Sunset and Sawdust

  “Thing is, you and me, we got to stick together. We got to make sure things are good for Karen. Where is Karen?”

  “Sleeping.”

  “This late?”

  “Yep, she’s a regular Rip Van Winkle. Kind of got into prettying herself up. Guess she’s getting to be a woman.”

  “For that little boy she was seeing?”

  “She’s kind of forgotten him. Think she’s got a crush on Hillbilly.”

  “Better watch that.”

  “He knows she’s a kid. It’s one-sided. She just walks around moon-eyed a lot.”

  “You don’t know him well enough to know that, know if he’d turn it two-sided.”

  “I think I do.”

  “But you’ll watch it?”

  “Sure.”

  “Another thing. That girl you found, she was shot with a thirty-eight.”

  “So I’ve heard. Damn, how’d you know that?”

  “They done spread the word, honey. That gun, it could be Pete’s, and he could have done it, I suppose. I don’t like saying it, but he beat on you, he could have shot her if he found out she was carrying his baby and he didn’t want it. Could have been that way, and if you don’t know who did it, a case could be made. Hell, Jones has a thirty-eight in that glove compartment right there in front of you. Lots of people got thirty-eights.”

  “I’m surprised you’d suggest that Pete done it.”

  “Not because I like the idea, or know he did it, but it could save you some time, till you found out who. It might be the answer they need at the town meeting.”

  “And if I don’t find out who did it? If it ain’t Pete?”

  “Reckon he can take the blame good as any.”

  Sunset saw Marilyn blink, then a tear squeezed out of her eye. She had a very fine face but the way the sun was shining on it the wrinkles were more visible, like little plowed lines, and her hair had come loose in places and dangled on her cheeks and forehead. Sunset thought it made her look like some of those Greek statues she had seen in books, thought of the story she had read about Helen of Troy, thought Marilyn might look as Helen would have looked at sixty. Still beautiful. Sort of face an artist would want to carve in granite.

  When Marilyn wiped the tear away with the back of her hand, Sunset said, “We don’t need to talk about it no more.”

  Marilyn nodded. “Let’s ride a little. Something I want to show you.”

  They threw up a lot of dust on sandy back roads and came to a small house with a big porch, and sitting in a rocking chair on the porch was Bill Martin. He had a pair of crutches beside him.

  Next to the house was an old blue truck speckled with rust, and a black Ford that wasn’t too old and looked in pretty good shape.

  “What happened to him?” Sunset asked as they pulled into the yard.

  “A tree kicked back on him. Got out of the way mostly, but it hit him some. He’s sprained up. Heard about it from Don Walker. Ain’t much goes on at the mill that Walker and Martin don’t blab about. They know everyone and everything.”

  Marilyn killed the engine, said, “Fact is, I think he’s probably faking some to get a few days off work. He likes money, but he don’t like working for it.”

  “Why are we here?”

  “He borrowed some money from Jones. Thinks with Jones dead maybe I don’t know about it. Or so I figure. I heard about this extra car he’s got, and I got an idea.”

  They got out of the truck and walked up to the porch. When they did, a dog that had been asleep under it, embarrassed he had been snuck up on, leaped awake and banged his head on the porch, started barking.

  “Shut up!” Bill said. The dog, to show who was boss, barked a couple more times, went silent, lay back down in the soft sand beneath the steps. Sunset could see his beady eyes watching them as they walked up to the porch steps and stopped. The dog was a big black-and-white hound with cut-up floppy ears, souvenirs of past coon hunts.

  “Good morning, Mrs. Jones, and Constable Sunset,” Bill said.

  Sunset thought when he mentioned her name he sounded a little snide, but she let it pass, as it was really too early to just shoot him, and it wouldn’t look good, shooting a man on crutches.

  “Good morning, Bill,” Marilyn said.

