“No supper. You’re too late.”
“That’s right,” Bohn’s eyes in the plate, hiding the mouth with the back of his hand, “kitchen’s closed.”
For Lou his mouth was open, his chin still sagged. The berries, the purple fish roe, still hung in the air and filled a vanished face; she saw a crawling, half digested bunch of grapes, a birthmark — at a single mouthful — swelling into sight between his lips. Bohn never looked at her again.
He had an old man’s kidney. He had an old man’s tumorous girth and thickly dying wind, a hardening on the surface of his armpits. Chest and shoulders were solidified against youth, bulged in what he assumed to be the paunch of middle age; he was strapping, suffered a neuralgia in winter, a painful unlimbering in the spring. A few fingers were broken, snubbed, since an old man labors from stone to knife to saw to possible tractor accident and back to the single burning of a match flame short in argument. He could laugh, sparsely, at the exploits of men over fifty who enacted, he believed, all they claimed; his own prowess, he told them, had been struck off, like a head of hair, by maturity. And he was, except for a few patches that had to be shaved monthly by a barber, bald; lost by pernicious exposure to the sun, kept from water and finally pulled out one night in a troubled sleep by bloody, rasping fingertips. He mimicked, with unclean, pyretic dignity, the limp folds under the chin, the cockles in the cheeks, the gasp of wisdom and inflammation, the rock-like, seasoned cough of the prime, half invalided buck.
Bohn argued at, commanded his world and saw it under the pale of bitter years when imaginary friends die off. From this weathered mask and within this swollen body of whore-wounded time — he was thirty years old — skipped eyes blue and lively, curious for abuse, soured at the sight of visiting women passing close and strange among the undershirts, the beards of the members of his town.
“Thegna’s finished for the day, pooed over all the cabbage you care to, ain’t you, Thegna?” And now and then, instead of speaking to or looking at the mustang buster, he thrust an arm across the table, struck the wood to keep the small man in his place. “You loved the boys already, ain’t you, Thegna?” The one arm on her waist, the other, just out of reach, aiming at the Finn, “In Fat Chance worried all of us at once.”
Lou looked quickly at the small but rotund cook.
Bohn broke away. He stood up and immediately, with a clatter of sticks, the frail, the chronically thin ex-rider left the table.
Bohn stopped in the doorway and whispered once more to the trussed and stocky, water-eyed and trembling woman. “Thegna, did you pull on your big hip boots when the dam slid in?”
She nodded, back against the stove, and continued to bow up and down her flushed and weeping head. The apron shot up in warm and baffled flight.
“Thegna here will learn you,” he said as he quickly passed the flash of blue-green silk.
Lou escaped the flaying of the tumbling canes.
He shied, big and halting as he was, at the web texture of the flyless slacks and at the emerald apparatus that lived and breathed, but further at the metal relic buried in the middle of her chest, visible, through the silk, in its modest wedge. At that time it was the only cross in Mistletoe, Lou the only woman despite several who gathered in the cook’s room for cards.
Below the window and under the stare of searchlights brilliant atop dry and root choked posts, a file of creaking men sat still the length of the dormitory wall. Their backs were encrusted to the glittering tar board and they could not stir, singly mushroomed in a row, did not twist white and curious faces toward the upstairs window at the sound of women, the exchange, starting overhead, of far carrying tones and smiles. The sound was enough, was robbed of sweetness near the ground by the chemically white light and itching in their feet; by the guitar that was struck now and then shortly above the rattling of the pails, crouched upon by the player who sang, suddenly muffled, as a man talking to himself and not in serenade.
Tin helmets at their sides, after a day of clinging to the turbine tower and before bed, they stilled the creeping of the fungus across their feet by immersion, waved them automatically, spreading the toes, in the medicinal, violet fluid that filled the pails. Septic patches of flaking skin and trails of the discharge from the soles of their feet caked the bottoms of their shoes and in the early morning reimpregnated cooling sores, fired, a sudden yeast, under men’s weight on the earth. But at night they rolled their trousers above the knee, sat still. Beyond the crushed glass of the lot they faced and away in the darkness, stretched open snares and painful walks, sand, black brush and the dam. They hung their heads, at night retreated in blue denim and with phosphorescent joints and bones to the gritty wall — and did not, after women slept and from the porch of a store, watch through heavy cobwebbed evenings for a moonrise. The women were awake.
“You better tell me about him,” demanded Lou. She leaned at the window and several times, in the beginning, looked down on the black and waxen heads, well lit naked legs, the narrow backs. “Been here before and damned himself. Or had a good time.” She glanced down again — searchlights hit her egg blue breast and sparkling cross — and breathed deeply, staring after caterpillars curled on a branch. “He’s short.” She looked at the gold braids, tarnished, at the cook with canvas hips, and she began to breathe like the fat woman, through her mouth. Already, giggling and without a word, the cook’s head shook in denial, admitting no eye on her bosom, no rocks thrown. “He sweats in bed,” said Camper’s wife. “He can stick things into himself and not feel. If he’s mad he cries. Remember?”
The journeying man was followed: a bandog with a trailing chain, by fighters brawling a hundred steps behind, by a fish that escaped in the years before or a woman pointing no sooner had he passed. He stepped fidgeting through the darkness, thinking now and then of the dead man, while, in the body of one and the backbiting of the other, he was described between two women lashed together for the night.
“A blue spot on his chest? Punches you in his sleep? Come on,” Lou urged in the foreknowledge of a young girl, “you weren’t just cooking all that time.” And she played upon the drawstrings of the bag they shared, pledged that dual experience imposed by birth — in its welter all men were innocent — to outlast, roundabout and broad, the lone conception men carried in a joke and for which they fought time and again. “Any other place I wouldn’t have missed him,” trying to judge the years and deducting pounds accordingly, squinting at the woman’s shape of old, “telling me he just come here to fish! He can do that in the bathtub.” And the cook stood stolid, no keener than when she had backed against the stove.
Lou flung away her own blonde hair. She slouched, eyes level with the cook’s, gained weight, inched like a man to the window where perfume would be safely lost into the salty night. Had she a bandana she would have tied it around her head, blown out her cheeks. She hid her bright fingers in the pockets of her slacks. She swayed, gone white, as if she too had just kissed a mouth thick with pie and tobacco leaves, just come from a man in black blucher shoes and pants swelled with a bladder beneath the belt. “Think,” she said, “I want to know. Did he have the nerve?” Then, against the snapping of the guitar and smell of scattered red pepper seeds: “He ran straight to it all right. Like a buried bone!”
Thegna revolved, clapped both hands into crimson cheeks and spun so that the back of her head became as blunt and sealed as her face. Her eyes disappeared, popped in pain — nerves, glitter, fluid— into her head as in laughter an egg or thimble is suddenly swallowed whole and the body continues to shake while vomiting through the nose. In the old days Thegna had fired upon thieving Indians, shot her rifle on the fourth of July and, unarmed, stormed once to the reservation to organize a convention of stercoricolous squaws. She was the first to order a crystal set and the last to give up wearing a money belt. One braid flew loose and clung flatly to her shortened arm’s thick end, one breast trailed the other.