The Killing Spirit

by Jay Hopler

  “But what do you want?” the voice cried again. It was forlorn, a ghostly voice; it seemed to come out of the air. Sweet Gum was so confused he did not even fire. “Let’s talk. Can’t we talk?” Jeremiah stood, staring furiously into the grass. His face was red. “Ain’t nothing to talk about,” he said sullenly, as if he suspected a joke. “We got a job to do.” “Somebody hired you?” the voice said. Sweet Gum lifted his gun but Jeremiah made a signal for him to wait. “Hired us for sure. What do you think?” Jeremiah said. “Somebody wants me kilt, then?” said the voice. “Somebody paying you for it?” “I just explained that!” Jeremiah said. “You having a joke with me?” And he lifted his pistol and took a step into the high grass. “No, no,” the voice cried, “I’m not joking—I … I want to hire you, too—I got a job for you to do … both of you—I’ll pay—” “How can he pay, if he’s dead?” Sweet Gum yelled furiously. “He’s making fun of us!” “He ain’t either, you goddamn backwoods idiot,” Jeremiah said. “Shut your mouth. Now, mister, what’s this-here job you got for us?”

  The patch of weeds stirred. “A job for two men that can shoot straight,” the voice said slowly. It paused. “That take in you two?” “Takes in me,” Jeremiah said. “Me too,” Sweet Gum heard his voice say—with surprise. “How much you paying?” said Jeremiah. “Fifty dollars a man,” the voice said without hesitation. “Hell, that ain’t enough,” Sweet Gum said, raising his pistol. “No, no, a hunnert a man,” the voice cried. Sweet Gum’s arm froze. He and Jeremiah looked at each other. “A hunnert a man,” Jeremiah said solemnly. “Uncle Simon’s giving us fifty both, and a gun for Sweet Gum—that’s him there—and a horse for me that I always liked; spose you can’t thow in no horse, can you?” “And no gun neither!” Sweet Gum said in disgust. “Can’t thow in no gun, and I’m purely fond of this one!” “But you can have the gun,” said the voice, “after he’s dead—and the horse, too—Why couldn’t you keep them, after he’s dead? Didn’t he promise them to you?”

  Jeremiah scratched his nose. “Well,” he said.

  The patch moved. A man’s head appeared—balding red hair, pop eyes, a mouth that kept opening and closing—and then his shoulders and arms and the rest of him. He looked from Jeremiah to Sweet Gum. “You two are good men, then?” His arms were loose at his sides. What was happening? Sweet Gum stood as if in a dream, a daze; he could not believe he had betrayed his uncle. “Aw, let’s shoot him,” he said suddenly, feverishly. “We come all this ways to do it—”

  “Shut your mouth.”

  “But Uncle Simon—”

  There was silence. The man brushed himself calmly. He knew enough to address Jeremiah when he spoke. “You two are good men, then? Can be trusted?”

  “Ain’t you trusting us now?” Jeremiah said with a wink.

  The man smiled politely. “What experience you got?”

  At this, Sweet Gum looked down; his face went hot. “I got it,” Jeremiah said, but slowly, as if he felt sorry for Sweet Gum. “Got put on trial for killing two men and found Not Guilty.”

  “When was this?”

  “Few years,” Jeremiah said. “I’m not saying whether I done it or not—was cautioned what to say. I don’t know if the time is up yet. Two state troopers come and arrested me that hadn’t any bus’ness in the Rapids—where we’re from—and I got jailed and put on trial; for killing two storekeepers somewhere and taking seven hundred dollars. Was put on trial,” Jeremiah said with a sigh, “and different people come to talk, one at a time, the jury come back and said Not Guilty for robbery; so it went for the other, too—murder, too. But they didn’t let me keep the seven hundred dollars; they kept that themselves and fixed up the schoolhouse. New windows and the bathrooms cleaned and something else. Makes me proud when I go past—I got lots of cousins in the school.”

  “You were Not Guilty? How was that?”

  Jeremiah shrugged. “They decided so.”

  The man now turned to Sweet Gum. But Sweet Gum, ashamed, could hardly look up. He could see his uncle, with that big wide face and false teeth, watching him and Jeremiah as they stood in this field betraying him. “What about you, son?” the man said gently. “This ain’t your first job, is it?” Sweet Gum nodded without looking up. “Well, I like to see young people given a chance,” the man said—and Sweet Gum, in spite of his shame, did feel a pang of satisfaction at this. “I like to see young ones and experience go together,” the man said.

