William Gay - The Long Home

Oliver must have already been abed, for he was in his long underwear when he cracked the door and peered out. Winer handed him the banknote.

“You can tear this up. I don’t reckon I need it after all.”

“Well. I heard of a good credit risk but you about the beat of any I ever seen.”

“I never even used it. I bought Motormouth’s car and it was a lot cheaper than the one Kittrel had.”

“Well, where’s Hodges gone off to?”

“His bus ticket said Chicago.”

“Chicago,” Oliver repeated in an awed voice. “Lord God.”

She must have been watching from a window, for as soon as he parked the car the front door opened and she came out onto the porch. Grinning, she came down the steps and approached the car.

“What are you doin with Motormouth Hodges’s car?” she asked.

“It’s mine, I bought it,” he said. He got out and let the door fall to, walked all around the car pointing out its virtues. She wasn’t really looking at the car, stood grinning at him in a curiously maternal way.

“Okay, okay,” she said. “You don’t have to sell it to me.”

“You want to go for a ride.”

“I don’t know. How’d you learn to drive so fast?”

“Motormouth showed me.”

She was laughing. “Oh Lord. I’ll just wait then.”

“He said I was learning from a master.”

“Well. Maybe in that case. I never rode with a master before.”

Mormon Springs fell away and on the way to town he was seized by a feeling of elation, the colors and sounds of this bleak winter day seemed heightened and he was possessed by a rockhard assurance that things were going right. Turning momentarily from the road he glanced at her bright profile against the dreary, rolling countryside and he didn’t see how things could go wrong for anyone who had a girl who looked as pretty as she did: there was a juststruck perfection, she looked new and unused to him, nothing had quite touched her.

“You know what I’d like to do?”

“No, but you can do whatever you want to.”

“I want to eat at the Daridip. I never did that before.”

“Where’s Hardin at?”

“I don’t know and I don’t care. He can’t stop me if I’m already with you, can he?”

“What’d he say to you about those blankets?”

“Nothin.”

Winer looked at her. He didn’t believe her but he didn’t say so.

“Then I want to go down on Brushy where they buried Daddy. I ain’t been down there since the funeral and I been wantin to go. You reckon we could?”

The grave was an oval of red earth. Wire flowers tilted and twisted askew by fall winds. Cliched sentiments gone weatherbeaten and forgotten, cheap celluloid flowers blatant in their artifice. There was no headstone and a meal marker driven into the earth certified who was there in watermarked type. Thomas Hovington, she read. It was like being famous, she thought, seeing your name in cold print like that. She’d never seen it before.

She knelt and pulled her skirt down over her knees and arranged the tacky remnants of flowers to some semblance of order she carried in her head. Hands gentle to rotted crepepaper leached colorless and limp.

“He never helped me much, but he might’ve if he hadn’t been so sick. I was a kid when they put him in the ground,” she said. “It was just this year but I ain’t a kid no more. I seen the hearse come all new and shiny and they took him out in that box and drive away. ‘Goin back after another one,’ I thought. I had never thought about folks doin that for a livin. I get a little boy I never want him to be one of them.”

An old man and woman were passing among the gravestones. Old gray man in a black suitcoat. Winer watched him. Prospective tenants perhaps, folks just visiting their neighbors. He wanted gone.

She arose. She was crying brokenly. She clung to his arm. “They had to break his back,” she said. “They ought never to have done that.”

He put his arms around her and drew her wet face into the hollow of his throat. He couldn’t think of anything to say.

“You got any money?”

“Sure I got money. Why?”

“Stop here.” She pointed.

He pulled into the empty parking lot. It was the Cozy Court Motel. They sat for a time, his fingers awkwardly drumming on the steering wheel, she was a calm serenity, staring out across the cold-looking pavement toward the numbered doors.

“We’ll play like we’re somebody else,” she said. “Somebody real nice.”

He didn’t say anything. He got out and closed the door and went across the asphalt to where blue neon said the office was.

Later they lay in bed, her back to him, the length of her body against him. The sun was lowering itself in the west and threw the window yellowlit and oblique on the eastern wall. Past her rounded shoulder he watched it slide slowly across the limegreen plaster and he wished there was some way to halt it but there was not.

He stopped the car on the last curve before Hardin’s and cut the switch off and drew her against him.

“We ought not to have drove back here at all. We should have just kept goin.”

“Goin where?”

“I don’t know.”

“Will he hurt you?”

“He never has really.”

“Tell me if he does.”

She looked at him wryly. “Why? What will you do? Kill him? Defend my honor? It’s easy for you. All you have to do is drive out of sight and it’s over for you.”

They sat in silence. He thought of the curious progression of things, the way the ragged edges of one event dovetailed into another like the pieces of a puzzle, no single piece independent of the whole.

“It ought not to have been like this,” he said suddenly.

“What?”

“If any one thing had been different then the rest would have too. We might be married. We might be a thousand miles away.”

She smiled. “We might be dead,” she said. “You want to see everything at once, Nathan. You want it every bit in front of you where you can look at it, make choices. I ain’t like that. I never had a choice to make. I just do what there is to do and then I don’t worry over it. It’s done.”

“All I want right now is for you to never get out that door,” he said.

She leaned and kissed his cheek. Then she got out anyway.

She traced the outline of her lips with a pink lipstick, pressed her lips together to smooth it. She studied her face speculatively in the mirror. Her eyes opened startled when Hardin’s reflection appeared behind hers.

“Think you’re goin somewhere?”

“Nathan Winer’s takin me to the show.”

“No he’s not.”

“Yes he is. Mama’s done said I could go.”

“Mama don’t call the shots around here and ain’t never if memory serves.”

“Well, she calls them with me. You’re not my daddy.”

“I damn sure ain’t,” he said. “And never claimed to be.” He came up behind her until their bodies touched and took the mirror from her hand and laid it aside. He embraced her from behind, a hand cupping each breast.

“Quit,” she said, twisting away, but his arms tightened and finally she stood without moving, slack in his arms. His touch appeared to drain her of any will of her own, as if she were absorbing some slowmoving but deadly poison from his body to hers. She was quite still, like some marvelous representation of human flesh lacking any spark to animate. They stood so for a long time.

“Mama’s crazy. She’ll kill you one of these days.”

“I’m like a cat,” Hardin said. “I take a lot of killin.” He kept on massaging her breasts gently.

“I’m a grown woman, Dallas. I can pick up and leave here anytime I want to. And if I’m of a mind to go with Nathan Winer or anybody else I want to, you can’t stop me.”