Hardcastle (19 page)

He swung his feet off the bunk and sat up, rubbed his face, rubbed the back of his neck. “Hellkatoot,” he said. He got out his tobacco and papers and rolled himself a cigarette. “Hey, Too Sweet,” he said, “what time do you make it to be?”

“I knows when de little hand’s on five and de big hand’s straight up, I got to blow de whistle,” Too Sweet said. “An I knows I’m here till I see dat big nigger comin in de mawnin.”

“All right,” Music said, “where are the hands pointing?”

Too Sweet scratched his head and looked at the power plant clock Music could not see. “De little hand’s nigh on to ten, and de big hand don lak much a’ bein in de same spot,” he said. “How come you ain sleepin, cap’n?”

“Can’t quit thinking about one thing or another,” Music said.

Too Sweet removed the rag from his brow, mopped his face with it, and tucked it in his hip pocket. He shook his head. “Lawd, I’d be a two-hundred-pound nigger, won’t fur too little sleep and too much frogjaw,” he said and laughed. “Ain nuthin but lyin awake with frogjaw keeps me so light; burns de meat plum off ’n mah bones.”

Music grinned through the smoke of his cigarette.

“Yassuh, dat sweet hole, dat dark well—frogjaw’ll melt a man down to mah size,” Too Sweet said.

Music laughed. “I’ve been wondering,” he said, “how you ever got a name like Too Sweet.”

“You’ze zactly right,” Too Sweet said, “thas the fust thing my momma say bout me the day I was bawn. Somebody come in de cabin and ask, ‘Ida, how’s dat baby?’ and Momma say, ‘Oh, he’s jest too sweet.’ Onliest name I ever had. Don’t see no need to change it. Haw!” he said, “Won’t fur de womens keepin me worn down so, ole Big Cigar Green hissef would run and hide when I come down de road. Haw.”

Both Music and Too Sweet jumped when the door opened and Regus came in. “Never known you to be so purely anxious to get out on the job,” he said.

“Wasn’t sleepy,” Music said.

“Tell me that when ye see me at two this mornin,” Regus said. He took the watch from his watch pocket, gave it to Music, and slipped out of his jumper. The .38 rode with walnut and blued authority high up on his ribs beneath his armpit. Music himself slept with his coat on, wanting no one to get a good enough look at the cap-and-ball pistol to be able to tell what it was. “Quiet as hell out there,” Regus said, “but I feel somethin. Somethin, by God, ain’t right.”

Music chuckled and slipped Regus’s watch into his pocket. “What did you feel the night you caught that last unionizer in your haystack?”

“Ha,” Regus said, “disappointment! I was a-lookin fer coon.”

“I thought you told me Hardcastle wasn’t big enough to draw any goddamned unionizers. The day I hired on, you told me some such thing, I remember it,” Music said.

“Yeah, well …” Regus said and sat down on the bunk. He rubbed the back of his neck, took a huge breath, and let it out. Ella had given him a haircut too, and his neck looked skinned and his ears stuck out. He flopped back on the bunk. “Yeah, maybe,” he said and sighed. He looked thoughtfully at the ceiling a moment. “Yeah, I guess,” he said. He knitted his fingers behind his head. “I’m tired, someway,” he said. “When ye come around at two, try yer best to be late, will ye, Bill Music? My butt fits this sack just fine, even if yourn don’t.”

“Sure,” Music said, “I’ll be late just like Too Sweet won’t blow me clean outta that bunk with that damned five o’clock steam whistle.”

“Ha,” Regus said.

Music let himself out and shut the door upon the noise of the power plant. On his right across the railroad track and siding, the hulking, black tipple loomed against the far greater mass of the mountain. A single light burned from under the roof of the tipple, two more along the conveyor, and another up the mountain at the drift mouth. Above the drift mouth the dark mountain reared against the stars, and somehow its great silence seemed to diminish and subdue the noise of the power plant behind him and even the sound of the river and the dim and occasional noise from the company shacks across the road; for the silence of the mountain was huge and not really silence at all, but an ancient and abiding sound that a man merely took for silence. A rushing. A sighing. A roar. He had no word for it. Sure, he thought, shoving his hands in his pockets and starting out toward the commissary, if Regus had been spooked by such as that, which he wasn’t, then he would have listened to him. When he was prowling about in the middle of the night, that sort of quiet bothered him too, if only because he did not like the sounds he made over against it, the small, stealthy sounds of a man sneaking about where he didn’t belong.

