He’ll be still all right, Crosswaithe said. Go get the gun.
He smashed a rickety ladderback chair and in a half-dark bedroom found an old wool Navy peacoat. He crammed the peacoat into the wood heater and laid the oak dowels and slats atop it and lit the coat with his cigarette lighter. He hunkered before it cupping his hands over a thin blue wavering flame. The hell with all this, Crosswaithe said.
He crossed a windy dogtrot to a spare room used to store oddments of junk. His head struck a lowhanging lightbulb shrouded with a tin reflector and the fixture swung like a pendulum, streaking the walls with moving light. He opened the freezer. Jesus Christ, he said. The old man lay on his side half covered with plastic bags of green beans and blackberries. He was wrapped in some sort of stained swaddling and only the top of his head was visible. He had a blue-looking bald spot the size of a baseball iced over with silver frost. Crosswaithe shuddered. He took a deep breath. He grasped the old man where he judged his shoulder might be and jerked as hard as he could.
Nothing happened. The old man wouldn’t budge. There was an inch or so of ice in the bottom of the freezer as if the whole mess had thawed and refrozen. He stood studying it. Finally he grasped the front edge of the freezer with both hands and tilted everything over onto the floor. There was a horrific din and bags of frozen food went skittering like bowling balls, Crosswaithe falling and scrambling up. When the freezer struck the floor there was an explosion of ice and the old man shot out like a tobogganist blown crazed and flashfrozen out of a snowbank. He went sailing across the room and fetched up hard against the opposite wall and careened off it with a hollow thud and lay spinning lazily on the linoleum.
Crosswaithe went outside to the dogtrot and sat with the logs hard against his back. He lit a cigarette and sat smoking it. He tried to get his mind under some kind of control. To force order onto chaos. He tried to think of the girl, the curving line of a hip, a rosebud nipple on a field of white.
The girl herself came out of the living room. What’s the matter? she asked.
Get away from me, Crosswaithe said.
It’s about dark, she said. We’re going to have to do something.
Get away from me, he said again. She went back into the room and pulled the door to. Crosswaithe rose and spun the cigarette at the snowy dark and went back into the room. He grasped the old man by the edge of the twisted sheet and went dragging him out of the room like some demented pulltoy.
We’ve got to get this mess off him and clothes on him, Crosswaithe said. I’m going to take him back in the woods and lean him against a tree like he was out hunting and just died. It’d look kind of peculiar next spring if some hunter walked up on him and he was still wearing this bedsheet. And find him some shoes.
He dragged a recliner next to the heater and propped the old man in it. The sides of the sheet-iron heater were cherry red. He went looking for something else to feed it. The old man crouched steaming and smoking in his chair and they sat before the fire watching him like necromancers trying to raise something from the dead.
HE WENT WITH THE GUN hauling the old man along into deepening dark. Trees like runs of ink on a white page, a shifting curtain of billowing snow. His feet creaked on the snowy earth and everything gleamed with a faint phosphorescence. When he got to the head of the hollow he could drag the old man no farther. He was forced to wrap gun and body in the blanket and shoulder the whole loathsome package and climb pulling himself from sapling to sapling up the slope. Halfway up he paused to rest, leaned with the old man balanced on him like something dread that had sprung upon him out of the dark and just would not let go. He crouched listening to his ragged breathing, to the soft furtive sound of the woods filling up with snow.
AT GOBLIN’S KNOB the parking lot blazed with light and there was the dull thump of a bass guitar feeding out of the white frame building like something you felt rather than heard. The graveled parking lot was filled with pickup trucks, with racked deer rifles in the back windows, and most of them festooned with tags with messages on them. Crosswaithe read a few of them on the way to the porch. This vehicle protected by Smith and Wesson. Ill give up my gun when they pry it from my cold dead fingers. Kill them all and let God sort them out.
Let’s get the hell out of here, Crosswaithe said.
Well just stay a minute. I need to get some more vodka for the road and I might see somebody I need to say goodbye to.
I need to say goodbye to every son of a bitch I’ve met in this sorry godforsaken place, Crosswaithe said.
Inside it was hot and loud and smoky. One enormous room with booths set about the walls and a bare wood dance floor where bodies jerked spasmodically to a bluesy shuffle amplified from a raised bandstand.
They found a corner booth and Crosswaithe wended his way to the bar and bought two bottles of beer and wended his way back through a crowd that seemed a cross section of Harrikin society. There were fat men in baseball caps turned backwards and overalls stained with deer blood or blood from more dubious sources and rawboned Marlboro men in cowboy hats and girls in beehive hairdos and formal gowns and girls in jeans and boots. Some of the men were carrying pistols, for Crosswaithe could see more than one imprinted against fabric pockets and once he bumped against one in a jumper pocket that swayed heavily and the man carrying it pulled away and eyed Crosswaithe with a long speculative look.
Let’s get the bottle and go find a motel room, Carmie said. Head out for Florida in the morning.
Just a minute, Crosswaithe said. Did you see that guitar? He must have went down and met the devil at the crossroads for one like that.
The lead guitar player of the band was playing a National steel guitar that Crosswaithe drunk as he was had to feel in his own hands. He drained his bottle and set it aside and rose and picked his way around the crowd’s perimeter to the bandstand. He stood with his hands in his coat pockets letting the wave of rehashed Lynyrd Skynyrd wash over him until the band took a break between numbers and the man leant the guitar against an amplifier.
Mind if I fool with your guitar?
The guitar player had pale shoulder-length hair and he smoothed it back both-handed and looked at Crosswaithe. It was my daddy’s and I don’t want it busted over somebody’s head. Can you play one?
I tried a lot of years.
Hell, sit in with us then. We need all the help we can get around here.
Crosswaithe began tentatively with the band feeling its way behind him, bass and drums and second guitar looking for a way into the song then falling silent one by one. There was no way in. The song was a scratchy old 78 from the bottom of someone’s trunk, his fingers feeling around and into a past that was realer and more imminent than the present, his fingers exploring the cracked linoleum and raw pine boards and faded rose wallpaper of Robert Johnson’s fabled kitchen. They read Son House’s “Death Letter Blues” and halfway through a song by Reverend Gary Davis the old magic seized him, a tide of power that rolled over him and made him omnipotent, invulnerable to kryptonite and bulletproof, someone who could make or destroy worlds at his whim or simply bend them to his liking the way his fingers bent the snaking strings.
When he handed the guitar back the man just looked at him. Goddamn, he said.
At least they didn’t throw bottles.
Where’d you learn to play like that?
All over the place, Crosswaithe said. Is there a pay phone here?
There’s one here but it’s outside. For some damn reason they put it on the porch.
At the bar he exchanged a five-dollar bill for quarters and went out the door into the cold. In the phone booth he stood for a moment with the receiver in his hand waiting for the number to rise up from his subconscious the way he knew it would do. When it did he put in money and dialed, and in San Francisco, in a room he’d never been to, a room his mind had imbued with myth, a phone began to ring. It rang and rang. At length he hung up and tried for another number. This one came harder but it did come. The phone was picked up on the third ring.