  He turned to Jeremiah and put out his hand. Jeremiah shook hands with him solemnly; both men’s faces looked alike. Sweet Gum stumbled through the grass to get to them and put his hand right in the middle. His eyes stung and he looked from man to man as if he thought they might explain the miracle of why he was acting as he was. But Motley, with color returning unevenly to his face, just grinned and said, “Let’s go back to the house now.”

  An hour later Jeremiah and Sweet Gum were heading out of town. Jeremiah drove faster than before and kept twitching and shifting around in the seat, pressing his big belly against the steering wheel. “No one of us mislikes it more than me,” he said finally, “but you know Uncle Simon ain’t much expecting to live too long. Three-four years.” With his mouth open, Sweet Gum stared at the road. There was a small dry hole in the side of his head into which Jeremiah’s words droned, and Sweet Gum had no choice but to accept them. Inside, the words became entangled with the shouting and cursing with which Uncle Simon blessed this ride. The old man sat in his rocking chair on the porch, stains of chewing-tobacco juice etched permanently down the sides of his chin, glaring at Jeremiah and Sweet Gum who, thirty and forty years younger than he, were rushing along hot dirt roads to hurry him out of his life. And his teeth were new: not more than five years old. Sweet Gum remembered when Uncle Simon had got the teeth from a city and had shown the family how they worked, biting into apples and chewing with a malicious look of triumph. Uncle Simon! Sweet Gum felt as if the old man had put his bony hand on his shoulder.

  “Boy, what’s wrong with you?” Jeremiah said nervously.

  “Sent us out after something and we ain’t preformed it,” Sweet Gum said. He wiped his nose on the back of his hand.

  Jeremiah considered this. Then he said, after a moment, “But kin don’t mean nothing. Being kin to somebody is just a accident; you got to think it through, what other ones mean to you. Uncles or what not. Or brothers, or grandmas, or anything.”

  Sweet Gum blinked. “Even a man with his father? If he had a father?”

  That was the thing about Sweet Gum: he would always get onto this subject sooner or later. Usually whoever it was he spoke to would shrug his shoulders and look embarrassed—but Jeremiah just glanced over at him as if something had shocked him. “A father’s maybe different,” Jeremiah said, and let Sweet Gum know by the hard set of his jaw that he was finished talking.

  They made so many turns, followed so many twisting roads, that the sun leaped back and forth across the sky. Sweet Gum could always tell the time at home, but out on the road it might as well be nine o’clock as three o’clock; nothing stayed still, nothing could be trusted. The old car was covered with dust and it got into their noses and mouths, making them choke. Sweet Gum wondered if his punishment for betraying his uncle had already begun, or if this wouldn’t count because the murder hadn’t taken place yet. “Remember this turn, don’t you?” Jeremiah said, trying to be cheerful. Sweet Gum showed by his empty stare that he did not remember having seen this patch of hot scrubby land before—he recognized nothing on the return trip, as if he were really someone else.

  As soon as they crossed the bridge to the Rapids, Sweet Gum gulped, “I can’t do it.”

  Some boys were running in the road after the car, shouting and tossing stones. “Hey, you, Jeremiah Coke, you give us a ride!” they yelled. But Jeremiah was so surprised by Sweet Gum that he did not even glance around. “Hell, what’s wrong now? Ain’t we decided what to do?”

  Sweet Gum’s lips trembled. “Sent us out and we ain’t preformed
it for him,” he said.

  “Goddamn it, didn’t you shake hands with Motley? Come loping acrost the weeds to stick your hand in, didn’t you? Hired yourself out for a hunnert dollars. Do you do that much bus’ness every day?”

  “No,” said Sweet Gum, wiping his nose.

  “Ain’t a man his own bus’ness? Christ Himself was a bus’ness; he was selling stuff. Wasn’t He? He never took money for it, wanted other things instead—more important things—a person’s life, is that cheap? Everybody’s a bus’ness trying for something and you got to farm yourself out to the richest one that wants you. Goddamn it, boy,” Jeremiah said, “are you going back on Motley when you just now gave him your word?”

  “Gone back on Uncle Simon,” Sweet Gum said.

