Joe (21 page)

“Don’t shoot me,” he said.

“Why not? Son of a bitch, you shot me.”

“I’s drunk, Joe. I didn’t mean to do it.”

“You know I could kill your ass right here and nobody would know it?”

He lowered the gun to waist level and took out the magazine and jacked the round out of the chamber. He dropped the gun and it clattered on the concrete.

“I ain’t goin to walk around the rest of my life lookin over my shoulder for you,” he said.

“I ain’t gonna mess with you no more, Joe. I promise.”

“I ought to beat your goddamn face in worsen it is. That’s what I ought to do. I just hate to go back to the pen over a piece of shit like you.”

“I’m sorry, Joe.”

“You better be. You better listen to what I’m tellin you. You got it straight?”

“I got it straight.”

“All right, then,” he said.

Russell walked over immediately with his hand stuck out. “Let’s be friends,” he said. He caught a left with his nose and a right with his throat, went down strangling, his eyes enormous, blood running down his shirt. He knelt, choking, on his knees.

“That’s for shootin me,” he heard. “I ain’t shakin hands with you, you son of a bitch.”

Russell was trying to say something. He was trying to make some words come out of his mouth. He was crying silently and Joe left him there for people to see as they eased across the bridge in their cars and slowed and almost stopped and then went on. He walked back down into the woods and got into his truck, thinking no more of fish or the river and only of whether or not this would settle it and if he had done the right thing and knowing that he probably had not since he had left him alive.

The rain ended that day and the woods stood steaming as they slowly dried. He sharpened the poison guns with a file and rounded up plastic milk jugs and went to Bruce for more poison and, on the seventeenth day of May, went back into the woods with nine black men and one white boy.

When the old man came back to the log house he was drunk and disorderly. He staggered in through the door one Tuesday morning about nine o’clock and stood there staring dully about, his face cut by briers and lumpy with mosquito bites, the clammy legs of his overalls plastered to his shins. His wife looked up to see him and he said, “Goddamn you,” and went for her. She rose like a cat with her fingers curved into cat’s claws and they met in the center of the room in a rush of dust. He slapped at her face and she pushed him out the door. The steps were rotten. He stumbled. There was a splintering of wood and he crashed to the ground. He had to stay there a moment, lolling his head drunkenly, looking for a stick maybe, the young summer sun burning a hole in his head. He lurched up onto his knees and tried to throw one leg up onto the floor of the house as he clutched at the sides of the door frame, grunting, halfway in and halfway out. His eyes were maddened, his tongue sticking out between the gaps of his teeth.

“Come on,” she said, motioning to him. “Come on in.”

“I ever get up,” he said. He pawed his way into the room on his
hands and knees and grabbed a windowsill to pull himself erect. He opened his arms and waddled spraddle-legged across the room and enveloped her in what he must have thought was a crushing embrace. They waltzed around the room, little scrolls of dust leaping from beneath their feet. The little girl sat crooning to her doll and not watching them, changing paper diapers and smoothing paper hair. The woman pushed at his face and tried to take his arms from around her. This married couple of thirty-six years tumbled out the back steps and lay there groaning with their hurts in the hot grass, until she rolled over and tried to get away from him. He grabbed her leg. She fell on him. Kissing him all over his face and pulling at his clothes, jerking up his shirt.

“Make me a baby,” she said. “We got to make Calvin again,” she said. He tried to crawl away and she caught him by the leg, trying to take off her pants. He tried to get up, but she leaped on his back and rode him down. He was begging her to stop and all but crying for her to turn him loose. The little girl watched from the window, her thumb caught in her mouth, as her mother and father moaned and groaned and crawled in the yard half naked. Strange sights but not as strange as some she’d seen, others that kept her silent. Endless nights in bitter cold, shaking with no covers and drawing no warmth from the knees pressed against her chest and the wind screaming through the cracks, or summer days and them like desolation angels through a desert wavering with heat and the blacktop burning their feet with every step they took. But he was down now, she was holding him.

“I got him,” her mother called. “Let’s kill him.”

The only thing in the room big enough to do it was a brick. The
child grabbed it up and tore through the room and leaped out the door and across the yard. He saw her coming and tried to get away. He was up, jerking his leg, sliding his wife along the ground, trying to get into the protective woods. When the little girl got close she threw the brick. It missed. She ran back toward the house for another one. She was going to rob the fireplace, one at a time. She squatted beside the blackened bricks and tugged one loose, then another one. She gathered them up in her arms, but when she went back he had pulled himself loose and was leaning against a tree with a big stick in his hand, while her mother lay in the yard with her legs spread, calling out to him to come on and do it to her, him shaking his head, trying to find a smoke in one of his pockets.

It was past three when the boy returned. He came up the road with his shirt wrapped around him, his hands empty. They were sitting in the back yard and he looked at his father. The others went into the house.

“When’d you get back?” the boy said.

The old man had two or three hot beers spread in the grass beside him. He was drinking them slowly, cupping each one in his hands. He had no answer for this upstart of his loins. The boy stood there. His hands were cut and bruised, his eyes burning from the poison that had splashed up into them.

“Where’s your money?” Wade said.

Gary shrugged. He squatted a ways off. “He ain’t give us none yet.” His mother leaned out the door and said that supper would be ready in a few minutes.

“Gimme some money,” Wade said.

Gary looked at him, looked away.

“I ain’t got none.”

Something flickered over the old man’s face. The boy had hard muscles in his arms. He was crouched lightly in the yard, the waiting over for a day that had seemed so far off in the future down the lonely roads of years past and was now here without warning.

