49
The boy went to bed and Grant lay down on the sofa and remained there in the fitful light of the TV, watching the webbing up in the vigas, the dusty swags pulsing with color. Voices from the TV reached him in strange incantation, voices undertowed into dream and his dreams playing on before his open eyes, all of it vivid and repeating until at last the hours delivered the new day, its gray light in the windows, and still in this fevered state he sat up, hunched and exhausted. On the screen a woman stood at a rostrum in a purple robe, small black ball of microphone near her mouth. She spread her arms wide and he raised the remote and the screen went black.
The air outside chilled his sweat, his clammy, clinging shirt. Porch floorboards popped under his weight and he felt the burning cold of them through his socks. He inhaled too deeply and the air came retching back up and he stood gripping the post, convulsed less by the hacking than by the effort to stop it—until the cigarette was lit and he drew the calming smoke into his lungs.
Before him, across the clearing, the house was taking shape in the dawn. No movement and no sound anywhere but the first tentative notes of the birds.
He crushed the cigarette in the ashtray on the railing and went back inside and got into a dry shirt, and then he returned to the kitchen and set the coffee to brewing and stood at the window looking at the old man’s house, the light already changed. He poured coffee into a mug and left the mug sitting there. Across the way the windows were dark, upstairs and down. The rockers on the porch stilled and empty.
He looked at his watch, then drew his fingertips slowly over his jaw, as if he were deciding whether or not to shave. He stood that way for a long time. Then he pulled on his boots and got into his jacket and stepped once more into the cold morning. Down the cold popping steps and the pops returning to him in echo off the face of the old man’s house.
He wasn’t in the kitchen and there was no sound of the TV in the living room but Grant looked there anyway. No sound in the house at all but the tocking of the grandfather clock, and after he’d checked every place a man could be downstairs, he climbed the stairs heavily and he knocked and stood a moment with his hand on the knob, then opened the old man’s door and looked in and there was no need to say his name but he said it just the same.
“Em,” he said.
Silent and still in the big bed where he’d slept with his wife so many years. Silent and still and gray and so small in the big bed and all the heat gone out of the bed and out the body, and all the history and all the love gone out of it too.
Part IV
50
Billy Kinney lay against the headboard with the bunched pillow under his neck, watching the smoke in the middle space above him. It was so quiet he could hear the burning of the tobacco each time he inhaled. He lay very still, listening, and after a while he realized it was the grandfather clock at the foot of the stairs: sometime in the night it had wound down and ceased its ancient tock tock tock. He had seen the waxen and painted face, had heard the old pastor’s entreaties to God, the platitudes of the
condolent—but it was this, finally, the abandonment of habit, of sound, of time itself, that made it true and real.
Downstairs next to a half pot of coffee was a hundred-dollar bill and a message. This money is from me, not the estate. I’ll be back in a few days with the auction people.
“Good morning to you too, brother,” he said, his voice strange to himself.
No more sheriff now so no more neighbors bearing casseroles and pies. No more hard heels rapping the porch at dawn and the sheriff thanking them for the food and for the sympathies and seeing them off with no further awkwardness, for they’d come early and wished to leave early, before the other one came down, and wasn’t it just remarkable they asked each other as they drove away how two boys from such two good souls could grow up such entirely different kinds of boys? One of the mysteries of the Lord, they allowed, and always would be, but today our prayers are with them both.
He uncapped his lighter and held it to a corner of the note and watched the flames climb, the paper twisting and blackening until the ink purpled and rose again in a phantom script, the flame going at his fingers before he dropped it into the sink. He lit a cigarette and thought of Denise Gatskill in her black funeral dress. Hair done up and showing her neck. She had come by the house but he’d sent her away. Now he had money and he ought to take her down to the city, to a bar where they served the red wine she liked.
He stood before the window. Nothing moving out in the gray midday world. Not a bird in the sky and nothing stirring over at the old ranch house either. The blue Chevy gone and those two likely gone off with the sheriff for some brunch or to the diner on their own. Monday, Monday. He began to whistle but abruptly stopped and looked quickly over his shoulder—at what? Nothing. The empty kitchen. The view into the empty living room. Dark blank face of the TV. Nothing.
He grabbed his jacket from the chairback and frisked it for phone and wallet and keys and slapped up the hundred-dollar bill, and then he went out onto the porch and past the wooden rockers and down the steps and across the yellow and crusted and spongy turf. Rich stink of earth in the air, pungency of rootbeds and tunneling worms. Grass and hay and horseshit.
He drove by the cafe and he saw the blue Chevy there and drove on. He drove by the Gatskill house and he drove by his old high school up on the yellow and snow-scabbed hill, and everything he saw was old and tired and pitiful. It was as though he’d gone away for many years and had not seen the process that changed things but only the change itself, all at once, which was the same as seeing your own life gone by. Then he reached the interstate, and with the speakers pumping through him he gunned the El Camino and headed down toward Denver.
