The night was loaded distantly with the smell of old shell cases and powder already shot. The welders, unlike hog men or men of the hills, were unable to keep silent in front of her, their mouths were not stunned shut and awry. And now and then, to break the stare of the silken woman, they mentioned him, a brief description of wet wash as telltale as his small footprints in the mud, the sound of their voices through larynx and nose still pinched and awed with the knell of the one death. There was no flood but of light, and in the light no clash of cocks or bodies, only the lime glass garden and woman whose whispering relations with any one of the sitting men could have sacked as little and exposed as much as the accident which, with a clap of land, had rocked the little purgatory.
“And if he stopped, you could have touched him.”
“If you caught his eye, and if he’d heard your name.”
Old Lifeline lay in the darkness before her men, no longer muddy but pocketed thin as rainwater over the pits of sludge. The tidal, raft-bearing sweep of her was gone, her gray capped current locked in a few poison berries dried by the banks. Her pitch evaporated, the flood pulled from her like the tubes of a butchered ox; she licked without stench or stomach the lower crude pyramids of the dam, above it, barely covered the rooftops of impounded farms. In the days before, howled upon, steeped in froth, she had rocked the speck of a cowman seated cross-legged upon his bobbing horse, had matted many a dappled mane and washed afield dog-paddling ponies.
But now, from Mistletoe to the end, to her most remote and dismal channels, and to the sea, she lay, with gaps from bend to bend, bell clear above the burdening offal. The welders were sometimes called upon to point her out. They had to kneel low to dip their hands at noon.
The young boy dug at his heel and a shiftless rattling of the pails sounded instead of lap of water behind the dormitory. None of them moved and, each to his stool, sat in file as if one hidden hand of each was wedged, trousers covering the manacles, into a split and gripping rail.
“It was hard to believe he was gone.”
“Turned his back on us.”
“Some of us called him, hollared after him from the bluff, damn fools that we were.”
“There was one soft sound that would have raised your hair — like a great animal digesting bran. Him or the dam we couldn’t tell.”
“Jonah.”
And after a pause: “Except if it had been a whale, he might have escaped.”
At that moment one Red Devil, lost from the rest, dashed to the edge of light, stopped and revved his engine. Standing with legs spread eagle, holding the machine quickly in both hands, he nervously twisted the throttle grip, blasted the sand with exhaust, and looked over his shoulder toward the trailing dogs. He sat like a bird still flying, in dead motion the wind still seemed to flatten his driving clothes. The small and wary goggles flashed in the floodlamps. The starting pedal vibrated beneath his calf. It was loosely wired to the oily makeshift frame. Now and then a short claw tugged at the strap around the neck, the knees bent rapidly up and down as if the heels were about to shoot in all directions and he twitched, pulled at the chipped and battered motorcycle and lifted his nose toward the freshly scented path. Behind him the scampering dogs with rough fur and winded ribs, jaws clamped on hanging tongues in the over-country race, drew near with forced cries and shaggy heads, bewildered in the sudden opportunity to run. With each crafty burst of the engine, the barks, a sound hoarse and long unheard, started anew. They seemed to be running through the air, these animals lured from under stoops and from the foot of tumbled dusty beds.
Suddenly, small oblong head jerked toward the men and woman cowered at the wall, he raised his fist. For a moment it jutted sharply from the sharkskin body. Then he crouched, kicked his feet, and sped diagonally across the lot like a thin and spotted deer before the bough stands of fumbling hunters.
In the following silence they stirred again, one coughed.
“You see, mamm,” whispering, still watching the hole in the darkness where the rider had disappeared, “we ain’t forgot.”
Lou Camper climbed slowly to her feet. The dogs did not appear.
four men stood at the roadside. They were led by one who seemed to know the country and who, as they paused, scanned it with the scarred and suspicious eyes of an old strong man. They had left the Buckhouse quickly but still were far from the waters behind the dam. Only now, out of breath and brought to a rustling stop by the pain in the largest’s legs, did they begin to talk and touch shoulder to shoulder, bumping in the darkness.
“How are you, Bohn?”
“I’m ahead of you, Lampson,” pulling the fat but beardless chin, “because you boys don’t have to try so hard.”
“Camper,” interrupted the perspiring fisherman, “remember that name?”
“He heard you,” murmured Luke.
“I knew his brother,” persisted Camper to the old buck, nodding at Luke, “by sight, anyway.”
Harry Bohn bit the tobacco plug, three inches long, round as a broom handle, then swung himself away and faced the north. The hair on the sides and back of his head was a tinted silver, black at the ends in the darkness.
“Harry, he can’t think of anything else, is all,” said Luke.
“I can’t either,” said the Finn, twisting and hopping, “and I’m going to get back to town, Bohn, where I can do something about it.”
“You stand right there. With me.”
In the broad and gray cat face the quick eyes shut and opened, and Bohn’s small lips, thin and stunted from a touch of the wailing forceps, yawned over a little cavity and trembled. “We’ll go on together, both of us.” He lowered his head, clenched one hand into a fist, grunted, and with the other gently rubbed his burning heart. “He ain’t open to the public,” feeling his trousers with the calmness of age as he spoke, back still turned to Camper, “no matter how much they crane. Get as old as me and you know that.”
Harry Bohn, by miracle born of a dead mother and thereafter in his youth — he looked quickly over his shoulder lest he be caught thinking of it — drawn to the expressionless genitals of animals as the Sheriff was in a later day, doted upon the stomach kept distended with effort, and lest they be torn to pieces, slept with his hands drawn in from the edges of the bed. “You’re lucky,” the doctor told the boy before he fled, “you wasn’t buried with her right then and there. Now be good.” And in the darkness of the night, with muscle of the athlete pitted against the hermit’s birthmark, he briefly stepped aside for the passing of water — as another might turn his head to cough — and swallowed a black and spongy pill picked from a matchbox. Then Bohn burst with feebleness and fought, with laughter and pains of senility, a past in which life moved deep within the woman’s body though her hands were cold.
“I’m still ahold of myself, Lampson. At least I ain’t out looking around like these boys here.”
“We’re just walking, Harry.”
“I know,” attempting to make his bass voice crack, “looking around for sweet tooth.”
“We’re out to fish,” said Camper and tapped the dismantled rod.
“I got shirts to wash, lighting wires to put across the floor, Bohn, with half my fence down, a window lead to hang and plenty of time except you use it all!”
“Finn, you ain’t nearly home yet.”
Except for Bohn each might have run his way, ducked his head to escape the dark and empty road, the still plain from which, even at night, the buffalo could be seen to creep. All but Camper, who might have wandered to his death. The spare men — they had hands that were of one piece and put to purpose like the head of a hammer, bodies that appeared to have come first through the mist of nettles, skin which over a period of time ejected splinters, were obviously men by the hanging of hat brims and the constant sound of their breathing — shook the dust from their clothes and rubbed their shins as if they had stumbled on the way. Camper urged them forward, the Finn back. As they talked, picking at each other’s sleeves, they looked up, listened for the faint jumping of the fish or cry of the wolf. It was not only Camper who, unto himself, licked his mouth for a taste of the imaginary spawn of game and feared through the night the footfall of the hunted. The great natural wilds lay around them without dens or lairs.