“He ain’t paid you?”

“He ain’t paid me. He’ll pay me Friday.”

Wade sucked the last of the suds gently from the can and eased it to rest beside his leg in the grass.

“Gimme some money.”

Gary didn’t even look at him. “No,” he said.

The old man reared up drunkenly.

“What’d you say?”

“I said no.”

Wade came across the grass after him and caught him by the leg, and they rose, holding each other until the old man began to hit him in the head with his doubled fist. The boy clenched his father close and smelled the awful stench of him, pushed him back while receiving the blows on his face and neck.

“Now quit it,” he said. His father’s breath was coming harder. His arms were swinging, his knotted fists finding no target as his son pushed him away. He swung so hard at Gary that he turned all the way around and fell. He lay on his back, scrabbling at the ground like an overturned turtle. He made it up on one knee and pushed off with his hands.

“I ain’t got no money,” the boy said. “He ain’t paid us yet.”

“Pays ever day,” said Wade, coming after him.

“Just cause he fired us that time.”

He backed around in the yard. His father followed him, but his breath was beginning to go and his legs were shaking. His steps were wobbly. Drinking hot beer in the sunshine had given him an uncontrollable head. Finally he went to his knees, his tongue out. His eyes were rolled up almost white in his head. He pitched over face forward into the grass and then he didn’t move any more. The boy looked at him. He looked back at the house. His mother and his one remaining sister were standing in the doorway watching.

“Drag him around in the shade and come eat,” his mother said.

Joe began to drive them harder as the last days of May slipped away. He stayed with them constantly now, taking a gun himself and joining their ranks as he tried to finish the tracts he had contracted for. He hired more hands, a load of them that bellied the pickup down so that it scraped and dragged over every rough spot in the road and ran down the highway canted up, and still they were not enough. He could see now that June would catch him unfinished, a matter of a lot of money. He pushed them more and more, harrying them around their edges, shouting, prodding the slow, the lazy, the hung-over, his own head throbbing and pounding under the summer sun. Clouds of gnats enveloped them and the yellowjackets rose boiling from their nests in the ground, and they moved through the green and tangled veldt like zombies in a monster movie or the damned in some prison gang, until under their breath they cursed him and work and the heat and the life
their ways had led them to. They began to quit one by one. Three quit one Saturday and he made them understand they’d walk back to the truck and wait until the working day was over before he’d take them back to town. They stood in a small group, muttering, their eyes baleful and lowered, watching him narrowly as he moved away with the rest of the crew.

“Hey!” one of them said.

He turned back. “What?” he said. He had sweat in his eyes and he was already angry over their quitting. He’d been stung five times that morning and all he wanted to hear was one wrong word.

Gary was listening but he wasn’t looking back. He had his head down, making overtime. Taking all he could get and glad to get it.

“You need to take us back to town,” a man named Sammy said.

“You want to go back to town you can walk,” Joe told him. “I ain’t got time to run you back to town.” He turned to walk off again.

“I ain’t walkin back to town.”

“Then you gonna have to wait on your goddamn ride.”

“Hey!”

Joe threw his poison gun down. He turned and walked back. “You got anything to say, say it. I got work to do.”

Sammy must have thought the other two were going to back him up, but now they stepped away. He looked around at them.

“Y’all gonna let him do this to us?” he said.

“I ain’t done nothin to you,” Joe said. “I hired you to work and if you don’t want to work when I need you, I ain’t got time to mess with you. I ain’t worked you no harder than anybody else. Look yonder.” He pointed. “They all still workin.” But they weren’t. They had stopped and turned back to watch what happened.

“Ain’t hired on to work no nine hours a day. Didn’t say nothin bout workin weekends.”

“You didn’t have to get in the truck this mornin, Sammy. And I can’t do nothin about the weather. I got till the first of June to finish up and if you don’t want to help you can go set in the truck. But I don’t want to hear no more of your mouth. You’ve laid on your goddamned ass all your life and drawed welfare and people like me’s paid for it. That’s why you don’t want to work. Now shut your fuckin mouth.”

He turned one last time to go away and be done with it and heard the quick movement behind him, stepped back and spun as the knife passed under his arm, coming up, the steel flashing bright and quick to make a burning red stripe on his tricep. He hit Sammy in the nose and Sammy’s nose exploded. The knife fell. He went to his knees and Joe grabbed his collar and pulled him forward. Nothing was said, no sound but their gasping breath in the early morning stillness and the scrape of their feet in the leaves. Sammy swung wild, once, then closed his eyes when he saw the next one coming. It snapped his head back and then it was over. Joe stood over him, a thin trickle of blood winding down his arm like a red vine and, drop by drop, falling off his middle finger to spot the leaves crimson, little spatters on the floor of the woods, like the trail of a wounded deer.

He said: “If they’s anybody else don’t want to work, or got somethin to say, you better speak up now.”

Nobody spoke. They stood immobile in the hush with the thin calling of tree frogs the only comment.

He said: “I don’t give a fuck if ever one of you wants to quit
right now. I’ll load the whole bunch up and pay you off. Last chance.”

Gary turned away and slashed at a small bush. He went up to a tree, stabbing, pumping the poison into it. He mopped his forehead with his arm. The rest of them turned away one by one and fell back to work. Joe walked over to his poison gun and picked it up. The two who had quit with Sammy looked at each other uncertainly, now that their mouthpiece had been silenced.

“What you want us to do with Sammy?” one called out.

Joe cut and slashed and checked the time by his watch. “I guess you better drag him back to the truck if you want to ride to town this evening,” he said.