I’d never imagined before.”
I drank the foam out of the bottle and looked at the summer haze on the river. It was a wonderful place. The juniper seeds on the water turned in swirls past the sandbars, and stray seagulls that had wandered far inland dipped and hovered over a dead gar on the mud bank.
“Go on,” she said. Her face was happy and so lovely in the broken shade that I had to swallow when I looked at her.
“I don’t like people who show home movies,” I said.
“I do, especially cowboy lawyers that dig up old arrowheads.”
“I told you I’m shit and nails, didn’t I? The Lone Ranger with a hangover.”
“You just think you’re a bad man.”
“There are probably several hundred people who will disagree with you.”
“You’re not even a good cynic.”
“You’re taking away all my credentials.”
“Go on. Please.”
“The old man knew Woody Guthrie, too. He stayed at the house once during the war, and every evening I’d sit with him on the front steps while he played that beat-up old Stella guitar and his harmonica. He always wore a crushed felt hat, and when he spoke his words had a cadence like talking blues. He could never talk very long, at least while he had a guitar in his hands, without starting another song. He played with three steel banjo picks on his fingers, and he had the harmonica wired to a brace around his neck. He played Negro and workingmen’s beer-joint blues so mean and fine that I didn’t want him to ever leave. When we drove him to Galveston to catch a merchant ship my father asked him what the migrant farmworkers thought of the movie
“Wow, did your father know anybody else?”
“Those were the best ones. And I’m all out of stories, babe.”
“Your father must have been an unusual man.”
“Yes, he was.” I bit the tip off a cigar and looked at the haze on the water and the line of willows beyond, and for just a moment, in the stillness and heat of the summer morning, in the time that the flame of my match burned upward in one sulfurous curl, I saw my father lying half out of the chair in the library, the circular explosion of gunpowder on the front of his cream-colored coat, with his mouth locked open as though he had one final statement to make. The pistol had flown from his dead hand with the weight of its own recoil, and his arm had caught behind him at a twisted angle in the chair. His eyes were receded and staring, and his gray hair hung down on his forehead like a child’s. As I stood in the doorway, unable to move toward him, with the shot still loud in my ears and Bailey running down the stairs behind me, I thought: It was his heart. He had to do it. He couldn’t let it kill him first.
“Hey, come in, world,” Rie said.
“The old man had rheumatic fever when he was a kid. All of the things he loved to do put his heart right in a vise.”
She touched the back of my hand with her fingers and looked quietly into my face. Her strands of sunburned hair were gold in the broken light through the cypress tree.
“All right, how about opening another beer?” I said.
“You’re a special kind of guy, Hack.”
“How did we get on this crap, anyway? Come on, girl. Get the beer open.”
“Okay, kemosabe.” Her eyes went flat, and she reached inside the sack of crushed ice.
“I mean, you’re hurting my badass identity.”
She worked the opener on the bottle cap without answering.
“Say, Rie. Come on.”
“You kick doors shut real hard,” she said.
“Look, I behave like a sonofabitch so often that sometimes I don’t think about who I’m talking to.”
“You don’t like anyone to get inside you, and maybe that’s cool, but you ought to hang out a sign for dumb chicks.”
“I’m sorry.”
“It’s a swell day and you’re still a piece of pie.”
I leaned over her and kissed her on the mouth. I felt her heavy breasts against me, and I slipped my arms under her back and kissed her forehead and her closed eyes and put my face in her hair. She breathed against my cheek and ran her hands under my shirt.
“Oh, Hack,” she said, and moved her whole body into me.
My blood raced and I could feel my heart clicking inside me. Each time I kissed her my head swam, my breath became short, and I felt myself dropping through her into the earth.
She hooked one leg behind mine and held me closer and ran her fingernails up my neck through my hair. When she moved her body against me the dark green of the trees and the summer haze on the river seemed to spin in circles around me.
“I felt you kiss me last night. I didn’t want you to stop,” she said. “All night I wanted to feel you around me.”
“My southern ethic wouldn’t let me take advantage of a bombed girl.”
“You have so many crazy things in your head, Lone Ranger.” She moved her lips over my cheek and bit me on the neck, and then I couldn’t stop it.
I put my hand under her shirt and felt her breasts. They swelled out each time she breathed and I could feel her heart beating under my palm. I unzippered her white shorts and touched her thighs and her flat stomach.
“I’m sorry for the woods. I should take you up the road, but you really got down inside me, babe,” I said.
She smiled and kissed me, and her almond eyes took on all the wonderful color and mysterious light that a woman’s eyes can have when they make you weak with just a glance.
That evening we drove back through the hills and the baked fields of string beans and corn, and stopped at a roadside restaurant and beer tavern north of Rio Grande City for Mexican food. On the broken horizon the sun was orange behind clouds that looked as though they had been burned purple. The sky seemed so vast and empty in its darkening light that my head became dizzy in looking at it.
We finished dinner and drank bottles of Carta Blanca while two drunk cowboys played the jukebox and arm- wrestled with each other at the bar. We had chicory coffee, and I brought in my flask of Jack Daniel’s from the car and poured a shot into our cups. On the jukebox Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs rolled out a Blue Ridge song, in their mournful southern accents, of ancient American loves and distant mountain trains:
I don’t know if it was the whiskey (I eventually drained the whole flask into my cup), the events and emotional fatigue of the past two days, or my need to confess my guilt of fifteen years ago, or a combination of the three, but anyway I began to talk about Korea and then I told her all of it.
CHAPTER 8
My legs were on fire as we marched the five miles along a frozen dirt road from the freight train to a temporary prison compound. The sky was lead gray, and the dark winter brown of the earth showed in patches through the ice and snow that covered the fields and hills. The few peasant farmhouses, made from mudbricks mixed with straw, were deserted, and at odd intervals across the fields there were old craters left from a stray
