Town Burning (43 page)

“Billy…” he began, knowing that his face mourned the words to come, and that Billy, seeing it, grew afraid.

Billy’s eyes slipped craftily to the side, his long teeth appeared and he cried, “How about some cider, Johnny? Clear the smoke outa your Adam’s apple!” He kicked the trapdoor with his heel and caught it on the bounce. Before John could answer—caught again in the grip of procrastination—Billy climbed down out of sight.

The eager brain suggested: Why not hate Billy? Wasn’t there a reason somewhere? Bruce hated toads because he once killed them; hated them for the liquid
squish
of their breaking bodies. If Bruce could hate for his cruelty, why couldn’t John Cotter? He’d hurt Billy once, and he must now hurt Billy again—why not enjoy it? Once he’d shot a sitting hawk,
thunk
through the body, and the hawk flew down to die, but he didn’t hate hawks for the death of one.

He might lean forward over the trapdoor and softly tell. The glug of cider into the jug would stop, and Billy, who couldn’t quite yet dare to know, would know….

“Yo, Johnny. Coming up!” Billy’s dirty hand, thumb in the jug’s round handle, appeared. He climbed out slowly, placed the amber jug on the table without meeting John’s eyes, and felt for tumblers on a narrow shelf between two-by-fours. “Funny old Jake ain’t been around. Ain’t seen him since the fire started, but I figure come something like fire, all them critters turn back to wild. It’s every critter for himself, come fire. Ayuh!” He poured two tumblers of the pale cider and looked straight at John for a second over the one he offered. “Jesus, John! Let me tell you about the buck I seen the other day! What a rack on him! Ten points, anyways. Two-hundred-fifty, three-hundred pounds. Neck like a barrel. I’m going to git him come deer season, Johnny! I know where he hangs out!”

Billy’s eyes shone, now, desperately hopeful as he looked into a different future. “You ought to of seen his tracks, Johnny. Damn’ near big’s a heifer’s, they was. Pressed ‘way down in so far I had to take near two handfuls of pine needles out to git to the bottom! Big? Biggest buck I ever see. I just got to git that buck, John!”

“Billy, did Junior kill Charlie Bemis?” John asked. The words sounded flat and impolite.

“‘Course he done it,” Billy said quickly. “Now let me tell you where I see that buck, Johnny. Just you let me tell you. Maybe you can git a crack at him….”

“Jane doesn’t think he did. Billy, I don’t either.”

Billy pretended to be greatly irked at the interruption. “Ain’t you
interested?
God dammit, John, seems I recall the first deer you ever got. You was interested then! Damn’ nice little buck, too. Hundred-seventy pounds. Why the hell don’t you have no expression on your face? ‘Course Junior done it, if that’s what’s up your nose.”

“Billy, you remember when Junior and Keith Joubert and Ramsey and the rest used to pick on you? You’d give them beer and treat them all nice and they’d let the air out of your tires and tip over your outhouse and write your name on the men’s room walls? I did that, too, Billy. I hung around so they’d leave me alone and did the same dirty things to you, Billy.”

“
No you never!”
On the big face, on the wide mouth appeared that parody of a smile that is the lips’ twist against plain crying.

“Yes, I did.”

“
You shit you never!”

“Yes, I did, Billy. I’m a dirty bastard like the rest, so don’t trust me, Billy.”

“No you ain’t, Johnny!”

Billy put both black hands over his face, his head appearing in the lamplight and then rocking back into darkness as he bent from the waist, in and out of the cot’s dark alcove. The long, dirty hands were wet when he held them out into the yellow light, the strong wrists long from sleeves that had worked back into permanent folds and wrinkles.

“You’re just saying that, Johnny. It ain’t true,” Billy said in the tight voice of a child. High, as brittle as bone, the voice was a triumph against self-pity, and
would
be clear and dry.

John’s chest became hollow, as if the lungs and heart and diaphragm had gone out of him, leaving in their place nothing but cold air and a sharp, peripheral pain, as if those organs had been wrenched, bleeding, from the cavity walls. The pain was real enough—the nearest approximation his sympathy could make of Billy’s fear.

