He waited a few moments, until his breathing had slowed. He tried not to think how much Mina had begun to frighten him. Why was she like that? He had done nothing to her, not really. He leaned and took up the fruit jar. Gray and white, but slightly tinged with yellow, Sheila’s pert face looked at him through the whiskey. She was smiling: a fixed stiff smile. His hand shook; her face wavered. He was doing well, only a few large drops splashed on his belly. She was smiling. He turned the jar around and peeled the wet photograph off the side, where Mina had stuck it. She had taken it from his wallet. Now he wished he had hit her, that he had made the blood come. Sheila’s face was draped between his fingers, the paper all limp, wet. He felt that no one had ever been so abjectly miserable as he; and he let his head roll on his chest from side to side. The photograph wouldn’t come loose from his fingers; he shook his hand hard again and again. But he was still extremely careful. He didn’t spill any more of the liquor, he had to preserve himself somehow. Finally he wiped the photograph off on the quilts, as if it were a sort of filth which soiled his fingers. Then he leaned and set the jar down carefully, and then lay back, still, his arms along his sides. He began to moan, and it got louder and louder. It got louder, and it didn’t sound like a moan any more. He was moaning like a cow gone dry; moo upon moo, and he couldn’t stop it. He might have gone on for hours.
But Mina came back in, came straight to him. “Hush up,” she said. “Hush up that goddam noise.” She slapped his face hard. “Just hush up now.” She slapped him again, harder this time, and he heard mixed with his own hollow fear a tinny ringing sound. He began to breathe more steadily, and the noise subsided to a moan. She slapped him once more, not so hard now, and turned away. “I’m goddam if you just wouldn’t drive anybody plumb wild with all of your craziness.” She went out.
He lay moaning for a while, and then managed to collect himself. The photograph was in wet bits, tangled in the quilt. He began to console himself with the jar.
Or there were times he would be gently melancholy, even rather humorous; would smile sadly but not bitterly and speak in a calm even voice. “The lachrimae rerum,” he would say. “There’s something in the part of a landscape you can see from a window that gives you the clearest idea of what Virgil’s phrase really means. The way the window limits the landscape, you know; it intensifies the feeling of being able to see the universe in miniature. Which is what you do when you think of those two words, though I don’t think you do it consciously at all. But in the back of your mind somewhere there’s a real picture of the smallness of physical existence, of its real boundaries; and there’s a corresponding sense of the immensities of the void, of nothingness, which encloses physical existence and to which it really belongs. And then to include the human personality, oneself, in this small universe is to see oneself really minuscule.” He chuckled softly. “It’s all a question of proportion, you know.”
“You’re as full of shit as a Christmas turkey,” Mina said.
He nodded and smiled gently. He felt very old. “I don’t mean to bore you, he said, “but I know I am. But you can see—can’t you?—how hard it is for me to keep my mind alive, to keep it going. With the weight of the circumstances, well, with the way I am now, I feel I’ve got to keep my wits about me somehow. I know these are nothing but foolish empty speculations, but it begins to seem more and more that my mind won’t operate on the material that’s given it. The things that happen more and more don’t mean anything, and I can’t make them mean anything. And as limited as my life has been—and it’s always been severely limited—I was always able to make something useful out of a few events. By ‘useful’ I guess I mean intellectually edifying or…or morally instructive. That’s what I mean, in fact: every event that happened to me was a moral event. I could interpret it. And now I can’t. It seems to me that a morality just won’t attach any more; events won’t even attach to each other, no one thing seems to produce another. Things are what they are themselves, and that’s all they are. Or maybe I’m just troubling myself to no end. One of my troubles always, too many useless scruples.”
“Scrooples,” she said.
She had got his checkbook from somewhere, and she got him to sign all the checks, blank. He didn’t hesitate; it couldn’t have mattered less. He felt a detached mild curiosity about the purposes to which she would put the money, but he didn’t question her. He knew she wouldn’t have told him, and anyway he had no use for it. What could he buy? He himself had been sold, sold out.
