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KICK.
That's a floating rib. "Git!! Git on out'cheer, drunkie! You ain't seen
shit! G'wan, now!"
"Hrrf." I open my
eyes, still on the ground. There's this boot needs tending to. It seems
to like my center mass, and--- "Hrrf."
Okay, now, that's
my belly. Enough. I roll away and scoot back, looking around in
all directions and panting. After a while, I don't see three of Flat Cap
coming at me in a crouch, like a wrestler. Oh, no. Him.
His cap is in his
hand. His head is shaved, with a big scar running up the left side like
a question mark that never got answered. I remember his teeth. In his
case, the word is barely a plural noun.
WHA-KOW!!! Pillow-Tick
fires the shotgun in the air as he rushes up, leveling both barells at
me with a hungry look. I can smell him where I am. They circle me on two
sides as I back up, looking for an avenue of escape. I don't know that
I can outrun a shotgun, but in my state I really don't care.
"Hmmp." Pillow-Tick
sounds like he has just enough gray matter to grunt. "He look soft,
boss. He seen---" He gestures all around us at the compound. "Should
we cut 'is head and put 'im to work, or… you gone give him to me?"
"Shaddap." Flat
Cap cuts him off. "Keep y'pecker in y'pocket. Plenty on the crew for you,
come sundown. Don't I pay you enough?"
Pillow-Tick looks
sullen, still holding the gun on me. "Quit movin'!" he says. I back up
more slowly. Flat Cap is looking at me like he knows me from somewheres,
and motions for Pillow-Tick to put the gun down to port arms. After a
moment, Pillow-Tick does.
"Ain't you-" the
big galoot begins, then stops, trying to string the thought together.
I might know him, too, had I my wits about me.
I avail myself of
the opportunity to take a good long look around. I should run, I know,
but… The writer in me cannot. This is too weird. I can't look away from
their underlings up and down the line.
A decent Southern
pulp writer named Wellman (who lives in New York, though I cannot imagine
why) tells of the island of Santo Domingo, what they call Haiti now. The
witch-doctors there, this Wellman says, will bury a man for days, then
put certain herbs and poisons on him and make his muscles work again,
get him to lurch around and perform tasks. They call them zombi, or some
such bullshit.
Squinting, I can
see make out their road-gang a bit closer now. They all look like zombies
out of a Wellman story from Weird Tales. They're all of them Negroes,
true enough, only I never saw a Negro look so gray without he was dead,
and unshriven, left in the street after a shootout or a razor fight where
every drop of fine black blood had run from his cooling clay and into
the gutter.
Yet all of these
swing hammers, hoist wood and haul those mysterious yellow-green bales
in, or the mysterious white ones out. The sweat on them looks like candlewax,
neither running nor pooling. Just there.
Through the weaving
conga lines of cadaverous critters who go until they drop, big white overseers
moved with electric bullhorns and cattle prods, all in stage-hand blacks.
Their mirthless yells are the loudest things of all.
"GRAB THAT PICK
THERE, BOI! WHY YOU COOPIN' ON THE JOB…" In between, the overseers laugh.
The wrong way, kind of screechy and giggly, like their own orders are
a farce. The heat and the wine make everything horrific and unreal.
The gray zombi
building the new railroad spur move in somnambulistic snakedance lines
around rusty, drippy cold-iron barrels sticking half-in and half-out of
new slit-trenches in the clay. Some kind of contained runoff from the
place where the brimstone comes from, I guess. The zombi all look
like they're barely out of breath, barely breathing for that matter.
The yelling overseers
sound like every boss I ever had, only… It's like they were talking to
meat. Whispering to horses. Training cats to walk in a straight line.
They do what they're paid to do, and beat whom they're paid to beat. But
behind it is… Something else. The brute mechanisms of Kraft-Ebbing and
the Marquis de Sade. I see… too far, the way I do, and choke for a moment.
The gun points back to me. Standoff.
"Whur…" Somewhere
in my pocket is that poke of Bull Durham tobacco. I'll find it. One day.
"Whur… ah … know … you… from…"
"Jesus." Flat Cap
sounds disgusted. "This corn-cracker got so drunk, he thought he was somebody.
Only---"
He chews his lip.
"You couldn't be… Naw. That little faggot's in Atlanta with the kid. Cloyd,
will you kindly escort him to the office? Boss Gus done said nobody in
or outta the job site no matter what."
"No matter what."
Cloyd of the pillow-tick cap agrees.
It might not be
gentlemanly or honorable, but I groggily, bilaterally reassess my options
and do the only sensible thing. My turnip sack lies within easy reach.
