roadway ascended, and he could see all there was left of the El Patio Club beerjoint. He went on up an embankment through sere tilted weeds, then the weeds fell away and there was the old parking lot of cracked paving and the four stucco walls still blackened by ancient smoke beyond a row of Lombardy poplars planted like a curious harp of the winds. Past the walls halflost in saplings two privies still faintly marked His and Hers.
The parking lot was encysted with ancient bottlecaps, arcane and extinct brands of beer like words in a foreign language. He hunkered on the crumbling paving and took out a pipe homecarved from briar root and stuffed the bowl with roughcut tobacco. He struck a match on a thumbnail and lit the pipe. He studied the El Patio through the shifting blue smoke.
All so long ago. The old man from his house used to hear the cries of revelry. Love or what passed for it in these regions, old rivalries brought to fruition. The music from their dances, like dispatches from a world he’d forsaken or it him. Cars coming and going at all hours of the night, fullthroated mufflers breaking on the switchback, motors opening up onthe stretch like racehorses getting their second wind. Laughter sharp and brittle as broken glass used to drift down through the trees. Laughter from women now old as he was, or dead, twenty-five forever and ever.
She came easing into the room with her slippers in her hand. The room dark, all the light there was moonlight, oblique and deceptive through the windowglass. When he spoke, he startled her so she dropped a shoe, then she recovered and her hands were at her hair, taking it down.
I thought I told you to stay away from that place.
Well. Maybe you did. I forget just now.
He could smell whiskey in the room. I meant what I said.
It doesn’t matter anyhow. Nobody gets to say what anybody else can do or can’t do. Nobody owns anybody else. They turned the slaves loose a long time ago.
Then she’d come in later and she’d come in later and one night she didn’t come in at all. Like some wild thing he’d tamed and chanced letting loose and lost a little at a time. He awoke stiff and sore in the rocking chair. As cold and bleak a dawn as he’d ever known washing the windows. He never saw her again. She was a page torn from a calendar, a year folded neatly and laid aside in some place you never look. Her name on his tongue was dry as ashes, bitter as quinine.
He knocked the pipe out and stood up and approached the building. A blackened and unshapen ruin. It was here she’dtaken up with Hankins. Here Hankins had sat on the last day of his life drinking boilermakers and getting up his nerve to come up the hollow and get the bedstead or kill him. He hadn’t known it but he was getting up his nerve to die.
He turned away. Old memories had lost the sting of pain and it was the loss of feeling he mourned more than anything else. It was all so long ago and might have been something that happened to somebody else, might have been some old story in a yellowed newspaper.
He went back down into the woods from the other side of the parking lot. There was a footpath here the old man had worn himself down through the years and he followed it through the woods directly opposing the way he’d followed it a lifetime ago in the dead of a Sunday night, leant slightly with the weight of a five-gallon bucket of kerosene, midnight visitor bearing the gift of fire.
He didn’t find the goats that morning and he decided to go out again after dinner. When he got back to the house it was approaching midmorning and there was a thin young man sitting on the edge of his porch idly drawing patterns in the dirt between his feet with a riflestock.
Hidy, the boy said.
The old man hadn’t been surprised in a lot of years and finding company on his front porch didn’t surprise him now.
How do, the old man said. Warmin up some, ain’t it?
Aren’t you Mr. Bookbinder?
I’m Hollis Bookbinder. I ain’t never been Mistered too much. Who might you be?
My name’s Tyler. I heard your goatbells in the night. You got a lot of them?
They’s several. I don’t know exactly how many. Ain’t run acensus on em lately. They a right smart of company.
You seen a man named Granville Sutter come through here?
No. Was I supposed to of?
I don’t know. I just wondered.
Was you huntin him?
No. I’m pretty sure he’s hunting me, though. Do you know him?
I know him well enough to stay wide of him. That’s a right nice rifle you got there.
Thanks. My granddaddy gave it to me.
Winchester lever action with that octagon barrel. You don’t see many of em, but what you do generally shoots true.
The old man had climbed the porch steps, and now he opened the screendoor. I ain’t had the rest of my mornin coffee. How about you?
I didn’t have any at all.
Then I reckon you ready for some. He disappeared into the house, and Tyler could hear the rattle of pans somewhere inside. He looked about. The house was set on the side of a hill, and the yard sloped away into the woods. The shadow of a cloud went across the sunlit treetops like smoke. Tyler couldn’t see as far as he would have liked, and he wondered where Sutter was.
The coffee when the old man brought it in a delicate china cup was opaque and dark and so strong it almost required chewing. The boy sipped it cautiously and watched the line of woods where the sun made moving shadows.
Sutter got it in for ye, has he?
I reckon. He tried to kill me.
It ain’t none of my business, but what did yins have yourfallin out about?
Well. It sort of come up about my sister. We got into it over her. He fell silent and sat staring at the ground, and his face was bleak with some grief he didn’t name.
And you took to the deep pineys. I would of thought this was somethin for the law to handle. I was never one to run overquick to em, but they get paid for protectin folks can’t protect themselves.
I can protect myself. I just don’t want to kill him unless I have to. Besides, I’ve been to the law. They never paid me any mind. Somebody told me there’s a sheriff in Ackerman’s Field supposed to be an honest man. Bellwether. You know him?
I know of him. He’s got the name of bein a pretty straight law. There’s a lot of these laws around here their badge just guarantees they can do their meanness and get away with it.
The cell door clanged hollowly behind him. He followed the jailer down a steep stairwell to a green room where folk sat about drinking coffee and pretending they were working. A deputy unlocked a locker and took out a pocketknife and a wallet and a cigarette lighter and handed them to him.
Next time you want to bust up a bar, do it in somebody else’s county, he said.
Bookbinder was going through his wallet. Now wait a goddamned minute, he said. I had sixty dollars in this billfold.
Everyone was watching him. Bland eyes out of calm faces.
Chief? the deputy said. A heavyset man behind a desk scratched his sandy head. He rummaged about looking for Bookbinder’s papers.
One pocketknife, he read. One Zippo cigarette lighter. One black cowhide wallet. Nothing about contents. You was charged with a public drunk. You sure you had any money left?
I wadn’t drunk. And I know goddamned well I had it.
All right, Mr.-he glanced down at the report-Bookbinder. There must of been some kind of a mistake. Wallace, take him back to his cell till all this confusion’s cleared up.
Let’s go, Wallace said.
Bookbinder didn’t move. He seemed to have been struck by some profound revelation. Wait a minute, he said. I believe I left that money in my other britches.
The chief was watching him. His face relaxed. All right, he said. All cleared up. See how easy that was?
