The Long Home (15 page)

“I thought nobody lived here in the Harrikin anymore.”

“They don’t hardly.”

“I can’t say I blame them. How far is it to where these women you know live?”

“I don’t know. Eight or ten mile. Open us up another one of them beers.”

The road worsened until in places Winer only suspected it was a road, faint vestigial imprint of where a road had been, narrowing, choked by the willows lowering upon it and always descending, Hodges riding the brakes and gearing down, until it was a wonder to Winer that folks still survived in so remote an area. They forded nameless shallow streams, wheels spinning on slick limestone, slid lockwheeled on into brackenencroached darkness, darkness multiplied by itself so that you would doubt the ability of light to defray it.

Where the woods fell away the ground leveled out and Winer could see the sky again. The rain had ceased and the clouds had broken up and a weird, otherworldly light from the stars lay on the land. Here buildings clustered together, yet still empty, unlit. They passed great brick furnaces brooding starkly up out of the fields attended by purposeless machinery black and slick with rain, silent. The roads intersected here and the car rattled over a railroad crossing where trains did not cross anymore.

“Right about here,” Motormouth was saying to himself. Past a house indistinguishable to Winer from any of the others the car slowed to a crawl, Motormouth peering across Winer toward a lightless building that looked like an old schoolhouse save the yard was cluttered with the deceased bodies of automobiles so dismembered they appeared autopsied. Motormouth blew the horn one short burst but did not stop. They accelerated and drove around the curve past the house.

“We’ll go down here to the lake and turn. Time we get back she’ll be out by the mailbox and waitin.”

“She? I thought there was more than one of them. Women, you said.”

“Well, yeah, that’s want I meant. Her and her sister.”

Winer had long since stopped believing anything Motormouth said but he did not want to get out here. Wherever here was it was mile from anywhere he had ever been and he had not seen a lighted house, a telephone pole. He guessed wherever he was was better than sleeping, these days he had come to feel that life was spinning past him, leaving him helpless. Sleep only accelerated this feeling of impotence. While he slept the world spun on, changed, situations altered and grew more complex, left him more inadequate to deal with them.

Where they stopped by the lake’s edge there was a pier extending out into the water. Past it under the still sky the water lay motionless as glass. It was a lake of india ink, the dark water tending away to nothingness where lay no shoreline, no horizon, just the blueblack mist above it where his mind constructed miragelike images that were not there. In the night it seemed to go on forever and this to be the point where everything ceased, land’s end, everything beyond this uncharted.

Motormouth lit a cigarette, arced his match into the black expanse of water. “This used to be a good place when I was a kid. Use to be kept up and you could swim in it. Now it’s growed up with some kind of chokeweed and a man’d have to swim with a stick in one hand to beat the cottonmouths off. You see that bluff down there?” He pointed westward along the waterline to where a shapeless bulk reared against the heavens. Jagged slashes of trees serrated its summit and above them hung a wirethin rind of brasscoloured moon. “That’s a old quarry, like a big cave. It used to be the whitecaps’ headquarters, them nightriders used to meet there fore they’d raid somebody. Now it’s road goes in, and a turnaround. Folks parks in there and screws, or used to. I guess they still do. I used to bring the old lady out here fore we got married. It’d be hot, July or August, we’d swim awhile then go back in there. God, it was dark. Black as the ace of spades.” His voice grew rueful, coarsened by the hard edge of the past. “Them was the good old days,” he finished. “Whatever luck I ever had just dried up and blowed away.”

Winer did not immediately reply. He stood silently staring at the dim outline of the bluff within which the whitecaps had met, in his mind he could hear the horses’ hooves click steel on stone, hear the vague, interweaving voices through pillowcase masks. In some curious way he felt pity for Motormouth but at the same time he felt a man was accountable for what he did and he felt a man made his own luck. He thought of Oliver. William Tell Oliver seemed the only person he knew who was at peace with his own past, who was not forever reworking old events, changing them. “You talk like a ninety-year-old man getting ready to die,” he told Motormouth. “All you need is some kind of a change.”

“Let’s change our luck right now,” Motormouth said. “Let’s ease on back up the road.”

He drove a little way past the house and stopped the car. They did not have long to wait. Almost immediately footsteps came up behind the car. Winer turned. In the pale light a heavyset black man was coming alongside the car. He swung a shotgun in his hand as casually as if it were an extension of his arm. “Lord God,” Winer said.