  “That’ll do on him. I’m asking you something else. The least thing you do after you break one promise is to keep the next one. A man is allowed one change of mind.”

  Sweet Gum, already won, liked to keep Jeremiah’s attention so fiercely on him. When Jeremiah looked at him he felt warm, even hot: but it was a good feeling. “Well,” said Sweet Gum, sighing. They were just then turning off onto their uncle’s lane.

  There the old house was, back past a clump of weedlike willows, with the old barns and the new aluminum-roofed barn behind it. Sweet Gum was surprised that he didn’t feel frightened: but everything seemed familiar, as it did when he was chasing Motley, and strangely correct—even righteous—along with being familiar.

  The car rolled to a stop. Jeremiah took his pistol out of the satchel and shoved it into the top of his trousers, past his big stomach; it looked uncomfortable but Jeremiah wouldn’t admit it by taking it out. Sweet Gum climbed over the door and stood in the lane. The dirt quivered beneath his feet; he felt unreal. He giggled as he followed Jeremiah back the lane. They crossed to a field, half wild grass, half trees. When Jeremiah got down on his hands and knees, Sweet Gum did the same. They crawled along, Sweet Gum with his head hanging limply down, staring at the bottoms of Jeremiah’s boots. If Jeremiah had wanted to crawl back and forth all day in the field Sweet Gum would have followed him.

  Jeremiah stopped. “There he is. Sitting there.” He pulled some weeds aside for Sweet Gum to look out, but Sweet Gum nodded immediately; he did not have to be shown. His brain was throbbing. “Here, aim at him,” Jeremiah whispered. He pulled Sweet Gum’s arm up. “I’ll say the word and both fire at once. Then lay low; we can crawl back to the car and drive up and ask them what all went on.” Sweet Gum saw that Jeremiah’s face was mottled, red and gray, like Motley’s had been. Jeremiah aimed through the weeds, waited, and then, queerly, turned back to Sweet Gum. “You ain’t aiming right! Don’t want to shoot, do you? Have me do it all, you little bastard!”

  “I ain’t one of them!” Sweet Gum screamed.

  The scream was astounding. A mile away, even, a bird must have heard it and now, in the following silence, questioned it three bright notes and a trill. Sweet Gum was so numb he couldn’t think of the name of that bird. Jeremiah was staring at Sweet Gum; their faces were so close that their breathing surely got mixed up. That was why, Sweet Gum thought, he felt dizzy—old dirty air coming out of Jeremiah and getting sucked into him. Rocked in inertia, dazzled by the sunshine and the silence, the two men stared at each other. “No, I ain’t one of them,” Sweet Gum whispered. “Please, I ain’t.” Then a voice sailed over that Sweet Gum recognized at once.

  “Who’s over there? Who’s in the field? Goddamn it if I don’t hear somebody there.” There was a furious rapping noise: Uncle Simon slamming the porch floor with his old-fashioned thick-heeled boots, angry enough to break into a jig. Jeremiah and Sweet Gum crouched together, sweating. They heard the old man talking with his wife, then his mutter rising without hesitation into another series of shouts: “Who is it? Stand up. Stand up and face me. Who’s hiding there? I’ll have my gun out in a minute.—Get the hell out of here, Ma, go back inside. I said--”

  Jeremiah, sighing mightily, got to his feet. “Hiya, Uncle Simon,” he said, waving the pistol. “It’s Sweet Gum here, and me.” He helped Sweet Gum get to his feet. Across the lane the old man stood on the edge of his porch with one fist in the air. Was that the Uncle Simon who had cursed them all day, hovering over the car like a ghost? The old man looked younger than Sweet Gum remembered. “Just us over here,” Jeremiah said, smiling foolishly.

  “What the hell are you up to?” Uncle Simon yelled. At this, the old woman came out again, her hands wiping each other on her apron as always. “Jeremiah himself and Sweet Gum hiding over there, playing at guns with their own Uncle Simon,” the old man said viciously. “A man with three-four years to go and not a month more. See them there?”

  The old woman, almost blind, nodded sullenly just the same. Sweet Gum wanted to run over to her and have her embrace him, smell the damp clean odor of her smooth-cracked hands, be told that everything was all right—as she had told him when two cousins of his, boys hardly older than he, had been arrested for killing a government agent one Hallowe’en night. And that had turned out all right, for the judge could not get a jury—everyone liked the boys or were related to them—and so the case was dismissed. “Like niggers in a field! Look at them there, crawling around like niggers in a field!” Uncle Simon yelled.

