The street was full of dust and grasshoppers. Hillbilly had never seen that many on a street before. In a field maybe, but not like this, leaping all over and in the middle of town.
Hillbilly, walking slightly bowlegged, grasshoppers jumping about as he went, waddled to Main Street, over to the red apartment above the drugstore. It took him a while to get there, and when he went up the stairs it was sheer pain. He hurt everywhere, but the small of his back, from the fall, and his balls, from the kick, were the worst. Every step, those two places felt as if they were being struck with an iron rod.
When he reached the landing he knocked on the door, and after a while it was answered by the blond whore he had had with him when Sunset’s old man broke in.
“Well,” he said, “you get around.”
She looked at him for a long moment, said, “I am a whore, you know.”
“Oh, I know,” Hillbilly said.
“How are you?”
“Never better.”
“You looking for me?”
“I wouldn’t have known where to look. And no. I wasn’t.”
“Why are you here?”
“At least that’s a question I don’t have to ask you, is it?”
“No,” she said, “I suppose not. I still owe you a finish.”
“Sure,” Hillbilly said. “McBride, he in?”
She nodded. “Go now, and I’ll tell him you were a salesman.”
“Why would I do that?”
“I got some ideas about what you want to do,” she said. “I don’t know all of it, but I know enough from hearing things here, know what happened to you, and I can put some of it together. Like maybe you want to get back at that woman constable, her father through these men. But these people, they’re bad, Hillbilly.”
“You do pick up a lot of information.”
“I get around.”
“I bet you do,” he said. “But, darling, I’m bad too.”
“Not really.”
“Oh, yeah,” Hillbilly said. “Really.”
She took a deep breath, let it out.
“You answer the door along with selling ass?” he asked.
“I do pretty much what I’m told to do.”
“I’m telling you, get the man.”
“You aren’t paying me. I do it for money, Hillbilly. You, you haven’t given me a dime.”
“But I gave you a good time.”
“You and everyone else. I thought, you and me…”
Hillbilly grinned. “Every woman I know thinks that.”
The blonde’s face got tough. She said, “Wait here.”
It was a great patch of land and once it had been covered in trees, but they had long since been cut, gone to the mill, except for three. The three were two oaks and a sweet gum, and the oaks were at the front of the house, and the sweet gum was to one side. The house was two-story and it had a porch around the bottom that went all the way around, and it had the same on the second floor. It was painted white as hope and the grass that had been planted had been cut close to the ground by enough negroes with push mowers to form a tribe. Dry as it was, the short grass was well watered and pretty green.
Sunset noted that it was more of a house than Marilyn had and she owned a chunk of the mill. But here Henry’s house was, bold as a tick on a patrician’s ass, not caring if the look of it made you wonder where the money came from.
Sunset, Clyde with her, parked her car in front of the place, sat and looked.
Clyde said, “That bottom porch is big enough to live on.”
Sunset got out of the car and went across the lawn, Clyde hustling to catch up. They went up to the door and she knocked. The door was opened by a big fat colored woman with a bandanna on her head and enough pattern in her floor-length dress to confuse and make you dizzy. There was a noise inside, a kind of snapping sound. It came and went, but it was pretty steady.
“Yes, ma’am, what you be wanting?” the colored woman said.
“Henry,” Sunset said. “I want to see Henry.”
“I go ask him.”
“No,” Sunset said. “That’s all right. We’ll just come in.”
“I got to have you invited,” the maid said. “I just got this job.”
“It may not be a job long,” Sunset said. “Sorry.”
“She’s the constable,” Clyde said.
The maid studied the badge on Sunset’s shirt. “She sure is. I ain’t gonna be stopping no law.”
The maid stepped aside and Sunset and Clyde went in.
“Where is he?” Sunset said. The maid pointed, and at the same time Sunset saw him. He was in front of a large fireplace mantel, a couch between them and himself, taking ceramic knickknacks off of the mantel, throwing them down as hard as he could. He had hold of a pink cat when they came up. He threw it down and smashed it and its pieces mixed with the stuff already there.
Henry looked up as they came into view.
“Hate these things,” he said. “Wife had them all over.”
“Nice way to treasure her memory,” Clyde said, “smashing her knickknacks.”
Henry smirked. “What you want, girl? Think over what I told you the other day?”
“I did.”
“I take it, him here, you decided not to go with what I suggested.”
Sunset nodded.
“That’s your choice, girl. Now, thanks for coming to tell me. Leave.”
“We’re leaving all right,” Sunset said. “Leaving with you.”
Henry’s mouth opened slightly. “You ain’t gonna arrest me?”
“I am.”
“What for?”
“All the things you told me the other day.”
“I didn’t tell you nothing. I was just talking. It’s just my word against yours.”
“I’m the law. You shouldn’t have told the law.”
Henry’s face looked as if he had just been given a mouthful of alum.
“Thought I could talk to you,” he said, “reason with you. I said some things that were tough, but I thought you’d listen. Thought you were smart.”
“Guess you were wrong,” Sunset said. “Clyde. Bring him along. He resists, knock the hell out of him.”
Clyde went over, said, “Resist, Henry. Make me a happy man.”
As they went out the door, Clyde holding Henry by the arm, the maid said to Henry, “Want me to sweep up that mess you made back there?”
Henry didn’t answer.
“You gonna pay me?”
He still didn’t answer.
“Then you gonna clean it up yourself, that’s what you’re gonna do. I ain’t got nothing against them knackers.”
“… and I can be of help,” Hillbilly said, finishing off a kind of diatribe, and when he said it, he tried not to let his voice crack, hoped he wasn’t sweating too bad. It was hot in the apartment, but he was sweating more than the man in front of him, McBride. McBride was sitting in a chair that he had drawn up right in front of Hillbilly, whom he had asked to sit on a low couch by the wall.
Hillbilly sat there with his hands in his lap, for once not thinking about how bad he hurt, because this McBride, his eyes made Hillbilly queasy, and he was wearing a funny wig and a goddamn apron. A frilly thing that went from chest to knees, had red splatters on it. But he didn’t look sissy and it didn’t seem funny. Not this fella.
Maybe he was just getting soft, getting his ass whipped like that by an old man, and it was making him less confident about everything and everybody. He hadn’t had an ass whipping since he was a boy and his daddy beat him with a razor strop, beat him unconscious a couple of times. But since leaving home he hadn’t lost a fight, and now he had lost one to an old man, and here was another old man, and he was scared of him. More scared of him than of Sunset’s father. This fella, something had fallen away from him that ought to be there, that was for damn sure. You could see it in his eyes.
That wasn’t bad enough, there was the big nigger too, and he was called Two, and he had been talking to himself, asking questions like someone was with him, not questions directed at him or McBride, but questions in the air, questions he answered himself. And now, goddamn it, the big nigger was sitting on the couch beside him, and he had one hand on Hillbilly’s knee, and Hillbilly, he couldn’t figure that, didn’t know what that was about, but the hand lay there like a big black crab, heavy and warm and firm as a log grapple.