The Long Home (11 page)

The old man roused from whatever state of halfsleep he habited and watched the wash of light across the faded wallpaper, arose and rested on his elbows till the light faded, the wall momentarily disappearing and then regaining visibility in the moonlight. For a moment he had thought the car was coming here, for a moment past and present had merged and he was unable to tell one from the other, dream from reality. Old days of crisis in the night, the knock at the door, the light at the window. Then he recognized the deepthroated roar of the Packard’s muffler and lay back listening to it fade away.

The town was in restless slumber as well but there was an allnight cabstand out of which a man named Wolf de Vries ran a bootlegging establishment and an almost perpetual poker game. Hardin parked in front of the cabstand and cut the lights and switch. He went in the front and passed by a desk where a woman slept with her mouth open and her head pillowed against a telephone and down a narrow hall to a locked green door. He knocked.

“Who is it?”

“Dallas Hardin.”

After a moment the door opened a crack and a face studied him. The door opened wider. Stale blue smoke boiled out and Hardin coughed. He fanned the air wildly. “Jesus Christ,” he said. “They goin to find ever one of you sots in here smothered to death some mornin. Does this place not have a winder?”

“Deal Hardin in,” de Vries called. De Vries was a quick little man with a slick, evasive face like a failed politician’s. “His money’s as good as anybody else’s”

Hardin studied the men circling the green baize table. “Looks like you got a full set of fools without me.”

De Vries had noticed the blood drying at Hardin’s temple. “What the hell happened to you? You been sorting cats?”

“No.” Hardin didn’t smile. “You know where a feller name of Blackstock lives? Runs a drygood store.”

“Charles Blackstock? Sure. West Fourth Street, right behind the school. Why?”

“I got him out in the car. Him and some whitecaps or Kluxers or some damn thing come down to the house to teach me a lesson.”

“Is he dead?”

“No, but he may have wished he was a time or two.”

The men at the table arose and followed Hardin back through the cabstand. The woman had awakened and her face wore a stunned, vapid look as if she did not know where she was, or care.

Blackstock was conscious as well. He stirred on the back floorboard, said something unintelligible. His eyes stared at the faces ringing the windows of the Packard but did not remark them. He flung an arm across his face as if the light bothered him. His trouserleg from the knee down was saturated with coagulating blood.

“Shitfire,” de Vries said. “You better get him to a hospital fore you’re lookin a murder charge in the face.”

Hardin got behind the wheel, cranked the engine. “By the way,” he said, “you didn’t by any chance know anything about this, did you? Or know anybody else who might be in on it?”

“Hell no, Hardin. They may hit me next.”

“No. It was me they wanted.”

The man remained conscious all the way to his house, mumbling something incoherent, prayer, blasphemy, benediction. When Hardin opened the door and laid a hand on either side of his shirtfront the eyes opened and when Hardin jerked as hard as he could the face blanched lifeless and the eyes rolled back and he went to sleep again. Hardin laid him in the dewy grass and sat down breathing hard. As he arose a black dog loped around the corner of the house, paused, its hackles rising. It growled deep in its throat.

Hardin had the pocketknife out. “Try it if you feel lucky,” he told the dog. The dog hushed and then dropped to its belly and began to inch along the ground toward the wounded man.

Hardin got back in the car and blew the horn. The dog turned and lay watching him across the fallen man. Hardin lit a cigarette with the gold lighter, turned to study the house. It was silent and dark. He blew the horn again, longer, puffed the cigarette, his image reflected back by the windshield fiercely orange, a curious fiery face with black recesses for eyes.

The porchlight came on. The door opened and a woman stood under the lightbulb tying the belt of a yellow robe. She raised a hand to her face and stood staring at the crumpled man on the lawn. She opened her mouth to speak but the Packard abruptly cut off whatever she said. Hardin glanced back once and she was running down the walk.

Sometime after four o’clock in the morning William Tell Oliver was awakened again, this time by a heavy determined pounding at the door. He lay for a sleepy minute listening to it, perhaps thinking that if he ignored it it would go away. It did not. It intensified and after a time a voice began to call, “Hey, hey.”

What on earth, the old man wondered. He got up slowly, began to pull on his pants. The voice kept calling. “All right, all right,” Oliver said. “I’m comin.” He took down the Browning over-and-under from the rack above the bed. He lit a lamp and with it in one hand the gun in the other crossed to the door. He leaned the gun against the wall and opened the door slightly.