The days got hotter. The weedy field below was noisy with grasshoppers. The sun was white as sugar and looked large in the sky.
Sometimes he was very depressed, kept a strict silence. He thought of suicide, thought of slashing his wrists. He pictured his long body lying all white and drained. Perhaps there would be a funeral for him in the brick house, in the dark disused sun parlor there, his body lying in a soft casket beside the disordered piano. But he knew that that was all wrong. There was no doubt he would be cast just as he lay into an open field and left to ferment in the sun. Muskrat food. Yet this seemed appropriate; it was, after all, a proper burial, wasn’t it? He wouldn’t expect any more than this for himself. In fact, he would stop expecting. —It would take him entire hours to think through a daydream like this, and then he would be mollified but sullen. His body would feel too heavy.
And in the bed too she was relentless. He came away nerveless and exhausted, his face and neck and shoulders aching with the cold bitter hurt. Why, why? Whatever she wanted there finally, it was nothing his body could give, poor dispirited body. She was not satisfied; even blood, he discovered, would not satisfy her. What was it she wanted? How could such stolidness be so demanding? He burrowed against her, spent his last, came fighting for breath. His heart would feel ready to burst; convulsed, convulsed. And it was unhealthy, the whole business.—Or afterwards he would fall into a deep sleep and dream bad dreams which once again he could not remember; but felt in his sleep still the fishy breath of her and the oily taste of her skin.—Or he would have one of the blinding headaches, his mind riven like a stone with the pain. What was it she wanted? There was nothing left.—He would not admit that he cried out in her grip.
After dark the visitors would come again, every night of the week. This time he was drinking in the living room, and Mina let him stay there, didn’t lead him through to the bedroom. She closed the kitchen door. He sat in a stupor in the soiled chair and heard without listening the shuffle and thump of the big shoes, the muttering. Finally he rose and went out on the back porch. It was cooler than he’d thought and stars of the deep summer were spread all over the sky; no moon. The night smelled good, snug odor of weeds and flowers and field earth and the cool smell of the running stream. It was the first night he had been outside, and going down the bowed wooden steps he felt slightly elated. He stretched out his arms; he felt he had forgotten until now the feeling of bodily freedom; it was as if a woolen musty coat had been snatched from him. He wandered about in the sparse lower yard, swinging his arms, and looked up at the stars, held still as if tangled in a net, among the small leaves of the wild cherry tree. A faint breeze moved the branches and the stars moved too, seemed to jiggle quietly.
He went round the right corner of the house, going up toward the roadbed. The light from the single small lamp in the living room—it sat on a small table next to the stuffed chair—fell on him as he passed the living-room window and caused him to appear pink and insubstantial. It was a queer sensation to stand here outside and look into the room he had just come out of. He could almost see himself sitting there in the chair, drawn and sullenly silent. Such a pitiable figure he made, or so contemptible a figure. The quart jar sat by the lamp; he had drunk half of it. He went up into the road, not walking steadily, but sliding his feet before him as if he moved on snowshoes. In the gravel of the road he found two small rounded stones and he held one in each hand, squeezing them slightly, reassuring himself of their s
olidity, their reality. Then he threw them high away into the field below. The kitchen window framed an irregular rectangle of orange light on the sloping ground, and once more he heard that unfathomable intense cry and was attracted by it to the bare kitchen window.
