Stories of Breece D'J Pancake (19 page)

Old Gerlock says, “Otto.”

“Good to see you sir.” He feels heavy, stupid, and bends to pet Sheila’s dog.

“That’s a sugar-dog,” Old Gerlock says. “Worthless mutt.”

Ottie hears Sheila laugh, but deeper than he remembers. Her laugh was high then, and the old woman worried them around the porch, saying, “Please don’t, honey. A thing alive can feel.” But Sheila held her paper-cone torch to another nest, careful to keep flames and falling wasps from her hand. She balanced on the banister, held the brace, and he saw the curve of a beginning breast crease her shirt. Then he looked to Bus, knew Bus had seen it too. He stops petting Sheila’s dog, and straightens.

The old man paws his shoulder. “Otto, you always got a place here, but when Buster comes, you help make him feel at home.”

“Yessir.” Bus’s face comes back to Ottie: a rage gone beyond fear—the thought almost makes him know. “I hadn’t figured he’d be here.”

“Soon enough. You don’t recollect nothing of what happened?”

“Nosir. Just me and Sheila fishing and Bus coming to say he wants me to ride with him and listen for a noise.”

“Not even after all these years?”

Sheila hugs the old man with one arm. “Dad, time just makes it go inside. Ottie won’t ever know.”

Old Gerlock shuffles and pshaws: “I just figured…”

The old woman comes out, a dish towel in her hand, and Ottie watches her gasp to keep down sobs. “Otto, don’t you take no disgrace at Bus coming here. Wickedness brung him. Pure-T devilment.”

The old man looks hard at her, then to Sheila and Ottie, and his face goes gray-blue with blood. “Sheila, take him yonder to see my new dog—only don’t be sugaring over her, now, you can’t do such to a hunting dog.”

Sheila and Ottie go down the steps, take the clay path to the barn. Ottie squints in the coarse sun. Along low slopes of parched hills, fingers of green twist into gullies where water still hides. Looking back, he sees the old man go inside, but the old woman stands alone, with hands over her eyes.

“This is a hell of a game,” Sheila says. “They wasn’t going to bring Bus. Then Dad hears you’re here—up and calls them, says, ‘Bring Buster hell or high water.’ ”

“Don’t matter. Just makes me feel tired, sort of.”

She takes his hand. “Why’d you never come in before?”

“Never been back this way. Had to get out sooner or later. I don’t see what made you stay.”

“No place to go but here. You changed, Ottie. You used to be rough as a damn cob, but you’re quiet. Moody quiet the way Bus was.”

He squints harder. “What about you?”

“Nothing much happens here. Lots happens to you with all your shifting around. Don’t that ever bother you?”

He laughs short and low. “You-all pity me my ways, don’t you? Only I’m better off—ain’t a thing here to change a one of you.”

“Ain’t nothing to make us any worse off, if that’s what you’re after.”

She looks away from him, and her frizzy hair, faded with the long years, hides her face. At sixteen she was nothing to look at, and he has always dreamed her as looking better. Now he sees her an old maid in a little town, and knows her bitterness.

“This is my last haul anyplace,” he says, waits until she looks at him. “I’m getting me a regular job with regular guys. I’m blacklisted, so I can’t drive union, but I know a place in Chicago that rebuilds rigs…”

“You won’t stick, Ottie. You don’t know what it is to stay in a place, and there ain’t any place you’ll stick.”

He has half hoped, kept the hope just a picture of thought, a thought of sending Sheila the fare and working regular hours. Now he puts it away, seeing too soon how dim it gets.

He looks into the pen. Old Gerlock’s dog is a square-headed hound, and Ottie knows to pet her means nothing. She stares at them blankly, beats her tail in the dusty shadow of her house. Blue-green flies hum her, but she does not snap them the way Beagle had. Got
something, something to show

When they were boys, he and Bus chopped brush along the fence all that day. Toward dusk, with chimney swifts clouding the sky, they cut into the scattered bones of a white-tailed buck—the yellowed ribs still patchy with leathered meat. Bleached antlers clung to the skull.

Bus up and grabbed the skull as Ottie leaned for it. “Lookee, I bet it was killed by Injuns.”

