The man held his throat, tried to say something, but couldn’t. He sat down as if a chair had been pulled out from under him. He sat upright for a moment, then lay on his back slowly and tried to tuck his chin, as if this might seal the wound.
Hillbilly put his boot on the man’s face and pushed with all his weight so the wound would bleed out. The man wiggled like a snake, but the wiggling didn’t last.
“I told you to leave me the hell alone,” Hillbilly said.
Hillbilly wiped his knife on the dead man’s jacket, put it away, went over and looked at the one who had worn the cap. The cap had fallen off and lay on the boxcar floor.
Hillbilly picked up the cap and put it on, then he bent over the man. He was alive, but in the partial moonlight his dark eyes looked like creek pebbles under raging water.
“You done stabbed me,” the man said. His voice sounded as if it were coming through a squeeze organ.
“You wasn’t gonna give me a picnic lunch,” Hillbilly said.
“That’s my hat.”
“Not anymore.”
“We was just gonna get some loving. There ain’t no fault in that.”
“Unless you don’t want it.”
“I ain’t gonna make it,” the man said.
“You took it under the rib. I think I got your lung. You’re right. You ain’t gonna make it.”
“You’re a sonofabitch,” the man said, and blood poured out of his mouth.
“You’re right about that,” Hillbilly said.
“Just a goddamned horse’s ass.”
“Right again. And I figure you ain’t got but a few seconds to get used to the idea.”
The man jerked and made a noise, then joined his pal in the long fall to wherever.
Hillbilly got up and looked at his guitar. It was junk now. And so was his way of making a living. Hillbilly tossed the busted guitar out the doorway, squatted and thought about things.
He could throw these bo’s out, go into the next town, get off there. Then again, it might be best he got off when the train slowed in Lindale near the cannery. It was a pretty good jump because it didn’t slow all the way, but he had done it before. You tucked and rolled and took your jump where the grass was thick, it was something you could do and not break your neck.
He did that, by the time they found these two, he’d be long gone.
Hillbilly glanced outside. It was black in the distance because of the woods, but the moonlight lay bright on the gravel along the tracks and made the stuff look like diamonds.
Hillbilly rummaged through their goods and found a potato, some salt and pepper in little boxes. He put these in his little bag and fastened it to his belt. He stood in the doorway for a long time, using one trembling hand to support himself on the frame of the boxcar, watched until he could see the Lindale lights.
Out there was Tin Can Alley. He had worked canning peas there, and he had worked picking the peas they canned. He had worked all along this railroad line, picking fruit, cotton, tomatoes, all kinds of jobs, and the only one he had liked was singing and playing that guitar. Now his guitar was broken, smashed over some amorous thug’s head.
He looked back at the two. The one whose throat he had cut had a dark pool under his head. It looked like a flat black pillow there in the darkness. The other lay on his side with his hands pressed against his wound, eyes open, as if thinking about something important.
Hillbilly’s mouth tasted sour with bile. He spat out of the boxcar, and when the train slowed coming into the Lindale yard, he took a deep breath, and jumped before it got there.
Wandering through the darkness, Hillbilly came to a wooded place. There was a little stream there, and in time he saw a flicker of light through the trees. He could smell smoke and he could smell food cooking.
He bent down and used his hand to cup up some water. He sat that way for a while, listening. There were voices coming from the light, and he decided to go to it. As he neared, he called out, “Yo, bo’s.”
A pause. Then: “Come on in. You got any fixings?”
Hillbilly moved into the light. Around a fire were three hobos. They had a can hung on a stick over the fire and were boiling some stew.
“I got a tater in my sack,” Hillbilly said, and wished now he’d nabbed one of those fish in the doorway of the boxcar.
He came into the camp and took out the potato. The men around the fire stood up as he neared, just in case he might not be what he seemed.
