In the morning he accused her and her dog, who had remained silent, of setting him up. He put the cur in her arms and kicked them both out. Then he fell out in a sleep of a few hours. When he woke up it was midafternoon, and he knew something was gone. The antique shotgun was not on the wall. He stumbled to his kitchen and pulled a hunting knife out of his drawer. He intended to cut Minny’s pre-Raphaelite hair off and drag her down the railroad tracks by her ankles. In a swimsuit and his serious coat he went out to the tracks. He seemed to remember her other place was near the tracks somewhere down there. So he walked and walked and then he was in a black section of town, there in his overcoat with lion-tamer boots on, holding the large saw of his knife, in the hottest summer on record. In the overcoat he was drenched, just an arm with the pounding awful fish of his heart inside him. A black teenager, tall, came out of one of the houses and asked him what he was doing with that knife out here, his mama didn’t like it.
“Hunting woman.”
“You sit down in that tree shade.” Smith gave him the knife. “How much you take for that coat? I can get that paint off it.”
“I’ll sell you the coat if you’ll call a number for me. I don’t feel good. I’m not all right. Here’s some money. Please get me some liquor too.” He gave his wallet to the boy.
“You wait.”
When Drum at last came out across the tracks and knelt beside him, Smith had terrible shakes, and could not pass out like he wanted to.
“You think you’re drunk, kiddo? Shit, this is nothing. I was drunker. And I was drunker alone.” Drum laughed.
Smith sold the black boy his coat for fifty dollars and got back his wallet. Then Smith stared into his wallet.
“Drum? I got exactly the same in my wallet. That boy bought my coat with my own money.”
“Forget it. It was a horrible coat. A chump’s coat. A pretender’s coat. It was the coat of a man with a small dry heart.”
“It was?”
Smith was out of money now, but he was waiting for a Reader’s Digest sweepstakes check very seriously. His unopened mail was a foot high, but none of it was the right envelope. Then a letter came offering him some work in Hollywood. He took it around town, running up tabs with credit on it. Some people still liked Smith. One night late he came in from drinking and misplacing his car. He felt there was something new in the place. Yes, there it was. On the kitchen table. The kitchen had been cleaned. But on the table was the final version of “Sarge,” the life-size ceramic head of the grinning old drunk, the butt of a real Pall Mall hanging from his lips. Drum, a year in labor on it, had given it to Paul Smith. There was a short note underneath it: “All yours. Go with Sarge.” Smith did not know it then, but this was as far as Drum would ever go in the arts. At first it made Smith afraid. He thought it was an insult. But then he knew it wasn’t. He laid his head down and wept. He had lost everything. He did not deserve this friend.
About three in the morning, into the last of his cheap wine, he heard a car in his drive and some bells at his door. It was Angel B., the punk crippled girl. She settled inside with her crutches and her bells on what was left of a wicker armchair.
“I know I can’t write, but you are a great man. I can get your job back for you. I know some things on the person fired you, some of them taped. This would destroy her.”
It seemed a plausible and satisfactory thing to Smith.
“I might not can write but I want a piece of a great man to remember. Would you dim the lights?”
He recalled the revulsion, but with an enormous pity overcoming it. In his final despair, the last anguished thrust and hold, he tried to mean actual love. He wanted to be a heavy soft trophy to her. The bells jangled faintly every now and then before he accomplished the end of his dream. Smith stroked Angel’s mohawk, grown high and soft. Then she was businesslike getting her clothes and crutches back together. She was leaving immediately. Smith suggested they at least have a wine together.
“No. I’m drinking with Morris, the Reverend. He’s out there waiting. We’ve got a tough morning tomorrow. We’re going down to the station and I’m putting rape charges on him.”
“He’s driving you? What, pleading guilty?”
“No, innocent. We’re still close. But I know what I know.”
She waddled out to the old Mustang. Morris waited in it like a pet. His dense glasses were full of moonlight.
A week later Drum drove him to the airport.
“I think that was it, Drummer. Pit bottom. And I can still taste her.” Smith was trying to get a long march out of sips of Southern Comfort.
“It probably wasn’t, sport. You get to go to California, stomping grounds of all my failures. Be patient, Paul. Nobody gets well quick, not with what you’ve got.”
He remembered Drum taking his luggage. The man wore a shapeless blue-green jumpsuit with plastic sandals on his feet. The porter was a diplomat, compared.
Smith was not a success as a screenwriter. After he destroyed two typewriters, he spent a month in a hospital, where they talked about the same little child inside that Drum had often mentioned. Smith was befriended by a kind genius of a director, one of his heroes. The man gave him money that put him right with his child support, but Smith was unable to compose anything worthy for him, for all his effort. The bright healthy weather and opulence mocked him. He could not get past stupid good feelings. His work was entirely made up and false. There was no saving it by pure language. He could not work sober and was greatly frightened by this fact. He was failing right along with the old Drummer. He had to take another teaching job in the Midwest. It was a prestigious place, but Smith felt dumb and small.
He kept up with Drum through the years left. The Drummer was making a lot of money as a carpenter in house construction. He wrote to Smith that he could have, if he were not a Christian, any number of miserable lonely housewives. The Cobra, his quarrelsome mother, died. He moved out to a big mobile home on the outskirts of town, near Cottondale. He attended the high school graduation of Smith’s son. He took and sent over a photograph of the boy in his gown receiving his diploma. He gave Smith’s children presents at Christmas. Many times he took them fishing.
Three years ago, Smith had bitten the bullet and visited Drum in his trailer. Drum had had a heart attack six months previous. He told Smith he could hold in pain, but this was too much. He drove himself to the hospital. Un insured, he paid out a ghastly amount. The trailer was all he could afford now. A preacher had become his landlord. Smith offered to lend him some money. Drum refused.
“Oh no. We don’t want money to get into this, baby. Somehow things go rotten with money between friends. Believe me. This thing we have is too beautiful.”
The streets of the town were a long heart attack themselves to Smith. Everything felt like sorrow and confusion, and tasted like Southern Comfort with cherry juice poured in — a revulsion of the tongue that had never left him. He felt the town itself was mean and fatal, each street a channel of stunned horror. He feared for Drum’s health. How could he carry on here?
He met Drum’s woman, a handsome lady of Greek descent. Drum was wild for her. She stayed over the night in their larger bedroom at the other end of the trailer. When she left, Smith told Drum he was very happy for him.
“I worried you’d turned queer,” Smith kidded him.
“You ought to hear her moan, boy. I’m bringing happiness to that one.”
Now Smith saddened, and his teeth cut into his tight under-lip. Drum all those years without a woman, the uncle to everybody, in the background, cheering them on; urging them on to the great accidents of art and love. Drum the Drummer. Keeping the panic out, keeping the big heart in. He had convinced Smith he was worth something. He had convinced others that Smith was rare. Many days in California Smith had nothing else to take him through the blank stupid days.