Before Cloyd has time to figure out what I'm up to, I bend down, grab
it, and stumble away as fast as my busted brogans will carry me.
By the time Cloyd's
aim actually lands the rocksalt anywhere near my ass, it's only a few
pellets. And drunk or not, neither of them can keep up with a former defensive
lineman.
*
Two
hours later, I'm at least vaguely sober enough to wonder if any of it
had actually happened. Drinking like a horse from a clear-running stream
on the way helped some, and my shirt-pocketful of willow withes are getting
gnawed down to nubs. But now I have a whole new cross to bear.
By this point, there
are no more peanuts growing in the fields. Only tall, lush plants with
leaves that look so fat and pithy you just want to rip them right off
the stalk and chew. Folks around Hogansville don't get too creative naming
landmarks. At the first crossroads I passed, an old metal sign reared
tall and white against the merciless sky:
TOBACCO
ROAD.
I'm
still good and drunk, and there's a third of a bottle left to keep that
going until I can steal some of Pappy's shine. No sense in a hangover
before the morning.
I know this place
too well, but I can't hold back, not if my own life was the prize. There
was my original reason for paying call, true. But now there's something
else I never dared to consider sober, something I hate myself for and
can't quit fixating on.
Someone,
that is.Maybe I'll get extra-lucky, and neither of the folks will be home.
Even from the sandhill
two miles out, four or five of Jeter's little cracker spawn from one wife
or another watch me from the yard like they want the turnips. And then
there's her.
Her, her, her, who
knew everything about twenty-one before she ever made twelve. I always
used to wonder if I'd picked the wrong daughter, then cursed myself for
a sinner every time. Family reunions are no place to chat up girls, especially
not with a gold band on my third left (in theory, before my Trojan beauty
and I had to hock ours for food.)
But good God almighty,
the girl looks like DaVinci's La Gioconda, a hillbilly Mona Lisa
out there barefoot in the mud of the dooryard with her skirts hiked up
to an absolutely improprietous degree stomping in the puddles with her
little blonde ringleted half-sister Medea.
Middy's sitting
down and building a mud-pie, looking up into Ellie Mae's inscrutable eyes
with the awe of an acolyte.They exchange a word or two more. Then dark
little seventeen-year-old Ellie Mae clambers up the trunk of the big mimosa
tree in the front yard and out onto the thickest branch, looking off into
the distance. At me. Or so it seems.
Half a mile from
the house, I leave the road and circle the old man's fields, taking the
long way around the barn, stopping to collect my wits.
I have a lot on
my mind. The ball's entirely in my court now. Before this afternoon, one
fact and one fact only had shaped my original destination: Helen won't
talk to me.
She gets like that
sometimes, when I'm writing. The writing sets me free, and makes me feel
like a man. I don't have to answer to her then, for my dreamer
nature she calls lazy and shiftless because she's scared of the breadline
herself and had her own dreams ground out by Jeter a long time ago. Even
from the first, when I went off to write she was still young enough to
think I was trying to shut her out.
It's not that she
can't bring herself to talk to me, after we fight. She just doesn't want
to dignify me with a response. That takes a lot of work to get around.
And a lot of help.
This time, though,
she changed the locks on every door in our house. While I was out, mind
you. Even a fight would have been better than that.
It was a congenital
thing, with her. The apple didn't fall too far from the tree. Helen's
Mama knows from her own experience what to do when she stays apart from
me and keeps her mouth closed. Even if Ma Lannigan can only get a 'Yes'
or a 'No' out of her, sometimes that's enough. Jeter knows all about it,
too. But there's no talking to the old bastard, most of the time.
Of course, the Lannigans
don't have a telephone. Why would they? I was out of work and in the doghouse.
Thus, the walk. I just had no idea it would come with a detour through
Hell. Deep down, especially being still drunk, my ulterior motive for
the visit was just to see Ellie Mae climb that tree.
Ruminating, I roll
a smoke and uncork the jug again, wondering why it is that Man's Ruin
always tastes as good as the first bite of a Winesap apple. Halfway through
the cigarette, the world starts spinning again, and there's that damn
seashell wind in my ears. God damn it, I have time to think, then---
*
I
set the empty bottle down on the washbasin. My head is roaring and rushing.
I can barely hear myself.
"Lean up on that
door so no one walks in."
Ellie Mae obliges
and kisses me hard, even hitching up one strong young tomboy leg around
my lower back when she does. I poke her with my thumb, nodding my head,
and lift her dress high enough to look for something pink. She's wearing
ten-cents-a-yard cotton mill-end underclothes. Under my thumb, they seem
to evaporate.