“Hey.” The black man was at the window. He leaned an arm on the roof, peered in. Motormouth leapt wildly in his seat, then appeared frozen, his right hand on the ignition key, his left on the steering wheel. “Hey there,” he said. Winer slid down in his seat and stared down the starlit road, dreaming himself speeding along it, all this forgotten.

“What you whitefolks wantin out here?” Light winked off a gold tooth, the eyes seemed congested with anger. There was no deference in his manner, the hour and the place and sawed-off shotgun seemed to have precluded all need of it.

“We—” Motormouth’s mind reeled far ahead, constructing in one quantum leap an entire scenario, characters, dialogue, events. In that instant of its creation it became truth to him, absolved him of all wrongdoing, all evil intentions, and he became confident of his mission.

“We was a bunch of us foxhuntin down here the other night,” he said easily. “We was runnin several dogs and one of em ain’t come up yet. You ain’t seen a strange one around here, have ye?”

“What kind of a dog was it?” The man’s face was close to Motormouth’s and Winer could smell raw whiskey on his breath. Suddenly the night seemed volatile, unpredictable, events were swirling like liquid, waiting for a pattern to coalesce.

“Big black-and-tan. Had a tore ear and a collar on it said its name was Ridgerunner.”

“I ain’t seen no such dog.”

“Well. It was right up the road there.”

“You sure it wadnt a scrawny old white hound with some yeller up and down its backbone? That’s about as strange a one as I’ve seen tonight.”

Motormouth swallowed visibly. “No. It was a black-and-tan.” He cranked the car and the black man stepped back. “You ain’t seen it I best be gettin on. I’d appreciate if ye’d keep ye eyes open for it.”

“You lookin for a fuckin dogcatcher you in the wrong neighborhood,” the black man said.

“Well. We’ll see ye.”

Winer looked back and the man was standing in the middle of the road watching them go, the gun still slung at his side.

“That uppity black son of a bitch,” Motormouth said. “A little more and I’d’ve had to get out and whup his ass.”

“How much more could there be?” Winer wondered aloud.

He spent the next three days and nights at Motormouth’s house. Monday morning Hodges drove him to Hardin’s and picked him up that afternoon after work. Monday evening they arose from the supper table to see a police cruiser halt in the yard. A deputy got out with a folded white paper in his hand.

“More Goddamned papers,” Motormouth said. “Goddamned divorce papers and peace warrants and now here comes some more. I reckon they must’ve moved her in a desk and chair in that judge’s office so she’d be handy when the notion struck her to swear out somethin. She ever gets caught up I reckon that whole courthouse bunch can just lock up and go to the house.”

They stood in the cool dusk while Garrison read Motormouth this news. It was that he had been evicted. His wife owned this house and she wanted him out of it. She wanted him out yesterday but perhaps today would serve. “Well, Goddamn,” Motormouth kept sayin in put-upon tone. The deputy read on. When he had finished he had Motormouth sign the paper and he handed him a copy and got back in the squad car. “I’ll be back in the mornin to make sure you’re gone,” he warned.

“I never doubted it for a Goddamn minute,” Motormouth told him.

The car drove away. Motormouth sat on the edge of the porch in a deep study of his options. They seemed to grow more limited day by day. “I know where there’s a good place down by the river,” he finally said.

With full dark they went with all they could stuff into or lash onto the Chrysler. Mattresses clotheslined athwart the trunk. A dining table tied atop with legs stiffly extended upward like some arcane beat rigid in death. Trophy of some surrealistic hunt. Refugees. A family of Okies displaced in time as well as location. Like a rolling trashdump they went bumping down a logroad alongside the river to where the spring floodwaters had deposited an almost intact cabin in a grove of trees. The log cabin sat canted against a giant hackberry, its floors perpetually tilted. Damp odors of other times, other folks, who knew who? Doris loves Bobby, the wallpaper said. They set up housekeeping in this crooked house. Luxuries abounded, here were bricks to bring the cots to a semblance of level. That night they could watch the stars through the roof where the shakes were missing. Music from the car radio, old songs of empty beds and thwarted dreams. When the radio was turned off there was just the placating voice of the river.

They were still there Thursday when Bellwether found them. Bellwether came down through the damp beggarlice and blackberry briars with an aggrieved look about him. He stopped by the fire where coffee boiled in a pot and began to pick Spanish nettles from his clothes. His khakis were wet almost to the waist. He hadn’t known about the road, he had come up the bank of the river and he was not happy. It was Winer himself he sought.

