William Gay - The Long Home

“You thought I was a whore, didn’t you?” Her voice through the fabric of her dress was muffled. She pulled the dress down and was arranging her hair, smoothing it backward with both hands.

“No. I never thought that.”

“But you thought I’d done it before.”

“I figured you had.”

“I guess I’ve heard them talk about everything two people can do to each other but I never did any of it. Mama always watched me like a hawk and Dallas, he’s even worse.” She pulled her panties on, her skirt caught up in them and she freed it. He was staring bemusedly at the hair crinkled against the cloth. “Quit looking like that,” she said. “You know I’ve got to go.” She arose. “I always used to have the idea that Dallas was goin to sell me off, you know, like to the highest bidder. A auction. Sacrificin a virgin.” She smiled ruefully. “I guess this is one time he got beat.”

After she had gone he dressed and sat on the edge of the porch with the blanket across his shoulders, for the day had grown chill. Blue dusk lay pooled about the fields. He thought to finish the wine but it had gone flat and treacly. He corked it and set it aside wondering how he had ever tasted summer in it. Without her the world seemed bland and empty. In the silence he imagined he could still hear her voice, some obsession with detail caused him to seek meanings where there were only words. He felt curiously alive, everything before this seemed gray and ambiguous, everything he’d heard garbled and indistinct.

He knew he should be going but here it still seemed to be happening, it was all around him, and some instinct of apprehension told him it might never happen again. It couldn’t be wasted. Every nuance, sensation, had to be absorbed. Dusk drew on and the horizon blurred with the failed sun and at last he arose to go, loath still to leave here for the dark house with its ringing emptiness and the gabled attic with its stacked books wherein he’d mistakenly believed all of his life was told. He went down the highway past the FOR SALE sign and climbed the locked gate and so into the road. He went on listening to the sounds of night as if he had never heard them before. He passed Oliver’s unlit house but the old man was not about and all he heard of life was the goats’ bells tinkling off in the restive dark.

In the last days of Indian summer the light had a hazy look of blue distances to it like a world peered at through smoked glass. It was windy that fall and the air was full of leaves. The wind blew out of the west and they used to take blankets below the chickenhouses where there was a line of cedars for a windbreak and lie beneath a yellow poplar there in the sun. Yellow leaves drifted, clashed gently in a muted world. Sad time of dying, change in the air, who knew what kind. There seemed little permanence to this world, what he saw of it came drifting down through baring limbs and the branches left limned against the blue void looked skeletal and brittle as bone.

Amber Rose would lie drowsing in the sun, an arm thrown across her face. He studied her body almost covertly, the symmetry of her nipples, the dark, enigmatic juncture of her thighs. Parting the kinked black hair with his fingers he leaned and kissed her there, she stirred drowsily against his face. Faint taste of salt, of distant seas. Some other taste, something elemental, primal, shorn of custom. His tongue delineated the complexities of her sex, he raised his face to study the enigma he found there. She seemed fragile and vulnerable, wounded by life at the moment of conception with the ultimate weapon, the means to be wounded again and again, cleft there with the force of a blow.

When she could she would meet him at night. He cached blankets in the hollow at Mormon Springs and wrapped in them he would lie in the lee of the limestone rocks and await her. Dry leaves shoaled in the hollow and he could hear a long way off. It would be warm in the blankets and the night imbued Winer and the girl with a desperate sense of immediacy, or urgency, they lay tired but not sated for they were learning that there were hungers that did not abate.

Laughing she slid down the length of his body and took him into her mouth. The blanket slid away and he could see her dark head at the Y of his body like some spectral succubus feasting while beyond them the trees reared and tossed in the wind and the throb of the jukebox and the cries of the stricken and the drunk came faint and dreamlike like cries from a madhouse in a haunted wood. His hand knotted in her hair and pulled her atop him he could feel her heart hammering against him through her naked breast.

“You used to drive Lipscomb crazy,” he told her once. “He used to find excuses to see up your dress.”

“I know it. I wanted you to look though.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know. I just wanted to make you hard, all right?”

“It’s all right with me,” he said.

Her face was pale and composed in the moonlight. Black curls tousled as if she slept in perpetual storm. His finger traced the delicate line of her jaw.

“Briar Rose,” he said.

“What?”

“I think I’ll call you Briar Rose. I like it better than Amber Rose and besides I like briar roses. They’re sweet and I like the way they smell. And you do look like somebody out of a fairy tale.”

“Like somebody’s wicked stepsister or something?”

“You can be a princess in mine.”

A new, soft world of the senses here she ushered him into. A world of infinite variety he had but heard rumored. On these sweet urgent nights he came to feel he was indeed living out an erotic fairytale, the dark prince who’d stolen the princess from the evil king. And like the protagonists of a fairytale they played out their games in a country of intrigues and secret corners and fierce inclement weather where nothing was what it seemed.

“You look like a man pickin cotton,” Motormouth told him. “Cept you grabbin trouble with both hands and stuffin it in a sack and never once lookin over your shoulder.”

“What you are talking about, Motormouth?”

“Listen at ye. You may not be as slick hardy as you think you are.”

Motormouth sat in Winer’s living room. He crouched on the edge of the sofa with a glass of 7-Up and bootleg whisky in his hand. The drink had the smoky, oily quality of nitroglycerin and he held it carefully as if dropping it might annihilate them both.

“I never was one for parables and hard sayings,” Winer told him. “You got anything I need to hear just say so straight out.”

“You think you’re in tight with him. But when he finds out, and he damn sure will, he will kill your ass and hide you or rig it up so it looks like he killed you in self-defense.”

“I’m still kindly left in the dark.”

“A little bird flew down and lit on my shoulder and whispered in my ear. It said, ‘You better warn little Nathan. He’s buyin trouble by the pound and he’s got about all he can go with.’”

“That little bird, did it have a name?”

“You seen one of these little old birds you seen em all.”

Winer didn’t say anything.

“Hardin wanted her hisself,” Motormouth said.

“You did too,” Winer said. “But you never got her.”

Motormouth arose and stretched. He looked about the room. There was an air of time about it, as if folks had grown old and died here. I BELIEVE IN THE POWER OF THE LIVING GOD, a glittercard above the fireplace said. “I got to get on,” Motormouth said. “Hell. I’m goin to Chicago or Detroit or somewhere. Someplace got some size about it. I’m burnt out on this damn place anyway.”

That was what he said but the only place he quit this night was Winer’s front room.

“This is nothing but trouble,” Winer told her. She lay against him beneath the blanket. “I’ve got to get a car somehow. A way of getting around so we can get away from him.”