He stood angled away from view. The room was choked with large forms of men. Along the edge of the table next the window a hand lay asplay in the lamplight. It looked huge. The freckles on the hand seemed large as dimes, the distent veins thick as cord. It didn’t look like a hand, but, oversized, like a parody of a hand, an incomprehensible hoax. Against the far wall, by the door to the bedroom where Peter slept, a tall farmer leaned. He was dressed in blue jeans and wore a cotton plaid shirt, the sleeves rolled to his biceps, exposing long bony forearms and sharp elbows. His face was narrow and small for his body, seemed as disproportionately small as the near hand seemed large. His nose was prominent and sharp, but his eyes under the shaggy eyebrows looked shrunken, aglitter with concentration. He gazed fascinated at something out of Peter’s view, and he licked his thin mouth with a sudden flicker of his tongue. He rubbed his chin with the back of his wrist. Then he moved forward to the table and took up a jelly glass half filled with corn whiskey and drank it suddenly. It spilled a little from the side of his mouth and darkened his shirt, and as he stood by the table close to the lamp his shadow loomed big and fell dark on the bedroom door. Then he stepped back and leaned against the wall once more; and he had not once moved his fierce gaze from what he stared upon.
Peter wanted to see, but he was afraid Mina would see him. Then what? It would be bad. He had to go all the way back up to the road and skirt round the patch of light. Again he picked up a stone and kept rolling it in his hands. His hands were damp with mounting excitement. What was it that everyone in the world knew but he? There was something grave and black being kept from him, and he could feel how important it was, how imminent, and he was desperate to know. There were two other men aligned against the west wall, by the door to the living room. Both wore bibbed overalls. One, a blondish thickset man, wore a faded red sweatshirt, looked yellow in the yellow light. He too stared—as did his companion. His face twitched and he was almost smiling, but not happily; in anticipation, perhaps, as one smiles involuntarily the moment before a vaccination. The other wore a rough blue workshirt, the collar open below the high bib of the overalls. He was taller and looked older than the other man. Spriggy gray hair lay on his chest. He wore an expression almost as unmoving as Mina’s, but his stare was as intensely fixed as the others’. Morgan himself stood by the outside door, his hands in his pockets. His face was red as always, his eyes filled with lazy mischief.
Mina had her back toward him. At first he could not make it out: her dark tangled hair on her shoulders; the blouse loose, obviously open all down the front; her thigh olive and bare beneath the edge of the table. He could not see her waist. She was reversed, sitting backward in the chair, straddled on the short fat man who sat round the other way. Her bare leg swung rhythmically and not idly, and it seemed to Peter that she was singing, singing softly music he could not hear. Astraddle, her leg moving to and fro. She gripped the farmer’s shoulders and stared intently into his face; it was the way she treated Peter when she was calming him from one of his bad hours. The red fat face was thrown against the chairback, the mouth was open, and the lips tightened and relaxed like a pulse around the dark cavity; lips were frothy and saliva trickled gleaming from one side of the mouth. And now the mouth began to open wider and then almost to close: a fish drowning in air. Mina’s naked leg swung easily but more quickly now. And now the muscles under his eyes twitched, this tic rhythmic also, and the man’s breath was a hoarse clatter in his throat. Still gripping his shoulder with her right hand, Mina reached behind to the table without looking. She drew forth a snake which was limp at first and then grew taut. She held it just below its head and it wrapped about her forearm. It was brown and splotched with a darker brown; he didn’t know what kind it was. She held it apart from her for a moment and then began slowly to bring it toward the man’s face. Below the edge of the table her leg swung ever more quickly. The farmer breathed a big bubble of spit; his breathing was louder now. Mina knew when. In time she brought the snake to his face, rubbed it slowly on his cheek. The mottled body writhed carefully, a slow cold movement of the skin without a catch. The man cried out, but the sound seemed not to come from him, but to fall from everywhere out of the hollow air of the kitchen; the sound totally itself, pure unintelligible feeling. “Iä! Iä!” he cried.
Mina spoke gravely and quietly. “Iä!” She spoke in affirmation.
It was over. Again she held the snake apart from them, and then leaned her head forward and put her mouth to the man’s neck. When she straightened, the white oval impress of her teeth was plain to Peter. Her leg had stopped swinging. She unbound the snake from her forearm, just as she might take off a spiral bracelet, and dropped the thing carelessly on the table. There it crawled a moment and then lay still; Peter thought that it might be dead now. She got off the lap of her victim easily—it was like crossing a low stone wall—and stood on the other side of the table straightening her black skirt. She brushed her thighs slowly with her fingers. The drab blouse still hung open all down the front and one small solemn breast peered blindly through the window at Peter.