“You a hard feller to find.”

“I didn’t know I was lost.”

Winer was alone. Fearing more papers or something that required his presence before an oaken bench Motormouth had faded back into the brush. But Bellwether had not even inquired after him.

“Well, you may not be but your mama thinks you are. She asked me to try and find out where you was.”

“I haven’t broken any laws I know about. And if she wanted to see me I was working right up the road at Hardin’s.”

“There’s nobody accused you of breaking any laws. I told you I was just doin a favor for your mama. She said tell you to come home. She wants to see you about somethin.”

“What?”

“Best I can gather her and Leo Huggins is gettin married. He’s got promises of a job over in Arkansas and you and your mama’s supposed to go with him.”

“Who said so?”

“I just said I’d try and get word to you. What you do is your business.”

“Well. Thanks for telling me anyway.”

“You goin down there I’ll run you by. I told her I’d let her know if I saw you.”

“I’ll just have Motormouth run me down there after a while.”

But he didn’t. It was the weekend before he went and that was a day too late. There wasn’t anyone there at all.

Winer and the girl were standing in a corner, hidden from the house by the weatherboarded walls.

“Why would I want to do a thing like that?” she asked him. “I’d be liable to get caught.” She seemed to be teasing him, everything she said had an ironic quality as if she were reserving the right to take back anything she said.

“So what if you did? What is he to you? It looks to me like anybody could slip out of a honkytonk for a few minutes.”

“I can’t .”

“Can’t or won’t?”

“Anyway, why should I have to slip out and meet you in the woods? Why can’t you get a car like anybody else?”

“Well. I got my eye on one. I just wanted to see you.”

“Then I guess that’s your reason.” She smiled. “Have you got one for me?”

He leaned and twisted her face up to him. She didn’t resist. He could feel her hair around his fingers, the delicate bones beneath her ear. She opened her mouth beneath his. Her breath was claim and sweet. She leaned against him. “You know I want to.”

“I’ll know you want to when I see you coming,” he said. His throat and chest felt tight and constricted. He felt as if he were drowning.

“I’ll try,” she said.

He lay on a tabled shelf of limestone and watched the slow, majestic roll of the fall constellations. He realized with something akin to regret that he had no names to affix to them though he’d known them all his life. The stars looked bright and close and earlier an orange harvest moon had cradled up out of the pines so huge he felt he could reach up and touch them. By its light the Mormon Springs branch was frozen motionless and it gleamed like silver, the woods deep and still. It seemed strange to lie here and listen to the sounds of the jukebox filtered up out of the darkness, windbrought and maudlin plaints, but no less real for being maudlin. Once or twice cries of anger or exultation arose and he thought he might go see what prompted them but he did not. He just lay with his coat rolled beneath his head for a pillow and listened to all the sounds of the night, ears attuned for her footfalls.

He wondered what time it was, felt it must be past midnight. The night wore on and he did not hear the jukebox for long periods of time, nor the cries of drunks, and the occasional car he heard seemed to be leaving rather than arriving. A while longer, he thought. He was keyed up and tense as if expecting something to happen in the next few minutes that would alter his life forever.

An owl on the wing shuttled across the moon and after a while he heard it or its brother calling from out of the fabled dark of Mormon Springs. Where dwelt the ghosts of murdered Mormons and their convert wives and some of the men who had come down this hillside so long ago, the slayers slain. He wondered had the face of the country changed, perhaps they passed this upheaval of the earth. Had folks learned from history, from the shifting of the seasons?

She is not coming, he was thinking. At length he rose. It had turned colder and time seemed to be slowing, to be gearing down for the long haul to dawn. He put the jacket on and buttoned it and picked his way through the stark and silver woods. He crossed the stream at its narrowest point and ascended through ironwood and willow until he came out in the field. In the fierce moonlight the field was profoundly still and his squat shadow the only thing in motion, a stygian and perverse version of himself that ran ahead distorting and miming his movements.

He angled around the hill until he could see the house. He sat on a stone hugging himself against the chill and watched like a thief awaiting an opportunity to steal. After an hour or so a bitter core of anger rose in him and he got up to go but then a figure came out of the house and moved almost instantly into the shadows the woods threw and he could barely watch it progress toward the spring.

