I went around behind the barn, and there was Obie singing this little song about two little hands for Jesus, and he was standing like a kid speaking a piece for the parents on the last day of school, with his big feet together in the dust and his huge, bony hands hanging down at his sides below knobby wrists that looked like they’d been swollen and crippled by arthritis. He had a pained look on his face, just like he always got when he sang, his pale eyes staring straight in front of him and filled with a kind of misery, as if it hurt him to try to remember the words in the order they were supposed to come. Tears were rolling down his cheeks, and his slack mouth that was never quite closed, even when he wasn’t talking or singing, leaked saliva at the corners, and the saliva ran down over his chin. He was a big, lank guy at least three inches over six feet, and his bones were thick and knobby at all the joints just like at the wrists, and he looked like just what he was, a big boob without the brains to know when someone was making a damn fool of him, but I didn’t think it was funny.
Ivy and Gunner did, though. They were leaning against the barn with their arms around each other, and they were laughing fit to kill, Ivy with an abandon that was almost hysteria and Gunner more quietly, in his own way, his bright red lips drawn back off white teeth in an expression that was somehow canine and cruel.
I went over and grabbed Obie by an arm and jerked him around. His song ended with a little squawk in his throat, and he stood looking down at me with his mouth hanging open and his pale eyes clouded and confused in the way they got when anything happened too suddenly or was a little different from anything that had happened to him before.
“What’d you do that for, Jake?” he said. “I was singing my song for Ivy. You oughtn’t to stop me when I’m singing my song for Ivy.”
“God damn it,” I said, “can’t you tell when someone’s making a damn clown out of you? Haven’t you even got that much brains?”
He shook his head slowly from side to side, laboring to understand what I’d said, taking each word one at a time in the darkness of his brain and figuring it and then putting them all together at the end like a little kid just learning to read.
“You oughtn’t to say that, Jake. Ivy’s my girl. You know Ivy’s my girl. Ivy wouldn’t do anything like that to Obie.”
“Don’t be any more of a fool than God intended you to be, Obie. Ivy’s just stringing you along. She’s Gunner’s girl, not yours. Why would she laugh at you if she wasn’t? Why would she stand there laughing at you and letting Gunner laugh with her right in front of you if she wasn’t?”
It was true that Ivy teased Obie. She was cruel by instinct, and it gave her a big bang to work him up to the point where he was leaking saliva through his loose lips and shaking like a bird dog evacuating peach seeds, and you’d have thought it was a dangerous game for her, that a big powerful guy with no brains to evaluate consequences might have just slapped her down and had what he wanted, but she knew it wouldn’t happen because Obie had this simple religion in him and a rudimentary kind of morality that had been drilled into him for his own protection that said you never bothered anyone, least of all a woman, and that any kind of physical intimacy, no matter how bad you wanted it, was evil and strictly taboo. He’d never have touched Ivy, or Gunner, either, if it hadn’t been for me. Never on earth.
He swung his head around and looked at Ivy and Gunner by the barn. “Gunner oughtn’t to do that to Ivy. Ivy doesn’t like it. Ivy wouldn’t even like Obie to do something like that.”
Gunner let his hand slip off her and stepped forward, bending a little at the waist like a man ready to attack. He was looking at me, not Obie, and his eyes were as black and shiny as two chips of anthracite, and his face, though he had quit laughing, had the same expression as before, his red lips drawn back in the shape of cruel pleasure without sound. Ivy, in an unconscious gesture, lifted her hands to her armpits and ran them down the sidelines of her body as if she enjoyed the feel of herself.
She said softly, “Don’t pay any attention to Jake, Obie. He’s just jealous. He’s jealous because I’m your girl instead of his.”
Obie shook his head again, his sparse dry hair falling down over his eyes. “No. Jake’s Obie’s friend. Jake’s Obie’s friend, and Ivy’s Obie’s girl.”
It was as simple as that to the big boob. He couldn’t see any conflict. He couldn’t see any reason at all why it shouldn’t be that way.
Gunner laughed with a sound that was no more than a long breath hissing through his teeth. “Jake’s a sneaky little mouse, that’s what he is. Jake’s a slimy, panting little jerk who can’t get what he wants and doesn’t want anyone else to get it.”
My hate was too big for me then, and I stepped forward and started to swing at him, but he was much too fast for me and hit me flush in the mouth, and I was suddenly on my back in the hot, dry dust with blood in my throat. After fifteen seconds or so, I got up to do the best I could, but it wasn’t necessary, because Obie was standing between me and Gunner, and his huge hands were clenching and unclenching slowly.
“Don’t hit Jake again,” he said to Gunner. “Don’t hit Jake and don’t touch Ivy.”
Gunner was lean and mean and fast as hell, but he didn’t want any part of Obie. Obie would simply have waded into him and taken him in his big hands and crushed the life out of him, and Gunner knew it. In his eyes were fear and sudden withdrawal, but in Ivy’s eyes there was nothing but the crazy, shining excitement that was always her reaction to violence or the sight of blood as the symbol of violence.
“Come on, Obie,” I said. “Let’s cut out. I want you to help me down in the fields.”
I took him by an arm and led him down the cowpath into the pasture at the lower end and across the pasture toward the creek, and all the way he kept turning his head every few steps to look back toward Ivy and Gunner by the barn, and I could tell he was trying to figure it out, what had happened and why I had stopped him from finishing his song and why we had all said and done the things we had. My lips were split and beginning to swell, and one tooth was so loose that I could push it around with my tongue, but that wasn’t what hurt. A few cuts and bruises didn’t matter a damn. What hurt was the festering hatred and humiliation inside me that made me want to vomit and was all the worse because I couldn’t think of anything to do about it. At the edge of the timber along the creek I stopped and looked back myself, and I could see Ivy and Gunner walk across the barnyard and into the barn with their arms around each other, and I knew all of a sudden without any doubt at all just what they were going in there for. I think I knew because I understood that it would be necessary for Ivy to complete the cycle of intense physical excitement that the brief episode of violence and blood had aroused but hadn’t satisfied.
“What we stopping for, Jake?” Obie said. “I thought we were going to the fields.”
If he hadn’t said that, maybe I wouldn’t have done it. Maybe just a little thing like his saying something at the wrong time was the difference between doing it and not doing it.
“I just remembered that we’ll need a pitch fork, Obie,” I said. “Go back to the barn and get one.”
“What we need a pitch fork for?”
“Never mind that. Just go get it. It’s sticking in the hay in the loft.”
He started back the way we had come, and when he’d gone a few steps, I said, “Wait a minute, Obie. Listen to me. You be real quiet going in the barn. Don’t let anyone see you or hear you. You understand?”
His eyes got clouded and confused from the effort of trying to understand why I was telling him to get the fork in a way that was different from the way I had always told him to get it before.