William Gay - The Long Home

There were already two of them at the back door, garbed in white, faces obscured by masks, featureless save dark eyeholes. He felt hands clutch at him, jerk him forward, he could hear their grunts of triumph and something, a club or cudgel, caught him alongside the shoulder so that for an instant his left arm went dead and he was conscious of a great rush of relief, thinking, Sticks. The son of a bitches have just got sticks.

The moon was shining and the dusty yard gleamed lime mica. He was down in it for an instant, twisting a cheek against the ground, the cold rifle still beneath him, his elbows holding it against his naked stomach. “Help me hold him, Ray. The son of a bitch is gettin up.” He staggered up with one of them astride his back, an arm about his throat, and struck blindly with the barrel of the rifle, felt metal strike bone again and again till one of them said, “Can you get aholt of his fuckin gun?” The other man kept swinging the stick. The voice behind him said, “Goddamn, Ray, you hittin me, not him. Try to hit him just ever now and then.” A glancing blow to Hardin’s head knocked him halfsenseless and he felt his legs buckle.

He whirled and the man on his back slipped free. Hardin’s momentum spun him halfway around and he fell, sitting with one leg twisted beneath him, the rifle in his lap momentarily disoriented, seeing rising above him the gray bulk of the house and the play of flashlights at the windows, above the inkblack pyramid of the roofline the luminous fabric of the sky, all of it swimming sideways in a sick illusion of motion as if he alone was stationary, all the universe spinning dizzily past him.

He could hear Pearl and the girl screaming, he was dimly aware that they had been herded into the yard. He heard blows without knowing where they were coming from, who they were directed against. One of the men dove behind the hood of the truck just as Hardin fired and simultaneously there was the whang of the bullet and then the more solid thunk against the engine block. He could hear running footsteps, they seemed to come from everywhere. A man was sprinting desperately for the road, bobbing in the moonlight. Hardin aimed, took a breath and held it, squeezed the trigger almost gently. The man did an eerily comic dance in the roadbed, his right leg flung out rubbery and unhinged, the knee shot away. Then he fell forward, balled up in the driveway. Hardin could hear him moaning. The man halfrose and began to vomit.

Hardin wiped the blood out of his eyes. The hair at his temples was wet with it. He could hear the brush popping in a diminishing flurry and in a multitude of directions. In a little while the car cranked somewhere down the road and he could hear the tires in the gravel. Hardin grinned. He thought, The first son of a bitch there took off with the car and left the rest of them to walk it. There’ll be some sore feet and mad whitecaps in Ackerman’s Field in the mornin.

“Shut it up,” he told the girl. She was sitting on the doorstep crying. She did not cease. Her face was hidden by her hands and twin wings of long black hair.

“Did they hurt you?”

“No.”

“Then shut it up.”

Pearl leaned her head against a porch support. Her eyes were closed.

“Are you hurt?”

“They hit my legs with a big old stick or something. They never done me and Tom thisaway. This never happened before.”

“Nor is it likely to happen again. Can you walk?”

“I reckon. Let me see about your head.”

“Let it go. Just help me load him in the car. Get a bedspread or quilt or somethin out of the house and put it in the back. Bastard’s bleedin like a hog with its throat cut.”

She arose, stood massaging the flesh of her thigh. She seemed dazed or drunken. “You ain’t aimin to kill him, are you? I can’t stand no more trouble.”

“Just get it like I told you.”

Hardin backed the Packard up to where the man lay and opened the right rear door. He knelt beside the man. Apparently he had passed out. He lay unmoving but Hardin could hear the steady rasp of his breathing. He took out the bonehandled Case pocketknife and tested the blade with a thumb, slit the pillowcase and folded it aside like a caul.

Pearl stood looking down, a quilt draped across her arm.

“Who is he, Blackwell, Blackburn, Blacksomethin. I’ve seen him.”

“Why, that’s Mr Blackstock,” Pearl said. “He runs the drygoods store in town.”

“He’ll run the son of a bitch out of a wheelchair now if he runs it at all. No, I ain’t goin to kill him. If I killed him I’d have to hide him, and I don’t want him hid. I want him where folks can see him, ever day of his life, right there in that drygood store. Get that quilt laid out in there.”

The man was heavy and slack, a seemingly boneless weight they could hardly handle. When he was almost in Hardin fell to swearing at him and shoved him the rest of the way in with the door, leaning his weight against it until he heard the latch catch.

“Where do you live, Slick?” Hardin asked, neither expecting nor receiving an answer, glancing upward at the rearview mirror and not seeing the man either, just the top of the upholstery and the back glass where fled a landscape in motion, a retreating moonlit world with a blacktop highway snaking down the middle of it. He looked forward again and the night was coming in wisps and tatters of fog like clouds blown past the speeding car. The countryside was remote, locked in sleep. Off the blacktop then and back to chert and past old man Oliver’s unlit house and the orchard of dead apple trees, tree on tree looming at him from the silver roadside, unpruned branches gnarled and twisted and dead, charred bone juxtaposed against the seamless heavens like some childhood witchwood of myth or nightmare. Taking the curve the headlights yawned across the unkept yard and touched the windowpanes with illusory life, leapt past the hedge of alders gleaming white as bone the road straightened here and he accelerated onto the long stretch to town.

The old man roused from whatever state of halfsleep he habited and watched the wash of light across the faded wallpaper, arose and rested on his elbows till the light faded, the wall momentarily disappearing and then regaining visibility in the moonlight. For a moment he had thought the car was coming here, for a moment past and present had merged and he was unable to tell one from the other, dream from reality. Old days of crisis in the night, the knock at the door, the light at the window. Then he recognized the deepthroated roar of the Packard’s muffler and lay back listening to it fade away.

The town was in restless slumber as well but there was an allnight cabstand out of which a man named Wolf de Vries ran a bootlegging establishment and an almost perpetual poker game. Hardin parked in front of the cabstand and cut the lights and switch. He went in the front and passed by a desk where a woman slept with her mouth open and her head pillowed against a telephone and down a narrow hall to a locked green door. He knocked.

“Who is it?”

“Dallas Hardin.”

After a moment the door opened a crack and a face studied him. The door opened wider. Stale blue smoke boiled out and Hardin coughed. He fanned the air wildly. “Jesus Christ,” he said. “They goin to find ever one of you sots in here smothered to death some mornin. Does this place not have a winder?”

“Deal Hardin in,” de Vries called. De Vries was a quick little man with a slick, evasive face like a failed politician’s. “His money’s as good as anybody else’s”

Hardin studied the men circling the green baize table. “Looks like you got a full set of fools without me.”

De Vries had noticed the blood drying at Hardin’s temple. “What the hell happened to you? You been sorting cats?”