  The door opened and three heads appeared. Children. Ranging from age nine to twelve, Sunset thought. The way their heads poked around the screen it looked as if they were stacked on top of one another, two girls, and at the bottom the youngest, a boy with a face like a rat, eyes like goat berries. Sunset figured none of them had ever seen the inside of a schoolhouse, such as it was. Camp Rapture’s schooling only went to the ninth grade. You wanted any more after that, you had to go over to Holiday, where it went up to the eleventh. Most didn’t bother after learning to read and write and cipher. Beyond there was just fieldwork or maybe store work, or for the damn lucky, barber college over in Tyler.

  Sunset wasn’t even sure that when summer ended Karen would go back to school. She did, she’d have to go to Holiday, and she wasn’t sure how she’d manage it.

  “Y’all get on back in there in the house,” Bill said. “Adults are talking out here. Get on, now.”

  The heads disappeared as if a hole had opened up and they had fallen down it. The door slammed.

  “Damn kids,” Bill said. “Can’t get no goddamn rest around here. Wife just had to have three of them, and then she up and died.”

  “Pretty ungrateful,” Sunset said.

  Bill gave her a look, and it was a look Sunset recognized as one of confusion. He was trying to decide if Sunset was poking fun or commiserating.

  “I’ll get right to it,” Marilyn said. “You borrowed some money from my husband. It’s past due.”

  The flesh on Bill’s face nearly fell off the bone.

  “I ain’t forgot, Mrs. Jones. Not for a minute. Soon as I can get back to work, I’ll try and get that paid off.”

  “How’d you come by the car?” Marilyn said.

  “I traded an old syrup mill and the cooking goods for it. It didn’t run when I got it, but I’ve fixed on it.”

  “It runs now?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, I heard you had a car and a truck, and I think we can make a trade. What you owe Jones for the car. You’ll still have the truck to get around in and do work around here.”

  “That’s a good car,” Bill said.

  “I wouldn’t want a bad one.”

  “I need that car.”

  “You got a truck.”

  “I like the car.”

  “You owe me money.”

  “Yes, ma’am. I reckon I do.” Bill studied on the situation for a while. “I could give you the truck and owe you some.”

  “You’ve owed me for a long time, Bill. When you needed it, we helped you out. It did help you out, didn’t it?”

  “Sure. It helped. I had to have help when the wife died.”

  “So?”

  “Well . . . I had to have it.”

  “And we gave it to you.”

  “Jones gave it to me. You didn’t want him to.”

  “And with good reason. You still owe him. But the debts owed him are now owed me.”

  “Things ain’t been good for me.”

  “I understand your circumstances, but you still got a debt due, and me and Jones went a long time without mentioning it. This car will cover it, and I’ll call it square. I didn’t want to call it square, the car wouldn’t be enough. It would be the car and then some.”

  Sunset could see it pained Bill more than the pain in his foot to lose that car.

  “I voted for Sunset for constable when you wanted me to.”

  “You voted for a nickel an hour raise,” Marilyn said.

  “Ain’t there another way?” he said.

  “You can pay the money you owe me instead of the car.”

  “Damn,” Bill said.

  “Did you think I forgot about you owing the money?”

  Bill grinned. “Kind
of hoped you had.”

  Marilyn shook her head. “Nope.”

  “I could still pay it out.”

  “It’s past time for that. You can pay me half of it now, or you can give me the car. That’s as good a deal as it gets.”

  “I ain’t got even a quarter of it. Times are hard. You’re giving me the Jesse James.”

  “No, I’m giving you a chance to pay your debt, and actually come out ahead.”

  “What if I don’t?”

  “That’s why I brought the constable. I have the papers you signed for the debt in my car.”

  “You don’t know if I paid Jones any.”

  “I know the contract you signed said there would be a receipt for every payment you made. I haven’t got any receipts. Want to show me yours?”

  “You’d have me arrested?”

  “I would.”

  “Oh, hell,” Bill said, as if he were being magnanimous. “Take the damn car.”

  When Bill crutched the keys out to them, along with the title, which he signed over, Marilyn handed the keys to Sunset.

  “It’s yours,” Marilyn said.

  “You didn’t tell me the car was for her.”

  “Didn’t need to,” Marilyn said.

