Brad Watson: The Heaven of Mercury

Junius turned over his cards. Full house, three aces and a pair of queens.

— All them queens, sitting pretty high in the deck.

— Make it bourbon, old Junius said. He stood up to leave the room. -I’m hungry now.

A car roared up into the yard outside and in a second Earl banged in the door, stood there lean and wild-haired, and pointed at Finus.

— You son of a bitch, I’m going to kill you.

— Let it go, now, son, Junius said. -Man knows he’s beaten.

Earl looked at his father, then at Finus.

— What happened to his eye?

— I winged him, Junius said. -Now go outside and cool off. I’m handling this.

Earl stood there staring at him, then at Finus, for a minute. Then turned around and went back outside.

— Where is Birdie? Finus said to Junius then.

— With her family, by the grace of God I suppose, Junius said. -Her mother took her back home this morning, didn’t want to spend her last night away from them. They’ll bring her over for the wedding tomorrow at noon. He took a half-smoked dead cigar from his jacket’s handkerchief pocket and lit it with a kitchen match. -With family is where she belongs, you ask me. Earl’ll never be happy with that girl.

— Why don’t you just tell him that? Finus said.

Junius puffed the cigar and waved the match out, tossed it into the fireplace.

— Nobody could ever tell Earl anything, he said.

In a little while Finus’s father came out in his car and took him to the hospital. He would keep the eye, they said, but it would be slightly defective, a spot or a blurry patch in its vision.

— I won’t ever see properly again, Finus said.

— You’ll see well enough, old Dr. Heath said. -You’re lucky. Man chases a woman into the path of a shotgun and comes out alive has got something to ponder. You ponder it, son.

The afternoon after the incident, he awakened in the hospital to see his father standing at the foot of his bed, wearing his business suit with the watch chain hanging from the vest pocket, which caused him to sense a peculiar gloom. His father’s hair was slicked down as if he’d just arrived at the office and Finus could smell the hair oil. With his long bony nose he looked like an oiled blackbird. He pulled the chain and extracted his gold watch, looked at it. He put the watch back into his vest pocket, straightened the vest. Finus cocked his head to listen, but this watch was silent to his gauze-covered ears. In addition to the patch over his eye, the entire top of his head was wrapped in a bandage — he’d suffered a concussion when he was pitched from the car.

— I’m going in to work, his father said. -You rest around the house, if you like, after you leave here. But don’t speak to me again until you can resolve not to act a damn fool in public. I’ll not tolerate that kind of behavior in my family.

Finus started to protest, then just said, — Yessir.

His father squeezed the bridge of his nose between finger and thumb for a moment, then released it. He looked out the hospital window, and seemed to Finus to have a sadness pass over his features. Outside the window it was a Saturday, and a few motor cars and some supply wagons in from the country passed by on the street, the shod hooves of the dray horses and mules clopping in the still, heated air. It was hay-cutting time, and where they had come from, where his father had grown up, tractors droned and mower blades clicked in the air domed high, blue-hazed, and empty.

— Do you really love that girl? his father said.

Just the question itself caused a wave of heat to rise from Finus’s spine into his aching head. He was haunted by the night at the Potato Ball, when he actually had her for a moment in thrall to the idea that he loved her, and that she should throw off Earl, and how he’d backed down. Jesus Christ! What had that been? What had caused him to hitch his emotions and blow his chance at happiness?

— Yes, he said to his father, I think. He felt overwhelmed. -I don’t know what I think anymore.

His father looked at him a long moment, made a face and looked away out the window.

— I tell you, son, he said. -It doesn’t pay to bank too much on the rightness of one woman or another. It’s all a difficulty, in the long run. He looked at Finus, picked up his hat.

— It’s not for me to tell you not to follow your heart, but I can point out this girl is simply not available to you. And you are still just a boy, whether you like the idea or not. I want you to go off to the university, make something of yourself.

Finus said nothing for a minute. Then said,

— You know I’d rather just stay here and help you run the paper.

— There’ll be plenty of time for that, you still want to after college.

His father shook his head.

— What about that girl you been seeing, now? What are you doing with that poor girl, if you’re so in love with this Birdie Wells?

Finus frowned and looked away.

— Well, what? his father said. -You think you can just jack people around like that, play with them like that?

— I’m not doing that. We just run around together some, that’s all, he mumbled. The last thing he wanted to think about right then was Avis Crossweatherly, with her determined if low-key tendency to attach herself to his arm somehow whenever they all went out in a group, and often when he was planning to head somewhere alone.

— Mind that’s all it is, then, his father said. -These things have a way of getting serious on a man before he’s aware of it. Especially if his head is lodged far up into his ass.

He picked up his hat from the chair and walked out.

Later that afternoon Avis Crossweatherly came into his room and stood at the foot of his bed. Though she was a tall girl with a narrow and somewhat flat face, hence the kangaroo jokes people made behind her back, she had a noble nose, which helped somewhat in close quarters to give her an odd kind of beauty. Though later Finus would think she’d never resembled her hard old father as much as she did in that moment. The old man was a self-made hardscrabble cattle trader whose only words to Finus when they would go out to his farm to ask his permission to marry (a moot point, her being a month or so along, pure ceremony) would be: — Have you any money in the bank, then? And when Finus said, — Yes, sir, a little, and business is pretty good, the old man nodded, said, — All right, then, and the two of them sat there on the porch for another ten minutes with the old man rolling cigarettes and smoking them and saying not another word until Finus got up, joined Avis, who’d been standing in the front yard holding her purse and pair of white cotton gloves in her hands, and left.

At the hospital, Avis was wearing a green dress, a green hat, and her white gloved hands held the handle of her white leather purse before her. Finus, surprised to see her there, didn’t know what to say.

— How are you feeling? she finally said.

— Well enough. They say I’ll keep the eye.

She stood there saying nothing, until Finus filled the silence and answered her unstated question with a lie about a bachelor party that got out of hand. Her face was like a nickel Indian’s set in stone.

— Where was the party?

— Out at Urquhart’s, he said. -We were shooting tin cans, drunk.

She stared at him a minute.

— Was Birdie there?

He shook his head. -Home, getting ready for the wedding.

In a moment, she nodded. Then she looked to see if the hospital-room door was closed, and walked over to his bedside.

— I know how you feel about Birdie, she said.

He didn’t reply, but looked away with his uninjured eye. He heard her sigh, and then in his good eye’s peripheral vision he saw her white-gloved hand reach over the hospital sheets, and to his astonishment he saw and felt it press gently against his groin, find his prick, and give it a gentle but firm squeeze. And what he couldn’t believe, in the context of the moment, was that under her strong fingers’ gentle pressure he responded like a bull at stud. He looked first at the hand, at the bulge of sheet beneath it that was himself, and then at her face, which wore an enigmatic expression of mischief and tenderness, something he’d never seen in Avis’s features before.