The moon had set by now and the porch was in darkness, fainter darkness framing the bulk of the man standing before the door. The door opened wider, allowing the seepage of yellow light to spread, illuminating a tiredlooking man leaning against the doorjamb. He swayed slightly as if drunk or exhausted.

“What is it?” Oliver asked.

“Well, I’m in kind of a bind and I need some help. I need to get you to run me into town.”

“Have you got a stick?”

The man looked startled. “A stick? What kind of a stick?”

“Well, you wanted run to town. I shore ain’t got no automobile.”

“Shitfire.” When Oliver didn’t comment the man said, “I’m Cecil Blalock.”

“I know who you are. But I still ain’t got no way to town. What’s the trouble, ye car play out?”

“Yeah, and it’s a hell of a piece to town. Seems like I been wanderin around in the woods half the night.”

“Where’d ye have trouble?”

“Down by Hardin’s.”

“Why, Lord, that ain’t over a mile. It ortnt took but a few minutes to walk that.”

“Yeah. Well I might’ve got turned around or somethin. How about lettin me use your phone to call a cab?”

Oliver was silent a time. “I’m sorry,” he said at length. “I just ain’t bein no help at all. I ain’t got no telephone either.”

“Hellfire.” Blalock stood as if undecided what his next move should be. A cool wind blew across the porch, rustled through the leaves. The light wavered in the quaking globe, guttered, flared up. “Thanks anyway,” Blalock said. He descended the steps and crossed the yard toward the road. He was out of sight but Oliver could hear the walking. “Hey,” Oliver called. The steps ceased. “Ain’t no use wakin up them Winer folks. They ain’t got no car either.” There was no reply save the steps commencing again and after a moment he went back inside and closed the door.

Like aging birds aligned on a winter wire the row of old men sat before Sam Long’s cold stove and endlessly refought Hardin’s set-to with the whitecaps. On creaking Coke crates and upended cuts of wood they refurbished or delineated the story to its marrow according to their whims.

“I hear they takin his leg off,” Horace Hensley said. “What of it Hardin didn’t take off with that highpowered rifle.”

“Some say Hardin didn’t do it,” a man named Pulley said. “Blackstock hisself says he had a fight with a feller he caught ransacking his house.”

“A man tells a baldfaced lie like that I wouldn’t believe him if he was standin in Buffalo River and he told me his feet was wet.”

Sam Long dumped William Tell Oliver’s poke of ginseng onto the scale, watched intently the fluctuation of the needle. “I make it just under thirty-nine ounces, Mr. Oliver. You want it in cash or credit?”

“Well, I took me on a partner. You might ort to just let me have it in cash.”

“That must’ve been a purty good to-do, though,” Long said. He punched No Sale on the cash register and began to count bills onto Oliver’s palm. “Shoot Blackstock’s leg off and kill a Diamond-T truck. All in the same night. Well, I guess Blackstock was astin for it since he didn’t have no business down there. But that truck was just a innocent bystander.”

Horace Hensley had been listening in silence. “I’ll tell you what Hardin told me one time,” he finally said. “And it was the damnedest thing I ever heard tell of, I still don’t know if it was so or not. You never could tell when Hardin was tellin the truth and when he was talking just to hear hisself.

“It was right after he come to this part of the country. Back before Hovington died and right after Hardin moved in with Pearl. Times was tight then and by God I mean tight. They wadnt no soldiers blowin money nor judges birdhuntin with him nor none of these sharptittied Memphis whores down there. He wadnt drivin no Packard back then neither, all he had was an old Diamond-T truck and he won that off old man Pennington in a poker game.”

Pope raised the lid of the dead stove and spat into the ashes. “Which he probably rigged,” he said.

“Which he probably did,” Hensley agreed. “Anyway, somebody had busted his still up, just teetotally demolished it and busted all his whiskey, and he worked up some kind of deal with Homer McCandless over in Hickman County and bought a bunch of whiskey off of him. I don’t know how, he probably beat him, you know how slick he could talk. The hell of it was Hardin couldn’t drive a car. Here he was a grown man and he couldn’t even drive. Oh, he could I guess hold one in the road but nobody had never showed him the gears nor how to start and stop one. Course he can now he drives that Packard, but he couldn’t then. So he come to me.

