Well he was big. It was about dusk when I met him and I didn’t get a real good look at him.
Swaw was a nightmare waiting for a dreamer, lying sweating on his cot in the humid dark going through the list he carried in his head. The list was the name of folks who had done him grievances, real or imagined. A sense of the power he possessed made him giddy and almost ecstatic there in the darkness. With a match to be had for the asking he could destroy anyone he wanted to, and when blame was handed out no one would even think of him.
There was a farmer named Milford on Jacks Branch who had run him off twice for hunting: the second time he had even gotten the drop on Aaron with a.30–06 and taken the brace of squirrels. He had called Aaron names Aaron was not accustomed to answering to. Had he known that his own name had been mentally entered on a little white card in Aaron’s head and that he was just waiting for his lottery number to come up, his sleep would have been more troubled than it was.
As it was he got off light. Aaron only burned his barn. He watched from the hilltop above the farm by the orange flicker. He could see miniature black figures darting about the barn lot, impotent and spastic as the jerking of marionettes on strings. Aaron lay in the leaves and had no word for what he felt, it was better than anything, better than the whitebreasted woman on the Beale farm.
The next night he lay and thought of David Binder, though what he saw in his mind was not a name but a face. He did not even know his name, just thought of him as the Yankee. But he was saving Binder: Binder he was intending to kill, wanted to kill, there was something crazy in his eyes. Binder was going to burn in his sleep and all his family was going to burn with him but he had plans for the woman first, all that he was wanting was the opportunity, and it would come round, it always had before.
Labor Day Weekend, 1982
Vern was a lover, Binder thought, surely amused, watching him study himself critically in the hall mirror. Vern fancies himself a ladies’ man. Vern was leant to the glass, peering closely at his face in the poor light. Now comb your hair, Binder said to himself. Vern took a pocket comb from his hippocket and ran it through his hair, eyed the result. His hair was the color of bright copper wire and it was naturally curly. Binder knew it was naturally curly. Vern had told him.
Even if he had not seen Vern scrutinizing himself in the mirror, Binder would have known Vern considered himself a ladies’ man. It was inherent in the clothes he wore, a kind of pseudowestern rigging boots and a yokebacked cowboy shirt, jeans riding low on his hips. It was encoded in his very stance, a kind of urban dream of a cowboy’s lockhipped work. The very essence of macho, Binder thought. He is a truck driver without a truck, a cowboy squinting in a carbon monoxide sunset.
There was other evidence as well. Sitting on the porch before supper, Vern had told him while Corrie and her sister Ruthie were in the kitchen.
You talk about women, Vern said. Boy, you know a motel operator meets a world of women.
Is that a fact, Binder said noncommittally.
Vern lowered his voice, glanced toward the screen door. It damn sure is. Them old gals on the run…dodgin their husbands, dodgin their boyfriends…calling me up at all hours to come down to their rooms, this ain’t right, that ain’t right. Givin me them up-and-down looks. That old long eye. Run in, run out, what’s Ruthie to know? What’s fifteen minutes?
Fifteen minutes is not very long, Binder said bemusedly, studying the wind in the sedge above the creek, the gradations of failing light. Binder could look at seemingly insignificant things for hours, losing himself in them. Now he was far away, lost in last week’s work, before Vern and Ruthie came for the Labor Day holiday.
Vern considered Binder’s reply for a time. What’s that supposed to mean? Fifteen minutes is not very long.
It doesn’t mean anything.
Vern was placated. He leaned closer, gouged Binder in the ribs with an elbow, winked. This old gal one time, he said, peering intently into Binder’s face, said she was from Omaha. Rung me up on room service and I went down there and knocked on the door. Come in, she says. Son, she was spread out there on the bed buck naked. I mean not a stitch on. That thing gaped open like a alligator’s mouth.
Binder didn’t say anything.
Don’t you believe me?
Sure, Binder said.
How come you keep backing up?
I’m not backing up.
Yes, you are.
You get right up in my face to talk, Vern. I can hear you very well. I never could stand anybody right up in my face. The territorial imperative, I guess.
The what?
I never did like anybody grabbing my arm, either, Binder said, disengaging the fingers from his bicep.
Vern studied him. Maybe you’re a latent homosexual, he said.
And maybe you’re full of shit, Binder said amiably.
But the main reason Binder knew what Vern was was he had seen him looking at Corrie. Corrie had on a pair of very tight faded jeans and Vern had been staring at her crotch, where the denim was pulled taut over the upthrust pelvic bone. Corrie had been looking away toward the creek, the sun in her face, animatedly talking to Ruthie, unaware of Vern’s scrutiny. Like the true ladies’ man he was, Vern didn’t care who was looking. He was staring at her crotch with a kind of constrained hunger, momentarily forgetting where he was or that Ruthie and Binder might be watching. Binder remembered Vern’s face with a kind of clinical detachment, as if he was watching the curious behavior of a stranger in a crowd. He told himself he had no feelings about it one way or another.
He just remembered it was all.
They played cards for a while. Binder and Vern were bored. Corrie and Ruthie weren’t bored: they were sisters, and they didn’t see each other very much. They had a lot to talk about, everything was a joke. It was a long way to Orlando, and Ruthie and Vern were always tied up at the motel.
Watching her study her cards, Binder thought how much Ruthie had changed. He remembered when he and Corrie married she had been an attractive girl, a little heavy on the baby fat, maybe, but with an aura of raw sexual awareness she made Binder immediately aware of. She’d treated him with a sort of big sisterly approach that seemed somehow tentative, subject to change at a moment’s notice. Now she just projected an overblown blow-siness. There was a haphazard look to her and the dark roots of her blond hair were showing. Looking at Ruthie and Corrie together, Binder thought sardonically, Well, I got the pick of the litter all right.
Say, you got something to drink? Vern asked him.
I don’t know. I think there’s part of a bottle of Scotch around here somewhere. Do you know where it is, Corrie?
Somewhere in the cabinet. I remember putting it there.
What’s the matter with you? You quit?
I seldom drink anymore.
He seldom drinks anymore. Ain’t that pretty. Ain’t that just like a writer. Writers seldom drink anymore. Anybody else would just say they quit.
He didn’t say he quit, Vern, Ruthie said. He says he doesn’t drink much. Quit picking on him.
You probably smoke that old dope, don’t you?
No.
Ruthie turned to Binder. He’s not happy unless he’s picking at somebody. I don’t know what’s the matter with him. Picking is what he does best.
As if to remove all doubt of this, Vern continued. Will there be any women at this forsaken dance?
It’s not a forsaken dance.
Vern was a few years older than Binder, and he seemed to have something to prove to him.
Will you please not be rude? Corrie had asked. I know you don’t like Vern, but just try to get along for my sake.