Winer changed course and moved as silently as he could into the thickening brush. Anticipation intense as prayer seized him. Tree to tree stealthily to the edge of the embankment and after a moment he heard a voice that appeared to be in conversation with itself. A stone rolled beneath his feet and splashed into the water and he was looking down at a soldier urinating into the stream. The soldier looked up blearyeyed toward the source of this disturbance and leapt backward fumbling with his clothing. Moonlight winked off his upturned glasses and he looked pale and frightened as if some younger variation of the grim reaper had been visited upon him or a revenant from some old violence played here long ago.

When Winer did not vanish or leap upon him the soldier steadied himself and staggered back down to the stream. He adjusted his campaign cap. “What outfit you from?” he called to Winer. Winer spat into the listing stream and made no reply save departure.

She came at midmorning and spoke to him but he was cool and distant and disinclined to conversation. “Be mad then,” she told him. She left but he hardly missed her. Winer’s head hurt from lack of sleep and his arms and legs felt heavy and sluggish and were loath to do his bidding.

He made it through the long morning and when he broke for lunch she came back. He hadn’t brought any lunch but he had a jar of coffee and he was drinking that when she stepped up onto the subflooring.

“I can’t stay but a minute and if you’re goin to fight I’ll just go back in.”

“I never sent for you.”

“You sent for me last night, whether you know it or not”

“Yeah. For what good it did.”

“I wasn’t goin to tell you this but the reason I couldn’t come was he made me set with a man.”

“Who did?”

“Hardin. Dallas.”

“He made you, did he. He hold a gun to you?”

“No.”

“I don’t guess he had to.”

“Just shut up. You don’t know anything about anything.”

“I know I sat up all night in the mouth of that holler like a fool holding the sack on a snipehunt. That’s all I know.”

“Well. I couldn’t help it.”

“Sure, you couldn’t. I bet you couldn’t help telling every soldier in there about it too. Well, you better enjoy it because it’s the last laugh you’ll get out on me.”

“Nathan, I really wanted to. I swear to God I did. His eyes were on me every minute.”

“How come he made you sit with a man? Who was it anyway?”

“I don’t know who he was. Some fat farmer. He’d just come back from sellin his cows or somethin. He was waving his money around and Dallas made me set with him till his money was all gone. I thought he never was goin to pass out.”

“How’d he make you?”

“I don’t know. He just told me I had to.”

“What would he do if you didn’t ?”

“I don’t know.” She fell silent.

When she had been a little girl she had tried to think of Hardin as her father. A father was strong and Hardin looked as remorseless and implacable as an Old Testament God, there was no give to him. The man whose blood she’d sprung from was flimsy as a paperdoll father you’d cut from a catalog, a father who when the light was behind him looked curiously transparent. No light shone through Hardin and in a moment of insight she thought he had a similar core of stubbornness in Winer. Somehow you knew without showing him that there was no give to him either.

“You don’t know. How could you not know?”

She was quiet for a time. She remembered the way Hardin had been looking at her for the last year or so, as though he were deciding what to do with her.

“Do you always do what people order you to? What if I’d ordered you to meet me? What would you have done then?”

“Don’t go so fast,” she said. She gave him just a trace of a smile and shrugged. “You’re not quite Dallas Hardin,” she said.

“Have you ever wondered what he’d do?”

Whatever it took, she thought, thinking Hardin was bottomless.

“All this is easy for you to say,” she told him. “You put up your tools every night and go home. I’m already at home. There’s nowhere else for me to go. You don’t know him.”

“I believe I know him about as well as I need to.”

He’d been looking into her eyes and for just an instant something flickered there that was older than he, older than anybody, some knowledge that couldn’t be measured in years.

“You know him better,” she said.

“I know him well enough to know he’s not paying me to shoot the breeze with you. I’ve got to get to work. This has been a long day anyhow.”

“I might could get out on a Sunday. There’s nobody much around here then and Dallas don’t pay me much mind.”

“I’m once a fool,” Winer said. “Twice don’t interest me.”

“I’ll meet you anywhere you say.”

She was studying him and something in her face seemed to alter slightly even as she watched him, somehow giving him the feeling that she had divined some quality in him that he wasn’t even aware of.

He tried to think. His mind was murky and slow, it seemed to be grinding toward an ultimate halt. “All right,” he finally said. “The only place I can think of where nobody can find us is where Weiss used to live. Meet me there Sunday evening.”

