William Gay - The Long Home

“They say folks was mean at Napier back then.”

“What? Oh well, I reckon they was. Riverside couldn’t hold Napier a light for rough. They had a bunch of them whitecaps over there tried to run everbody’s business. Take folks out and whup em, that sort of stuff. But the truth is people don’t change much. Individuals change, me and you change, but people in general just keep on bein people. All you can do is just try to pull yourself up as high as you can. Your own self, that’s all you can be helt accountable for. Sometimes you’ll think folks is gettin a higher foot on the ladder, and then here comes a son of a bitch like Hardin and it all goes out the winder with the dishwasher. But you can’t worry about that. Leave that to the preachers, they get paid for it.”

Winer was silent a time. Past the timbered horizon and west was awash with purple. Whippoorwills began to call one to the other tree to tree. With falling light the woods took on a quality of ambiguity, as if nothing were quite what it seemed.

“Don’t it bother you living by yourself all the time?” he finally asked the old man.

“Well, I don’t reckon. It did awhile, some time ago. Course, a man don’t always get his druthers, he has to make do sometimes. Why?”

“I don’t know. I was just thinking about Motormouth Hodges. Him and his wife split up and his wife took up with somebody else. He acts like he’s about halfcrazy. Tryin to get her back all the time.”

“He ort to let it lay, but it ain’t for me to advise nobody. And Lord knows a man can’t always do what he ort to. Me, I got used to livin by myself. When you come right down to it, a man’s always by hisself anyhow. When push to comes shove all you got’s yourself.”

“Leavin? Leavin where?” He’d come in off the third shift and she had her suitcase already packed. He’d come home an hour early, had the furnace not broken down she’d have been down the road and gone. “It come up might sudden,” he said. “And might hard too for you to set out walkin four miles to town.”

“It’s nothin to me. I’m going and you can’t stop me.”

“The hell I can’t.” She’d been standing by the bed and he’d pushed her back, gently laid his weight against her, his hands cupped her face. He’d kissed her, but the face was dead, she lay quite still without looking at him, staring at the ceiling, he did not exist anymore. He laid a wrist across her throat: he’d been feeding the boilers at Napier then, loading them three times an hour with iron ore, and his arms were thick and corded with muscle. He had never hit her but he was dizzy for a moment with an awareness of his own strength. He could have broken her neck, crushed her throat in his hands, but he could not get what he wanted or make her do anything but that she had already made up her mid to do.

“It’s that son of a bitch on Jack’s Branch, ain’t it.”

“Jack’s Branch or China, it’s all the same to you. I’m leavin.”

It was a week before Rayner came by.

“Rasbury talked to Clyde and knows you ain’t sick. He said to tell you he’d hold your job for twenty-fours hours and then that’s it. He’s hirin somebody else.”

“You tell Rasbury I said hold it or drop it, or just whatever suits him.”

“Oliver, what the fuck’s the matter with you? You look like death warmed over and this place is a Goddamned pigsty. What're you doin?”

“What does it look like I’m doin?”

“It looks like you're tryin to crawl down the neck of a whiskey bottle. And to my way of thinkin makin pretty fair progress.”

“I lived by myself a lot of years,” Oliver said. “Used to work twelve hours and walk home and feed the stock by lanternlight. Cook and eat and hit the bed and in the mornin tryin to farm. Back that night at the furnaces. A man that busy don’t have much time for feelin sorry for hisself.” He looked westward, arose stiffly. The last of the light had drained off, the might crept up like rising waters. “We stayed longern I meant to. We don’t get out of this mess of tops fore good dark we’ll be here in the mornin.”

Nights Motormouth spent time like linty change fished up from the pockets of his jeans. Drinking in the Snowwhite Cafe, Hardin’s. In the Snowwhite a slanteyed whore with a mop of curly black hair give him a halfsmile he carried with him into the cooling night, where his only other comfort was the slow drift of the Chrysler’s wheels in the gravel, his only absolute the moonlit road coming at him like gleaming cable unreeling dizzily from a spool.

Out of town then, where the last of the streetlights were sentries marking civilization’s end, all that dark beyond them a world in flux, unclaimed, provinces without dominion. A world up for grabs, where a man with an eye for the angles might make a stand. Here where the light pooled and gave the slick pavement the gleam of dark glass he went, reflected headlights tracking below like something sinister pacing him just beneath the surface of the earth, car and anticar snaking past the city limits and gone, looking perhaps for the deceptively simple curve where matter and antimatter collided in a brief and fatal explosion, the slow rain of falling glass, the tilting headlights limning panoramic birches white as bone, the grinding wrench of crumpling metal, sweet peace.

For there where nights when Hodges sought death like a brother, courted it like a longlost lover, a bitter and unnamed grief lodged in his breast like a stone. If I can make it at seventy-five, can I make it at eighty? he’d wonder, the mysteries of physics spread before him, a clinical coolness settling over him. Hands steady on the wheel, the fruitjar cocked between his thighs, the spiel of disc jockeys a dislocated and demented commentary on the onslaught of night coming at him faster and faster, a dark frieze of trees and mailboxes and nameless tenant houses. Then at the moment he was sure of his control a feeling of elation almost orgasmic would seize him, he’d slow and raise the fruitjar and drink to the fates pacing him who’d seen fit to spare him once again, some joy perverse and sweetly erotic.

And down the line. Past sleeping houses behind whose walls sleepers spun dreams he’d never know, let alone share. A thousand lives woven like threads in a patternless tapestry and if he died here on the highway it would alter the design not one iota. The world was locked doors, keep-out sign, guard dogs. He figured to just ease through unnoticed and be gone.

Maybe down to Hardin’s, he might think, fingering the scant sheaf of bills, the ball of greasy change. Who knew who’d be there? A blond whore from Memphis watching him from beneath mascaraed lashes. “You wasted in this onehorse town, Daddy,” she’d tell him. “Let me take you away.”

Rounding a curve on the Mormon Springs road he came upon them framed in his headlights temporary as startled deer, the old man and Winer stepping from the hedgerow of sumac onto the roadbed and turning frozen in momentary hesitation as if undecided whether to flee or wait and take their chances, will he stop or not? A madman coming at them in a two-thousand-pound carton. Motormouth locked the wheels and slid sideways toward them.

“Lord God,” the old man said. He leapt backward as the car careered past, flailing at it with his stick as if he might head it off like an animal, the stick striking the front fender and rebounding into the night, Oliver scrambled up swearing from out of the sawbriars and gravel, fiercely red and diabolic in the brakelights. The backup lights of the Chrysler came on then and the car fishtailed drunkenly back toward them.

“He’s seen he missed us,” the old man said. “I reckon he means to try his luck again.”