William Gay - The Long Home

Wearing the hat and carrying the radio tucked under his arm he went out of the room and up the hall and stepped into the kitchen just as a heavyset middleaged woman turned at his step from the sink. She had a plate in one hand and a soapy rag in the other. She cried out and dropped the plate.

Motormouth reeled back in shock, his eyes grown saucerlike and disbelieving in his freckled face. He made some terrorstricken sound deep in his throat and he was already whirling to run. Brandishing the dishrag like a weapon she started after him.

“They shitfire,” he cried.

He went fulltilt down the hall in a rising crescendo of sound from his tennis shoes on the polished floor. He went out the hall door and through the screened-in porch without moderating his pace. He felt the radio slip from his hands and tumble, he grasped desperately for the cord, felt the radio wedge itself between door and jamb. “Broke my radio,” the woman shrieked and he redoubled his efforts. He went through the hedge without slackening, bent over and his feet pumping madly. Ascending the bank he was running almost parallel with the ground. He crossed the blacktop swearing at a carload of startled faces that almost ran him over and went into the rainglutted bracken toward the hillside where the dark spruce beckoned.

He went into the woods running in silence save the ragged tear of his breathing and the rain in the trees. When at length he ceased he fell to earth and lay gasping for breath. For some time he lay inert and then cautiously rose to a crouch and strained for any noises of pursuit. All there was the sound of raincrows jeering at him from the sanctity of the treetops.

He looked ruefully at his fist, still clutching the plug and four or five feet of electric wire. He threw it disgustedly from him and sat for a time on a stump, still wearing the hat. A dark, inklike stain was seeping down his temples. He just sat listening to the wild hammering of his heart slowly begin to subside.

Monday Winer loaded the manure spreader and listened to the rain beat on the tarpaper roofing, for the rain to slacken so they could unload it, but it did not. In the middle of the morning Weiss came down to the chickenhouse. Herman Weiss was a short, thick little man with crinkly black hair shot through with gray. Winter and summer he wore a pith helmet and clean-pressed khakis and walking boots as if perpetually ready to join a safari should the opportunity arise. Folks said he was impossible to get along with. Hardly anyone would work for him but Winer thought him not a bad employer. Weiss had a clipped, brusque way of talking that folks didn’t take kindly to and no one knew where he had come from. They said he was a rich Jew, a hunky, and Italian. He was a white slaver, or a doperunner, or a retired motion-picture photographer, and his own tales were so convoluted and absurd that perhaps he no longer knew himself.

Winer didn’t care who he was. To Winer he was just a poultry farmer. He had three enormous chickenhouses and each housed six thousand chickens. Winer fed them twice a day, watered them morning and night. When they were nine weeks old Weiss hired a few extra hands and the chickens were caught and crated on a trailer truck and hauled away. The houses were cleaned out, a new crop started.

All Winer knew was that he halfliked Weiss. Weiss had a wry, ironic amiability that amused Winer. He did get excited. He was full of stories about far places and easy women and huge amounts and with the rain drumming on the roof, and Winer a willing audience, he told of them again.

He had a thousand tales to tell and perhaps one or two of them were even true. He was a consort of presidents and kings. Generals sought his advice on military matters, he and Blackjack Pershing had been just like that. (Taking the chalk of Pershing’s uncertain fingers, turning to the green chalkboard, signifying with dots and dashes the movement of troops across terrain contested by the maimed and the dying: No, the Germans’ll expect you here. If you’ll…) Had it not been for a crooked business associate he would have been a millionaire a hundred times over, for he had invented Coca-Cola. The formula had been stolen and sold out from under him.

“I bought one for a nickel in Topeka, Kansas,” Weiss said. “In a drugstore. It was my drink, right down to the secret ingredient. I could have wept.”

“I imagine so,” Winer said. “Did you ever see your partner again?”

“As a matter of fact I did,” Weiss said. “I saw him on State Street in Chicago in I believe it was 1922. He was driving a Rolls Royce Silver Ghost and he had a blondhaired woman with him who would have altered your heartbeat. Moseby just threw up a hand at me, casual, how do you do. And kept on going…but that woman. I’d have taken her on the White House lawn had the opportunity ever presented itself.” He fell into a ruminative silence. “Or any other reasonable place of her choosing,” he said after a time.

Weiss and his wife subscribed to several magazines and once a month or so they’d bundle them up and give them to Winer. Sometimes they’d give him books they’d accumulated. Once Weiss’s wife, Alma, gave him a new copy of Sandburg’s Complete Poems . Winer’s mother viewed this habit with suspicion, she kept thinking the gifts would be held out of the boy’s pay or someday they would be tallied up and retroactively accounted for, annihilating an entire paycheck.

Another habit Weiss had that the boy liked was that about nine thirty he looked at his watch and said, “Well, let’s drink one,” and they walked to the porch of Weiss’s house. Weiss opened the old icebox he kept stocked with Coca-Cola and homemade wine. He opened Winer a Coke and poured himself a glass of strawberry wine.

Winer studied his Coca-Cola, the slow rivulets of icewater sliding down the green bottle. “Did you bottle this one?” he asked innocently. “Or just buy it at the grocery store like everybody else?”

“What?”

“I thought maybe you just ran off a batch every two or three weeks.”

Weiss studied him above the rim of the upraised wineglass. He drank lowered his glass. “Respect for your elders is a trait not to be sneered at,” he told Winer after a time.

“You might amount to something someday if you didn’t work so damned hard.” Weiss told him that morning. “A man works as hard as you do doesn’t ever have time to make something of himself.”

“Do you want your money’s worth?”

“I’ll get my money’s worth. You go at every job as if it were the last one and you’re trying to finish up. You’ve got to get out of that. There isn’t any last job. You finish one and there’s another one waiting for you. You’ve got to pace yourself.”

Winer leaned on his spade, resting. Through the screened window the sky had darkened, clouds arisen in the west.

“Most folks around here are a little different,” Weiss was saying. “You must be a throwback or something. A mutant. Those woolhats or rednecks, whatever…I’ve lived here twenty-five years and I’m still a foreigner. I guess they’re waiting to see if I stay or not.”

“I guess some of them are peculiar all right.”

“Peculiar? Trifling is the word I had in mind. I had that shack up by the mouth of the creek and rented to a fellow named Warren one time. Boy, he was industrious. He liked to sit on his front porch and watch his garden grow. Only moved when the shade did or his wife yelled supper. Used to brag about that garden. ‘Fine garden,’ he’d say. ‘Fine garden.’ I was up there once when it all come in and I think he had maybe four head of cabbage. I could have carried off the stringbeans in this helmet and only made one trip. He only had about eight kids so I don’t know what in hell he planned to do with the excess. Can it for winter, maybe. Truckcrop it out.