He looked out the window and dark had come without his knowing it. A heavyset man in wire-rimmed glasses brought a tray of food. Scribner did not even wonder who this might be. The man was balding, and when he stooped to arrange the tray, Scribner could see the clean pink expanse of scalp through the combed-over hair. The man went out of the room. Scribner, looking up from his food, saw him cross through the hall with a bundle of letters and magazines. He went into Rabon’s room and closed the door.
Scribner finished the plate of food without tasting it.
He might have slept. He came to himself lying on the bed, the need to urinate so intense it was almost painful. He got up. He could hear a television in the living room, see the spill of yellow light from Rabon’s bedroom, the bathroom.
His bandaged hands made undoing his clothing even more complicated and finally he just pulled down his pajama bottoms, the stream of urine already starting, suddenly angry at Rabon, why the hell has he got all his plunder in the bathroom, these shoes, suits, these damned golf clubs?
Goddamn, a voice cried. The old man whirled. Rabon was standing in the hall with the TV Guide in his hand. His eyes were wide with an almost comical look of disbelief. My golf shoes, he said, flinging the TV Guide at Scribner’s bullet head and rushing toward him. Turning his head, the old man realized that he was standing before Rabon’s closet, urinating on a rack of shoes.
When Rabon’s weight struck him he went sidewise and fell heavily against the wall, his penis streaking the carpet with urine. He slid down the wall and struggled to a kneeling position, trying to get his pajama bottoms up, a fierce tide of anger rising behind his eyes.
Rabon was mad too, in fact angrier than the old man had ever seen him. He had jerked up the telephone and punched in a series of numbers, stood with the phone clasped to his ear and a furious impatient look on his face, an expression that did not change until the old man struck him in the side of the head with an enormous fist. The phone flew away and when Rabon hit the floor with the old man atop him, Scribner could hear it gibbering mechanically at him from the carpet.
The hot clammy flesh was distasteful to his naked body but Scribner had never been one to shirk what had to be done. With Rabon’s face clasped to his breast and his powerful arms locked in a vise that tightened, they looked like perverse lovers spending themselves on the flowered carpet.
When Rabon was still the old man got up, pushing himself erect against Rabon’s slack shoulder. He went out the bedroom door and through a room where a television set flickered, his passage applauded by canned laughter from the soundtrack, and so out into the night.
Night air cool on his sweaty skin. A crescent moon like a sliver of bone cocked above the treeline, whippoorwills calling out of the musky keep of the trees. He stood for a moment sensing directions and then he struck out toward the whippoorwills. He went down into the hollow through the herd of plywood cattle pale as the ghosts of cattle and on toward the voices that called out of the dark. He came onto the spectral roadbed and crossed into deeper woods. The whippoorwills were drawing away from him, urging him deeper into the shadowed timber, and he realized abruptly that the voices were coming from the direction of Brown’s Ferry or Deep Elm. Leaning against the bole of a white oak to catch his breath he became aware of a presence in the woods before him, and he saw with no alarm that it was a diminutive man in a green plaid suit, derby hat shoved back rakishly over a broad pale forehead, gesturing him on with a malacca cane.
They’re up here, the little man called.
Scribner went on, barefoot, his thin pajama bottoms shredding in the undergrowth of winter huckleberry bushes. Past a stand of stunted cedars the night opened up into an enormous tunnel, as wide and high as he could see, a tunnel of mauveblack gloom where whippoorwills darted and checked like bats feeding on the wing, a thousand, ten thousand, each calling to him out of the dark, and he and the man with the malacca cane paused and sat for a time against a tree trunk to rest themselves before going on.
Crossroads Blues
DID YOU HAVE TO scrub the blood off the walls? Karas asked her. Was the water pink when you squeezed the sponge out? Did you vacuum bits of bloody tissue out of that ugly shag carpet?
In a fever dream that was almost but not quite nightmare Karas asked the Storm Princess those questions, then abruptly realized that he had in actuality asked them this very morning, watching her face intently as he spoke, looking deep into her eyes to see if anything changed in their depths.
What in the world are you doing back here? a voice asked.