He decided he’d go look in on Merlee, then decided he wouldn’t. He would walk down to Mink Slide and take a look around. If he went slowly, he could kill an hour of his four-hour shift with that. Maybe he’d even wander down to the Bear Paw. He crossed the river and came up by the commissary. There was no one abroad. Light from deep inside the commissary, back by the candy case, shone through the greenish glass of the front windows and out upon the empty gallery. It made the inside of the commissary look vaguely underwater, like the inside of a fishbowl. Hell, he thought, hellkatoot anyway—maybe she’d be up. Maybe she’d give him a cup of coffee. Before he could think better of it, he crossed the road and mounted the rocky path up to the first row of company houses. What if he knocked upon her door, and when she opened it, he bowed and said, “Pardon, ma’am, Bill Music from the state of Virginia has come to seek the pleasure of your company”? Would she laugh? He had never seen her laugh, and it came to him that if he could see her laugh, he might be able to tell something about her, something he otherwise wouldn’t know. He might even be able to discover, finally, his own feelings in this matter.

Merlee Taylor’s shack, with the roof and floor of the small front porch collapsed and askew, seemed to have a light burning only in the kitchen. Good, he thought. Perhaps the old woman and the child were asleep. He looked in the window as he came around the side of the house. The rocking chair by the grate was empty, although a fire still burned—the nearly flameless, joyless fire of coal—and there was no one upon the ragged, broken couch, but faint sounds he could not identify came from the kitchen. He went around to the back to look in that window but discovered someone had hung a blanket over it and he could see nothing. He stood for a moment, undecided. Perhaps the little girl was sick again. Perhaps the old woman was up with her rheumatism. He went back around the house, and with his cheek pressed to the rough wood to one side of the window, he found that he could see a portion of the tiny kitchen through the connecting door. He could see half a galvanized tub, the wet sleekness of her thigh, the sharpness of her hipbone, her uptilted breast, and, when she turned away, the vulnerable dimples just above the swell of her buttocks. He yanked his cheek away from the house as if it had burned him. “You son of a bitch,” he said, “you goddamned Peeping Tom.” But his feet would not take him away. They grew into the ground like roots, and for twenty minutes he watched her.

Even after she had bathed and dried herself and pulled a ragged cotton slip over her head, he watched. Watched her drag the tub to the back door and open it and pour the water out so that it drained away under the house. Watched her step out of sight into the dark—his dark—where he could not see her anymore but where the sounds of her hanging the galvanized tub on the nail beside the door wallowed in the air around him. He watched her enter again, add coal to the fire, turn off the light in the kitchen, and come through the front room again in the dim wavering light of the fire upon the grate where she might have been able to look out the window and see his fool’s face looking in, the inside and outside dark being, at last, nearly equal. And still he watched, even after she had entered one of the two small sleeping rooms and there was nothing more to see except the rough, bare floor and bleak furniture.

Nor was he exactly sure when he had quit the side of her house; he merely found himself between the depot and the school, hands in his coat pockets, head hung, feet moving south, thinking strange and disturbing thoughts. He had got beyond cursing himself for a Peeping Tom. Hell, that was what he was paid for. Fact was, he had been looking in windows for some time. Fact was, it suited him to do so. He’d seen nothing that was worth three dollars a day to Kenton Hardcastle, but he looked; and whether he watched a meeting of the Holy Rollers, a weary man slumped over a plate of biscuits and bulldog gravy, or Merlee Taylor taking a bath, he watched for purposes of his own. Hands shoved in his pockets, head bowed, he paused before the empty lot between the depot and the schoolhouse. It was rife with long grasses and dead weeds and cluttered with timbers for the mine. Somewhere an out-of-season cricket trilled, a crystal sound as if the creature were made of glass. Fact was, he spied on folks in order to get some clue as to what people did, as if he no longer knew, as if he were no longer one of them himself.

It seemed to him that his present mood was somehow unworthy and childish, but he couldn’t shake it off. He had lost some proper sense of himself. How the hell did a man know who he was without knowing what he did or who he loved? He’d lost all command of such things, left them, somehow, all along his back trail since the day he’d struck out from Virginia.

