirt sleeves, clean-shaven, middle-aged, paunchy and sleepy-eyed. He glanced once at me, then at Jeannie. Then he turned his back, selected a bottle of Gordon’s Gin, and drank it off the neck, straight, several long swallows.
The other woman with the stringy black hair came into the room and looked at him. He saw her, holding the bottle to his mouth.
“Now, Helen,” he said softly.
“Don’t Helen me!” she yelled. Then she leaned down and picked up a hammer from behind the bar and threw it at him. He ducked and the hammer slammed against the cash register and fell into the sink.
I went over to Jeannie and looked at her.
“We can go upstairs,” she said.
“All right.”
She stood up and I followed her through the archway. The woman was cursing the man. He stood there holding the bottle of gin, saying, “Yes, Helen—yes—yes—”
I followed her up a narrow, dark stairway. We came to a landing and she opened a door
and we were in a small room heated by another oilstove. There was a bed and a washstand in the room, nothing else save an electric cord with a bare bulb at the end of it.
She went over and sat down on the broad window sill. “That poor fool,” she said. “Always after me—all the time paying. I tried to hold him off, ‘cause she’s his wife and she loves him.”
“Uh-huh.”
“All hell’s going to burst loose,” she said. She stood up and moved over to the bed. “I’ll probably have to get out, now. Maybe not, though.” She shook her head, the tight brown curls jouncing. “What do you want?” Then she laughed.
I took out a five dollar bill and handed it to her. Then I gave her another five. She crumpled them in one hand and grinned at me. Then she began to talk. She told me all that Lew had told me. “So it was a good job, too, being his secretary. But after he killed himself, I couldn’t get another job. They said I’d been sleeping with your old man, see? Well, for your information, I didn’t.”
I went over to the window and stared outside. I put my hands on the pane. The glass was cold.
“Your old man held a mortgage on my father’s place. Then he got my old man to invest in some stock just so he could get our house.” She lay back on the bed. “But I don’t care what they say—you didn’t get it. And I’ll tell you something else. I worked a long time with your old man, Harper. I got to know him pretty well. He wasn’t the type who’d take that money. I don’t care what they say!” She got up and came over to me. “He never took that money out of the bank vault. There’s something you don’t know about your home town—something nobody knows.”
“Thanks,” I said.
“Never mind.” She stepped in close and jammed the bills into my topcoat pocket. I tried to give them back to her. She shook her head, ran over to the bed, flung herself on it and began bawling. Then she stopped. “Go away,” she said softly. “I’ve told you all I know. I’ll see what I can do—I can try to help.”
I went over to the washstand and laid the money by a cake of strong-smelling soap. Then I went back to the door. “Thanks, Jeannie. Thanks a lot.”
“Take my word,” she said, talking into the pillow. “Your old man never stole that money.”
I saw the stalled sedan up ahead in the middle of the road. A man in an overcoat and hat stood beside the car, flagging me with both arms. I was about two miles outside of Pine Springs and it was starting to snow heavily.
I brought the coupé to a slippery halt.
“Yeah? What’s up?”
“You know anything about engines? Mine’s conked out. Just quit without any warning. I’m freezing.”
I climbed outside, slammed the car door, and walked over to him. He was a medium-sized guy and he looked worried. He led me around to the front of the sedan. When he came abreast of the driver’s seat, he turned fast and slugged me across the face with a jack-handle.
SIX
I got my arm up and took some of it. The jack-handle struck across cheekbone, eye socket, and forehead and my wrist. I got down on my knees and started crawling in circles, trying to escape the pain and trying to bring consciousness back.
“All right,” somebody said. “Grab him. Get him off the road. Augie, you take care of his car.”
I came to my feet and started running. I ran right into somebody and he swung something across my head and I heard voices and I was being dragged across ground.
“Get him over this damned fence!”
They quit dragging me. I lay there and I could feel the cold snow-wet ground. Something tore at my shoulder. For some reason my head was a lot clearer and there wasn’t so much pain.
I heard somebody breathing. I looked up and there were two of them standing there in overcoats. Then I heard somebody walking.
A hand reached down and grabbed my hair and jammed my face into the ground. Somebody kicked me in the side.
I worked one knee under me and came up running again. I ran straight at them, working my fists. One dodged and swung, catching me in the stomach. Snow fell on my face.
“All right,” one of them said, “well fix him right, then.”
I got up, lurched around, trying to see them, trying to make out where I was. The snow came down thickly and there was a strong wind howling.
“Take his coat off.”
Hands grabbed me from behind, a knee caught me in the groin. I bent over and something hit my head again and my coat was ripped off.
“Take his shirt off.”
It seemed as if I should know that voice. I tried to think but I couldn’t.
