— Here’s your sweetheart, she said, and Finus saw Avis Crossweatherly headed his way across the floor, her eyes pinning him to the spot. She came up and stood before him in a pale blue skirt and navy cashmere sweater.
— Dance with a girl? she said.
He smiled weakly, and took her hand.
A MONTH LATER, the night before Earl was set to marry Birdie, Finus got drunk at a card game in Earl’s honor at Marie Suskin’s whorehouse on 9th Street. The drunker he got, the less he felt like honoring Earl, so when he got Earl down a hundred dollars at stud he demanded that Earl go double or nothing and put up his fiancée as collateral. Earl, who never drank but had a temper, didn’t really like to gamble, knew Finus had long been sweet on Birdie, accepted and lost — three kings to Finus’s full house. Earl threw his cards down and they fought. Finus was bigger, knocked Earl down with a roundhouse and went outside, climbed into his old Model T. He meant to go out to Earl’s house, where Birdie was staying with her mother until the wedding there the next day. He would get her out onto the porch, and tell her that he loved her and there wasn’t anything he could do about it, and ask her to marry him, instead. They could move to some other town, if she wished, even to the Gulf coast, live in his father’s beach house, he’d work out of Mobile. He would tell her he was serious even though he was drunk. He would tell her he’d call on her later in the week, and then he would leave.
He carried a pearl-handled.32 revolver in his pocket, his father’s pistol, with which he meant to shoot Earl’s father, old Junius Urquhart, if he stood in the way. The Urquharts lived out past southside, beyond the highway, out the Junction Road. Finus roared across the highway hardly checking for traffic, fishtailed in the gravel on the other side, and then while trying to light a cigarette on down the road he slipped a wheel into the ditch, ramped into a thicket of sapling pines, and flew from the car through the old fabric roof like a circus performer on a vault. His head banged hard on the ground and he lay insensible for a while with a broad knot swelling up through the gash in his forehead.
A couple of his friends had followed him some five minutes behind. When they saw the lights of Finus’s car in the stand of pine saplings they went in and found Finus lying a few feet away on the ground, bleeding from the ear and the bump on his head, a burning cigarette stuck to his bottom lip, and so they at first thought him conscious, smoking beside his crashed car, which would have been just like Finus. They sat down in a ragged circle around him for a minute before they realized he was out, and about that time Finus opened his eyes anyway and asked where they all were.
— In a little set of pines just off the ditch, Curly Ammons said.
Finus noted the cigarette still in his mouth, spat it and asked for another. He lit up, pushed himself off the ground, touched the bloody knot on his head, and walked over to look at the car.
— I don’t imagine it’ll start again, not now, he said.
— Not likely, Bill said. -We can tow it in. I got a piece of cable.
— All right, Finus said. -Take it to Papa’s house. And he started walking.
— Better not go on out there, now, Curly called. -Old man Urquhart is waiting on you. One of Earl’s buddies called him on the telephone at Marie’s.
Finus gave a wave and kept on. Shoot him and his goddamn telephone too, he said to himself, righteous in the drunken certainty that Earl and Birdie’s was a marriage illegitimate in the highest moral sense. Contrary to natural law. There was a moon and he could follow the road easy. He smoked the rest of the fresh cigarette, and when he’d finished it he picked up his pace. He kept to one of the well-packed ruts. In the bright moonlight he could see the Urquhart house where it sat low in a grove of old oaks that seemed to guard the sprawling house like hulking gnomes. He walked into their shadows as the dogs started up. Old Junius’s rabbit dogs, beagles. They shot out toward Finus as if unleashed.
Junius stepped onto the porch, a stout man with an egg-shaped head gleaming in the porch light, toting a shotgun at the ready. When he saw Finus approaching at the edge of the grove by the highway, he hollered at the dogs to stop, raised the gun to a level above Finus’s head, and fired. He was a tough old man but he did not shoot to kill, he’d long ago had enough of killing. The gun was shooting dove load. One pellet dipped away from the rest like a dove itself and flew into Finus’s right eye. It felt like a grain of sand flung in a gale.
After Finus stopped screaming and the dogs had been put up, Junius helped him into the house and laid him on the sofa in the parlor.
Junius said, — Son, you’re lucky about that eye. He leaned forward to peer at it, then straightened up. -It don’t look so bad. I could’ve killed you if I’d wanted to. No riffraff is going to presume to win my son’s fiancée in a goddamn poker game.
Finus, though in pain, managed to get out, — Well, sir, what about the fool who would put her up in the kitty?
— Earl loses his temper, don’t think straight, Junius said. He sat in a chair next to the sofa, a stout man with a little tuft of graying hair on the top of his bald head, looking at Finus with small, glassy eyes.
— It’s a bad marriage, Finus said. -She doesn’t know what she’s doing. He knows every one of those whores by name.
— Hear tell it wasn’t just him by himself out there at Marie Suskin’s, speak of your attitudes toward females, Junius said. -My own opinion is every good woman could use a weekend in a whorehouse. And what was he to get if he won?
— Just to keep her. I had him down.
— Boy’s no gambler, Junius said.
Junius left the room and came back in a minute with a cold wet rag for Finus’s eye. He sat down, produced a worn deck of playing cards, and began to shuffle them on the coffee table between them. Finus held the cold rag to his eye, which was throbbing now and still hurt like hell. There was a sound been digging at him, tic tic tic, and when Old Junius pulled his pocket watch from the fob pocket in his vest it got much louder, TIC TIC TIC TIC, and when he put it up it was back to tic tic tic. Finus stared at where the chain disappeared into the folded generosity of the vest around old Junius’s girth.
— What kind of cards was y’all playing? Junius said.
— Stud, Finus said. -I was winning.
— Let’s see how you do with one eye then. He dealt onto the coffee table. -You win, I tell Earl a deal’s a deal and maybe he ought to think about calling it off, marry a woman better suited to him. I win, you buy me a drink next time we meet up in town and forget this foolishness.
The vast absurdity of the whole situation just then swooped down on Finus, and he was aware of the old man patronizing him. He sighed, said, — You want to go that route, I’ve already won her.
Junius ignored him, a placid look on his hamlike face. He dealt each of them two down and one up. Finus showed a two, Junius a queen.
Finus looked at him. Junius was without expression. He dealt two more each, up. Finus had his two and an eight and a jack. Junius had his queen plus an ace and a seven. They checked their cards. Finus squinted his good eye, saw a queen and a three. A pain shot through to the back of his head and something throbbed on the top of it. He tapped the table. Heard a tic tic tic tic. Junius dealt them each two more facedown. Finus checked his last cards. A queen and a two. Pairs of queens and twos, then.