The Watchman (16 page)

And if I keep on seeing Jill, he said. You mean it will be the end of us?

No, she said, her hands rising to cover her eyes. Only the end of you.

Do you think I'm afraid?—that I can't take care of myself, Cris? I'm a pretty good man, you know.

A better man than Cole Blake, Jase? she whispered.

He picked up the cheap sheet of crumpled court-stenogra-

pher's yellow, ruled-pad paper and looked at the pasted letters, like a first-grade exercise at alphabets.

And Cole was killed for being with Jill? he said. Is that what you meant, Cris?

She nodded, fast, hard, quick nods into her fingers.

And I feel like a Judas, she whimpered. Because I haven't told you all the things you ought to know to keep on living.

What things? he said.

Just things things things! she cried. Things I couldn't tell you because I wouldn't know how to even begin—dark things, Jase—queer, twisted things. Judas! My God, yes, a she-Judas. That's what I am!

She looked so forlorn, so spent and defeated that every shred of sexuality, for the moment, seemed gone from her. And so he felt it safe to reach out and touch her glossy, freckled shoulder; consoling, patting it with manly taps. And then she had seized his hand in both of hers, drawing him down again to sit beside her, against her, pressing her mouth against his ear like an open, roseate sea shell to let him hear the faint surf of sea-dangers, in the thunder of her slow, harsh breath.

Stay here with me, Jase, she whispered. Don't go. Call the hotel desk and tell—tell them to let her know you won't be there.

No, Cris.

Please. Oh, Jason, I've never asked you for anything ever. Now I'm asking you this—in God's name, please. Stay with me. Come back into bed with me, under the covers—Oh, Jase, we'll do it the way you like—Jason, I'll do anything for you! Listen, Jase, I'll even try to be like her—cold and mocking and not-letting-you-do-anything if that's how you want me. Jase, maybe you might start to love me and I won't mind—maybe I'll even learn to love, too. We could get bus tickets at the hotel and go away to Elkton, Jase, and I'll be real coy and cold and won't let you touch me till we're married and up in the hotel room. Is that what you want, Jase? Would it work? I wouldn't be just acting either because I can make myself be whatever someone wants me to be and make myself want that, too. Would it work, Jase? No, I have a date with Jill, he said, pulling away, undoing her fingers from his face as if they were cold and clinging things whose touch just then he could not quite endure. She got up suddenly, snatched up her flowered seersucker housecoat and jabbed it on, ripping the seam somewhere: he heard

the tear, and her swift, angry feet whispering off now toward the bathroom.

Go to hell then, she shouted, and he could hear the water-running and the bowl-flushing and the shower roaring: all the sounds she could make so that he wouldn't hear her crying. Go to hell, Jason Hunnicutt. I don't care what you do. Go to Jill and go to hell, Jason Hunnicutt.

It was still not dark, nor even dusk: the air was the late gold of chilled autumn light: the pale, limpid amber of harvest cider. He moved away from the window and began to dress slowly, sadly. He wondered if she would ever let him come back, and if she ever let him come back if she would ever let him. The bathroom door slammed thundering shut with a bang that crooked the framed picture of Cole Blake by the clothespress door. He could hear now, above all the smothering tumult of open taps, the wildness of her sobs and so he looked at himself in the mirror and watched a stranger tie his tie and when he had on his suit jacket he saw that his tie pin had fallen into her half-opened vanity drawer among the silks and sundry lace, rickrack and nylon daisies: his fingers feeling through it all as if dipping into a tumbling, silken froth of ice cream soda. He found the tie pin. It had worked its way to the bottom of the brassieres and panties which he drew aside in his search. It was there. It lay on the yellow, sachet-fragrant wood almost touching the Sheriff's revolver: steel blue and iridescent with gun oil, and in its scorched, impotent chambers the brass shells of five fired cartridges.

