Joe

  The old man nodded vigorously.

  “Yeah. What if I do that?”

  The store owner rubbed his temples.

  “Well, in that case you simply bring back the unused portion and we cheerfully refund your money and put the rest of it back on the shelf.”

  “Aw yeah? I ain’t never seen a place that would do that before.”

  The owner sighed and went around behind the counter. He unlocked the cash register with his key and rang it up.

  “Two dollars,” he said.

  The old man hadn’t moved. He was looking back toward the coolers. “Wait a minute,” he said. “Have you not got this in a bigger bottle?”

  “I thought that was what you wanted. I’ve already rung it up.”

  “I may want a bigger bottle.”

  The owner put both hands on the register and looked at his customer. I am a fool, he thought. I am a fool and I am going to make sixty-five cents profit by fooling around with this other fool. He walked out front and took the half-pint away from the old man. There were some fifths on the opposite shelf, hot ones, and he walked over to them and pointed.

  “We have fifths and half-pints,” he said. “No pints.”

  “Can’t get it in a pint?”

  “No.”

  “How come?”

  The owner lied. “They don’t make it in a pint.”

  “Why’s that?”

  He took a deep breath. Just a few more minutes. Just a few more minutes and he’d be gone.

  “There’s a reason for it,” he said. “It costs more to make a pint bottle than it does to make a fifth or a half-pint bottle. It’s not the liquor. It’s the glass.”

  “Well, I be damn. I didn’t know that.”

  “It’s a little known fact of the liquor industry, actually,” he said.

  “Well, I be damn.”

  “Do you want this fifth of schnapps?”

  “I don’t know,” Wade said. “How much is that?”

  “Six twenty-five.”

  The old man didn’t say anything. To the owner he looked as if he had lost what little brains he had. He held up a finger and pointed.

  “A half-pint’s two dollars, and a fifth’s six twenty-five?”

  “Right.”

  “Well, I’s just kinda figurin,” he said. He rubbed his chin whiskers a little. “Let me ask you somethin.”

  “Anything.”

  “How many half-pints would you say was in a fifth?”

  “What?”

  “How many . . .”

  “I heard you. I don’t know. How many would you say?”

  “I’d say four or five. Or maybe a little over four.”

  “Maybe. But I doubt it. Now if you want this take it. If you don’t I’m going to put it back on the shelf.”

  “I’s just tryin to figure the best deal,” he said. “If it’s five half-pints in a bottle and at two dollars, that’s about ten dollars worth at that rate in a fifth, right?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” the owner said. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  “I wish they made it in a pint. I bet a pint wouldn’t be over about four dollars, would it?”

  “I told you they don’t make it in a pint.”

  “I wish they did.”

  “I wish they did, too. Now,” he said. He was offering the bottle and its companion on the shelf like a sacrifice, a grail, a chalice. To take one of them or leave or whatever.

  “Shit, just gimme the fifth,” the old man said.

  “Fine,” the owner said. He went over to the shelf and got one and handed it to him. He still had the half-pint in his other hand. He headed back toward the cooler with it, to put it back inside, all the way to the back of the room.

  “I think you’ll be happy with your . . .”

  But the door slammed the instant he opened the cooler, and he paused. He didn’t even look around. There was no need. It was done.

  He set the little bottle back inside the cooler, gently among its brothers, so as not to disturb them, knock them over. He shut the door a little sadly and stood looking over his goods momentarily. They were lined up in neat rows, perfectly straight. He checked his cooler about thirty times a day to see that everything was in order. He couldn’t stand disorder, couldn’t abide sloppiness.

  After a while he went up to the front of the store and sat down in the high-backed chair behind the counter. He took out his pipe and reached for his tobacco and slowly put it in, tamping it lightly, sighing to himself with enormous lassitude. He lit it with a match, turned the match slowly in the flame, puffing lightly, until the whole bowl was glowing red and consumed in fire. He shook out the match and drew deeply, and turned in his chair to gaze out through the large plate of glass where the name of his own little business was written backwards in paint. He didn’t know where the man had gone. There was nothing but kudzu across the road, an apparently impenetrable jungle of green vegetation that crept softly in the night, claiming houses and light poles, rusted cars and sleeping drunks, the old and the infirm, small dogs and children. He wondered if maybe the old man lived in there and had trails like a rat, like the slides of a beaver or the burrows of a rabbit. Perhaps it was worse than he thought. Perhaps there was a whole city of them under there, deep, sheltered from the rain and shaded from the sun, with tents and canopies pitched beneath, cooking fires, camps where the children played and where they hung their wash. Where else could they hide? Anything was possible. And they only came out once a month, when the welfare checks and the food stamps were issued, and they stocked up on everything, and disappeared back into their lair. Maybe one day he’d look. Maybe one day he’d lock the store and walk across the road and peer over the edge of the creepers and look down, to see if he could spot a wisp of smoke, to see if he could hear their radios playing, their TV sets. Maybe they had Honda generators and refrigerators. But he knew, really, that he wouldn’t look. He wouldn’t look because he didn’t really want to know. He didn’t want to be right.