“Christ. What the hell,” Billy said weakly, his voice losing to the stronger force of pity. John tried to breathe, his mouth open, his eyes upon his surrendering victim. If Billy lost to pity, his was not the first caught voice to cry, “Who is on my side? Who?” knowing the inevitable fact of loneliness.

“I ain’t asking for nothing. I never asked nobody for nothing.”

“That’s right, Billy,” John said. “You don’t owe me or anybody anything.” As if he were falling, he had breath but seemed not to. He wanted to do the only instinctive act in the face of such helplessness: to gather the man become infant in his arms, to rock him, to do whatever medicine occurred between comforter and child. Billy sniffled in his dark corner, snuffed up the liquid in his nose as unselfconsciously, as messily as a child, yet without a child’s sure call to pity, without much of the innocence that hides death from a child. Billy knew the purpose of the visit, and when he got around to taking his hands away and bringing his poor face back into the light, as he must, John would surely see Billy’s death working there, growing like cancer upon the familiar face.

“I didn’t want to, Billy,” he called across the circle of light, “I never wanted to hurt you, Billy.” Out of the darkness Billy’s long legs, in blackened overalls, lay splayed apart, the hairless shins skeined with dirt dried into small, curving lines like patterns of sand on a beach. His big boots rested on their heels, toes canted outward.

“Why’d you go and tell me, then?” Billy mumbled through his hands.

“I’m not going to lie any more. I want to be your friend, Billy, honest to God I do! Nobody knows but me, and I had to tell you first.”

“Tell me what!” Billy cried, knowing. “I knowed the minute I heard you call my name,” he said after a while. “It ain’t that about Bemis, Johnny, but what you said you done before. Why’d you tell me that?”

“Just because it’s true. So you don’t owe anybody anything. I didn’t think you’d want to.”

Billy still hid in the shadow. “You damn’ right,” he said, his voice steadying, then growing exultant as he grasped the offered picture of himself. “That why I live up here where I can’t even
smell
them little farts down there, you know that? Pay cash for everything! Don’t owe nothing, don’t ask for nothing!” He sat forward into the light, and the face belied the comforting image of himself as a hard and independent man. The face still cried pity, but it was changing.

“Sure, Johnny, sure! Let the little bastards come and git me! They ain’t never seen a man like me before!” He reached over and took his big rifle from against the wall, jacked a cartridge into the chamber and let the hammer down, lightly, upon it. “Me and Old Bungaloo,” he said, smiling grimly into the famous scene of resistance against insuperable odds.

It was this that finally brought John to tears. The cold little things passed down his face and wet his neck. His throat hurt. Tears were the most unhelpful response of all: they could do nothing for Billy. He could not stop his tears—no one could do that—and Billy needed help of a different kind if he were to gain the only comfort left to him.

“You said you was the only one knows?” Billy asked. The worn steel barrel-end of Old Bungaloo, and Billy’s face—now made up into the smile that meant, “I don’t mean it,
maybe,”
pointed straight at John. “How come you ain’t afraid of me, John, since you know?”

“I don’t know why, Billy.”

Billy opened the action of the rifle, took out the cartridge and slid it back into the magazine before he put the rifle back against the wall. “I ain’t that kind of a man,” he said proudly.

“I know that, Billy.”

“I just ain’t that kind of a man.”

“That’s why I knew I could tell you, Billy.” John kept his face back in the shadow. Tears must not show. This must be a scene between brave men. Billy stood up and took a deep, heroic breath. The light reached his face from below and struck black, angular shadows across it. The nose jutted; the brow was straight above the carved hollows of his eyes; the chin was square and strong. As if conscious of this effect, he took his glass and held it out.

“Drink up!” he said, “and screw ’em all, eh, John? You want to be my friend? Be my friend!”

“Thank you, Billy,” John said, with the feeling that these might be his last clear words and that he must get away before he gave himself away. And yet the tears he hid in shadow were tears, also, of admiration for the bravery with which a man could grasp the fact of death and then go further to see, at least, a way to die. Even if temporary, the memory of such a proud and defiant moment might illuminate the last cold one.

“Drink!” Billy said.

John leaned forward to reach for his glass, and as he did his face came into the light, tears dishonorable upon it; more tears where those tears came from.

