(In the deep dark and dead time the old man hears the soft scraaap scraaap and feels the sudden sinking through the uterus wall and the blood running over his hand again. The uterus wall that, once pierced, bleeds till no blood remains. O, Old Gross remembers a thing or two in the deep dark and dead time.)
Gross lived in an unendurable twilight land, a land of in between, with a woman whom he had married in order to make her his prisoner. Now the prisoner was the jailer, he the captive. Velma not only had enough on him to send him to the pen for keeps, but also those inside-the-walls connections that Gross feared more than the uniformed law. He knew that she could have him disposed of without the bother of having him carried through federal gates. In any one day she had only to pick up a telephone and he wouldn’t see his rocking chair that night.
Dove’s function, he soon saw, was simply to perform errands that Velma would otherwise have had to do. The only ease the old man knew was when she was at work right under his nose. Whatever he had coming, it seemed, he wanted to see it come.
Yet Gross went on little errands of his own that didn’t bother Velma at all. Every morning she wrapped a small package in gift paper, tied it with colored string, put it under the old man’s arm and sent him off with it. He would be back in less than an hour without the package. It was some days before Dove saw that all the paper contained was garbage.
‘He leaves it on a street car or a newsstand for someone to find, thinking they’ve found something of value and hurry home to undo it, and there it is. What else can an old man do for fun?’
It seemed to Dove there must be something else even for an old man.
How she had found him out, here in the lake-palmed suburb where the rise and dying fall of a rollercoaster and bonfires on the beach of Lake Pontchartrain made summer sweet, Gross didn’t want to know. He had married her in a last despairing hope of winning her loyalty legally.
The woman had wanted a home of her own all her life. She knew a good thing when she found it. Marriage had turned out to be no more than a down payment from Gross. Now she had a legal grip on everything he owned and didn’t have to bother arguing with him except to indulge him.
It was his table manners she found most difficult to indulge.
‘I swear I never before did see a man dip oyster crackers in coffee,’ she commented across the table to Dove.
Yet Gross went on dipping placidly. The whole front of his shirt was greased with droppings from his fingers.
‘It could be they never seen a oyster cracker in Arkansas,’ he goaded her a bit by tipping the coffee into the saucer so that most of it spilled onto the cloth. ‘What was it you said you got run out of Arkansas for? I always forget.’
‘The point isn’t who got run out,’ Velma corrected him, ‘the point is who they wouldn’t let in. I swear I never before did see a man dip oyster crackers in coffee.’
‘Talk to my ass,’ Gross told her, ‘my head is hard.’
She went back to the sink to finish washing the dishes that Dove was drying, and Dove saw her dab furtively at her eyes. ‘I’ve taken all the insults I’m going to off that cliff-ape,’ she warned Gross aloud, ‘it’s more than natural flesh can bear.’
Dove patted her gently. ‘He don’t mean harm, ma’am. It’s his way of showing affection is all.’
Velma would have none of such affection. ‘That man would be rode out of town on a rail where I come from.’
‘Look!’ the old man commanded her triumphantly from across the kitchen, ‘Look! I’m sopping up!’
Velma was a kind of cross between a gadfly and a ferret, but like many people streaked by violence, usually maintained a deep serenity. In which she sang not unpleasantly,
and went serenely on molding skins and painting them, clamping, drying, sorting, glueing, counting, counting days till the old man died. For Dove sensed she preferred that he die in his bed rather than by violence.
She would not give the old man the peace that such knowledge would have afforded him. Perhaps she feared that, once allowed to relax, he might just live on and on. After all, she had had a hard enough time and didn’t have too far to go herself. She could no longer afford pity.
So all night long the old man was up and down in his flannel nightshirt, hiding his money in one place or another. He would unscrew the top of a bedpost, drop a couple twenties down the hollow of it, then forget to screw the top-piece down. He had as many stashes as a squirrel in October and one of his favorites was the water box above the old-fashioned plumbing. He would bind a bankroll into a condom, fasten it tightly and tie it to the waterworks. But when he heard it flushing, and Velma would issue forth, he would race in there to stand on the seat to see if she had found him out. Thus giving himself completely away.
Actually she had found him out in everything so thoroughly she had no need of following him around. When she needed money she picked his pocket, that was all there was to it. If the pocket was bare she went to his bookshelf and leafed through a few volumes until a bill or two floated out. The old man had no way of banking without betraying his whereabouts.
Season of heat when skins dry fast below the copper blaze of noon or flashflood spring when pipes back up and colored clothespins clamp the skins in rainbowed rows above the dark gas-range’s flames, they pour the rubber and heat the glue, clean the molds and forge the forms and never go dancing down below.
‘When you start hitting toward sixty,’ Gross complained, ‘you feel some days like you want to take a cab to the graveyard and wait for your maker beside your stone. Yet when you’ve not had an hour’s true contentment out of all those sixty years, you don’t want to lay down till you’ve had your hour. You want something for all your pain.’
‘Maybe if you’d give more to others, like our Lord said to do,’ Velma reminded him, ‘you’d of got more. Maybe if you’d change your ways you’d still have your hour.’
‘If that advice came from anyone else I might heed it,’ Gross admitted. ‘Coming from you it makes no sense. How do I change old bones for new? It wasn’t give to me to live so I could give to others. With me it was a matter of take or die.’
‘You didn’t have to try to take it all to keep from dying,’ Velma pointed out.
‘I took all I could, that’s true,’ Gross admitted, ‘now you take all from me. Here.’ He crooked his little finger toward her. ‘Pull.’
One night Dove woke to hear the old man shouting, ‘Old-time shoplifter! Stealing all her life!’ He was at the bathroom door in his nightshirt and pounding the wood with both fists. ‘Give me a hand, boy! We got her trapped in the act!’ Between his shouts the plumbing kept flushing – the moment the waters had rushed once and risen, down they rushed like a thundering falls again. A light shown from under the door. It sounded like Velma might be drowning in the waterworks.
But when they yanked the door open, the place was empty. How she had contrived to start the fixture flushing automatically Dove never discovered. Yet there she lay, feigning sleep in her own virgin-white bed all the while, her country-grocer shoes at the foot of it and her cotton stockings hung neatly over a chair.
Dove got the plumbing quieted first, then quieted the old man. When he heard him fall back into a restless sleep he rose softly and dressed. He had had enough of rubber.