‘Did you ever throw a ball in the air and catch it coming down?’
‘Naturally.’
‘Then common sense will tell you that if the earth actually moved you’d be too far away to catch it coming down, wouldn’t you? Now tell me the ball knows the earth is moving.’ The old man had victory within reach.
‘For God’s sake, when they say the earth moves it don’t mean it goes forty miles an hour, old man,’ Byron protested.
‘What’s to keep it from going forty?’ Fitz asked dryly, ‘if it’s round as you claim it ought to be going faster and faster like a snowball down a hill. I’ll tell you the reason it don’t move is the same reason it aint round – it got corners to keep it from moving. I’ll prove it by the good book.’
Dove heard him rustling about with the battered Bible, trying to find the passage that proved him right.
‘Don’t bother, old man,’ Byron sounded tired. ‘I know what you’re lookin’ for – “and the winds blew from the four corners of the earth” – so how can anything round have corners? Go to sleep, fool old man.’
The light was turned down. Dove heard the old man creep onto his cot bed. So long as the world was flat he would sleep well upon it. Only round worlds left Fitz sleepless.
As softly as if he’d been saving it Byron asked – ‘On what day of the Creation did God say “Let there be light and there was light”?’
‘The first, of course,’ Fitz answered contentedly.
Dove heard a little silence run about around the room and back. Byron had a sense of timing.
‘And when did He make the two great lights, the greater to rule the day and the lesser to rule the night?’
‘The fourth, naturally.’
‘Think that over, old man.’ Byron turned on his side. He slept best upon a rounded star.
Dove heard the old man thinking it all over; tossing then fuming. While Byron slept the sleep of the just, snoring softly.
Dove was glad Byron had won for once. But personally didn’t care if the planet was shaped like a pretzel. He had issues more pressing to solve.
‘First she totes me on and the next thing I know I’m standin’ on my haid in the middle of the road. She could have spore me that.’
Well, he wasn’t the sort to hang around a door he’d been shoved through. She’d have to send for him before he’d work for her again. That much was certain.
All the same, there is no statute forbidding a man to walk down the common highway.
Dust puffs filed behind him early the next morning, and an anxious wind went sniffing ahead like a hound favoring a sore forefoot; gas lamp to telephone pole, one side of the road to the other. Till it came to the lamp that leaned toward the La Fe as the La Fe leaned toward it. There it scooted suddenly around the corner into the yard, abandoning Dove altogether.
He hadn’t heard of any law forbidding a man to go around the corner of a broken-down chili parlor either.
Terasina’s back was toward him. Her earrings glinted green against the white of the wash like news of an early spring. Slips and step-ins, yellow and pink, flapped about her like invitations to love in the morning. The strong forenoon light silhouetted her thighs to the full and the wide.
Sure enough, she was hanging yesterday’s black night dress. He watched the wind pawing it and saw it turning a little away from the wind like a girl evading a jealous lover. A wind that could not let matters be, but had to twist things around to suit itself.
Raising herself on her sandaled toes to reach the topmost point of the line, she stretched her brown sleeveless arms and her haunches pressed hard together.
As he had pressed them with his own large hand, when his other had pillowed her head.
That he would not pillow again. He spat across the fence and saw his spittle strangle itself on a thorn.
Look who’s hangin’ out her dirty underdrawers.
Out of the corner of her eye Terasina saw him leaning. One more tramp come to stare. So stare. If it helps your health it does me no harm. I did not send for you.
Won a wetback beauty contest forty years ago and thinks she’s the Queen of the May.
Go when you wish to go.
Let’s people see her make a-purpose. Thinks she got so much to show because she sells old fried beans. Wouldn’t be the least surprised if folks run her back across the river one of these nights.
If I am to play the whore I will play for my own people.
Better lookers than this Pachuco would be giving him the eye in Dallas or Houston one of these days. ‘Let me spend my money on you, Big Boy,’ is what they’d be asking him. Big Boy wouldn’t be wasting time on Pachucos then. He’d have some trim blue-eyed Anglo all his own, to cook him up real American meals. There wouldn’t be any frijoles in that house by God. And she’d say ‘think’ instead of ‘theenk’ and go to a Christian church and wear enough clothes on her back to keep every passerby from seeing how she was built between ankles and belly button. In Houston. Or was that Dallas?
‘No work today,’ she took the clothespin out of her teeth to announce.
‘I got a better job,’ he assured her.
‘Oh? That is nice.’
‘Aint in this old shite-poke town neither.’
‘What poke town is it in?’
‘Dallas, natcherly.’
‘What do you do there, in Dallas?’
‘You’ll read about that in the paper.’
‘You bring the paper and I read about it, so you know what you do there too.’
‘It’s not hard to make fun of weakness in others. I’ll pay you the dollar I borrowed.’
‘You owe me nothing but goodbye,’ she told him and bent, trim at the waist and broad at the shoulders, hitching her skirt to the backs of her knees.
She didn’t sense him coming up until his hands clamped her waist – then she wheeled like an ambushed cat and jammed the clothespin into his teeth. He rocked as if hit by fire.
‘Segundos?’ Terasina inquired politely.
He drew off, shaking his head and spitting splinters. No, he didn’t care for seconds on clothespins. He reached cowlike toward the blood trickling down his chin, and she held out the little black lace kerchief.
He shook his head. ‘Keep your rag.’
‘That is all I can do for you today then.’ The proceedings were closed.
‘You done nothin’ so great for me any other day,’ he told her, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand – ‘but you durn well liked what I done fer you.’
Her face showed no recollection.
‘It felt good is what you said,’ he remembered gallantly. ‘Slow you said – you liked it slow,’ and put his hand on the nape of her neck. She sank her teeth into his palm, he felt them sink to the bone and forced her, biting still, to her knees.
‘It’ll be a little faster today,’ he assured her, ‘I’m a mite short of time.’
Spring-green and sun-yellow the clothes flapped about. Polkadot bandannas flapped a polkadot quadrille. But the night dress turned aside and a stocking hung dark as a shroud. Till she lay on her side with her head between her hands and her dress tossed back to her hips. The front of the dress was ripped to the waist. A low wind paused long enough to toss a handful of dust and pass on. It was done.
Dove picked up her handkerchief and daubed his chin. He waggled a lower front tooth. It was just a mite loose. The noon freight hooted two miles away.