William Gay: Time Done Been Won't Be No More

Sandy had once been beaten terribly, but studying her closely Dennis could see no sign of this now. Perhaps the slightest suggestion of aberration about the nose, a hesitant air that she was probably not even aware of. But her skin was clear and brown, the complex and delicate latticework of bones intact beneath it.

Nobody was flirting with us, she said, smiling up at Wesley.

If they did you flashed them a little something, Wesley said.

If I couldn’t get flirted with without flashing them a little something I’d just stay at the house, Christy said. She was giggling again. The big one said his name was Lester, she told Wesley. But don’t worry, he was ugly and baldheaded.

Lester? What the hell kind of redneck name is Lester? Was he chewing Red Man? Did he have on overalls?

You know, Wesley’s not the most sophisticated name I ever heard, Christy said. Nobody’s named Wesley, nobody. Do you know one movie star named Wesley?

It occurred to Dennis that Christy might be doing a little flirting herself, although Wesley had been married to Sandy for almost two years and he supposed that he was going to marry Christy himself, someday sooner or later.

I don’t know any movie stars named anything at all, Wesley said. I’ll make him think goddamn Lester. I’ll Lester him.

Wesley wore cutoff jeans and lowcut running shoes with the laces removed. He was bare to the waist and burnt redblack from the sun so he looked like a sinister statuary you’d chopped out of a block of mahogany with a doublebitted axe. He’s been in the water, and his jeans were wet, and his hair lay in wet black ringlets.

Nobody was flirting with anybody, Sandy said carefully. She enunciated each word clearly, and Dennis figured this as well was because she had been deaf so long. Now she had an expensive hearing aid smaller than the nail of her little finger, and she could hear as well as anyone, but this had not always been so.

Are you all going to get the boats and stuff? Christy asked.

Let’s get everything down from the camp, Dennis said. We can pick the girls up there.

Then let’s go, college man, Wesley said.

They followed a black path that wound through wild cane, brambles, blackberry briars. It led to a clearing where they’d spent the night. On the riverbank were sleeping bags and a red plastic ice chest. Dennis began to roll up the sleeping bag he’d slept in with Christy. Sometime far into the night he had awoken, some noise, a nightbird, an owl. Some wild cry that morphed into Sandy’s quickened breathing as Wesley made love to her. He wondered if Wesley still beat her. He looped a string round the sleeping bag and lashed it tight. When the breathing had reached some frenzied peak and then slowly subsided to normal, he had turned over, being careful not to wake Christy, and gone back to sleep. He turned now and tossed the sleeping bag into one of the two aluminum canoes tied to a hackberry depending out over the river.

When the canoes rounded the bend through the trailing willow fronds, Dennis saw that a red four-wheel-drive Dodge truck had backed a boat trailer down the sloping bank to the shallows. On it were two aluminum canoes that might have been clones of the ones Dennis and Wesley were rowing. Two men were in the bed of the pickup, two men on the ground. The man unbooming the boats did indeed have on overalls. He was enormous, thicker and heavier than Wesley. He wore the overalls with no shirt, and his head was shaved. The top of his head was starkly white against the sunburned skin of his face, as if he’d just this minute finished shaving it.

Son of a bitch, Wesley said.

This is by God crazy, Dennis said, but Wesley had already drifted the canoe parallel with the shore and was wading out. Don’t let this canoe drift into the current, he said over his shoulder. He went up the bank looking at Sandy and Christy. Sandy’s face was as blank as a slate you’d erased, but a sort of constrained glee in Christy’s told him what he wanted to know. He turned to the men grouped about the red truck.

Lester, I heard you were trying to hit on my wife, he said.

The bald man was turned away, but there were so close Wesley could smell the sweat on him, see the glycerinous drops seeping out of the dark skin of his back. The man had a malignant looking mole the size of a fingertip between his shoulders, where the galluses crossed. The man fitted a key into a lock clasped through two links of chain securing the canoes. The lock popped open, and he freed the chain and locked the hasp through another link and picketed the key. He turned. He looked up at the two men in the back of the truck and grinned. At last he glanced at Wesley.

The electronic age, he said, and laughed. I reckon it’s been all over the news already. He wiped the sweat off his head with a forearm and turned to inspect the women. They’d seated themselves on the bank above, and they were watching like spectators boxseated before some barbaric show.

Which one’d be your wife? Lester asked.

Faced with the prospect of describing his wife or pointing her out like a miscreant in a lineup, Wesley hesitated. Sandy raised her arm. That would be me, she said.

Did I hit on you? Say anything out of the way?

No. You didn’t.

The man looked Wesley in the eye. He shrugged. What can I say, he said.

Hey, loosen up, good buddy, one of the men in the truck called. He turned and opened an ice chest and began to remove cans of beer from it. He was bare to the waist, and he had straight, shoulderlength hair that swung with his movement when he turned from the cooler. He tossed a can to Dennis: Unprepared, he still caught it onehanded, shifted hands with it. One for the ladies, the man said, and tossed them gently, one, two. When he pitched a fourth to Wesley, Wesley caught it and pivoted and threw it as far as he could out over the river. It vanished without so much as a splash.

Lester looked up at the longhaired man and grinned. Not his brand, he said.

Don’t try to bullshit me, Wesley said.

I wouldn’t even attempt it, friend, Lester said. He turned to the boat, his back to Wesley, as if he’d simply frozen him out, as if Wesley didn’t exist anymore. He unlooped the chain and slid the canoes off the sloped bed into the water. The two men leapt from the bed of the truck and with the third began to load the boats with ice chests, oars, boxes of fishing tackle. They climbed into the canoes and headed them downstream into the current. Lester turned to the women. He doffed an imaginary hat. Ladies, he said.

Wesley seemed to be looking around for a rock to throw.

Let it go, Dennis said.

I could have handled them, Wesley said. All that fine help I had from you.

Dennis turned and spat into the river. Hellfire. You didn’t need any help. You made as big a fool of yourself alone as you could have with me helping.

I ain’t letting them shitkickers run over me, Wesley said. Hell I got a good Christian raising and a eight-grade education. I don’t have to put up with this shit from anybody.

But Wesley’s moods were mercurial, and he seemed to find what he had just said amusing. He repeated it to himself, then looked toward the girls. Let’s get organized, he said. As soon as Jeeter Lester and his family get gone we’ll start looking for that Civil War cave.

He waded out to the canoe containing the red cooler. But first let’s all have a little shot of that jet fuel, he said.

Dennis was watching Sandy, and a look like apprehension flickered across her face and was gone. No more than the sudden shadow of a passing cloud. Wesley had removed the lid from the cooler. He had somewhere come by an enormous quantity of tiny bottles of Hiram Walker. They were the kind of bottles served on airlines, and Wesley called them jet fuel. He was fumbling under sandwiches, dumping things out. Jet fuel, jet fuel, he was saying.