“I put in some cooked beans a woman gave me,” one of the hobos said. He was a little man with an old black fedora and clothes that had been patched so much the original clothing was no longer visible. He had been sitting on an old black jacket rolled up on the ground.
“I didn’t have nothing to add but my best wishes,” said a fat colored man wearing overalls. He was squatting by the fire.
“I had the can,” the other man said. He looked pretty dressed up for a hobo. “I cleaned it in the creek there. It’s a pretty fresh can, so it doesn’t have rust in it.”
Hillbilly gave the patched clothes man the potato and the man pulled out a pocketknife and went to cutting it up, skin and all, into the can of boiling water and beans.
“It’d taste pretty good we had some wild onions,” said the colored man. “But I don’t know we could find any in the dark.”
“I got a little salt and pepper on me, too,” Hillbilly said, and he removed the little bag he had tied to his belt and opened it again. He took out the little boxes of salt and pepper. “Give it a pinch of these here.”
When the stew was cooked up, Hillbilly took his cup from the bag and the patched clothes man poured him up some. Then Patches poured some into a tin can the black man had, a metal plate the other man had, and he himself drank out of the cook can.
As they sat and ate, they talked about this and that, and then the important stuff. Where they could get handouts and who was an easy mark on up the road. Patches said, “There’s this woman over near Tyler. She ain’t got no man. She’ll give you food if you’ll come in the house and service her. I don’t know she’d screw a nigger, though, Johnny Ray.”
Johnny Ray shook his head. “I don’t want me none of that. No trouble like that. No, sir.”
“How does she look?” the dressed-up man asked.
“Look at her straight on, you might turn to stone,” Patches said. “And her cunt hairs are all gray. Ain’t so bad when you ain’t had none in a long time. And then she’s got that food. But don’t kiss her. Her mouth tastes like sin.”
“She looks like that, I wouldn’t think of kissing her,” said the well-dressed man. “Least, I don’t believe I would. It’s hard for me to know what I might do these days.”
“What I need is work,” Hillbilly said. “And I need a guitar. Mine got busted.”
“You play guitar?” said Patches.
“That’s why I need one,” Hillbilly said. “I sing too. I don’t have a guitar, I feel like half a man. I don’t feel the half that’s left is my good half neither.”
“Hell, I play the spoons,” said Patches.
“I got me a Jew’s harp and a harmonica,” said the colored man.
“I play them too, if that’s all I got,” Hillbilly said. “But I’m a guitar man.”
“I can’t play anything,” said Well-Dressed. “Formerly I was a school-teacher. Can you believe that? Now I don’t know a thing I need to know. Goddamn Depression. Goddamn Hoover.”
“You can listen,” said Patches. “Me and Johnny Ray, we play good together. I get them spoons going, and he comes in on that Jew’s harp or the harmonica, we get a lively tune playing. It would sound real good if you can sing. Me and Johnny Ray sound like two old frogs a-blowing.”
“I can sing,” Hillbilly said.
“Do you know ‘Red River Valley’?” said Patches.
“You strike it up, and I’ll come in singing.”
Patches got out the spoons and went to it. Johnny Ray went to blowing his harmonica, and pr
etty soon Hillbilly began to sing.
He was good too, and his voice rang through the woods, and they played and sang tunes well into the night.
4
Pete’s father and a colored man named Zack Washington brought Pete back. They went to Pete’s house, or what was left of it, found Pete the way Sunset said they would. At first, in the early moonlight, Zack thought the man on the floor was colored, but as they neared, the black on him rose up and flew away with a furious buzz.
Pete had his pants down, his head on the floor, his ass to the wind. There was a strip of shit in the crack of his butt that had jumped out when Sunset shot him. Blood had run down his face, into his mouth, onto the floor, and had dried.
Zack held the lantern close to Pete’s face and thought Pete’s expression was one of mild surprise, as if he had just spooned up a bug in his breakfast mush. One eye seemed more surprised than the other.