Karas thought at first the voice was inside his head. One character in his dream speaking to another, but when the voice came again he judged it behind him and slowly opened his eyes.
He was lying somewhere on his back. The first thing he saw was the tall Ron Rico rum bottle he was clasping erect on his abdomen and from which he had apparently been sipping from time to time. He saw his feet, polished brown loafers, his legs crossed at the ankles and protruding from the passenger-side window of the Grand National. His head was protruding from the opposite window for he could feel the window frame hard against the back of his neck.
What are you doing?
Beyond his feet Karas could see riotous summer greenery, a sunlit wall of rock, the trunks of trees. A squirrel ran along a shelf of limestone and vanished up the bole of a cypress. A cardinal shot across the emerald undergrowth, abrupt and startling as a spatter of blood. A bobwhite called, and he closed his eyes for a time and listened, amusing himself with explanations he might offer whoever was standing behind him and holding him accountable for driving the pristine Grand National he had restored far into the woods where there had not even been a road to follow. Waiting for deer season to open, he thought. Took a left at that last traffic light and goddamn, where is this place? Supposed to meet the devil here around midnight and interview him about Robert Johnson.
I about thought you was dead, the voice said. You ain’t are you?
The thought of the Storm Princess, the wife who had fled him, suddenly jolted him clear of all this nonsense. It suddenly occurred to him that he was alive, and he had not expected to be. He raised his left arm and studied the inside of his wrist. A red scratch perhaps an inch and a half long. No more damage than you might do with the end of a paper clip. Either the penknife he had found in the glove box had been duller than expected or he had suffered a severe breakdown in the nerve department. He figured it was some of both, and withdrew his feet from the window and sat up in the driver’s seat. He drank from the Ron Rico bottle and lowered it and sat clasping it loosely between his thighs.
There was a little man standing patiently beside his car. Karas glancing his way judged him some sort of woodsprite or gnome or some such nature spirit but when he turned and drank from the bottle then looked back the little man was still there.
What are you doing in here? the man asked.
I’m writing a book about Robert Johnson, Karas said.
The little man wore a peaked green hat with a long trailing cock feather of the sort Alpine mountain climbers might favor and Karas supposed that was why he had taken him for some sort of elf. Beyond the man the sun was slant in the trees with its rays harsh and oblique and Karas could tell that the day was waning and that he had drunk and dozed it practically away.
I don’t believe I know any Johnsons in these parts, the man said. Do you always write in the middle of the woods?
Robert Johnson was a blues singer and guitarist who died a long time ago in the Mississippi Delta, Karas said, and fell silent, unable to go on, unable to talk, unable to think about anything save the Storm Princess.
She had been gone for three weeks, and when Karas had knocked on the front door of the trailer she had fled to that morning, not even waiting for decent daylight, he had been just drunk enough to believe that she would climb joyfully into the front seat of the Grand National and ride away with him: it had been a long three weeks, and it should have reduced her to a compliant
state of loneliness.
I’m having a little trouble handling this, he told her.
She had a hand on the door, waiting to close it. Well, you’re just going to have to handle it, she said. There was a hard-edged quality of finality about her that he was unaccustomed to. There was little evidence of loneliness and none of compliancy, and the phrase Karas had been about to utter, We can pretend this separation never happened, was stuck in his mind like something he had no use for.
I just wanted to talk to you.
There’s nothing to talk about, she said. Sublimate it, channel it, write it into one of your books. Isn’t that supposed to be good therapy? And why are you drunk? You never drink. Why are you acting like such a fool about this?
Well, I didn’t set out to act like a fool about it, he said. It sort of happened to me a little at a time.
He stood for a moment before the door that was barred only by her slender forearm, the bottle slung at his side like a sample case. He felt like a salesman hawking some dread wares no one wanted anything whatever to do with. I want you back, he said, knowing the instant the words left his tongue how inadequate and worthless they were. There was no way to tell her. He had been half of two and now he was one, bloody and illy used, a Siamese twin set upon with a chopping ax.
I never mistreated you, he said.