This is the kind
of thing that boys brag to each other about on the porch. This is raw
and real. And somehow, it's happening to me.
Her hair is very
black, her skin all white phosphorous in the gloom. This all feels pre-ordained,
mechanical, compulsive. My young sister-in-law acts like she's speaking
a part in a school pageant. But underneath it is her wet, rapacious lust
I barely knew was there, a soul-deep hunger for things she couldn't raise
nor buy.
Out of nowhere,
she breaks off. "You're shakin'." she told me. " You skurt?"
"Naw." It's the
truth. I just have the shakes from all that wine on such a hot day. And.
"Just saw somethin' bad, earlier."
I can't stop thinking
about that weird trough in the earth where the truck stopped. I can still
smell the poison, and hear the bullhorns of the overseers. I can still
see the flat, dead eyes of the road-gang. And damn it all to hell, I still
can't get that Jimmie Rodgers song out of my head.
"Some kinda new
railroad bein' built." I hear myself say. "South of here. I was in where
they're puttin' it through, and…"
She's riveted. I
think. I go for broke.
"None of the road-gang
are real convicts. They all been… shanghaied. Had…stuff done to 'em. Foreman's
a big guy, got a scar like this." I sketch the shape of a question mark
on the left side of my head.
Ellie Mae nods sagely.
Everything else is instantly put aside for her.
"That's Dudey. He
went to work for Boss Gus. They out there makin' co-caine, now't'y'cain't
get it at the drugstore no more. Said he already kilt him two G-men and
a revenuer."
"Dudey." My knees
turn to India-rubber. My jaw doesn't work. "Oh, fuck." The word's out
before I have time to care. "Oh, fuck. I knew he looked familiar.
Your baby brother got big."
"Uh-huh." I don't
know why her eyes were glowing when she says that. Nor do I want to. "We
cain't…" She hesitates. "We cain't talk about it." Clearly, she wants
to use her mouth another way.
"You got the old
devil in you," I tell her a moment later. Now I'm getting hungry, too,
and she's just about to oblige.
"So do you." She
takes me out of her mouth and giggles, licking me up and down like I'm
an all-day sucker. "You got three kids of your own. Why you got to come
take after me?"
I'm still spinning."I
just can't tan that patch of hide. I give Helen everything. Sorta gets
me all crazy. I need her as bad as any man ever needed a woman."
Ellie Mae's voice
gets low and smoky. "Oh, I like that. I---" Then the bathroom door is
kicked in.
I have time to do
no more than throw up an arm. "What the hell'd I just see?" I scream at
Dudey. "Your men want to point a damn gun at me, you---"
"You ain't seen
shit!" Dudey yells back, trying to pull my legs out from under me. He
stinks like a polecat marinated in beer, and looked like he fell from
the ugly star and made a crater when he hit the Earth. Ellie Mae screams
and runs out of the bathroom half-unclad. Dudey swings at me and misses.
I circle him defensively, barking one shin on the washtub and not even
feeling it. He snarls.
"Ground's poison
out there! They ain't but niggers, anyway! We fixed their heads with icepicks,
so they won't tell what goes on down to---"
I duck behind him
and bust the empty wine bottle over his head. Dudey goes down and doesn't
look like he wants up.
"Now you match!"
I snarl, and spit on him. "You got you a scar on both sides!
*
Helen told me I was the luckiest son of a bitch alive when she came down
and bailed me out of the Hogansville jail house. Dudey never worked again.
No more was said on the matter. My baby boy cried with delight when I
got home. I sang him to sleep, and stayed home 'till he and his sisters
were grown and gone.
It's been many years.
I've never written about this until now. Not directly. The nest has long
been empty.The children have gone their own ways. Helen and I are divorced
these days, and old.
I haven't been back
to see the in-laws. Nor do I have any plans down that old tobacco road.
Ellie Mae's had three kids since she was seventeen. One of them might
or might not be mine. I send them Christmas cards. And checks.
Well, checks especially
since the movie version of my book came out, such as it was. Gene Tierney
played Ellie Mae. El seemed pleased, but never really said.
Even now, the great
State of Georgia still affirms to me that the railroad spur out by Jeter
Lannigan's wonderful one-acre farm was begun by party or parties unknown,
and abandoned without cause before they found out. That's their story,
and they're sticking to it. In a few years when the right people die,
they'll leak the truth.
I hope I'll still
be alive when they do. I'd really like to hear it. So would the families
of a lot of black men who turned up missing out that way in that antique
summer of 1930.
And I've been looking
for Boss Gus ever since.
I've got a load
of rocksalt for him.
