William Gay - The Long Home

When he went that afternoon to the honkytonk Motormouth was still there. He had been drinking steadily for all the time he’d been here and perhaps before and he seemed to have arrived at some bleak outpost of drunkenness, a strange, ravaged sobriety, and Hardin thought he’d never seen a man so close to death, his own or somebody else’s.

“You want him gone?” Jiminiz asked.

“No,” Hardin said.

“He gets on my nerves. He slept in here again last night too, at that back booth. He was here when I came in this mornin.”

“I know it.”

“Well, I guess you know what you want. You’re the man with the hairy balls.”

“Yes I am,” Hardin agreed.

With his mug of coffee he crossed to the table where Motormouth sat and seated himself across from him. He set the mugs on the formica and lit a cigarette with the gold lighter and breathed out a shifting haze of smoke and watched Motormouth through it.

“I’m goin to give you some advice,” he said after a time. “I’m goin to tell you one time and then I’ll let you be, you can drink yourself to death or put a pistol to your head or just whatever suits you.”

“Hell, I’m all right. I aim to drive off over to the old lady’s here directly and talk to her.”

“No, you don’t. You aim to set here and drink till your liver or pocketbook or my patience just gives completely out that’s what you aim to do.”

“I’m goin to quit this old drinkin soon as I figure out what to do about my wife.”

“You know what your trouble is, Hodges? You let people run over you. You don’t stand up for yourself. Hell, no wonder Blalock’s fuckin your old woman. I guess he figures it’s all right with you. You ain’t never had it out with him, have you?”

“Well, we ain’t never talked about it right out.”

“Talkin don’t settle nothin. You got to let him know where you stand. You just lettin him railroad you, you supportin her all this time and him fuckin her and layin back laughing about it. Tellin it all over the poolhall you raped her.”

“Yeah, he done that all right.”

“And you let him. Where I come from we do things a little different. What it boils down to is the edge. You let him get a foot in the door and never said a word and let him get a edge over you. You got to get one of your own. You get a edge over him and you can lead him around like a lapdog.”

Motormouth was looking more and more skeptical. “Hell, you know Blalock. How overbearin he is.”

“Nobody ain’t goin to just hand you a edge. Like everthing else in this world you got to take it. You take a feller sets hisself up like Blalock and you got to kick the stilts out from under him. You’d be surprised how humble he gets. Back home we’d take a feller like that to see Patsy.”

“You’d do what?”

“Take him to see Patsy, that’s a thing we had back where I come from. You take a feller with his hatsize growed a size or two too big and tell him Patsy wants to see him real bad. Patsy’s a gal got the hots for him, some gal he don’t know but that’s been eyein him. It ain’t no trouble to get him to believe it, I never seen a feller yet wouldn’t believe some gal has the hots for him.

“Then what we’d do is take him out to someplace don’t nobody live and tell him to go to the door and Patsy’d be there waitin on him. He’d be all primed and ready to go, he’d go struttin up to the door like a bantyrooster and we’d have a feller in there with a shotgun waitin on him. He’d jump out hollerin about folks leavin his daughter alone and cut down on him with that scattergun, course we’d have the shell doctored, all the shot out of it and nothin left but powder and cap, but the feller all set for Patsy didn’t know that. He’d get right lightfooted. I’ve seen these old rawboned sawmill hand piss theirselves and run over halfgrown saplins and whatever else got in their way. Eyes rolled back in their heads. That gun wouldn’t hurt em but I’ve seen em hurt theirselves.

“And you know what? They wasn’t ever the same after that. They’d lost their edge. They couldn’t go that extra fraction of a inch no more. Oh, they’d fly off ever now and then and act like they was going to get rough but just when they started to push they’d look at you and know you was seein em running through the bushes with their hands throwed up. They just didn’t have it no more.”

He laid on the table before Motormouth a waxed shotgun shell. It was a deep burgundy red, its end shorn cleanly with a knife. He turned it toward Hodges to show that it was empty. Nothing in it save darkness. “I got a plan for you,” he said. “You want my advice or not?”

Hodges didn’t say anything.

Hardin arose. “Come on,” he said. “I got a thing to show you in the office and I got a plan to lay out for you. I’ve had it workin in my head for a while and I want to see that you think of it.”

Motormouth got up and stood swaying unsteadily a moment, then he followed Hardin across the hardwood flooring toward the back room Hardin referred to as his office.

“Go on and I’ll be in in a minute,” Hardin said. He turned to the bar. Jiminiz was watching him with a face devoid of curiosity.

“See if you can get Blalock on the telephone,” Hardin said. “Tell him I said come get his horses.”

Jiminiz took a thin phonebook from beneath the bar and began to leaf through it, ceased, his forefinger tracing down the list of names.

“When he comes if I ain’t here you go out with Hodges and take four or five of these highbinder with you. Hodges got a trick he aims to play on Blalock.”

Jiminiz nodded, he had the phone off the hook, dialing.

“What I like about you is you never ask me why,” Hardin said. “Why is that, Jiminiz?”

“I’m afraid you’d tell me,” Jiminiz said.

Bright in the winter sun the Morgan came up from the copse of trees when Hardin approached the wire. It paused a few feet from the wire fence and watched him, halfarrogant, halfinquisitive. Its breath steamed in the cold air. “You want to ride around awhile or see us a show here directly?” he asked the horse. He lit a cigarette and returned the lighter to his pocket, feeling as he did so the empty cartridge he had palmed. He withdrew the shell and studied it a moment wondering where he had heard the story he had told Hodges or even if he had heard it at all, if it was just some tale his mind had told them both. He tossed the shell into the sere weeds and stood leaning against the gate smoking. “All right, we’ll ride then,” he said. “We’ll go in a minute. We waiting on a truck right now.”

There was less time than he expected between the cessation of the truck motor and the shot. There was a man’s voice and a shout and he was swinging into the saddle when the explosion came. When it did a tremor coursed through the horse’s withers and its steel shoes did quick little dance on the frozen ground. He kicked its ribs and they went through the gate toward the branch. They crossed the stream and went up the steep slope, the horse laboring on the unsure limestone footing, faster then through the stony sedgefield.

He did not look back until they were on the ridge and when he did he could see the tableau of men gathered about the truck in the winding chert road with the Chrysler fleeing down it in silence. He watched it out of sight. The men looked like animated miniatures, unreal, against the muted winter landscape they milled and moved without purpose about one of their number who had fallen and lay unmoving, a puppet unstrung perhaps, or one who had fled at last the exhortation of a mad puppeteer.

The bentlegged waitress watched Winer across the tall vase of celluloid flowers, across the worn tile of the Snowwhite Cafe, where he sat near the plateglass window watching the street, occasionally sipping from his coffeecup, a menu face up but unread before him. There was a curious air of indecision about her but after a time she seemed to make up her mind. She took up her cigarette from the ashtray and crossed the room.