Still, of one thing she had been wrong: there was no car of surveillance waiting across from the hotel window where Jill still waited. Seeing her again he breathed in the season and felt it jolt his pulses Like whiskey. The air was brilliant, as if it contained within itself the source of light, independent of the sun which stood in the high heyday of late afternoon at the instant before it would blaze with thermite brightness on the orchard brim of the hilled Ohio horizon and then quench swiftly out. Now the fine air was spun out lucent as noon, all shimmering light rich with that nacreous, silken luster of river September like a honey mother-of-pearl, air to be tasted more than breathed, tart as the leaping juice of hard, cold apples' first bites, yet air neither cold on the tongue nor hot but something, mysteriously, of both, paradox of peppermint: chilled at its surface

but blooded and blush-dappled under, like the dimpled, strutting flesh of a cheer leader's thighs. And Jason, starting across the street sljwly, a little breathless, his heart racing on some paces ahead of him toward the girl, watched, waiting for the lover's good hurt of her first glancing-up to see him.

On the corner by the bus stop a curious and minor tumult was jiist in the act of gathering into climax: the fifteen gray men leaning against the streaked and lichened bricks of the hotel, not lounging nor loafing, and yet idle in a curious way which at first sight suggested attitudes of both stilted tension and languid, purposeless idling: fifteen men in cheap, identical suits of a material stiff and styleless as gray wrapping paper, some of them holding cracked and bursting suitcases of imitation leather, like laundry cases bound in clothesline strips, all of them with the sallowed pallor of convalescents, skin livid with the sicklied bleach of flesh long constrained from light and movement both and the pitted eyes in their faces feverish with the lifeless, shoe-button glass of old, thrown-out toys.

There was a manner about them of restrained and bandaged uneasiness, even of terror at having abruptly been set adrift among eddying, pedestrian custom and sidewalk liberty: a milieu which, plainly, they had each been for long terms and at great pains both to cherish and put from their thoughts. Fifteen convicts, or rather ex-convicts (there was something about them still which was both), men paroled, some pardoned, others merely at the end of their sentenced terms, now waiting on the street corner for the Greyhound to bear them off down State Route Two, scattering each mercilessly into the sudden shock of aliened home, among fifteen country crossroads, cities and villages stretched down the whole state's length. The bus was late and, for that matter, so were the men: some snarl in the intricate prison procedures of release, of eviction, having postponed their exodus from early morning until now.

Jason's pace slowed as he approached them, he searched them with curiosity: something in them was frightening which originated in the contagious frightenedness of themselves. A few yards away from them, leaning against a lamp post and a traffic meter were the two guards, chewing and spitting with slow, sag-jawed remorseless indiTerence and staring at the leafy pavement with faint, odd smiles. And though, since the fifteen were, at least in a savage, heartless technicality,

freedmen, the guards, unarmed and also in street clothes, had come to see them to the last, the final card-punched, static performance in the long, vast ritual of their penitential regimen: come, perhaps, to take one long, careful, sen tried glare into the blanched, restive masks of these men's eyes: one final inspection of their insides before departure as if, like jail-gate electronic-eyes detecting metal, they might still luckily and at last-minute spot, incipient in the men's very terror, a lurking, latent crumb of criminality which the remedial despotism of state-captivity had not douched from them.

Perhaps, indeed, it had not. But whatever it had not flushed from out these men, with the flooding, purgative agony of a firehose enema, it had washed from their spirits every last taste for that very freedom, ambiguously and so long hoarded through years, months, weeks, days, minutes, seconds and those yet finer fractions of time, unknown to all but convicts and insomniacs, with which no clock-face is calibrated: the moment of liberty which they had cross-calendared through aggregate centuries with chewed-point and stubbly pencil fragments on the reeking cell walls, that sweet wine now gone vinegar and murky with the mother-fungus of a tortured misgiving. So that the freedom of them there on that innocent comer of small-town street, beneath the kindly softness of a sad and all-forgiving autunm light, seemed rife and racing with delusions of guardless anarchy of treachery and menace: the very blowing maple leaves across their shoes might each have showed, like blood-money, their damning fingerprints.

