and smoothed his hair.
“Say,” he said. There was something he wanted to tell. He looked at the ground. “Ever been West?”
It was a story of California in the thirties. There was a whole bunch of them going from town to town, looking for work. One day they came to a place, he forgot the name, and went into some little restaurant. You could get a whole meal for thirty cents in those days, but when they came to pay the check, the owner told them it would cost a dollar fifty each. If they didn’t like it, he said, there was the state police just down the street. Afterward Harry walked over to the barbershop—he looked like that musician, he had so much hair. The barber put the sheet around him. Haircut, Harry told him. Then, hey, wait a minute, how much will it be? The barber had the scissors in his hand. I see you been eating over to the Greek’s, he said.
He laughed a little, almost shyly. He glanced at Billy, his long teeth showed. They were his own. Billy was buttoning his shirt.
It was hot in the evening. The hottest summer in years, everyone said, the hottest ever. At Gerhart’s they stood around in big, dusty shoes.
“Shit, it’s hot,” they told each other.
“Can’t get much hotter.”
“What’ll it be, then?” Gerhart would ask. His idiot son was rinsing glasses.
“Beer.”
“Hot enough for you?” Gerhart said as he served it.
They stood at the bar, their arms covered with dust. Across the street was the movie house. Up toward the pass, the sand and gravel pit. There was ranching all around, a macadam plant, men like Wayne Garrich who hardly spoke at all, the bitterness had penetrated to the bone. They were deliberate, their habits were polished smooth. They looked out through the big, storelike windows.
“There’s Billy.”
“Yeah, that’s him.”
“Well, what do you think?” They laid out phrases in low voices, like bets. Their arms were big as firewood on the bar. “Is he going to it or coming from it?”
The foundation was finished at the beginning of September. There was a little sand where the pile had been, a few specks of gravel. The nights were already cold, the first emptiness of winter, not a light on in town. The trees seemed silent, subdued. They would begin to turn suddenly, the big ones going last.
Harry died about three in the morning. He had been leaning on the cart in the supermarket, behind the stacks, struggling for breath. He tried to drink some tea. He sat in his chair. He was between sleep and waking, the kitchen light was on. Suddenly he felt a terrible, a bursting pain. His mouth fell open, his lips were dry.
He left very little, a few clothes, the Chevrolet filled with tools. Everything seemed lifeless and drab. The handle of his hammer was smooth. He had worked all over, built ships in Galveston during the war. There were photographs when he was twenty, the same hooked nose, the hard, country face. He looked like a pharaoh there in the funeral home. They had folded his hands. His cheeks were sunken, his eyelids like paper.
Billy Amstel went to Mexico in a car he and Alma bought for a hundred dollars. They agreed to share expenses. The sun polished the windshield in which they sat going southward. They told each other stories of their life.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
JAMES SALTER is the author of the novels
THE MODERN LIBRARY EDITORIAL BOARD
Maya Angelou
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A. S. Byatt
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Caleb Carr
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Christopher Cerf
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Harold Evans
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Charles Frazier
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Vartan Gregorian
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Jessica Hagedorn
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Richard Howard
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Charles Johnson
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Jon Krakauer
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Edmund Morris
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Azar Nafisi
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Joyce Carol Oates
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Elaine Pagels
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John Richardson
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Salman Rushdie
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Oliver Sacks
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Carolyn See
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Gore Vidal
ALSO BY JAMES SALTER