HE LEFT THE CLOUDS and the dregs of snow and descended into the full green outbreak of spring. There were good cheap places on the east side of the city but there was a place he liked on the west side with a billiards table and where you could still smoke and where if you got too lit you didn’t have to drive all the way back through town, through all that traffic and highway patrol. He also hoped to see an old boy he knew there, although this old boy wouldn’t show until much later if he showed at all.
It was just one o’clock in the afternoon when he pushed through the back door into the near-empty barroom; the room itself was hardly more than a passageway, dominated by the old Brunswick with its three good lion’s feet and a fourth blocky stump of blackened oak, its stained and burn-holed felt.
Behind the bar was Louis, the old man with the tremendous hands. Louis didn’t care for a song during the day and if someone got one going he’d limp over and unplug the machine and after that the billiards cracked more smartly, voices sailed, a girl’s laugh turned the heads of the daytime drunks.
Billy took a seat at the bar, leaving an empty stool between himself and two men who’d been talking quietly when he came in and who now stopped to watch him in the backbar mirror as he settled himself, as if he were a strange new development that might or might not be suffered.
Louis came and Billy asked for a seven-and-seven and the old man set to mixing it. In the mirror, beyond the image of himself, was the bright reflected square of the bar’s only window, and within that bright square were the shapes of a man and a woman. The man leaning close to tell her things no one else could hear in the hushed and daylit bar.
Louis centered the seven-and-seven on a bar coaster and Billy palmed the hundred-dollar bill down and the old man held the bill to the light, made change, and placed the smaller bills exactly where the hundred had been. Billy pushed two singles back and folded the remaining cash into his shirt pocket and raised his drink to Louis, who nodded, and he drank.
“Can a man still smoke in here, boss?” he said, and Louis said, “He can if these boys don’t mind,” and the two men turned to look at Billy—the far one older than the near one, who might’ve been a little older than Billy.
“Smoke ’em if you got ’em,” said the older man, and Billy looked to the younger, nearer man, this man staring at him for a moment from under the bill of his cap, then shrugging and facing forward again.
Billy said Much obliged and got one going. Louis placed the ashtray on the bar.
He drank. He smoked. The two men resumed their conversation, the older man monologuing low and steady, speaking about his wife, or his ex-wife, telling the younger man in the cap all the things he and the ex-wife had done in their marriage, good and bad. Billy ordered another drink and the man spoke about the things he would like to do to his ex-wife now, now that he was no longer blinded by love, and he said many graphic things he’d be sorry he said, Billy thought, if the woman ever turned up dead. If she wasn’t dead already. He stirred his drink and drew the little double-barreled swizzle between his lips and sipped at the fizzing glass brim.
“It’s like a man just goes along for years,” the man said, “and he thinks he’s living his life, he thinks he’s a normal Joe living his life with a normal woman, but he ain’t, he ain’t, and one day he sits up in bed and he sees his life for what it really is. Sees his wife for what she really is. You know what I’m talking about, Steve?”
The younger man nodded.
“Right, Steve?”
“Right,” said the younger man, Steve.
The man lifted his beer, swallowed, set it down again. “Same thing as when I was in the service, Steve, which, as I said, I ain’t at liberty to talk about. Five years of high-level shit and then, one day, boom, there I am, staring at myself in a mirror, covered in blood and no idea how or why. Same motherfucking day different motherfucking story.”
Billy caught his own eye in the backbar mirror. He ain’t never gonna stop, this old boy.
Well, I don’t see the chain keeping you here.
But the seven-and-seven was smooth and he had the twenties in his pocket and he sat watching Louis wash out glasses and dry them and set them in their places, big pint glasses that in the old man’s hands became abruptly, unbelievably smaller. When he came over to see if Billy wanted another, Billy ordered a beer just to watch the effect. He drank half the cold pint and then he stood up and walked to the men’s room, and when he returned, the talker was gone.
The other man named Steve sat staring into the mirror, one hand on what remained of his pint. Billy nodded at him in the mirror; Steve nodded back and both drank from their beers.
Louis wiped down the bar and stocked the cooler. Behind them, in the window, the man held the woman’s throat in his hand, she the wrist of that hand in hers.
“Quiet in here,” Billy said, and the man named Steve said, “Nice and quiet.” He sipped his beer and caught Billy’s eye in the mirror. “It must be a terrible burden,” he said, “having to keep so quiet.”
“How’s that?” said Billy.
Steve nodded to his right. “Military man,” he said. “Keeping it all locked in like that. Terrible burden.”
“Terrible,” said Billy. “He sure had some stories he couldn’t tell.”
Steve picked up a pair of sunglasses from the bar and frowned at the lenses. “I like a good story, don’t get me wrong. But a man should never be the hero of his own stories. Nobody likes those stories.” He jiggled the sunglasses, as though he were thinking about putting them on and going.
“Do you shoot?” Billy said.
The sunglasses stopped jiggling.
“Sorry?”
“I said do you shoot.”
Steve sidled his eyes at him. “Do I shoot what, bud?”
“Guns. Firearms.”
“What kind of a question is that?”
“A simple one. I saw your shades. Usually see those on boys at the range. Or po-lice. Or po-lice at the range.”