Even the guards, out of uniform, out of gun belts, seemed meanly out-of-sorts. From time to time they spat splashing spurts of mail-pouch tobacco juice across the sidewalk bricks: great splatters of brown, bitter wetness like the excreta from some dark, special organ, peculiar to their profession, which had grown in the quid-bulged udder of their hard cheeks. And sometimes they would look at one another and the playing smile would break into open chuckle: cynical and knowing, and they would run their immured and slitted eyes stonily along the ranked faces of the fifteen, seeing them not as friends soon to say farewell forever but rather as commuters about to take a ride home for the night to return with time-clocked and recidivist precision on some soon dreadful morning. And, even more terribly, the eyes of some of the fifteen would rise sometimes to meet this inspection

no The Watchman

of shifty, pettifogging meanness, four eyes like bloodless wounds slashed in nerveless leather, would smile back sheepish, helpless smiles, pale smiles whispering tacitly: Well, hell, sure, don't I know it, too, that this ain't good-hy nor the end of it with you and me, screw? So don't bother to tell me what I already know, that I'll be back and back maybe times after that. Like it was. Like I come back before and the times before that since the first little stretch when I was eighteen. Don't tell me with your slick, hard grain what I know. Don't grin at all, Christamercy, at the terrible sight of a man that's been jailed so long, so often that jail is home and home is jail. Sure, I'll be back, Christamercy, and then I'll start scratching the days off on the wall again and counting the hours, minutes, seconds, milliseconds till I'm out, standing here, and wanting to go home again: stir-sick and home-sick all the same. Because after a while the steel bars of the wheelgate is the old front porch, and the night smell of tears and creosote and sodomy and death is the downhome smell of Mama's cooking, the big pump-gun in your ham-sized fists, screw, like old Pap's hayrake in the harvests. Don't tell me what I know and stand here free and sick and pissing my pants with fear of knowing, for I know, Christamercy, yes, how well I know that, screw.

Jason came to a full stop, looking at the men like a stacked row of embalmed, mobile mummies astonishingly excavated from some vast prehistoric mound of granite and oiled, chilled steel: incredibly alive; saw them and gaped shamelessly, as did the others on the street: commoners passing in pedestrian and unarraigned or even unsuspected guilts within themselves; troubled somehow to see these stigmatized and classified felons wearing the state's gift of the new street suit with the state's new ten-dollar note in its pocket: criminals in suits, no uniforms, perhaps plainer but essentially civil as their own: somehow these men should not be dressed with that communal casual indiscrimination, something should set them off from the, if not good, at least unconvicted, unconfined, unstained. A patch sewn in the sleeve, perhaps, like the yellow-star of mongreled ghettos: perhaps, a tattoo—a number needled blue into the flesh of the forehead. A small crowd gathered, not standing, moving back and forth so as to give the surface impression, at least, of nonchalant and passing interest; perhaps crossing the street to turn suddenly and stare from the irreproachable decency of that distant vantage.

Such crowds have always come. Such crowds have always shuffled by, paused, turned to stare, cringing at the whisper of comparisons inadmissible even in the deepest dungeons of their thought, crowds who watch men move in the orbit of doomed and dooming punitive hopscotch, men shuttled from one maroonment to another; crowds have always watched so. Nor was that chronicled—First the only time in the times of such crowds when some among them with bolder souls may, before they dismiss the spectacle, say terribly to themselves: But there for the grace of I goes God.

Jill called to him from the hotel steps and he moved up the stones to her side and squeezed her hand and was about to forget the spectacle of the gray men and the thought they had brought stealthily back into his consciousness of the gun, strange and deadly as a copperhead, beneath the foolish, heaped sweetness of Cristi's lingerie. The bus would come, the crowd would plass on, the guards would go back sullen and momentarily cheated up the chilling street of dusk; he would have forgotten all that, had he not, at that moment, seen reflected in the plate-glass window the shadowed, somehow pathetic figure of the man watching them from behind the ticket window of the movie house across the street. His seeing that was a shock and that shock compounded suddenly and Jason aware of this and with a swift chemistry of blood-beat and gland watching Jill; the fifteen men facing their guards in the bared-nerve prison of emancipation: these unsettling ingredients making it difficult for him to speak to her at all and then suddenly, as if at a prearranged signal, the last blazing wisp of sun went out in the Ohio orchards and cast the valley instantly into the chill of a darkened twilight, like water suddenly flowed among everything; simultaneously, and as if hopefully, and by the will of God, come at that moment to correct the gloom and bathos of dusk, seven men, girls, and boys carrying musical instruments came down the pavement, their faces beaming with that dour, oppressive optimism of professional redeemers, took up positions between the two guards and the fifteen men and industriously commenced fitting horns together and clipping small paper hymnbooks into their lyres.