William Gay - The Long Home

“We was a bunch of us foxhuntin down here the other night,” he said easily. “We was runnin several dogs and one of em ain’t come up yet. You ain’t seen a strange one around here, have ye?”

“What kind of a dog was it?” The man’s face was close to Motormouth’s and Winer could smell raw whiskey on his breath. Suddenly the night seemed volatile, unpredictable, events were swirling like liquid, waiting for a pattern to coalesce.

“Big black-and-tan. Had a tore ear and a collar on it said its name was Ridgerunner.”

“I ain’t seen no such dog.”

“Well. It was right up the road there.”

“You sure it wadnt a scrawny old white hound with some yeller up and down its backbone? That’s about as strange a one as I’ve seen tonight.”

Motormouth swallowed visibly. “No. It was a black-and-tan.” He cranked the car and the black man stepped back. “You ain’t seen it I best be gettin on. I’d appreciate if ye’d keep ye eyes open for it.”

“You lookin for a fuckin dogcatcher you in the wrong neighborhood,” the black man said.

“Well. We’ll see ye.”

Winer looked back and the man was standing in the middle of the road watching them go, the gun still slung at his side.

“That uppity black son of a bitch,” Motormouth said. “A little more and I’d’ve had to get out and whup his ass.”

“How much more could there be?” Winer wondered aloud.

He spent the next three days and nights at Motormouth’s house. Monday morning Hodges drove him to Hardin’s and picked him up that afternoon after work. Monday evening they arose from the supper table to see a police cruiser halt in the yard. A deputy got out with a folded white paper in his hand.

“More Goddamned papers,” Motormouth said. “Goddamned divorce papers and peace warrants and now here comes some more. I reckon they must’ve moved her in a desk and chair in that judge’s office so she’d be handy when the notion struck her to swear out somethin. She ever gets caught up I reckon that whole courthouse bunch can just lock up and go to the house.”

They stood in the cool dusk while Garrison read Motormouth this news. It was that he had been evicted. His wife owned this house and she wanted him out of it. She wanted him out yesterday but perhaps today would serve. “Well, Goddamn,” Motormouth kept sayin in put-upon tone. The deputy read on. When he had finished he had Motormouth sign the paper and he handed him a copy and got back in the squad car. “I’ll be back in the mornin to make sure you’re gone,” he warned.

“I never doubted it for a Goddamn minute,” Motormouth told him.

The car drove away. Motormouth sat on the edge of the porch in a deep study of his options. They seemed to grow more limited day by day. “I know where there’s a good place down by the river,” he finally said.

With full dark they went with all they could stuff into or lash onto the Chrysler. Mattresses clotheslined athwart the trunk. A dining table tied atop with legs stiffly extended upward like some arcane beat rigid in death. Trophy of some surrealistic hunt. Refugees. A family of Okies displaced in time as well as location. Like a rolling trashdump they went bumping down a logroad alongside the river to where the spring floodwaters had deposited an almost intact cabin in a grove of trees. The log cabin sat canted against a giant hackberry, its floors perpetually tilted. Damp odors of other times, other folks, who knew who? Doris loves Bobby, the wallpaper said. They set up housekeeping in this crooked house. Luxuries abounded, here were bricks to bring the cots to a semblance of level. That night they could watch the stars through the roof where the shakes were missing. Music from the car radio, old songs of empty beds and thwarted dreams. When the radio was turned off there was just the placating voice of the river.

They were still there Thursday when Bellwether found them. Bellwether came down through the damp beggarlice and blackberry briars with an aggrieved look about him. He stopped by the fire where coffee boiled in a pot and began to pick Spanish nettles from his clothes. His khakis were wet almost to the waist. He hadn’t known about the road, he had come up the bank of the river and he was not happy. It was Winer himself he sought.

“You a hard feller to find.”

“I didn’t know I was lost.”

Winer was alone. Fearing more papers or something that required his presence before an oaken bench Motormouth had faded back into the brush. But Bellwether had not even inquired after him.

“Well, you may not be but your mama thinks you are. She asked me to try and find out where you was.”

“I haven’t broken any laws I know about. And if she wanted to see me I was working right up the road at Hardin’s.”

“There’s nobody accused you of breaking any laws. I told you I was just doin a favor for your mama. She said tell you to come home. She wants to see you about somethin.”

“What?”

“Best I can gather her and Leo Huggins is gettin married. He’s got promises of a job over in Arkansas and you and your mama’s supposed to go with him.”

“Who said so?”

“I just said I’d try and get word to you. What you do is your business.”

“Well. Thanks for telling me anyway.”

“You goin down there I’ll run you by. I told her I’d let her know if I saw you.”

“I’ll just have Motormouth run me down there after a while.”

But he didn’t. It was the weekend before he went and that was a day too late. There wasn’t anyone there at all.

Winer and the girl were standing in a corner, hidden from the house by the weatherboarded walls.

“Why would I want to do a thing like that?” she asked him. “I’d be liable to get caught.” She seemed to be teasing him, everything she said had an ironic quality as if she were reserving the right to take back anything she said.

“So what if you did? What is he to you? It looks to me like anybody could slip out of a honkytonk for a few minutes.”

“I can’t.”

“Can’t or won’t?”

“Anyway, why should I have to slip out and meet you in the woods? Why can’t you get a car like anybody else?”

“Well. I got my eye on one. I just wanted to see you.”

“Then I guess that’s your reason.” She smiled. “Have you got one for me?”

He leaned and twisted her face up to him. She didn’t resist. He could feel her hair around his fingers, the delicate bones beneath her ear. She opened her mouth beneath his. Her breath was claim and sweet. She leaned against him. “You know I want to.”

“I’ll know you want to when I see you coming,” he said. His throat and chest felt tight and constricted. He felt as if he were drowning.

“I’ll try,” she said.

He lay on a tabled shelf of limestone and watched the slow, majestic roll of the fall constellations. He realized with something akin to regret that he had no names to affix to them though he’d known them all his life. The stars looked bright and close and earlier an orange harvest moon had cradled up out of the pines so huge he felt he could reach up and touch them. By its light the Mormon Springs branch was frozen motionless and it gleamed like silver, the woods deep and still. It seemed strange to lie here and listen to the sounds of the jukebox filtered up out of the darkness, windbrought and maudlin plaints, but no less real for being maudlin. Once or twice cries of anger or exultation arose and he thought he might go see what prompted them but he did not. He just lay with his coat rolled beneath his head for a pillow and listened to all the sounds of the night, ears attuned for her footfalls.

He wondered what time it was, felt it must be past midnight. The night wore on and he did not hear the jukebox for long periods of time, nor the cries of drunks, and the occasional car he heard seemed to be leaving rather than arriving. A while longer, he thought. He was keyed up and tense as if expecting something to happen in the next few minutes that would alter his life forever.