Ottie pulled at an antler until Bus let loose, then chucked the skull into thick green woods. “Hell, them’s common as sin.” He hooked brush again, stood straight only to watch when Beagle scared up a rabbit, set a sight-chase. He saw Bus far behind him, staring into meshed underbrush. The woods were already dark.

Bus was half crying. “I would of made me a collection like yours.”

“Beagle jumped another one,” Ottie said. He went back to work, heard Bus whipping with his sickle to catch the pace.

Bus said, “I don’t like Beagle.”

A bottle fly buzzes Ottie’s eyes, and he fans it away, watches Sheila’s dog sniff the wire-edged pen. The dog tries to jump over, and Sheila catches his collar.

Ottie says, “Boy and a girl.”

“Not this one. He’s been fixed.”

“Yeah, but they still know what to do.” He looks at ridges made brown fire by sun, and thinks back to a boy with mouse bones, a hollow tree, a beagle puppy.

A triangle rings up from the backyard, and Ottie goes with Sheila around the barn; but looking up, he sees them wheel Bus into the shade of a catalpa. Sheila gives Ottie a hasty, worrisome glance, and Ottie walks slowly to Bus, tries to see each day of the hidden time, but only sees the way Bus is now. Bus sits crooked to one side, his hands bone-bunches in his lap, head bending. He is pale, limp, and his face is plaster-quiet. Ottie smells a stink, and knows it is from the bags hanging on the chair.

“Here’s Ottie,” says Bus’s mother. She leans over the chair. “You know Ottie.”

Bus looks up at her, and his face wrenches tight. He rocks side to side in his chair. “Cig’ret’.” In the shadow of the tree, blue veins show through his skin. A tube runs yellow from his crotch, and he lifts it, drains it into its bag.

“Oh, honey, you smoke so much.” She looks at Ottie. “His Uncle George wants him to stop, but it’s the only thing he gets any pleasure from.”

Ottie shrugs.

“Here’s Ottie.”

Ottie squats, sticks out his hand. “Hey, Bus.”

Bus takes the hand, then growls up at his mother. “Cig’ret’.” He shows his teeth.

Ottie gives him a Pall Mall, lights it. A curl of smoke wisps Bus’s eyes, and he blinks once, slowly. Pieces of tobacco cling to his gray lips, and he spits weakly at them. The woman’s bare hand wipes her boy’s chin. Ottie glances from the grass to Bus’s face, but all the days of waiting are not there, only a calm boy-smile. Ottie scratches at his scar, and his hand smells of Bus’s—the smell of baby powder and bedsore salve.

“Buster, it’s Ottie,” she says again.

“Otto.” On the porch, the old man holds his Bible against his chest, one finger parting the leaves.

Ottie stands. “Yessir?”

“Get the plow from the toolshed yonder.”

On the path to the shed, a strangeness creeps through him: he remembers walking this way—nights, years ago—and Bus yelling, “I’m going to show you something, Ottie.” Bus grinned, made Beagle dance on his hind legs by holding back the collar. Then Bus shoved hard with his sickle blade, and Beagle stumbled, coughing, into a corner. First his bandy legs folded, then he fell to his side, did not breathe, and his flanks filled, swelled. Ottie found no blood, only the pink-lipped wound in one dimple of Beagle’s chest. Then he carried the dog toward dark hills.

In the hot shed, he gathers himself and finds the plow. With its handles and traces rotted away, the blade seems something from an unreal time, and his fingers track warm metal now pitted with rust. The Gerlocks always tell that this plow was first to break the bottoms of their valley, and Ottie wonders what it means or if they just made it up.

Sawdust falls into his eyes and he steps back, looks to the ceiling; a bumblebee drills the rafters. The joists are spotted where Old Gerlock has daubed other holes with axle grease. Still, the bee drills. Ottie dwells on Sheila’s laugh, a laugh high and happy at burning wasps. He remembers the nest in her hand, the fresh smile on her face, and the wasp worms popping from their paper cells under her fingertips.

He carries the single-blade to the porch, puts it on the banister, and brushes at the rusty streaks on his good shirt, smears brownish dust into the threads. He goes to the yard’s edge, away. Sheila comes to stand with him, and he feels her eyes on him from the side, feels her fingers pressing inside his forearm.