He stepped back quickly out of the light. He turned his back to the window. They had begun talking again. He went again, avoiding the oblong of yellow light, to the road and came back down into the yard. It felt much cooler now than when he had first come outside. Passing the dimly lit living-room window he glanced inside and then stopped. At first he couldn’t understand, but looking more carefully, he saw that it was he himself who sat in the ugly stuffed chair. His gangly body was all angles and still. There he sat, uncomfortably asleep, the quart jar still half filled beside him. He stood looking for a few minutes until it all came clear; then he went on, round the house and up the steps; entered the living room and went to sit in the chair. He arranged his body carefully in an angular repose. It was all going to be a bad dream, one of the terrible dreams which caused the sweat to stand on him unmoving and cold. He arranged himself carefully, according to plan, and almost immediately he fell asleep, breathing easily and regularly, not stirring. He stirred once, only slightly, when that hard inexpressive cry sounded again; a different voice, and this time followed by an outbreak of hoarse laughter.
TWO
In early August Mina found what she wanted. Now the heat was tortuous. The sky pressed more closely than before, the landscape seemed flatter, rolled out before the eye, baked, seamless; in the metal heat the different kinds of plants were not to be distinguished. The great white sun was cluttered with yellow and black specks.
“I got somebody who can drive us,” Mina said. “I’m sick of this place. I don’t want to hang around here forever.”
The short blond boy leaned against the doorframe, relaxed and indifferent. He always had about him a liquid uncaring gracefulness. His arms hung at his sides and smoke rose along his body from the cigarette he held in his fingers with a cool exquisite droop. His name was Coke Rymer. Peter, sitting in the stuffed chair, looked at him. He detested Coke Rymer thoroughly; he hated him. He couldn’t remember when the fellow had shown up, yawning, glancing about with watery blue eyes which seemed to take in nothing and yet seemed always observing, observing without curiosity. The dark-streaked blond hair was gathered upward in a stiff greased pompadour and was bunched behind in a shabby d.a.
“Coke here can drive,” Mina said. “He can take us anywhere we want to go.”
Peter nodded. Why was she telling him? She didn’t care what he thought about it; she had given him up, for a while at least. He sat in his chair all day, slept in it at night; had denied himself Mina’s bed, or had been denied it. “What good are you if you can’t fuck?” she had asked, and the question had no answer, of course. He couldn’t care, either; for the moment at least
that was one ordeal he was spared. Many things in him were damaged; one thing in him was broken, but he didn’t know what exactly, was hardly interested. He had gone stale in the ability to suffer, but was certain that Mina knew it; she would find some way to rouse him again. He could contemplate without rancor long intense days of pain, thought of it dispassionately, as if it were a solid library of books that he had to read through.
“I can drive anything with wheels on it,” Coke Rymer said. “Take you anywhere you want to go, honey.” He had a thin watery tenor voice which wavered on the verge of a grating falsetto. “Just point me on the road and we’re gone.”
Peter nodded again. What difference did it make?
“They’s some things I got to look after first,” she said. “But it won’t be long now.” She sidled through the door by Coke and went through the kitchen into the back bedroom. She’d grazed him with her thigh.
The blond boy stood where he was, watching Peter with nonchalant eyes, not moving except to puff slowly at his cigarette, which was burned almost down now. Peter was thirsty again; these last few days that he hadn’t been drinking the corn whiskey he couldn’t seem to get enough water, made innumerable trips to the bucketed dipper in the kitchen. He rose and went toward the door, and Coke Rymer shifted his stance slightly, setting his right foot in the opposite corner of the doorsill. Peter stopped immediately before him, looking carelessly into the pasty blond face with its fixed smile, a meanly dissembling expression. He was indifferent; it wasn’t worth it. He turned about and went out the other door onto the porch, down the steps into the yard.