You mistreated me every day for fifteen years, she said. You only wanted me around when you wanted to go to bed with me. The rest of the time you wanted me out of your way. The mystery is why it took me so long to make this move.
He drank from the bottle and tried another tack. I guess you know the realty company screwed you, he said.
So? You’ve screwed me a few times yourself. It’s not as if I’m unused to it.
I never took your money for it, though. They couldn’t move this place. On account of what happened here. Did you have to scrub blood off the walls, vacuum flesh out of the carpet, things like that?
Of course not. They’d hired someone to renovate it. It’s been completely recarpeted. She was drinking a cup of early-morning coffee. She hadn’t offered him any. She was drinking from a thin blue china cup he recognized as coming from the wreckage of their marriage. Besides, she added, I got a great deal on it.
That’s what every sucker’s said from day one. I got a great deal on it. How do you sleep here?
I sleep fine, she said. No dreams at all.
Her sleep had always been provisional, what there was of it peopled by demons and faceless shapes and, as she had told him once, by the murderers of children. Once long ago she had cried out no in such a strangled outrage that he had shaken her roughly out of sleep and she had begun to cry. She always awoke in a state of alert apprehension, as if someone had laid a black-edged telegram on her upturned palm, as if the telephone had rung at three in the morning.
She moved her forearm and began to close the door. I have work to do, she said. And God knows I wouldn’t want to keep you from your drinking.
MOVE AWAY FROM THE DOOR, Karas told the old man. I want to get out. The little man retreated and sat down on a block of stone and took,tobacco from a pocket and began to construct a cigarette. Karas saw that the stone was part of a set of ancient limestone steps laid into the earthen wall of an embankment. He opened the door and climbed carefully out.
The little man had his cigarette going. How’d you get back in here? he asked through a fog of smoke.
I drove, Karas said.
There ain’t no road, the man said. Did you wreck?
Karas glanced at the Buick, bright and anomalous midst the brush, like something that had been teleported there, and wondered at the force necessary to wreck a car so far into the woods—some sort of nuclear fission wreck, a chain reaction wreck that kept forcing the car deeper and deeper into the timber.
There is now, Karas said. Of a sort. I made it. I drove around the big trees and it looks like I just drove over the little ones. I was drunk.
How’d you plan to get out? Back where the road is? You did come off a road, didn’t you? Or did you just come all the way from wherever you come from through the woods?
Karas had walked around behind the car and he stood urinating with his back turned to the little old man. It was not my intention to get out, Karas said. I came in here to drink and do away with myself. I figured I’d be toted out. I just didn’t bring any weapon adequate to the job.
Lord God, the man said. Do away with yourself. What method was you usin, if you don’t mind my asking?
Karas came around the Buick zipping his pants. All I could find was a penknife and a jack handle, he said. Do you think a man might beat himself in the head with a jack handle until he died?
I expect it’s been tried, the man said. Might near everything has, at one time or another.
Likely you’d just knock yourself out and wake up back at the same old stand with a hell of a headache. It was one of those tire spuds though, I guess a man might fall on it like a disgraced samurai falling on his sword.
I guess, the man said doubtfully. Was you not wearing a belt?
Son of a bitch, Karas said, falling into the spirit of things. Karas was fond of words and suicide seemed to call for a lot of them and he had brought neither pencil nor paper. He had heard of living wills and immediately decided to make of the old man a sort of living suicide note. I don’t know why a belt never occurred to me, he said.
Give me a little drink of whatever-it-is. My name’s Borum, by the way. He rose from the stone nimbly and took the bottle when Karas proffered it to him. Borum was wearing strapped across his shoulders a bag that looked like a child’s book satchel. On closer examination Karas could see that was just what it was, for there were faded green Ninja Turtles imaged upon it. Borum squatted in what appeared to be a spectral roadway and tilted the bottle and drank, his throat working.
What are you doing in here yourself?
Borum lowered the bottle. He stood up and reached it to Karas. He gestured at the pack he carried. Roots and herbs, he said. I been diggin ginseng, goldenseal. I sell em for medicine. There’s a spring right up that holler, he said. Let’s go get us a drink. You drink some good cold water, wash your face in it, you’ll see things in a different light. First let’s see that knife, though. Was that what you was going to do, open a vein?