  “Are you sure, Marilyn?” Sunset said. “I mean, it’s a good car.”

  “It sure is,” Bill said.

  “That’s why I want you to have it,” Marilyn said. “You need it. You can’t be depending on someone else all the time. What if Clyde quit?”

  “I don’t know what to say.”

  “Say thanks.”

  “Thanks, Marilyn.”

  “I don’t want her to have it,” Bill said.

  “Why’s that?” Marilyn said.

  “Well, I know she’s constable, but she ain’t really.”

  “Yes, I am,” Sunset said. “Really. And if you hadn’t paid your debt to Mrs. Jones, I’d have arrested you.”

  Bill looked as if he could eat glass.

  “It really bothers you a woman has this job, doesn’t it?” Sunset said.

  Bill crutched back to his porch and his rocking chair. When he settled into it he began to rock furiously, as if he might rock himself off the porch and on out of East Texas, a place where women became the law and hoodwinked him out of cars for money owed.

  “Good enough,” Marilyn said. “You drive it home, Sunset. Tell Karen I’m going to come get her soon, take her to the picture show over in Holiday.”

  “Sunset’s done been there,” Bill said from the porch. “That’s where she saved that nigger.”

  “You’ll be happy to know he was lynched,” Sunset said.

  “Already heard. And you’d have saved a lot of trouble if you’d done let them go ahead and do it while he was in Holiday. I reckon he ate some meals over in Tyler. He wasn’t worth that, even if he only got bread and water.”

  “I’d shut up if I were you,” Sunset said. “Don’t forget you’re talking to the law.”

  “I ain’t talking law business. I’m just talking. Y’all go on, now. You got what you wanted.”

  Bill rose from the rocker, stood tall on his crutches, worked his way into the house, let the door bang.

  Sunset had learned to drive when she was a kid working on the farm, before she got the sniff on what her male foster parent had in mind for her. Then she ran off and didn’t drive much after that. She drove for Pete once in a while, but not often, just when he really needed something done. He didn’t like to see a woman drive, especially his woman, and the idea that she could drive, that she might drive away, was not a comfort to him. He liked her handy, as he liked to say, which meant under his roof and under his thumb, trapped like a rat in a shoe box, no air holes.

  So as she drove, the window down, the wind blowing her red hair as if fanning a blaze, she felt a kind of glory rise up in her. The flesh on her neck and cheeks flared as if bellows were beneath her skin, pumping up heat from coals she thought dead, and her skin seemed to lick at the air, and the taste of it was sweet, and she felt strong, her bones suddenly of iron, and along she drove, the dust rising up, some of it coming through the window, making her cough, sticking to the sweat on her face, but she didn’t mind. Didn’t mind at all, because there was a fine fire in her and it made her comfortably warm even in the not so comfortable East Texas heat, and out the window she saw the world no longer in the dusty whites and grays of the road, but in the bright greens of the pines and the cedars of the forest and the blues of the sky and the bouquets of Indian paint-brushes and bluebonnets and buttercups and sunflowers and all manner of wildflowers that fled out of the woods and stopped at the edge of the road as if on parade, saw all this as the roar of the car startled bright bursts of birds when she made curves too fast, and in that good moment she felt as if she was the queen of all she surveyed.

  Sunset drove the black Ford to her tent, and when Clyde, who was still sitting in a chair out front, saw her, he stood up, walked out to the car to greet her.

  “You steal it?” Clyde said through the open driver’s window.

  “No, I let a drunk man feel my tittie for it.”

  Clyde gave her a shocked look, and she laughed, told him how she had come by the car, telling it while she sat with her hands on the wheel, her head against the seat, turned slightly so she could speak to Clyde, doing it that way so she could feel her car.

  “Hell, you can fire me now you got a ride.”

  Sunset climbed out of the car and closed the door. “Don’t be silly, Clyde. I couldn’t do without you. You’re my right-hand man. And speaking of my left-hand man, where is he?”

  Karen came out of the tent. Her hair was combed and she looked way too neat and clean for just getting up. She said, “Whose car?”