Zack tugged him up, and when he did, the blood that had dried on Pete’s face and the floor made a sound like someone tearing a piece of sandpaper in half.
They pulled Pete’s pants up, rode with him propped on the truck seat between them, Mr. Jones holding Pete up, Zack driving, trying to keep his mind on the road, trying not to let the smell of feces and decaying flesh overwhelm him. Due to the heat, even on the short ride to Camp Rapture, even though the day was now cooler, Pete had turned choke-your-nose ripe, and after they had gone a little ways, ants that had gathered in Pete’s clothing crawled out and got on Zack and bit him on the wrists and hands and ankles.
Zack had not volunteered to get Pete’s body, but Jones, who was called Captain by the colored workers because he was a main man at the mill, made him volunteer. Had he not gone, he knew he would have been out of work, looking to pick cotton for a fart and a song, hoeing between rows when he wasn’t dragging a sack, so there wasn’t a whole lot of saying no even considered.
Secretly, Zack was glad Pete was dead. Pete had pistol-whipped him once for not calling him Mister. Zack had referred to the constable as Pete, like the white men he knew.
“You done forgot your place, nigger,” Pete said, and the pistol came out and the whipping commenced. It was a pretty brisk whipping, just a few blows, and Zack thought it was a good thing it wasn’t the beating Pete had given Three-Fingered Jack. If it had been that bad, he would be pushing up grass and feeding the worms.
So Zack thought it was damn funny finding Mr. Pete the way he was, pants down, that silly look on his face, his crack full of mess, a bullet in his head, put there by his own gun, fired by a little redheaded woman.
Jones and Zack brought Pete home and made a cooling board by taking a door from the closet. They placed the door between two chairs and put Pete’s body on it. Zack said a few kind words, then stepped out, without Mr. Jones so much as saying thank you or go shoot yourself.
If things weren’t bad enough, Pete’s daughter, Karen, arrived from having gone fishing with friends. Showed up shortly after Mr. Jones brought back the body, opened the door with a smile on her face and a lie on her lips. At fourteen, it wasn’t the first lie she had told. She had picked up some fish after the storm to pretend she had caught them.
Instead of fishing with friends, she had been with a boy. Jerry Flynn. They had gone down by the creek to spoon, then the storm came up. They spent the time they had meant to spend kissing with their faces in the dirt, the storm howling all about them.
When the tornado passed, they started home immediately, in Karen’s case to the Jones’ house, where she had been visiting her grandparents.
When Karen came in the door the lie was lost. She saw her father stretched out on the cooling board. His hair was in his face, his tongue hanging out. His clothes were wet from the storm and his left eye was bulging from its socket like someone was inside his head pushing it out of his skull with his finger.
Karen dropped the fish, screamed, said, “Daddy, Daddy, Daddy.”
Sunset, who had gotten some of her energy back and borrowed an oversized dress from her mother-in-law, came out of the back room when Karen screamed. She was still carrying the revolver. She took hold of Karen and dragged her out of there.
Marilyn wondered where Sunset and Karen had gone, but was too weak and too sad to find out. She hoped they were okay out there in the dark.
She knew only that her husband was happy about Sunset leaving, said he was going to get his shotgun and when he saw her next he was going to cut those long legs out from under her. And Marilyn knew he would too, and probably get away with it.
It was in that moment, sneaking in between her other thoughts, that Marilyn realized she had been worried to death about her granddaughter during the storm, but the worry had been tucked away when Sunset arrived wearing only a shirt, toting a gun, saying she’d killed Pete. Now she was thinking about Karen again, and she was thinking about Sunset too.
She thought about all this as she lay in bed, not able to sleep. She kept seeing things over and over in her mind, and the thing she saw the most was her son and the little hole in his head.
When they laid him out on the cooling board in the parlor, his head had turned and the flattened-out load from the bullet rolled out of his mouth and fell bloody on the floor.
She could still see it in her mind’s eye, hear it as it snapped against the floor.