“I didn’t want no part of him. He just didn’t look right to me. He looked like a feller who’d do anything and already had a start on all of it but drivin a car, but I had three kids contrary enough to want to eat ever day or two. And he laid a twenty-dollar bill on the table, I never will forget it. It looked as big as a bedsheet, and I believe I could have warmed my hands off of it. I got to thinkin about grocers.”

“Hovington had about five or six hundred pounds of cotton down there in a crib and we loaded it on that truck. He had some old sideboards he’d cobbled up. We headed out to Hickman County and got that whiskey, and I was on pins and needles all the way. I never fooled none with whiskey, didn’t even drink. I think that’s why he wanted me. He had the whiskey hid under that cotton and a tarpaulin stretched over it and lit out like we was headed to Lawrenceburg to the gin. Made it all the way back and turned down the Mormon Springs road and a rod in that old truck started knockin. I was wringin wet with sweat, and it October, I knowed we wadnt goin to make it. I knowed I’d be settin there in the middle of the road with fifty gallon of whiskey and a blowed-up truck and I’d done made up my mind to take to the bushes.

“Then to top it off the law stopped us. Amacher was hid out in a sideroad and he stopped us. I don’t know if he’d been watchin Hardin or not, I do know he didn’t have em bought off like he does now. Amacher come up and checked my license. Wanted to know where we was goin. ‘Just takin off cotton,’ I told him. ‘Takin it where?’ he ast. We was headed the wrong way and I hadn’t even thought of it. Then Hardin spoke up calm as you please. He told Amacher we was headed to Lawrenceburg and the truck started tearing up and we come back.

“Amacher made me crank it up. It sounded like a cement mixer with a armful of brick throwed in it. Amacher just nodded and waved us on.

“Anyway, we got there and got the whiskey unloaded. Hardin took him a little drink and got to braggin. Spread hisself a little bit. That’s when he said what I started out to tell you that was the damnedest thing I ever heard of. He said he was a walkin miracle, that nothin couldn’t ever happen to him cause the worst already had. He said he was a walkin dead man.

“He told me he was born in a casket. Said his mama was killed when a horse run off with a buggy and throwed her out and broke her neck. They had her laid out and everthing and was preachin her funeral, and in a way I guess his too, when they heard a baby squallin. Folk didn’t know what on earth to do. Some just jumped up and took off runnin out of the church. Some of the women finally got up and looked. Godamighty. He was down in her clothes. He’d crawled out or got jarred out by them handlin the casket or somethin. Anyway there he was.”

“Not that I believe any of this horseshit for a minute,” Sam Long said. “But that’s the strongest argument for embalmin I ever heard. She’d a been embalmed he never would’ve been.”

“It just sounds like a damn lie to me,” a man named Pope said.

“I don’t know. I’ve thought about it a lot and I don’t know why a man would make up a tale like that to tell on hisself. But I don’t know why he’d tell it if it was the truth either.”

“Hardin never done nothin without a reason.”

“Yeah. It makes you think though. This ain’t nothin against religion but looky here. It looks like somebody slipped up and let him get started in the first place and then seen what they done. They tried to wipe out that mistake with anothern and let the cagey son of a bitch slip through anyway. I guess when they seen how set on gettin into this world he was they just throwed up their hands and said let him go.”

The car blew one peremptory blast of its horn but by the time it did Winer had already opened the door and stepped onto the porch. Dusk was deepening, the western sky beyond the darkling stubbed fields mottled with bloody red where the day’s light was draining off the rim of the world.

“What say, Winer?” The Packard sat gleaming dully in the yard.

“Hidy.”

“You got a minute? I got a little business I need to talk with you.”

“I reckon so.”

Winer approached the car. Hardin cut the switch and the lights and swung the door open a little way though he made no move to get out. He sat facing Winer with his arms on the door panel, chin resting on his forearm. “Come on up, boy. I reckon everbody’s peaceable.”

Winer thought the face curiously asymmetrical: the nose had been broken and healed crooked, tipped slightly toward the left side of his face. The right side of the face was lanternjawed, the cheek perpetually swollen. There was an imbalance to the jaws as if God Almighty had laid a hand on either side of the face, slipped one side a notch up and the other a notch down. The eyes were pale yellow, some peculiarity about the pupils. The eyes were goatlike. The left lid drooped sleepily as if his guard never dropped, as if one eye must watch while the other rested.