“John,” Billy said, and that didn’t help. The tone was kind and concerned. Billy put his hand on John’s shoulder. “Johnny, you don’t have to do that! Goddam! I forgive you, Johnny. I know how Junior and them used to pick on you. I know why you done it.”

Kind, comforting voice!
I forgive you.
Where was the carefully constructed artificial bravery, the act of pride, he had schemed for Billy? Billy pulled him to his feet and held him out at arms’ length.

“You’re my friend, John. They ain’t nothing holds you back from being my friend. Don’t you worry none, John. Don’t you cry.” The dirty, creased face had become paternal and responsible; the brown eyes were dry and worried for Billy Muldrow’s friend.

At the Huckins graveyard John stopped to stretch his aching throat and to look high into the silent pines. Smoke filtered the afternoon sun, and the green had an amber, softening sheen upon it. Even the cloudless sky was another shade of rich amber, as if the world had become the cured and woodsy shade of Billy Muldrow and everything of Billy’s. He watched the rigid gravestones. No, stones that moved on the earth with a slower rhythm than he could now perceive.

How cheap he had considered the man to be! Billy did not need a vision of resistance in order to consider himself a man. And John had not forgotten, as he watched Billy, that he could be afraid of him. He had been aware of Bruce’s loaded pistol, hard in his back pocket. Now he took it out and looked at it. How cheap, how ridiculously toy-like it seemed now! The little machine could work no change upon a man except to kill him, and that change could be worked upon a grasshopper or a toad with exactly the same idiot implications.

He had the urge to throw the pistol deep into the woods, but he did not. If he had lost faith in its strength, Bruce had not, and it belonged to Bruce.

There was no wind at all. Leah stood deep in the tall trees of its valley, houses and steeples all old and golden in the strange light.

Junior spoke with a tongue made careful by the pain of his wired jaw. He said, “I din doot,” until she told him she knew he didn’t do it, and that he didn’t have to say it any more. “Nobody believe it,” he said.

“I believe it.”

“
Ow!
Christ it hurts.” He moved his head from side to side, both eyes bandaged although only one was injured, and she felt that the negative motion was more of pain and wonderment than of negation. His lips were thick and cracked, as if they had been burned, and had a bluish-yellow cast to them that never, in spite of a rule she remembered about mixing colors, approached green. He hadn’t been told about the danger to his eye. For a reason she could not explain she felt that this might be more damaging to his state of mind than the charge of murder.

His bandages and visible bruises no longer excited an extra measure of pity in her; he had always been bruised—had to act out his hurt in anger. What that basic hurt was she did not know any more than John knew the forces that had caused Bruce to be the kind of man he was. She and John were both observers of those with violent needs, and they were both helpless to the extent that they did not know the causes of the need. Neither of them was helpless to treat symptoms, however, as she had (not always) done with Junior. To find the cause might, perhaps, as they said of cancer, let in the air and stimulate its growth; it might be better to let the deep places alone—let the disease either cure itself or more slowly kill its host. She knew that she could never ask Junior
why
he lived the way he did. It would be a breach of dignity she would never let herself commit. To tell Junior that he acted like an ass—that was all right, and signified a certain equality. But let the man be keeper of his own depths and causes.

“Don’t feel good, Janie. Think I’m going to upchuck.”

She held the basin for him, one hand on the back of his thick neck to guide his experimental retchings. She hadn’t heard the childhood word for vomit for many years. Certainly Junior would never use it if he weren’t so sick and worried. Puke was his word, and if he were drunk and puking it could even be a virile, boasted act. Poor Junior; in trouble he seemed to show some need for the babyhood he despised.

He gasped and sobbed over the basin, then fell back against the canted bed. A string of drool had been forced between his fixed teeth, and she gently wiped it off. As she did he kissed her hand.

Later in the afternoon, after Junior had gone to sleep, she had coffee in the cafeteria with Charlotte Paquette, who told her that the Paquette house and barn had burned. Evidently someone had thrown a cigarette out of a car and started a grassfire in the adjoining field.

“Bob just called me,” Charlotte said. Her round, pretty face was framed by her family’s thick black hair. “He said there wasn’t anything I could do—they don’t even have much left to help move. Ma and Pa and the rest are going into Leah to stay with Aunt May and Uncle Albert.” She seemed quite sad and old. “It was such a nice big old house,” she said mournfully.