Joe (17 page)

At midmorning the lawnmower sputtered and died. He stopped
and mopped at his sweat and stood looking around him. The city trucks were parked in the shade beside the pavilion and he made his way down to them. Two black boys were sitting in the shade when he got there, smoking cigarettes. They were park employees, kids hired for the summer maybe.

Wade rummaged around in the bed of a truck, looking for an antifreeze jug with gas. There were razorous joe-blades and green-stained weedwhackers piled up in there. He rooted among them, shoving things aside, sweat stinging his eyes. Finally he looked over at the boys.

“Y’all know where the gas is?” he said.

“They supposed to be some in there,” one of them said.

He looked and looked. He found an antifreeze jug but it had antifreeze in it. He poured some out on the ground to make sure, and sure enough it was green.

“That ain’t gas. That’s antifreeze.”

The boys looked at each other. One of them scratched his ear. “We supposed to have some,” he said.

“Well, you
ain’t
got none,” Wade told him. He looked at him with what appeared to be barely controllable rage. His face was red and droplets of sweat were swinging on his jowls. “I can’t cut the grass without no gas. By God, if I’m gonna work down here, y’all got to furnish me with some gas. I ain’t gonna buy it myself.”

“What you think?” one of them said.

“I don’t know,” the other one said. “I guess, run get him some.”

“I’ll get it,” Wade said. He got in the truck and shut the door. They looked at each other.

“He supposed to be drivin that truck?”

He cranked it and pulled the shift down into low, popped the clutch and spun one small spurt of gravel from a rear wheel. They were without phone or radio and even though they chased him for a short distance, shouting and waving for him to come back, he was soon a small blue speck flying down the street. They stopped and stood looking after him as he disappeared from sight. They turned to each other.

“You gonna be in trouble.”

“Me in trouble? It’s you in trouble.”

“It ain’t me. It’s you.”

“They gonna put you back paintin that swimmin pool.”

“I done painted that pool one time.”

“You may paint it two times.”

A few days later the old man stood in front of the liquor store for a long time with his hands in his pockets. He eyed the rows of brown bottles within, Dickel, Daniel’s, Turkey, and wetted his dry lips slowly, as if he were astonished at the taste of his own tongue. It was ten-thirty and the regular winos were briskly conducting their early-morning business, shapeless men in rumpled clothes who emerged from the front door looking neither right nor left. He stood there until one went in that he thought he could handle and then he walked down to a laundromat and waited, squatting on the cracked concrete against the bricks, idly watching the cars move about in the parking lot. He whistled a low and tuneless hymn. Next door in Shainberg’s, some women were adjusting stacks of jeans and moving over the polished floors and talking in voices that had no sound. He picked up a scrap of wood and turned it in his fingers.

An old black man came out and turned down the alley between the stores and shuffled past with a nylon windbreaker over his arm. Wade didn’t appear to watch him shamble around the corner. He waited a few more deliberate minutes. He got up and dropped
the piece of wood and stepped around the corner. There was nothing but discarded tires and mop handles and a broken compressor with one wheel missing, all piled against the back side of the building. For a moment he lost the shuffling figure. Then he looked toward the bypass and saw him in the act of halting his climb up the bank, putting one hand down, easing himself to rest on the sparse grass of a red clay hill. Wade watched. The black man put his coat down and drew his knees up and opened the bottle he had and tilted his head back. Wade started across the parking lot. With his head down he lifted his eyes and marked the man’s position, noted the stream of cars flowing past behind him, high on the hill. The parking lot ended abruptly in a choke of kudzu and honeysuckle.

He stopped at the ditch and looked up at the man forty feet above him, lifted one hand in greeting.

“Hey,” he said.

The black man said nothing, didn’t look. He capped his liquor and wrapped it in his coat.

“I’s wonderin if you could tell me how to get to Water Valley,” Wade said. “Wife’s in the hospital down there and I just now got here.”