They began, coming in at me with everything they had. Somehow I stood there. I couldn’t lift my arms. The first blow with the jack-handle had done something to my head. I wanted to do something, but my arms wouldn’t move. And then I was on the ground again, on hands and knees.
“Give it to him good,” the voice said.
A foot landed in my face. The foot struck again and again and I couldn’t seem to move my head out of the way. It smashed into my jaw and something cracked in the back of my neck. Hands grabbed at my arms and stood me up. I couldn’t hold my head up. They started hitting me again. Then I knew they weren’t hitting with fists—they had clubs.
“Haul him over to the gully.”
“In the water?”
I ran. I thought I was running fast across the valley.
They laughed.
“Will you look at that? Ever see anything like it?”
“He thinks he’s running away. Kick him in the gut, he’ll quit.”
Somebody kicked me and I became very sick, with my face in the hard cold ground.
They were dragging me. Things ripped and tore at my bare back, then I went through the air, rolling downhill, hitting things. A tree stopped me.
It was very quiet. I lay there, every part of me a big blinding ache. Then it began to be cold and I started shaking and being sick again, wrapped around the tree. I lay there panting, trying to listen. There was no sound, just falling snow.
“You’re all right, Harper. You’re not dead.”
A man was standing above me, fifteen feet away on a rim of earth, outlined against whirling snow and pale sky. A large man with his hands jammed into the pockets of his coat, shoulders hunched.
“Can you listen to me now?” he said.
I started shaking again.
“Know who I am?”
“Yes.” I suddenly knew who he was, standing up there against the flying snow. “Sam Gunther.”
“That’s right, Al. That’s right.”
“Thanks for telling me.”
“It’s all over with, Al. You’re finished. Understand?”
“You’re going to a lot of trouble.” I tried to move but couldn’t. I hung onto the tree. I couldn’t stop shaking; it came in waves now, my teeth chattering and the shaking deep in my bones. I kept thinking how Sam Gunther wasn’t going to get away with whatever it was he was doing. I didn’t want any help now—not from anybody.
“You were a fool to come back here,” he said, standing up there. I could see his face now, a little gray—the flat planes, the narrow eyes, the straight line of the lips. He was smiling. “A fool,” he said. “Come poking around here, like you have. Nobody wants you here, Harper. Somebody had to see that you realized that. I was appointed.”
“You’re lying like hell.”
The pain was very bad inside me. I tried to rise again, but I couldn’t.
“We don’t want you around.”
“Why?”
“Because we don’t like to be reminded of what Cy Harper did to us. He was an evil man, and we’ve been making out all right in the town since he died. It’s taken time. We’ve been getting on our feet again. We’ve pulled together.”
“How you lie.”
“Maybe you think it’s all right, coming back and living there in that house. But you remind us all of something we want to forget. Hardly a man in our town went untouched by your father. People hold it against
you, Al. They can’t help it. Pine Springs is a small place and that makes you loom very large, you see? It makes the whole thing a big thing. So you’re going away now.”
His voice was very level, explanatory. He moved down a few steps, clutching at saplings. The sky was clotted with snow now, violent and giddy. I could hear him breathing, his breath rasping.
I said, “I’m not going away. For a long time I’ve been coming home, and now I’m here. I should have come before this, but I didn’t. Now I’m here, I’m staying.”
“That’s where you’re wrong.”
“Where are they?”
“Who?”
“Your bloody apes?”
“They’ve gone away, Al.”
He came down the slope and clutched at a slim white birch.
“Listen, Al,” he said. “Listen carefully. You are going away, tonight. You’re not coming back. If you try to get help, it’s not going to work.”
“I can go to the law outside.”
“Go. See what happens.”
I said nothing.
“You’ve been warned in every possible way,” he went on. “I regret the death of your dog. He wasn’t really your dog, though—just a stray hound.”
I got to my knees, hunched against the tree. He did not move. I took hold of the tree and finally rose to my feet, leaning against the tree.
“You said something back there,” I said. “Poking around, you said.”
“We don’t like you poking around.”
I laughed.
“Listen, Al,” he said. “Your father stole our money from the vault of the town bank. It was all the savings of the people in this valley. All they had. Everything.”
“Two hundred thousand is a lot of money here,” I said.
“That’s right. Your family ran that bank ever since God only knows when, Al. Your father’s father before him.”
“You’re talked out,” I said.
“Yes?” he said. “That was our money and it’s gone.”
I watched him.
“Good night, Al,” he said. He made his way up the slope, then he strode off.
I started up the slope. I was a sheath of bright pain.
Weaving through the fields, I plowed back toward the highway. I stepped on a white mound that turned out to be my topcoat. It was dry. I put it on and in a moment began shivering again, trembling in every bone.
