William Gay - The Long Home

“This is how I am.”

Although he had stood up to go he made no further move to do so. She was watching him. “That thing weighs nigh two hundred pounds,” he said. “I wish you luck with it.”

“There was anything to you you’d help me put it up. It’s settin right out there where you put it last spring.”

“Yeah,” he said, trying to get a focus on last spring, a definition of it. Spring seemed years ago.

“You help me get it in the back door and I’ll get it the rest of the way myself.”

“I bet it’ll be cold tonight. I may need it myself.” For a fey moment he thought of the heater set up by the riverbank, himself housed only by the walls of the world, the elements. “A few minutes ago you called me crazy,” he told her. “I may be but I ain’t crazy enough yet to put a heatin stove for some other son of a bitch to warm by.”

“It wouldn’t hurt you to help me. It wouldn’t cost you a dime.”

“I made you my best deal. You come back to me and we’ll go to town and get some grocers and I’ll put it up and build a big fire in it.”

“Forget it. Cecil can put it up when he gets back.”

He took a deep breath. “All right then. I’ll tell you what I will do. You give me a little and I’ll put the damned thing up for you.”

“You are crazy.”

“What could it hurt? Ain’t Cecil in Memphis? Ain’t we married?”

“Just in name only.”

“That’s close enough for me,” Motormouth said. He crossed the room, stood beside her. The top of her head did not even reach his shoulder. She did not move away. He knew suddenly with a shock of exultation that she was going to do it.

She undressed at the foot of the bed. He kicked his boots off, shucked out of his slacks and lay watching her. She unhooked her brassiere. A strap secured by a safety pin made her more vulnerable, less remote. She slid out of her skirt, it pooled at her feet. She began to roll down her panties, looked up, and saw him watching her. She flounced her hair back from her forehead and pushed her underwear down defiantly, her eyes hard and fierce. “Get your eyes full,” she told him. He stared at the cool, rounded flesh of her belly, the snarled rustcolored pubic hair. In the cold air gooseflesh crept up the ivory of her thighs, her nipples hardened and elongated.

When he inserted himself into her her face did not change, nor when he began to move inside her. He labored above her as if inch by inch he would force his entire body into her, merge with her, become her, he sweated in the juncture of her body while she lay abstracted, lost in the pattern of the ceiling wallpaper, and he knew she had defeated him once again. Her pale flesh looked pristine, unused. He thought of the countless times he had lain in her arms, that Blalock had lain inside her, that she had lain down with faceless names that were just taunts she had flung a him. Yet none of them had hurt or marked or even touched her. She was unused.

“Why did you quit? Are you done?”

He hadn’t known he had. “I was just thinkin,” he said. He commenced again halfheartedly.

She laughed deep in her throat. “You never could think and do this at the same time,” she said.

She had dragged it almost to the smokehouse door, its legs leaving skidding indentations in the rough flooring. He stood looking down at it. It looked ungodly heavy. She watched him from the kitchen door, buttoning her blouse. He squatted in the earth by the door, studying it. Figuring the easiest way to move it. He could not remember how he had gotten it there in the first place.

He looked up. The sun was nearing its zenith but the light had a thin faraway quality to it, the red orb stingy and remote, and it seemed to him that it was speeding away from him, the earth settling incrementally into some age seized in ice. Baring branches rustled softly, told sweet ageold secrets he’d never know. He was thinking about Blalock. He could see him opening the door of the stove, throwing a stick of wood in, stirring the roiling coals with a poker. Settling back in the armchair, sighing, feet clocked aloft to the warmth of the heater, now opening his farm magazine.

“Piss on you,” he told the stove.

He started toward his car.

“You dirty son of a bitch,” she shrieked at the immutability of his back. He had heard it all before and he went on. He wheeled the Chrysler back into the yard and then it leapt forward, spun smoking across the ditch and onto the gravel road. He sped off toward town.

Winer went down the embankment through the cold gray drizzle. The bracken was already wet and by the time he reached the car he was soaked to the thighs and angry. Motormouth had a fire built in the stone grill constructed for campers and a pan set atop it but the fire was guttering in the rain and smoking and heavy smoke bellied bluely away down the riverbank. Winer could hear the soft hiss of rain falling in the river.

He opened the car door and got in. Motormouth sat behind the wheel. He was staring out the rainwashed windshield toward the blurred river as if at some landscape he was hurtling fulltilt toward. Winer slammed the door. “You’re a hell of a lot of trouble,” he said. “You moved. You could have told me where you were movin to.”

“I didn’t know myself. It come on me sudden.”

“All this stuff coming on you sudden is going to put you in the pen or under the ground,” Winer said. “Rape comes on you sudden. Living like a crazyman in an automobile parked in the bushes comes on you sudden. You move but you don’t move good enough. All I had to do was ask at the grocery store. I guess it come on you sudden to tell Patton, just in case anybody wondered where you were or had any warrants to serve or anything.”

“Yeah. Well, hell. I told him to just tell you.”

“Well, you’re a trusting soul. The power of a ten-dollar bill may be lost on you, but it’s not on Blalock or Patton.”

“Is Blalock huntin me sure enough?”

“That’s why I come down here. He’s told it all over town what he’s going to do when he catches you. He says you raped her and beat her and he says he swore out a warrant against you. Likely he’s just blowing about the warrant, but he’s told so many folks he’s going to whip your ass he’s just about bound to do it whether he wants to or not.”

“Do you think he can do it?”

“Has a cat got an ass? Of course he can do it. Hell, he’d make two of you and enough left over to referee.”

“No, I mean that rape stuff. Can he make that stick. You can’t rape your own wife, can ye?”

“I don’t know.”

“I don’t mind gettin a asswhippin, he wouldn’t get no cherry, but thinkin about hard time up at Brushy gives me a chill.”

“I’d have to ask somebody. How about cranking this thing up and turning the heater on? I’m cold all the way to the bone.”

Motormouth cranked the car and it sat idling, vibrating rhythmically. Winer turned the heater on, shuddering at the onrush of cold air, turned it back off. “Does this thing not work?”

“It has to warm up. Ask who?”

“Somebody that knows something about the law. A lawyer, a judge, you know.”

“I know you best keep away from them kind of folks. You’ll have us both in the pen. Anyway, I never raped her and I damn sure never laid a hand on her. I know exactly what’s the matter with him. He’s mad because he had to put up that Goddamned heating stove by hisself.”

“Maybe. Anyway, he’s hunting you.”

“I’m fixin to leave as soon as I get a stake. I’m burnt out on this place anyhow. I’m sick of it. The only place I ever want to see this place is in a rearview mirror.”

He fell into a ruminative silence. Winer turned the heater on, held his hands cupped to the warming fire. “I’m going north,” Motormouth said. “Chicago. That’s a place for a feller like me. I could make it big in a place like Chitown. There ain’t no angles to play in a dump like this. There’s a world of angles in a town that size. That’s what I need.”