  The days went by and the rain would not stop. Or it would stop for a day or a day and a half and Joe would gather his crew and park on the highway and send them up the muddy slopes only to blow the horn for them an hour or two later when the drops began to pelt down on his truck, where he was sitting drinking whiskey. He hadn’t gone after the boy because he hadn’t wanted to walk up the muddy road. But the boy had walked it. He’d walked it every morning the sky wasn’t cloudy and waited by the highway, pacing, studying the sky and listening as the cars and trucks came within hearing. The old GMC never showed. He gave up hope late each morning. He knew they wouldn’t start at that time. There was nothing to do but go back through the mud to the log house and idle his day away. The food went rapidly. His mother would say nothing of Fay. After a while he stopped asking.

  Joe stayed in the living room when Connie was at work, playing the same songs over and over on the tape player, watching game shows and soap operas. His needs were few and his money was stacked in sheaves. Some days he and John Coleman sat behind the stove and hid their whiskey from the women and children who came into the store. John told stories of dogfights over the African deserts, of wading rivers behind the German lines, of nightmare fights with knives and gunstocks. They ate pigskins and crackers and poured Louisiana Hot Sauce on their sardines. Sometimes in the afternoons the store would be closed without warning. They’d have the curtains drawn over the door and hear people knocking and see them trying to see in, dim figures with one hand cupped over their eyes as they leaned against the glass, wanting gas for their pickups or Kotex or a loaf of bread or a pack of cigarettes or a dozen eggs for breakfast.

  John Coleman had returned from the war in 1945 a quiet man, a wounded man with shrapnel close to his spine and shrapnel beside the bones of his legs, and in his head that same torn steel. A man with few words for people, who had seen all of the world he wanted to see. Not sullen, just a somber aloofness that no one could see was sadness for wh
at men did to other men. He had inherited the store from his father and had kept it open all these years and each day of the year. He was a prodigious reader, a drinker with capabilities near legendary, a man with plenty of money. He ordered rare volumes, collections, series of books and chronicles of war. He studied and memorized little-known facts. He stayed inside the store days and in his little house across the road nights and never went anywhere. Joe would not go to town most times without stopping and asking him if he needed anything.

  The days of May drew by and the fields stayed wet and the woods dripped water. Joe fished in his tedium, cutting canes in the river bottom and rigging set hooks with cord and lead and jabbing them deep into the bank. Morning and evening he checked them, carrying a five-gallon bucket of live crawdads along the path, stopping to take off the fish and checking every hook to see that it was baited. Then back at the house by eight or nine, skinning the fish with pliers while they hung shivering on a post, stripping the living skin from their pale bodies and flinging the offal to the waiting dog, whose jaws snapped shut in midair over the flying morsels. One morning he eased up to the bank after baiting all his hooks, after standing around for a while to see if the fish were biting. He squatted at the lip of the bank and took a cigarette out of his pocket and lit it, smoking and watching the smoke drift across the slow brown water. Limbs in the current dipped and swayed, rose and fell. He looked down and thumped the ash with his little finger. And not a foot below him, there in a little cutback in the bank, lay a snake with scales the size of his thumbnail. He didn’t say anything. He might have just sat down on the bank without looking and hung his legs over. It wasn’t coiled, just lying there, and he couldn’t see its head. So he just looked. He could even smell it now that he had seen it, a dry sour smell like dead vines in a garden or carrion that is almost wasted away, until the essence of its scent is almost gone. He only wished that he had his pistol and could see its head to shoot it because nobody would believe it without the evidence of its dead body. There was probably no safe way he could kill it. He watched until he grew tired of it, until he convinced himself that it couldn’t really be as big as he thought it was. Then he got a stick and poked it. The head flew out in a blur, hard enough to jar the stick in his hands, and he drew back a little, not certain it wouldn’t come up the bank. He leaned over and poked it again, but the snake bunched and moved and began to flow into the river, loop after loop of steel muscle sliding over the mud, an impossible girth of snake that ended in a stubby tail. He stood back and watched for it to surface in the water, but it never did, python, boa, anaconda of Mississippi. And he was careful never to run the hooks at that place again, to watch the ground when he walked near there.

  Mornings he would park his truck off the road, hidden from view in a copse of trees close to the river and near the place where he got on the path. He was laden with fish one morning coming back to the truck, a stringer cutting into the flesh of one hand and the crawdads in the bucket sloshing sluggishly in stagnant black slough water in the other. He was tired of dressing fish and being out of work and his hands were tired of carrying these things for half a mile. He stopped within view of the bridge to rest his legs before the climb up the bank to his truck. He squatted in the wet weeds and smoked a cigarette, mopping at the sweat on his forehead with his arm and wrist. A rifle cracked suddenly, close, then again and again. He looked toward the bridge and saw a man standing there, facing away. But he knew him anyway. With one hand he caressed the healed holes in his neck, and then he hunkered down, keeping bushes and trees between them, went closer. The .25 was in the truck and was no good for even shooting snakes, you couldn’t hit anything over six feet away with it.

  The rifle spat from time to time as turtles floated up to see if it was safe and found it was not. He went closer and closer, silently up the overgrown bank next to the bridge until finally he could pull his head up over the bottom rail with most of his face hidden behind a post and examine this fool who had leaned his rifle on one side of the bridge while he drank a beer on the opposite. He went up over the side and walked carefully down the concrete curbing until he was within twenty feet of the gun. He grinned then. He walked to the gun and picked it up with no noise. Then he leaned against the side and held the rifle in his arms until the man felt him there behind him and whirled. The eyes were wide in the blasted face.

  “Surprise, motherfucker,” Joe told him.

  Willie Russell dropped his beer when he saw the gun leveled at him.

  “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 fr
om 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.