William Gay - The Long Home

“I just did,” Hardin said. “And it didn’t hurt a bit, did it?”

He turned her toward him but she twisted her face away. “Quit,” she said. “Quit it, Dallas.”

“You think I don’t know? You think I’m going to let you throw yourself away on some redneck with dirty fingernails and no idy at all what he’d got? Sure I am. The hell I am.”

He released her. He lit a cigarette and stood studying her.

“Throw you a change of clothes in a suitcase,” he told her. “Long as you’re already dressed up we might as well go somewhere.”

“Go where?”

“You’ll see when we get there.”

“You think I’m going anywhere at all with you you’re badly mistaken.”

“Get it packed or you’ll by God go without it.” Hardin turned on his heel and went through the long front room just as Pearl came through the door. She stepped aside to let him pass and then stood there watching Amber Rose and Amber Rose watching her, but neither of them spoke.

Winer smelled strongly of Old Spice and he had something on his hair that plastered it gleaming to the contours of his skull and he had on a new white shirt. One long room of the honkytonk had been sheetrocked though not yet plastered or painted. A bar was aligned against the narrow end of the room and tables and chairs were spaced about the floor. Winer passed through the doorway and into the sounds of Saturday-night merriment as though he were accustomed to it and seated himself at one of the bright new stools at the bar.

“Lord God, Winer,” Wymer said. “You smell like you broke a twenty-dollar bill in the barbershop and had to take the change out in trade.”

Winer gave him a small, tight smile and sat absentmindedly tapping a halfdollar on the bar. “Let me have a Coke, Wymer.”

Wymner set up the bottle but refused the coin. “Pearl’s givin it away tonight,” he said wryly. “Everthing’s on the house.”

“Do what?”

“Hell, yeah. She’s pissed at Hardin about somethin and she’s already give away enough beer and whiskey to give the whole county a hangover.”

“What’s she mad at Hardin about?”

“You’d have to ask them. They don’t tell me their business.” He stood unsteadily, arranged his thin hair with his fingers to cover his bald spot. His small eyes flitted drunkenly about the room as if Hardin might be crouched behind a table watching. “They got me right in the middle,” he complained. “He’s gone off God knows where and all I know for certain is he’s goin to have a shitfit when he does get back. I just may be somewheres else when it happens too…He keeps talkin bout this Mexcan feller he’s bringin up from Memphis. I guess I’m out of a job anyway.”

Winer drank Coke. “How about you go to along with her? I thought you were workin for Hardin.”

“I don’t know who in hell I work for. Right now I’m workin for that 30–06 she throwed on me a while ago.”

“I see,” Winer said though he didn’t. He arose with his bottle. “I’ll see you.”

“You better drink up while it’s free. You won’t never see this again in your lifetime.”

“I got to get on.”

He crossed onto the porch and knocked on the door, the screen rattling loosely on its hinges.

“Who’s there? Get away from that damned door.”

“It’s Nathan Winer. Can I see you a minute?”

“What do you want?”

“I just need to see you a minute.”

After a time he heard her get up heavily and he heard her mumbling to herself or another. The door opened and she stood leaning heavily against the jamb. He could smell the raw-whiskey smell of her and her sweat and the curious volatile smell of her anger.

“What is it?”

“I just wanted Amber Rose,” he said. “We were supposed to go to the show in Ackerman’s Field.”

“Well, she ain’t here, Nathan. She’s gone off to Columbia or somewheres with Dallas.”

“We were supposed to go to the show. She said she wanted to.”

“Dallas didn’t say for sure where they were goin or when they’d be back.” She drank from an upturned bottle. Lowered it and reached it toward Winer. “Get you a little drunk there.”

“I wouldn’t care for any.”

“Here.” She took the Coke bottle from him and filled it to overflowing from the bottle she held. “Come in and set awhile with me. We’ll wait on em together.”

“No, I may wait out in the car awhile. I got me a car.”

“Say you have? That’s real nice, Nathan.”

“We were going to the show in it.”

“Well, I don’t know where she is.”

“If you were guessing what time would you guess they’d be back?”

She pondered a moment. “I’d guess when I seen them comin,” she said.

Sometime in the small hours of the night he sat on Weiss’s couch drinking strawberry wine. He sat in silence with the thin crystal goblet balanced on his knee.

The silence seemed distilled, pure, silence augmenting itself. The walls were listening, the room hushed and waiting. In this silence he seemed receptive to all the world of experience, sensation multiplied by sensation rushed to him as if he were attuned to a vast stream of data bombarding him from every side. He drank from the wineglass and he could taste the musky heat of the berries, feel the weight of the sun, detect the difference between sunshine and shade smell the strawberries and their leaves and the earth, see dry fissured texture of last year’s earth, the serried grasses, the minute but vast life that flourished there. Laughter, conversations he was too weary to listen to funneled into his ears. He had heard all the words anyway, only the progressions had changed. He could hear Hodges’ voice, its halfcocky whine torn between bullying and wheedling, he could hear Amber Rose’s soft ironic voice and smell the clean soap smell of her, hear the rustle of her clothing. He could hear Weiss’s clipped and scornful cadence. The dark oppressed him. This dark house of stopped clocks and forfeit lives and seized machinery. Here in the weary telluric dark past and present intersected seamlessly and he saw how there was no true beginning or end and all things once done were done forever and went spreading outward faint and fainter and that the face of a young girl carried at once within it a bitter worn harridan and past that the satinpillowed death’s head of the grave. He rested his head on the couch arm and he could hear Weiss and his wife talking, hear all their lives flow past him like a highway he could enter and depart at will. He heard her asthmatic wheeze and the shuffle of her bedroom slippers and the click of the little dog’s claws on the tile and he got up. He drained the glass and set it by the couch. He went out into the cold night without looking back.

Cold dreary days now of winter in earnest and every day it seemed to rain. A cold, spiritless rain out of a leaden sky and he used to sit and watch out the weeping glass but there was nothing to see save brittle weeds and the coldlooking dripping woods. Water freezing on the clotheslines, a gleaming strand of suspended ice.

There seemed to be nowhere he wanted to go and no soul in all the world he wanted to talk to. He’d sit by the fire and try to read but the words skittered off the page like playful mice and he thought he’d never seen grayer or longer days.

On this gray, chill Sunday there was an air almost pastoral about Mormon Springs, an air of pause as if time must be given to ponder the events of Saturday night. Or respite to gear up for the week ahead. There was a hush here, a silence that seemed to gather about the pit. Winer kicking through the beerbottles and cigarette packs and the random debris of Saturday night seemed somehow resolute, calm, he seemed to have broached some line he’d never expected to and made a decision he was at peace with.