The old black man raised one long bony finger and pointed due south. His face was the face of stone, sullen, the eyes red and malevolent, his countenance ruined with the scars of small drunken wars. He bore small scraps, perhaps of cotton, in the dark wool of his head.

“How far is it?” Wade said. He stepped across the ditch and stood there looking up. He had his hands in his back pockets but his eyes searched the ground. He stepped a little higher and the
black man rose in a crouch. One hand rested on the ground, the other clutched his precious bundle tightly.

“That the highway goes to it?” he called up.

The scarred head nodded yes. Just once. Don’t come no closer.

Wade stepped forward another five feet, grasping a sapling to aid himself. He stopped and looked behind him. A boy was changing a tire on a tiny car behind Otasco, and a freight truck was backing up to Big Star. Blue milk cartons were stacked higher than a man’s head on the dock.

“I just wondered was I goin the right way,” he said to the ground.

The head above him nodded again.

“You don’t care for me comin up there, do you?”

The man shook his head, soundless wonder etched on his face. In his troubled gaze he seemed to hold some terrible secret.

The old man went up the bank like a mountain goat and squatted next to the drinker. The black man didn’t look at him.

“What are you drinkin?” said Wade.

A demented smile crept onto the face of the wino, three long yellow fangs bared in the purple gums.

“Fightincock.”

“You ain’t drinkin some wine, are you?”

“I may,” he said.

“Yeah? Why, hell. That’s all right. Lot of folks think a feller ought not drink at all.” He wasn’t looking at him. He was smiling to himself, talking to himself, looking out over the parking lot. “Little drink never hurt nobody.”

The black man was watching him carefully now, perhaps seeing him in a new light.

“That right,” he mumbled.

“Shoot,” Wade said. “I get me a little drink when I can but the old lady raises so much sand I don’t drink much around the house. I just usually get me a drink when I’m uptown like I am now.”

“You wife in the hospital?”

He paused for a moment, thinking. “Aw yeah. Well, yeah she is —today. I got to get off down here at Water Valley and go see about her. That’s where I was headed. What it was, I’s supposed to got paid this mornin but the feller that was supposed to paid me ain’t never showed up. I’s gonna get me a little somethin to drink and head off down here to Water Valley and see how she was doin.”

The man drew his bottle up to his lips, arms still wrapped in his coat, and untwisted the cap. He sipped it as if it were something forbidden. He wiped his lips and his face.

“What all wrong with her?” he said.

“Got cancer,” Wade said immediately. “Got cancer of the leg. Just eat up with it all over, can’t even walk. Gonna have to put her in the rest home, I guess.”

The black man was sucking bubbles from the mouth of the bottle. He put it down and said: “Aw.”

“Yep. A feller don’t know from one day to the next which one’ll be his last.”

The scarred head nodded mute agreement to this undeniable truth. But he didn’t offer the bottle in commiseration. The old man watched each swallow, each sip, like a hungry child. Clouds were bunching up high in the east, a dark bank of them that loomed up suddenly to banish the sun. In their hillside glade the shadows bled together. Wade saw that the rain was not far off. He hunched
his shoulders against it even as he scanned the ground around him. But he was sitting on something, a hard bump beneath his shoe. He moved one foot and nudged it with his toe and it rose up from where it was half buried, brown and heavy and coated with a brittle corrosion that flaked away as he worried it with his toe.

“I believe it’s fixin to rain,” he said.

He let his right hand drop and pulled on it and broke the dirt around it free, a ringbolt twelve inches long, buried where some construction worker, long ago laboring on the shopping mall below, had perhaps flung it one day.

“Yes,” he said, “I believe it’s fixin to rain some.”

He whipped the bolt straight across his body without looking and it landed hard on the forehead of the black man, who was in the act of passing the bottle, and knocked him whimpering into the grass with his eyes full of blood. He curled up and began a spasmodic kicking, until the old man hit him again, and then he stiffened and quivered. A sodden thump, a hammer on rotten wood.