On the porch, the old man preaches from his Bible, and his voice is a wind and whisper; the words of his god have the forgotten colors of another time. As the gathered families listen, Ottie watches them, their clothes fitting so well, and he knows the old man is the only Bible-beater among them. He hears false power in the preacher’s voice, sees outsiders pretending. Old fool, he thinks, new fools are here to take your place.

Old Gerlock shouts to the hills: “For if they do these things in a green tree, what shall be done in the dry?”

Heads bow to the prayer, the unfixed wish, the hope offered up, and every head turns to Bus.

“Godspeed the plow,” they say.

A line forms for supper, and Ottie sees the folding table set for Bus, a special table alone, and he knows Bus has no right—nobody has any right. They should all eat alone, all with no past, no life here.

On another table sit foods long forgotten: pinto beans, fried tomatoes, chowchow relish. He is hungry and keeps close behind Sheila, fills his plate, sits with her where he can see Bus. Old Gerlock wanders to their table, rests skinny arms by his plate as he prays to himself. Sheila elbows Ottie, jerks her head toward her father, and her mouth stretches out to a grin. Ottie shrugs, eats, watches Bus’s mother strip chicken and spoon it to her boy.

The old man looks up, blends his food. “Is it a good life, the way you live?”

Ottie puts down his fork the way the old woman taught him. “It keeps me busy enough.”

“Must help you forget, I figure.”

“Yessir. There’s mistreatment galore from you I don’t recollect.”

Sheila takes Ottie’s hand. “Stop it, you two.”

The old man’s lips go pale with a smile. “Just what happened to wreck that car, Otto?”

A dull flash passes over him; a sickness and a pain streaming from his neck down his back. Beyond the old man sits Bus—Bus with eyes of hard sadness. Ottie knows. “We been through that before.”

Sheila squeezes his hand. “Goddamn, let it alone.”

The old man draws to hit her, and her head turns.

Ottie yells, “Hit
me.
”

Old Gerlock drops his hand. “No, you have got your suffering—just like her.” He eats, does not look up.

Bus’s eyes fix Ottie with a helpless gaze, but his lips skin back in rage. He sits straight in his chair, one hand waving away the spoon of chicken. He moans, “Ot’ie.”

Sheila takes Ottie’s arm. “C’mon, that’s enough.”

He shakes her off, walks under the waning shade of the catalpa, and bends over Bus. He draws his face close, and smells the smoked oil of Bus’s skin.

Bus cries, shakes his head, “Ot’ie.”

He whispers, tries to hiss, “Bus.”

“Ot’ie.”

With the lumped knuckles of Bus’s hand, he saw the far-hidden minutes of racing along the Pike. He saw Bus’s face go stiff to fight, saw the sneer before that hand twisted the wheel a full turn and metal scraped and warped against bridge sides.
Show you, you got some
Ottie looks to the hills: in their hollows were outcrops, shallow caves where he hid with leaf-bedding and fire pit, where he waited out the night beside Beagle’s cool carcass.

He squats, puts his hand on Bus’s shoulder. “Bus?”

Bus blinks, bows his head.

Standing, Ottie sees the families staring, and he goes from the yard into open, brown bottoms. Sheila follows, catches his hand to slow him. He curves uphill to the orchard, stops at its crest. Far below are black splotches of Two-Mile Creek showing between patches of trees, the only green spreading slowly out from the marshy banks.

He remembers standing in that creek with Old Gerlock. He almost knew again the cool sweep against his knees, felt the hand cover his face, then the dipping into a sudden rush. Only that once he prayed; asked to stay, always live here. Sheila’s arms go around his waist.

The ground is thick with fruit: some ripe, some rotten, some blown by yellow jackets. Ottie pulls a knotted apple, bites into dry meal. Even the pulp has no taste, and he sees the trees need pruning. He tosses the fruit away. “We used to cut props for the branches.”

“Mom worked me all week making apple butter, but it’s been a while.” She snorts a small laugh, holds the back of her hand to her forehead, mocks: “Oh, dear. What
shall
we do in the dry?”

“Blow away, I guess.”

“Yes,” she says, pulls on him. “Asses to asses and bust to bust.”

Ottie feels too close, lets go, and watches as she picks up something, holds it out to him. It is the pale blue half of a robin’s egg left from the spring.