He suspected he had lost a good deal more than money when those fellows had robbed him on Maxwell Street in Chicago. Yes, and before that, when the manager of the Embassy Hotel had talked him into paying three months’ rent in advance in order to get a cheaper rate, and he had given the manager three months’ rent one Monday morning and had come home Wednesday to find the hotel locked and barred and two uniformed policemen standing by to keep anyone from breaking in. He’d had an awful time even getting in to claim the few clothes he owned. That manager fellow had gypped nearly twenty people—old people, some of them—before he skipped out; gypped some folks bad if only because they had been able to pay six months’ rent in advance for an even cheaper rate. Oh, there had been a bunch of suckers out on the street when the hotel was taken over by its creditors. But he’d washed dishes in an eatery; got pick-up work at the freight yards, loading and unloading cars at one, two, and three o’clock in the morning; and he’d got his diploma from Coin Electric; yes, and a job as a lineman. He’d made enough money to eat regularly, to buy himself a suit, to go to the picture show now and again, to go to a whorehouse. And who was he then? And when his partner had pulled the wrong fuse jacks and he’d gotten into twenty-three hundred volts and shook hands with the devil, who then? And when he’d gotten himself back on the street and could find no job, who stole clothes off clotheslines, stole food, ate from garbage cans with stray dogs and cats, carried the jarring ride of freight cars around in his bones for weeks at a time? And if he dragged up at this very moment and started back to Virginia, who would he be taking home? Unmanly as the mood was, he could not shake it, could taste it in his mouth like ashes.

The cricket, somewhere under the timbers in the vacant lot, made its crystal and intermittent trill, and on an impulse he was never to understand, he drew the Walker Colt from his shoulder holster, thumbed back the hammer, and took aim at the first target that caught his eye: the yellow light over the depot’s empty platform. The pistol roared. A long tongue of flame leapt from the muzzle, and a nimbus of smoke and flame flared from the cylinder. The yellow light on the platform glowed untouched. He cocked the pistol again. He could imagine people in the company houses sitting bolt upright in their beds; he could imagine Regus snatching for his coat and rolling out of his bunk; Too Sweet immobile over his coal shovel, his eyes as white as porcelain knobs. He held the pistol with both hands, locked his elbows, and fired. The pistol roared. Smoke and flame fanned out in three directions. The yellow light stayed exactly where it was, but the cricket shut up. “Hot damn,” Music said. He left the hammer resting on the nipple of the exploded chamber. Acrid, sulfurous smoke hung in a cloud around him. “Hot damn,” he said, and feeling inexplicably better, he holstered the blackened, stinking pistol. If anyone asked, he’d say there had been someone walking the railroad track into town, and when he’d commanded him to stop where he was, why, the fellow had run away instead. “Decided I’d stir the gravel under his feet a little and help him on his way,” Music would tell them. If Regus asked, he didn’t know what he’d say. He started back into town; perhaps he’d think of something. He’d say he had taken some kind of fit. He’d say he’d seen Merlee Taylor taking a bath, and, just naturally, he had gone down to the depot and tried to shoot out the light. If Regus didn’t want to believe that, then to hell with him, for it was as good an explanation as he was going to get.

As he passed the depot again, he could see a long, splintered gouge in the wooden ceiling over the platform; it wasn’t more than three inches to the right of the light bulb. Damned good shot, he thought, for fifty or sixty yards. He didn’t know where the other .44 ball had gone and didn’t care. There were faces in a few of the windows along the first row of company houses, but only one front door was open. A barefooted man in a union suit stood in it. He looked at Music and then turned his head owlishly to look up and down the street. “It’s all right,” Music shouted, “just some goddamned stranger, and I run the sucker off.” The man backed up a step, took one more quick look up and down the street, and closed the door. Any moment Music expected to see Regus round the corner by the commissary, but Regus didn’t show. And when he himself got to the edge of the gallery and stuck his head around to look down toward the power plant, the road was empty, merely a stretch of potholes and ruts, faintly polished with moonlight.

Music snorted softly through his nose. The reports of the Walker Colt had sounded to him like claps of thunder—hell, louder, like sticks of dynamite going off, one after the other. But Regus Patoff Bone was nowhere in sight.

He went on down to the power plant and opened the door upon the whir of wheel and belt and the deep hum of the turbine. Regus lay on the bunk, one arm flung up over his face, sunk into sleep like a stone dropped in a well. Too Sweet was busily rubbing beeswax into the leather belt to the turbine.