  “Ours. Courtesy of your grandma.”

  “Really?”

  “Really.”

  “Oh, heavens,” Karen said. “Our very own car.”

  Karen came over to look at the car and Sunset went to the water pump and washed the dust off of her sweaty face. She pulled her hair back to do it, and when she turned her head to let the water run over her face, she saw Clyde looking at her, and the way he looked, it was so sweet, and she thought, Oh, hell, don’t fall for me, Clyde, because I can’t do it, and then she turned her head the other way to wash that side of her face, and she saw Hillbilly coming down the road, walking in that cool, collected way he had, and she thought it odd he seemed free of sweat and dust, and the way the sun hit his cap, it looked like some kind of dark halo.

  In that moment, a heat like she had felt driving the car, maybe even hotter, rose up in her, but it wasn’t just her face this time, it was her loins as well.

  “Hi, Hillbilly,” Karen said.

  “Hi, darlin’,” he said.

  17

  Lee, dreaming he was Tarzan asleep in a tree with Jane in his arms, awoke to the sound of a moan.

  For a moment, upon realizing he was not Tarzan, he was confused, had no idea where he was, and when he looked above and saw the limbs of the tree, he decided maybe he was in fact Tarzan, and that the moan belonged to Jane. Since no Jane was present and he was fully dressed, he determined it was not a moan of ecstasy or even a moan connected to backache, but it was a moan, perhaps from falling from the tree, because trees, for all their romance, really weren’t that good to sleep in unless you were a monkey.

  Then he came full awake. He was in a tree, but not in Africa, and below him lay Goose.

  He rolled over and looked down. Goose was sitting up with his back against the tree. Goose said, “Goddamn it. I done been snakebit.”

  “What?”

  “Snakebit. Copperhead.”

  “You sure?”

  “Course I’m sure. Woke up when it bit me. It weren’t no chicken snake. I know them copperhead sonsabitches are poison. I know that much. Saw it crawl in the leaves there. Got me on the hand. It was a little one. Don’t hurt much.”

  “Where exactly did the snake go?”

  “Well,
he didn’t tell me where he was planning on finishing out,” Goose said. “But in them leaves, over there.”

  Goose pointed.

  Lee dropped down from his limb and looked around and found a heavy stick.

  “He done bit me,” Goose said. “I ain’t gonna get better cause you hit him with a stick.”

  Lee tossed the stick down. “You’re right. We got to get you to a doctor. Can you walk?”

  “Bit me on the hand, not the leg.”

  “Thing to do is to walk slow and careful, not hurry. Poison gets het up and runs right through you that way.”

  “Am I gonna be okay?”

  “Sure. But we got to get you to a doctor.”

  They went out on the road and started walking. It was good and morning now, already starting to turn hot. Lee hoped Camp Rapture was not too far away, and that a doctor was there, and that they wouldn’t be too late. He looked about, hoping to remember the place better, get some idea of where they were, but he might as well have been in Romania.

  As they walked, Goose said, “Hand’s starting to hurt like fire now, and get heavy.”

  Lee looked at the boy’s hand. It was swollen up huge and turning dark.

  “Put it inside your shirt. Unbutton a couple buttons. Put it in there Napoleon style, so you don’t let it dangle by your side.”

  “Oh, Jesus. It hurts.”

  “I know, son. Just keep going.”

  They went a ways, then Goose fell to his knees. “My head’s all whirly. I’m hotter in the head than a jacked-off mad dog.”

  “It’ll be all right.”

  Goose hit face forward in the dust.

  Lee picked him up and carried him in his arms. This was hard work and he didn’t get too far before he had to put the boy down. He picked him up again, but this time he threw him over his shoulder. This was hard, but not as hard as carrying him in his arms. He went twice as far this time, stopped, and with great difficulty, shifted the boy to his other shoulder.

  Goose wasn’t talking anymore. He wasn’t making a sound. He felt hot to the touch. Nonetheless, Lee talked to him. “We’re gonna make it, son. Can’t be that damn far. I been here before, long time ago, and it don’t seem it’s that far.”