  Jeremiah was the first to break down. Big hot tears exploded out of his eyes, tumbled down his face and were lost in his beard. “He talked us into it,” he said, “me and Sweet Gum was trapped by him. He talked us all kinds of fast words, and long sentences like at church; and explained it to us that he would tell the state police. I had enough trouble with them once, Uncle Simon, didn’t I?—And he tole us it would be a hunnert a man and we could keep the horse and the gun anyways. We got so mixed up hearing it all, and them police at the back of my mind—” Jeremiah’s voice ran down suddenly. Sweet Gum stared at his feet, hoping he would not be expected to continue.

  “Who? Motley? A hunnert a man?” What was strange was that Uncle Simon stared at them like that—his rage frozen on his face, and something new taking over. “A hunnert a man?”

  “And to keep the horse and the gun anyways,” Jeremiah said in a croaking voice.

  The old man put his little finger to his eye and scratched it, just once. Then he yelled: “All right. Get back in that car. Goddamn you both, get in it and turn it around and get back to Plain Dealing! I’ll plain-deal you! I’ll ambush you! Use your brains—tell that Motley bastard you took care of it out here—shot your poor old uncle—and want the reward from him now. Say you want your reward, can you remember that? Jeremiah, you stay back; don’t you come on my lane. You stay back in the field. I don’t want to see your goddamn faces again till you do the job right. Do I have to go all that ways myself, a man sixty-five or more years old, would be retired like they do in the city if I was a regular man? Yes, would be retired with money coming in, a check, every month—Ma, you stay back, this ain’t anything of yours! And say to Motley you want your reward, and let him give it to you—one hunnert a man—then fire at him and that’s that. How much money you make from it?”

  Sweet Gum said, so fast he surprised himself, “A hunnert a man.”

  “How much?”

  Sweet Gum’s brain reeled and clicked. “A hunnert-fifty a man and a gun for me. And a horse for Jeremiah.”

  “Put in a horse for you and another one for Jeremiah. That’s that.” The old man spat maliciously toward them. “Now, get the hell back to the car. You got some work to do with Motley.”

  “Yes, thank you, that’s right, Uncle Simon,” Jeremiah said. He gulped at air. “We’re on the way to do it. Two horses? Which one is the other? The red mare or what?”

  “Your pick,” the old man said. He turned sullenly away as if he had forgotten about them. Sweet Gum wanted to laugh out loud—it had been so easy. He did laugh, he heard himself with alarm, and felt at the same time something begin to twitch in his face. It twitched again: a muscle around his eye. Nothing like that had ever happened to him be
fore, yet he understood that the twitch, and probably the breathless giggle, would be with him for life.

  Jeremiah’s jalopy broke down on the return trip, without drama: it just rolled to a stop as if it had died. Jeremiah got out and kicked it in a fury and tore off the fender and part of the bumper; but Sweet Gum just stood quietly and watched, and by and by Jeremiah joined him. They strolled along the road for a while. Sweet Gum noticed how Jeremiah’s fingers kept twitching.

  Though they were on a U.S. highway, there was not much traffic—when a car appeared Sweet Gum would stand diffidently by the road and put up his hand, without apparent purpose, as if he were ready to withdraw it at any moment. After an hour or two an automobile stopped, as if by magic; the man said he was driving right through Plain Dealing.

  When they arrived in front of Motley’s house it was supper-time. Sweet Gum and Jeremiah went up the driveway; Jeremiah took out his pistol and looked at it, for some reason, and Sweet Gum did the same—he noticed that he had one bullet left. Hiding a yawn, Jeremiah approached the porch and peered in the window: there the family sat, or at least the woman and children, arguing about something so that their faces took on slanted, vicious expressions. Jeremiah stood staring in the window until someone—the oldest boy—happened to see him. The boy’s face jerked, his features blurred together, his bony arm jerked up as if he were accusing Jeremiah of something. Then the woman caught sight of him and, pulling her dress somehow, straightening the skirt, came to the door. “Whatcha got there? He’s in town right now. You them clowns come out here before, ain’t you?” The woman looked ready to laugh. “Nat told me about you; says you were kidding him with play-guns. How come I don’t know you? Nat says—”