for me to come out and play some more. Wanted me to take a turn chasing it. And my mama went out there and chopped off its head. Always made me feel kind of guilty.”
“You look kind of like a preacher.”
“Don’t confuse me with one. Though I have done some preaching in my time.”
“Just to make money, work the rubes? Do some of that healing stuff?”
“No, son. I meant it and I didn’t heal nothing, cause ain’t nobody can heal but the Lord God hisself.”
“Why ain’t you still preaching?”
“Sort of fell off the wagon. I could still hear the call but I couldn’t tell no more what the Lord was calling. I felt like a man going deaf. Still good enough ears to hear the sound, but not enough hearing to understand it.”
“What was it knocked you off the wagon? Booze? Gambling? Pussy?”
“I know I’m not your daddy, but you really are too young to talk like that.”
“I don’t know no other way to talk. As for booze, gambling and pussy, I’ve had me some of all three, so I guess I can talk about it, and I can tell you straight out that I like pussy the best. Which was it with you?”
“All of them. Including some you didn’t name. Fact is, I ain’t just here for a job. I’ve come here to set some things I done here right as they can be set. Gonna try and give a lady an apology, if she’s here and willing to take it.”
“And if she ain’t willing to take it?”
“I wouldn’t blame her.”
“What if she isn’t in Camp Rapture?”
“I try not to think about that. It makes me feel bad to think that, so I don’t think about it, and won’t, unless she ain’t here. Then I got to start up with a new set of worries.”
“It happen a long time ago?”
“Yeah.”
“So let it go. My pappy always said, you already done something, ain’t no use noodling on it. It ain’t gonna get better if you do.”
“He may be right. But I’m not doing it just for her. Doing it for me.”
“Hell, I don’t feel guilty about nothing I’ve done.”
“Maybe it’s because you haven’t done anything really bad.”
“I stole that peppermint. I’ve stole other stuff.”
“That’s bad, but it could be worse.”
“It wasn’t so bad you didn’t eat that peppermint.”
“I was hungry.”
“Why I stole it and about four others. That was just the last one left. Got a cigarette, Lee?”
“No. Don’t smoke. And you’re too young to smoke.”
“There you go with that young stuff again,” Goose said. “What about a chaw, or some snuff?”
“Same answer,” Lee said.
After an hour or so, Lee and Goose discovered they were farther from Camp Rapture than they thought and that it looked unlikely they would make it before morning.
This was all surmise on their part, as neither had any exact idea how far it was. Lee had been there before, but it was many years past, and much had changed since then.
Goose said, “I’m so damn tired, I think I’m gonna fall over.”
“Me too,” Lee said. “I can tell by the hang of the stars there. Look right there through them trees-”
“I see em.”
“I can tell by where they’re hanging it’s getting pretty late on, and I’m as tuckered out as a tick in a tar bucket.”
“Me too. But I can go on a bit if you can.”
They walked on a little ways more until they decided they just couldn’t take it anymore.
“Ain’t like when we get to Camp Rapture they’re gonna be waiting on us with open arms and a hot meal,” Goose said. “Reckon dirt out here is good as dirt around there. Won’t be the first time I’ve laid in dirt.”
“You’re right,” Lee said. “Let’s cash it in.”
They veered off the road, into the woods, looking for a place to lie down. Just a few yards off the road they found where leaves were mounded up under a tree, and in that moment that pile looked like a featherbed. Then Lee saw that the tree, a massive oak, had a large low limb that had been split, possibly by lightning. It was wide enough to hold a body and split deep enough to serve as a kind of natural hammock. Lee put leaves in the limb and said, “Now you got you a bed, Goose.”
“Not me. I can take care of myself. I don’t need no help to lay down somewhere. Besides, I don’t climb no trees I don’t have to. I don’t climb nothing I don’t have to.”
“Isn’t more than five feet off the ground,” Lee said.
“Still, ain’t for me.”
“You ain’t much of a boy, not wanting to climb trees.”
“It ain’t the climbing worries me. It’s the falling.”
Lee took the limb and Goose lay down on the leaves. “These leaves piled up like this, my daddy used to tell me that there was ape-men did it at night. Piled them up, I mean.”
“You think they did?”
“I don’t know. I guess not. It was a good story.”
“What were your people like, Goose?”
“Just like other people, I reckon. Poor. But they was poor before the Depression. My mama was part Cherokee, and my papa was half Choctaw. When the dust come I left so they wouldn’t be in such a bad way with all us kids. I went down here to East Texas, and they carried on out to California.”
“Why didn’t you go with them?”
“Didn’t want to go no place where the weather stays the same. Can’t stand it when summer drags on. I like it when I don’t know it’s going to rain or storm, be clear or hot. Course, I liked it better before I didn’t have a roof to get under and some regular food. Maybe I’d have been better to have gone out there to California, now that I noodle on it.”
“I been. It’s nothing special. Just more of the same, only with a steady climate and oranges. Like you, Goose, I don’t like it steady all the time. Changeable weather teaches a man how to be changeable hisself. He can move with events. You can’t learn character when everything is smooth.”
“Maybe I don’t need no character. Maybe what I need is three meals a day and a bed and some kind of something over my head so I don’t get rained on.”
“Could be, Goose.”
Pretty soon Lee heard Goose snoring, and was surprised that now he couldn’t sleep. His mind was racing, and Goose’s snoring wasn’t helping.
He lay there and looked up into the limbs of the tree. At first it was just dark up there, but in time his eyes adjusted and he could make out limbs, and finally, through gaps he could see a few stars.
He felt an old urge. The one he had when he was preaching. The urge to reach out with his thoughts to God, who surely must lie behind that veil of night and stars, and maybe wasn’t as mean as he seemed to act. Sometimes he thought God was just mean to him.
Maybe he deserved it.
He didn’t know what he deserved anymore, and didn’t reckon it mattered. Deserving had nothing to do with it.
There once was a time when he had felt close to God, had thought himself God’s servant.