Karas unpocketed the knife and handed it over, somewhat ashamed of it—the blade was scarcely two inches long and the tip was broken off and it was covered with a scaly orange accretion of rust. It seemed a ludicrous tool for so solemn and daunting a task, and Karas wished he had put more forethought into killing himself.
Borum was looking at the knife and he was shaking his head. I doubt you’d have the stomach for it, he said. It’d be like swallowing a bedspring, or bein eat a mouthful at a time by them little bitin fish. Eatin yourself with a spoon. A gun’s quicker and easier.
I don’t own a gun, Karas said. I never believed in guns.
Borum had produced a knife of his own from somewhere beneath his clothing, a thin lethal-looking blade with a deep blood groove. He turned back the cuff of his khaki shirt and raked his forearm with the blade—it made a faint, unpleasant sound that Karas felt more than heard. Tufts of crinkly gray hair clotted on the blade and Borum raised the knife to his lips and blew them away. He turned his arm so that the paler underside of the wrist was uppermost and laid the blade across the veins. When he looked up at Karas in the failing light his eyes looked like a cat’s watching you through broken jungle greenery. This one’d be like a whisper, he said. Like a woman’s fingernail raked real light across it. You want to use this one?
Karas thought his madness must be communicable and the old man had caught it. Then he thought Borum must be something out of one of the Storm Princess’s nightmares, demon or child killer made real and malevolently set upon the sleepfast countryside with dire intent.
Then Borum grinned and took from a pocket a flat rectangle of chewing tobacco and sliced a corner off it and tucked it into his j
aw. The knife disappeared back into the folds of his clothing. Let’s get that drink of water, he said.
Swinging the bottle along, he followed Borum up the stone steps to a smooth slope of land, they crossed through old foundation stones, shards of broken dishes, scattered bricks, past a chimney standing like a sentry with nothing left to guard. An old house place, metal twisted and blackened in some long-lost conflagration. Everything was laden with an enormous silence, and for a bemused moment Karas felt that he used to live here, in a white frame house. The Storm Princess had planted a rose garden, he had tilled the fields. Then some cataclysm of the heart had destroyed it, he had come in from the fields one day and found only rubble. They crossed what had once been a lawn, rhododendron grown rank and feral, and went down the slope on the back side to a small meandering stream. He began to hear the rush of water. They followed the stream up a hollow to its source, where it came boiling out of the fissured limestone rock. The air was cool and astringent and heady with the smell of peppermint.
Long ago someone had hammered a section of iron pipe into the striated rock and the water that ran from its moss-encrusted end was cold to his fingers. He set the bottle aside and cupped his hands and drank from them and washed his face in the icy water. He dried with the tail of his shirt and when he turned around Borum was studying him.
I expect it’s a woman, he said. I’ve seen it a lot of times. Had it happen to me myself. A woman’ll warp your mind worse than whiskey ever thought of doing.
Karas’s wife, when she was eighteen, used to wake in the mornings with her black curls so tousled and windswept that he imagined the landscape of her dreams to be beset with perpetual storms. Now years had come and gone and in her dreams ice held dominion. He took up the bottle and drank from it and let it ease him further into despair.
Course you’re talking foolishness, Borum said. Doin away with yourself. Let me tell you a story. You notice them stone steps we dumb up? Laid in that bank? I toted that limestone out of this hollow myself. Mixed the mortar in the hood of a forty-seven Studebaker. Laid that rock more years ago than I want to think about. This used to be my place, me and the wife lived here when we was first married. I raised corn and a little cotton, she planted all them flowers. Then later on we had some trouble over one thing and another and she quit me. Went back to her family. Them was hard times. Bitter times. I thought of killin myself, setting the house on fire and just laying down in our bed and letting the ceilin cave in on me. Instead of that I got up my nerve and went and talked to her one last time. Pled my case, so to speak. No politician running for office ever spieled out words the way I did. No lawyer try in to snatch his client out of the electric chair. Like I had a tongue of gold. Words were sweet as honey in my mouth. So she come back to me.