William Gay - The Long Home

Sleepy Sunday windows, no one about save a drunk dozing in the backseat of a parked car. No smoke from the flue of Hovington’s house. Winer went on past it and past the bundled bricks and to the unpainted boardwalled honkytonk and went in.

A trio of silent men sat before the hushed jukebox like worshipers at some fallen or discredited shrine and they glanced up as Winer passed and approached the bar and then they looked away. They had the strangely attentive attitude of men listening to music no one else can hear.

Hardin sat on a stool at the bar. An enormous dark man sat on the next stool over and neither of them seemed aware of Winer. Winer stood awkwardly awaiting acknowledgment and he felt dazed and sleeprobbed and he could smell his own nervous sweat. Hardin was drinking some dark liquid from a glass with icecubes in it and when he drained the glass he set it atop the bar with a small liquid rattle of ice and sat staring into its depths as if he read the configurations of his future or someone else’s there and they did not please him.

“What do you want, Winer?”

“I want to talk to you a minute by yourself.”

“Anything you got to say to me can be said right here. I don’t believe you know this feller here. Winer, this is Jiminiz. I brought him up from Memphis to help with my light work. Jiminiz used to bust heads in the meanest whorehouse in Beale Street and I reckon this place is goin to seem like a vacation to him.”

Jiminiz turned a dark, moonshaped face toward Winer but made no further overture and there was no look at all in his eyes. His white shirt was open to the waist and his chest and belly were laced with a scrollwork of old scars. His smooth black hair was shiny with brilliantine. Winer noticed that the collar of the white shirt was soiled. There was an air of violence constrained about him, he was mantled with a flimsy and makeshift indolence.

“Winer used to be a pretty good feller till he got him a little pussy,” Hardin told Jiminiz. “Then he just flew all to pieces. Don’t know who his friends are anymore. Just can’t keep off that old thin ice.”

Jiminz seemed not to have head but after a time he said, “Pussy warps a man’s head worse than codeine ever did.” His voice was mellifluous and touched with a soft Spanish lilt. “I guess next to gettin caught pussy has caused me more trouble than anything else.”

“I want to see you outside,” Winer told Hardin.

“I look just the same in here,” Hardin poured Jack Daniel’s into a glass, sat turning it on the formica, studying the series of interlocking rings the bottom of the cold glass made. “All this old shit keeps buildin up,” he said. “One thing after another. Seems like ever which way I turn I got folks snappin at my heels and worryin me. Well, I ain’t never been one to put things off. I believe if somethin’s bothering you cut it out right at the start. Be done with it and get on to somethin else. Now, me and Jiminiz aims to set some folks straight. So why don’t you just ease out of here?”

“I’m goin to see her.”

“Goddamn it, Winer. Does it have to be spoonfed to you a word at a time? I’ve got money tied up here. I’ve bought her clothes and fed her and by God raised her and now you think you’ll get her off somewhere and get her to thinkin about dishes and baby buggies and such shit and it all goes out the winder. Like hell it does. Folks around her beginnin to think they can shove me this way and that and I reckon I’m goin to have to bang some more heads together. They think I’m mellerin down or somethin. But we’ll see. Now, pick up that long face and that draggy ass and get out of my place. I’m sick of it, do you hear me. You and your money ain’t no good in here.”

“I’ll tell you what, Hardin. Why don’t you put me out?”

“No, you won’t tell me what. You won’t tell me jackshit. I’ll tell you what. I don’t have to put you out. I told you Jiminiz does my light work. He’ll have you out of there so fast all you’ll remember about it is how bad it hurt.”

Winer was watching Jiminiz. The man sat cupping a tiny shotglass of bourbon in his hand. He seemed unaware that he was under discussion. But Winer wasn’t really seeing him, he was seeing the long, slow days of Indian summer, days of dreamy peace, the rafter going up in the heat of the sun, the feel of the icy fruitjar against his face. The ebony fall of her long hair against the whitewashed wall. The way his arms were thickening day by day with the raising of the heavy oak timbers and the smell of the hot green wood curing in the sun. I can do it, he was thinking. The tenseness left him, he stood loose against the bar, light and arrogant on the balls of his feet.

“Take me out, Jiminiz,” he said.

Jiminiz smiled a small, onesided smile. “I don’t work for you,” he said. “The man pays me off on a Friday gives my orders.”

Hardin stood watching Winer and something in the boy’s posture or in his face was evocative and recalled to him another who had snapped at his heels long ago. He knew by the way he was standing what was on his mind and he could see the imprint of the knife through denim and he thought in wonder. The same knife. For a millisecond the past seemed to engulf him, as if old deeds were never done and over with and there were things that must be done in perpetuity. As if he must go on forever taking this selfsame knife away from folks.

“He’ll have a knife,” he said tiredly.

“He won’t use it,” Jiminiz said offhandedly. “I’ve seen a thousand of him.”

“Then take him out,” Hardin said.

Jiminiz drained his shotglass and set it aside. “Easy money,” he said.

Winer waited. When Jiminiz approached him he swung as hard as he could at the calm, dark face. Jiminiz ducked and Winer felt his fist glance off the slick black hair and his momentum carried him sideways. Jiminiz straightened and positioned his feet and though his fist seemed to travel only six or eight inches before it struck Winer’s ribcage, Winer felt his lungs empty in a sharp explosion of pain and he went reeling backward.

The covey of drunks flushed like startled quail when Winer struck the table. It overturned and he fell in a cascade of playing cards and falling glass and the drunks erupted from toppled chairs and developed a simultaneous interest in what lay beyond the door. Winer got up on all fours slowly shaking his head from side to aside like a bear set upon by dogs. He was trying to breathe. His breath whistled eerily in his throat and the room seemed to have tilted to a forty-five-degree angle and poised there, Winer waiting for the furniture to slide sideways and pile up on the left periphery of his vision. Marvelously defying gravity and tilted as well, Jiminiz was crossing the room toward him, his fists cocked. Behind him a tilted Hardin watched as if this were all beyond his interest.

Winer got up clutching a chair and when he threw it Jiminiz just grinned and fended it away onehanded and kept on coming. Winer stiffened and hit Jiminiz in the belly with his right and crossed with his left and a slight shudder ran through Jiminiz and then he hit Winer full in the face.

Lights flickered in Winer’s head and he hit the floor limbernecked with his head slapping the hardwood flooring and they flickered again. Perhaps he dozed for a moment for when he came to himself Jiminiz was standing over him with look of infinite patience on his face. Winer was lying on his back and he rose to his elbows and lay staring out across his prone body. Nothing seemed to have changed. The chairs were still scattered and the table capsized and Hardin still sat on a stool drinking. Winer had fallen in broken glass and his arms were bleeding.

Then Hardin spoke. Winer could hear him though there was a roaring in his ears like far-off water. “Mark him up a little,” Hardin said. “Mess them smooth jaws up. Ever time he looks in a shavin mirror I want him to remember how sweet that pussy was.”