As she lay there, she realized another thing, and it pained her to think it, but she knew it was true, and she had known it for a long time.
Pete had it coming.
He was just like his father. For years now, Jones, which was what Marilyn called her husband, had considered his word gold, even if it was sometimes tin.
Pete was the same.
Jones had blacked her eye more than once—punched her all over, for that matter. Kicked her. Slapped her. And he had raped her. She had never thought of it as rape until now. She thought that was just his way, and the way of a husband.
But now she thought about what Sunset had said and what she had done and she knew it was not just the way of a husband, and if it was, it was a bad way.
She lay for a moment feeling the sweat on her lower back stick to the sheets, thought about how much better it was on the sleeping porch and wondered why they had not slept there tonight. She sat up in bed and looked at Jones. He had not bothered to take her tonight, but that was because of Pete. He didn’t have any lead in his pencil because of it.
Tomorrow, she knew he would hit her. A way to take out what happened to Pete on her. And he would find a way to make it her fault. He always said, “See what you made me do?”
Marilyn got up quietly, padded in her bare feet to the dresser drawer, pulled out a big Singer sewing machine needle, crept quietly into the parlor and looked at her boy lying there.
She had cleaned him up and put some of his father’s clothes on him, had even managed to push his eye back in place and close his lids and cover the hole where the bullet had gone in with candle wax.
For a moment she stood looking at him. She reached out and pushed at his hair to make it look the way it did when it was combed. Then she went outside and looked under the porch. She found what she wanted. Her husband’s fishing tackle box. She got some heavy fishing line out of the box and went back inside. She threaded the sewing machine needle in the dark by touch, went to the bedroom and very carefully removed the blanket from the bed, took to sewing the sheet to the mattress with Jones between them.
She was patient about it, silent and deliberate. When she finished, she had Jones sewed in tight with only his head exposed. She put the needle away, went outside and got the yard rake.
The rake had never been used except to scratch the ground to make it smooth, and now that she thought about that, it seemed silly. She raked the dirt sometimes to keep from going mad, listening to the whine of the saw, the sound of men and mules and clanking machinery, while anticipating her next beating.
Back in the bedroom she studied Jones for a while, then raising the rake, she brought it down hard on hi
s head, trying to imagine she was standing in a watermelon patch busting a melon.
Jones came awake with the first whack, yelled, and she hit him again. His head turned toward her and she hit him once more, this time putting all her weight behind it. He tried to get up but the sewed sheet and mattress held him.
“You’ve hit me the last time,” she said.
“You’re crazy, woman.”
“Been crazy till now.”
She began beating him from head to toe. She beat him until she was too tired to beat him. She rested and he cussed, and she went at it again. Had she been stronger she would have killed him, but she wasn’t that strong and she didn’t spend enough time on the head. She beat at his big body, grunting with every blow, the sound of the strikes echoing through the house like a dusty rug being thrashed.
When she wore out the second time, she went out of there, and when she came back, she had her husband’s double-barrel shotgun.
Jones’ face was red. He was bleeding from his ears and nose and the sheet was spotted with blood.
“You ain’t right, woman,” he said. “You ain’t right on account of Pete.”
She pointed the shotgun at him. “I ought to just go on and shoot you.”
There was something about seeing him over the barrel of the gun, the smell of gun oil in her nostrils, that made her want to pull the trigger.
“What’s got into you?”
“I let you into me, and that gave us Pete. And I let you teach him how to treat women by letting you treat me way you did. Sunset killed him cause she had to.”
“You can’t mean that.”
“She killed him for the reason I ought to done killed you. I ought to not let you treat me this way. Pete might not have been like he was, I hadn’t let you hit on me.”
She cocked back the hammers on the shotgun.
“Now don’t do nothing you’ll regret, Marilyn.”
“I already got plenty regrets.”
She went away, came back with a knife in one hand, the shotgun in the other.