He rifled the pockets quickly. Thirteen dollars in cash, three U.S. Government food coupon booklets worth sixty dollars each.

And the bottle of Fighting Cock. He got that, too.

The sun had gone in too early and the sky looked like rain. The air was cooling and the wind shifted and moved among the stiff tops of the pines along the road. The ditches were rich with cans and Gary marked them to memory for later retrieval, for harder times. But these seemed hard enough. His eye was still swollen and black-looking but it didn’t hurt. He could see out of it a little now, anyway.

He could hear the trucks and cars coming a long way behind him, but he moved to the shoulder of the road and did not turn and raise his thumb as they drove past. The mailboxes were slowly becoming more frequent, the land more populated, but the houses were too far from the road for him to want to ask directions. He kept walking, his stomach empty and hard and tight, his head light. It was all he could do to keep going. The road climbed and twisted through the land. At the tops of hills he could look out over green forests and hay fields far off in the distance, where barns and silver metal towers stood hazy under the gray and leaden sky. Beyond the last greenery he could see was another line, blue as smoke, the last trees of the horizon. Earlier he had come through
a bottom where hawks hunted over the sagegrass or merely perched on limbs thin as pencils, watching over all that moved before them, but there were no hawks now. There were neat fenced pastures and deep oak hollows and muscadine vines growing beside the road. Posted signs, barred gates. Little gravel trails stretching away to nothing through lanes of pine trees. He kept seeing mailboxes and he watched for them to stop. He didn’t know for sure if he was on the right road. He was just trying to do something, do anything. He didn’t know how far he’d come but he guessed five miles.

In another thirty minutes there were more houses, closer together. The sun tried to peek back out but the clouds moved over it and hid it again. In two more hours it would be dark and his journey all for nothing.

It had been easy money to him and he couldn’t understand why Joe Ransom had let them go. Maybe the man wouldn’t even be home now. Maybe he wouldn’t find his house.

The rain came, thin drops that spurted dust from the roadside gravel, small explosions of brown dirt. The sun was trying to shine. He could see the rain marching against the forest, bending the treetops with the wind it brought and waving the boughs wildly. He started running, looking, and when he saw the big rusted culvert, he went down the bank over the loose gravel and beer cans and slipped and caught himself with one hand and stepped down into gray muck that sucked his shoetop in. He pulled his foot loose and bent and stepped into the culvert, ducking his head and entering a cavern of corrugated blackness. In the round mouth of the thing he squatted and watched the rain beat the grass flat and slowly grow into a curtain of water that obscured the trees
twenty yards away. He bent with his feet spread wide. Before long he felt the first trickle come between them and watched it pipe out in a spout over the lip of the culvert. He tried to put his feet up higher on each side of the barrel, but soon there was four inches of water racing down and rising. It flooded his shoes, then his ankles.

“Well, crap,” he said. He braced himself up like a cat facing a dog until his back met the roof of the tunnel he was in. The roar was a din and the color of the water was like pure mud. One foot slipped, then one hand, and he flew out of the culvert and landed churning in the middle of a creek rising to an angry level, foaming with bits of straw and trash and sticks. He pawed his way through the brown water to the bank and clambered up over the edge of it, his knees coated with mud, his shirtfront and his hands slick with it. The water was cold and the wind was a solid thing he could push his body against and feel it push back. There was nothing for shelter. Leaves were wafting across the road as they were torn from the trees and sucked out of the woods. He tried to go up another bank slippery with mud, but it defeated him again and again. His ears were full of water. It didn’t seem possible to him, but the rain doubled in intensity. The world was gone, nothing left but gray disaster. He squatted on the side of the bank and dug his heels in, covering his head with his arms and waiting for it to be over. He was washed clean by the rain. Every drop of mud ran from his clothes and shoes. He had never seen such a rain. He had never even imagined that such a rain could come.