Bean’s father, a salesman, had fallen asleep on a highway cut through a bayou and driven off into the water. The police called from Louisiana that night. All of the boys were at the funeral. Right after it Bean took his shotgun out hunting meadowlarks. The daughter of his maid was at the house with her mother helping with the funeral buffet. She was Bean’s age. She told Bean it didn’t seem nice him going hunting directly after his father’s funeral. He told her she was only a darkie and to shut up, he made all the rules now. Her feelings were hurt and her mother hugged her, crying, as they watched young Bean go off over the hill to the pine meadows with his chubby black mutt Spike. Bean was very thin now. He had a bad complexion. He ran not on any team but only around town and the gravel roads through the woods. Almost every hour out of school he ran, looking ahead in forlorn agony and saying nothing to anybody. He was the Runner, the boy with a grim frown. When he ran he had wicked ideas on girls. They were always slaves and hostages. His word could free them or cause them to go against all things sacred. Or he would leave them. Don’t leave, don’t leave. I’ll do anything. But I must go. After the death of his father he began going to the police station when he was through with his run. He begged to go along on a call. He hoped somebody would be shot. He wished he lived in a larger city where there was more crime. When he got a wife he would protect her and then she would owe him a great deal. Against all that was sacred he would prevail on her, he might be forced to tie her up in red underwear and attach a yoke to her. Bean was vigilant about his home and his guns were loaded. He regarded trespass as a dire offense and studied the tire marks and footprints neighbor and stranger made on the verge of his lawn. Bean’s dog was as hair-triggered as he was, ruffing and flinching around the house like a creature beset by trespass at all stations. Both of them protected Bean’s mother to distraction. She hauled him to and fro to doctors for his skin and in the waiting room thin Bean would rise to oppose whoever might cross his mother. Of all the boys, Bean most loved Swanly.
Three boys, Bean among them, waded out into a gravel pool now, a pool that moved heavy in its circumference but was still and deep in its center like a woman in the very act of conception. The water moved past them into a deep pit of sand under the bridge and then under the bluffs on either side, terra-cotta besieged by black roots. An ageless hermit bothersome to no one lived in some kind of tin house on the bank down the way a half mile and they intended to worry him. It was their fourth trip to the Strong and something was urgent now as they had to make plans. They were not at peace and were hungry for an act before the age of school job money and wife. The bittersweet Swanly named it school job money whore, and felt ahead of him the awful tenure in which a man shuffles up and down the lanes of a great morgue. Swanly’s father was a failure except for Swanly himself who was beautiful past the genes of either parent. He worshiped Swanly, idolized him, and heeded him, all he said. He watched the smooth lad live life in his walk, talk, and long silent tours in the bathtub. He believed in Swanly as he did not himself or in his wife. It was Swanly’s impression there was no real such thing as maturity, no, people simply began acting like grown-ups, the world a farce of playing house. Swanly of all the others most wanted an act, standing there to his waist in the black water.
The storekeeper Tuck knew for twenty years about the clothesline strung from the shed at the rear of the yard of the house behind the store. The T-bar stood at the near end with high clover at its base. Yet that night two weeks ago. His throat still hurt and had a red welt across it. He ran through his lawn and necked himself on the wire. Blind in the dark in a fury. What was it? All right. He had given himself up to age but although he did not like her he thought his wife would hold out against it. After all she was ten years younger. But he saw she was growing old in the shoulders and under the eyes, all of a sudden. That might cause pity, but like the awful old she had begun clutching things, having her things, this time a box of Red Hots she wouldn’t share, clutching it to her titties, this owning things more and more, small things and big, when he saw that he took a run across the yard, hard on baked mud, apoplectic, and the wire brought him down, a cutlass out of the dark. Now he was both angry and puny, riven and welted and all kind of ointment sticky at his shirt collar. It was intolerable especially now he’d seen the youth, oh wrath of loss, fair gone sprite. His very voice was bruised, the wound deep to the thorax.
Swanly, out in the river in old red shorts, was not a spoiled child. His father intended to spoil him but Swanly would not accept special privileges. He did not prevail by his looks or by his pocket money, a lot at hand always compared with the money of his partners, and he was not soft in any way so far that they knew. He could work, had worked, and he gave himself chores. He went to church occasionally, sitting down and eyed blissfully by many girls, many much older than Swanly. Even to his sluttish pill-addicted mother he was kind, even when she had some pharmaceutical cousin over on the occasion of his father being on the road. He even let himself be used as an adornment of her, with his mild temper and sad charm. She would say he would at any moment be kidnapped by Hollywood. And always he would disappear conveniently to her and the cousin as if he had never been there at all except as the ghost in the picture she kept.
Walthall with his German Mauser was naked in the pool. He had more hair than the others and on his chin the outline of a goatee. On his head was a dusty black beret and his eyes were set downriver at a broad and friendly horizon. But he would go in the navy. There was no money for college right away. His impressions were quicker and deeper than those of the others. By the time he knew something, it was in his roots as a passion. He led all aspirants in passion for music, weapons, girls, books, drinking, and wrestling, where operatic goons in mode just short of drag queens grappled in the city auditorium. Walthall, an actor, felt the act near too. He was a connoisseur and this act would be most delicious. He called the hermit’s name.
Sunballs! Sunballs! Hefting the Mauser, Lester Silk just behind him a foot shorter and like a wet rat with his big nose. Swanly stood in patient beatitude but with an itch on, Arden Pal and Bean away at the bluff. You been wantin’ it, Sunballs! Been beggin’ for it, called Silk.
Come get some! cried Bean, at that distance to Walthall a threatening hood ornament.
None could be heard very far in the noise of the river.
Tuck, who had followed in his car, did hear them from the bridge.
What could they want with that wretch Sunballs? he imagined.
He was not without envy of the hermit. What a mighty wound to the balls it must take to be like that, that hiding shuffling thing, harmless and beholden to no man. Without woman, without friend, without the asking of lucre, without all but butt-bare necessity. Haunt of the possum, coon, and crane, down there. Old Testament specters with birds all over them eating honey out of roadkill. Too good for men. Sunballs was not that old, either. But he was suddenly angry at the man. Above the fray, absent, out, was he? Well.
Tuck knelt beneath a cluster of poison sumac on the rim of the bluff. He saw the three naked in the water. There was Swanly in the pool, the blond hair, the tanned skin. Who dared give a south Mississippi pissant youth such powerful flow and comeliness? Already Tuck in his long depressed thinking knew the boy had no good father, his home would stink of distress. He had known his type in the Scouts, always something deep-warped at home with them, beauty thrown up out of manure like. The mother might be beautiful but this lad had gone early and now she was a tramp needed worship by any old bunch of rags around a pecker. A boy like that you had to take it slow but not that much was needed to replace the pa, in his dim criminal weakness. You had to show them strength then wait until possibly that day, that hour, that hazy fog of moment when thought required act, the kind hand of Tuck in an instant of transfer to all nexus below the navel, no more to be denied than those rapids they’re hollering down, nice lips on the boy too.