William Gay - The Long Home

“Then let him get up,” Jiminiz said. “I don’t like hittin a man already down and I don’t like hittin a man already out on his feet and don’t know when he’s whipped.”

“He’ll get up,” Hardin said contemptuously. “You couldn’t keep him down with a fuckin logchain. He ain’t got sense to lay down and quit.”

Winer was trying. It hurt him to move and it hurt to breathe and it hurt to talk. “You better make him kill me,” he said. “Because if I live you won’t. You’re a dead man.”

“I know the words to that old song,” Hardin said. “I’ve heard it often enough.”

“You gettin up or stayin down?” Jiminiz asked.

The price he paid was dear but Winer got up. There was blood welling in his mouth and his eyes had a slick, shiny look like glass. For a few moments he managed to evade Jiminiz but the Mexican moved like a boxer, graceful despite his size, feinting, jabbing through Winer’s flimsy guard at will. Winer sat down hard with his vision darkening and the last thing he saw was the dark bulk of Jiminiz coming on and Jiminiz hit him some more but he had stopped feeling it.

The water had turned red. Winer squeezed the washrag out in it and went back to cleaning his face with the pink cloth, studying his cut in the mirror.

“Who was it done it? Hardin?” Oliver sat straddling a ladderback chair, his dead pipe clutched in his teeth.

“He subcontracted it out to some Mexican.”

“Mexcan?”

“Some bouncer or something brought up here from Memphis.”

“Big feller?”

Winer was gingerly daubing his face with alcohol. “I hope I never see one bigger,” he said. “But it wouldn’t have mattered anyway. I had some idea I was tougher than I turned out to be.”

“I seen you come by the house right slow driving like a drunk man. I knowed you wouldn’t be drunk so I figured I might ort to step up here and see would you live. Do you reckon you will?”

“I expect so.”

“You shore ain’t goin to be much in the purty department for a good long while.”

“I never was anyway.”

“Looks like you may have ye a scar or two to remember that Mexcan by. What’d he whup you with? A stick of stovewood? Or a choppin axe?”

“I think he had a ring on and he sort of twisted his fist when he hit me.”

“Boy, I just don’t know what to say. Goddamn it, there just ain’t nothin to say. You ort to go to the high sheriff. Bellwether’s a fair man, what I hear.”

“Hardin’d just swear I started it. Which I did. He gave me every out there was and I just wouldn’t take them, I had Pa’s old knife and I was going to cut one or both of them. Then he chopped me right good in the ribs and all my intentions just few away.”

“You think you’ll be all right?”

“I hurt too much to think. It must he stove in my ribs or something.”

“Let’s get in ye car and try to make it in to see Ratcliff.”

“I’ll be all right in the morning.”

“Lord God, boy. Now ain’t nothin to the way you’ll feel in the morning. I remember one time I got locked up in Nashville for a public drunk and a pair of the blueboys played around with me for a while. I went to bed feelin purty good and when I got up next day I fell right flat on my face. I hurt in places I didn’t even know I had…Say what did yins have ye falllin out about anyway?”

“We just got into it.”

“Well, whatever it was you ought to swear out a warrant and have him locked up anyway.”

“No. I got an idea or two of my own.”

He made his way through the slack Monday-morning commerce, a felthatted old man in a gray raincoat too big through the shoulders and chest carrying a shoebox tucked tightly under his arm as though he conveyed something of unreckonable value. Whatever his business was it drew him down North Main and left at the General Cafe across toward the courthouse sat on its carpet of winter brown. A flag on a flagpole set in concrete fluttered and snapped in the bitter wind.

Old courthouse sounds and smells and the way his footfalls echoed hollowly in the sepulchral silence brought back other days so strongly he fancied he felt guided hands on an elbow, steel chafing his wrists, heard other harsher footsteps that echoed his own. Days when the wildness lay on him and he bought time by the second and paid for it by the year. “I said I’d never darken these doors,” he told himself. “And I wouldn’t if it wadnt for the boy, if there was any way in God’s world around it.”

He went down the stairs to the basement level and past the library to where the high sheriff’s office was. The door was locked. There was a sign on it. BACK IN FIVE MINUTES, the sign said. There was a bench in the hall by the door and the old man seated himself there with the box in his lap and waited. He waited with the patient forbearance of the old, through some acquired knowledge that sooner or later all things come to pass. Past the concrete stairs that ascended to the level of the courthouse yard he could see a gray square of winter light and the bare branches of trees. He sat idly watching foraging birds flit from tree to tree as if he had never seen such a thing before.

It was an hour before Bellwether came and when he did he had Cooper in tow. He nodded to Oliver and unlocked the door.

“How you makin it, Mr. Oliver?”

“I’m tolerable, I reckon. You need to set your watch.”

“I expect I do. But if I did it’d be the only thing working right around here and just foul everything else up. Did you need to see me about somethin?”

“I wanted to talk to you a few minutes.”

“Come on in here and get you a seat.”

Oliver took off his hat and seated himself in a straightback chair. He cross his legs and hung his hat on a spindly knee and sat cradling the shoebox in his lap. Bellwether glanced at the shoebox a time or two but he didn’t say anything. He poured himself a cup of cold coffee from the unplugged coffeepot and drank and shuddered and sat waiting for Oliver to speak.

At length Oliver cleared his throat. “What I had to say was just for you,” he said. “Not this young feller here.”

Bellwether looked up sharply. “Well, he’s a deputy sheriff in this county. I reckon whatever you had to talk to me about had to do with law enforcement.”

“Yeah, it did,” Oliver said. “That’s why I’d just as soon this feller here didn’t know nothin about it.”

“Anything that pertains to law enforcement in this county is my business,” Cooper said. “Like he told you, I’m a deputy sheriff.”

Oliver arose, put on his hat. “I’ll be gettin on if that’s the way of it,” he said. “Yins may hear it but you won’t hear it from me.”

“Wait a minute, now,” Bellwether said. “Sit down there, Mr. Oliver.” He looked from the old man’s flinty face to Cooper’s and back again. “Is there somethin goin on here I don’t know about or what?”

Cooper shrugged. “If it is it’s news to me.”

“What about it, Mr. Oliver?”

“I’ve said my piece.”

Cooper favored Oliver with a look of perplexed innocence. “What have you got against me, Mr. Oliver? I don’t reckon I ever stepped on your toes, did I? Hell, I don’t even hardly know you.”

“Cooper, you go on over to the General and drink you a cup of coffee. Bring me one when you come back.”

“Why, hellfire. I ain’t done nothin, ain’t actin like I have. If he knows somethin on me let him say so or shut the hell up.”

“Mr. Oliver?”

“It ain’t nothin to me what he does, he don’t work for me. But the man I come to see you about totes this feller in his pocket like a handkerchief. He’s bought and paid for and I don’t like where the money come from.”