Paying his debt to Motormouth, Winer had invited him to stay until he found a permanent residence but Motormouth seemed to have passed beyond the need for shelter and he stayed only three days. He found the walls too confining, the house too stationary to suit him. He was too acclimated to the motion of wheels, the random and accessible distances of the riverbank, the precarious existence that shuttled him from Hardin’s to the river, from de Vries’s cabstand to the highway. Some creature of the night halfdomesticated reverting back to wildness, staying out for longer and longer periods then just not coming back at all.

Then Winer was alone. He put up the winter’s wood and stacked the porch with it. On these first cool evenings he’d build himself a fire and sat before it. He quit worrying and wondering about the future and decided to just let it roll. By lamplight he’d read before the flickering fire and he found the silence not hard to take. He was working hard now trying to beat winter. In bed he would sometimes lie in a halfstupor of weariness before sleep came but he felt that somehow a fair exchange had been made, someone paid him money to endure this exhaustion. I am a carpenter, he thought. He was something, somebody, there was a name he could affix to himself. And there was a routine and an order to these days that endeared them to him, they were long, slow days he would remember in time to come when order and symmetry were things more dreamt than experienced. I am paying my way, he thought, carrying my own weight, and on these last fall days he found something that had always eluded him, a cold solitary peace.

Having finally gotten her alone, Winer was at some loss as to how to proceed. All the clever conversation he had thought of fled, and such shards as he remembered no longer seemed applicable. Her clean profile roiled his mind and he felt opportunity sliding away while he sat with dry mouth and sweaty palms. “How come you quit school?” he finally fell back on asking.

“I just got tired of it. Why did you?”

“I didn’t. I’m goin back next year.”

“I’m not. I wouldn’t set foot inside that schoolhouse for a thousand-dollar bill.”

Below them a car appeared on the winding roadway. She fell silent and watched its passage, studied it until it was lost from sight near Oliver’s house. She turned to Winer. “Did you know that car?”

“Not to speak to,” Winer said.

She arose, smoothed her skirt. “We’re goin to have to go in the house. If anybody sees me up here they’ll tell Dallas.”

“For somebody who can hustle a drunk out of his cattle money and never bat an eye you’re awfully concerned with appearances,” Winer said. But he instantly regretted saying it and arose and held the storm door for her and they passed into the semigloom of the living room. They stood uncertainly looking about then Winer suddenly felt uncomfortable in the abandoned house and he caught her arm and led her through the sliding glass door onto a concrete patio.

“There’s nothin to sit on here,” she complained.

“We can get a blanket or something out of the house if you want to.”

“Why don’t we just stay in there?”

“I just don’t feel right. It’s still Weiss’s house, even if it is up for sale. Besides, it seems like I can hear that old woman breathin in there.”

“That’s silly.”

“I guess so.”

They sat side by side on the edge of the concrete porch with their feet in the uncut grass. Below the long, dark line of the chickenhouses the afternoon sun hung in a sky devoid of clouds.

“This is a real nice place. I guess Mr. Weiss must’ve have been rich.”

“I doubt he was rich. I suppose they lived all right though.”

“It’s the nicest house I was ever in.”

“I got a cousin lives in Ackerman’s Field,” Winer said. “Lives in a house you wouldn’t believe. There’s velvet wallpaper on the walls and all these fancy chandeliers hanging everywhere. And both of them crazy as bessie bugs.”

She sat leaning forward with her arms crossed atop her round knees and imbued with the composed air he had become accustomed to. Studying the pristine lines of her profile he was suddenly struck with a sense of inadequacy, he could not imagine what had brought her here to meet him. She could have had her pick of all of them. Yet there was some inevitability about it, as if it all had been ordained long ago, when he was a child, when she was a child. There seemed to be nothing to say, nor any need for it. She felt it too, for when he touched her she turned toward him as if the touch were something she had been waiting for.

He drew her to him with a kind of constrained urgency until her cheek rested against his shoulder. She remained so for a moment then turned her face up toward him. Her teeth were white against her tanned face. Her eyes looked violet. She closed them when he kissed her, her left hand was a cool and scarcely perceptible weight on the base of his neck, her right hand lay against his stomach.

When he went for the blanket he got a bottle of Weiss’s homemade strawberry wine from beneath the counter and two glasses and before he remembered the power was off turned on the faucet to rinse them. He settled for wiping the dust off with a towel and canting them against the sun through the window. They looked clean. He found the blankets stacked in a bedroom closet. Passing a mirror he fetched up, startled for a moment by his reflection, he and his mirror image were face to face conspiratorially like cothiefs ransacking a house, their arms caught up with plunder. Both their thin faces looked feral and furtive, harried.