Listening to the radio in the falling night by the river the disc jockey’s voice overlay an incessant crying of frogs and the voices became his consorts, all there was of friendship left in the world. Silences elongated, for there were fewer and fewer people who would listen to Motormouth’s troubles. His face in these solitary hours between waking and the drugged unconsciousness he accepted as sleep took on a peculiarly serious look, a kind of slackjawed thoughtfulness as if all his resources were locked in concentration, devising a way out of the quandary he found himself in. Sometimes while the voices and guitars underlined his plight he feared madness, thought, I've got to get a hold of myself, but he could not find the handle. By day he’d spend the kickbacks Lyle paid him at Hardin’s or wherever temptation and opportunity coincided, sure of an audience as long as he parceled out his worn greenbacks.
His theory was that all would have gone well had it not been for the Blalock brothers. “If I could just keep the sons of bitches away from her,” he told Hardin one day. “If me and her was off to ourselves and let alone I know she’d be all right. But they’re like a pack of Goddamn dogs around her. I had it all to do over I’d marry somebody so ugly nobody would even fuck her.”
“There is nobody that ugly,” Hardin told him from the height of his experience. Hardin was whittling with a big bonehandled Case pocketknife, carving something unrecognizable from soft red cedar. He favored Motormouth with a look of sour condescension. “People will fuck anything,” he said. “Chickens, cows, sheep, each other. They’ll fuck watermelons and cucumbers. Anything with a hole in it or that’s soft enough to cut one, somebody somewhere will fuck it.”
This romantic view of the world of Eros did not sit well with Motormouth. “Ruby ain’t like that,” he said sullenly.
Hardin would listen to Motormouth’s incessant monotone as long as there was money left to spend but when Motormouth began stretching out his last beer and letting it warm in his hands Hardin would know he was broke and he would grow restless, wanting him gone, his sad stories falling on other ears. “I’ll tell you how it is, Hodges,” he said. “It’s a fact of life and you might as well face it. When you lay down with the hogs you ain’t got but two choices. You can waller with em in the mud or you can get clean away from em. You can’t have it both ways.”
Motormouth lurched drunkenly to his feet, the Coke crate falling behind him against the house. “I didn’t come here to be made sport of,” he said, running a big freckled hand through his hair, his face seized with besotted dignity. “And furthermore Ruby ain’t no hog.”
He looked for a moment as if he might reseat himself, then thought better of it and shambled around the corner of the house. After a while they heard the Chrysler cough and start.
“Hodges had to draw light in ever pot he was ever in,” Wymer told Hardin. “But he really outdone hisself on that Blalock deal. Cecil Blalock took to wantin to screw that gal Motormouth was married to so he got his brother Clyde to go over and get Motormouth to go coonhuntin. They was coonhuntin heavy there for a while. Motormouth was always braggin about it, he thought they wasn’t nobody like Clyde Blalock. Me and Clyde this, me and Clyde that. What fine coondogs Clyde had. And all the time Cecil screwin her right in Motormouth’s bed an then him and Clyde sniggerin about it.”
“It does sound like he’s missin a face card or two,” Hardin said.
“Hell, he used to ride em around in that old car. Him and Clyde in the front and her and Cecil settin in the back.”
“He talks like he thinks a right smart of her.”
“Yeah, I guess so. But he done it to himself. He’s just too dumb to live.”
Hardin sat for a time in silence, just listening to Wymer talk. Hardin lived in a world he manipulated day to day, you never knew when a piece of information might have a use. Life was a jigsaw puzzle someone had kicked apart on the day Hardin was born and he was still putting it back together a piece at a time, turning each section this way and that to see where it fit. He sat listening and whittling while Wymer talked on and the evening shadows lengthened.
She had been gone for over forty years and Oliver would have thought her forgotten long ago. Wherever she was she was old or maybe even dead but that was not the way he remembered her, for in some curious way she had transcended the ravages of the years. From where she waited in time she still looked the way she had that morning long ago when she had walked through the door with no backward look, not even pulling the door to, just across the porch with her shoulders stiffened and into the road.
He seldom thought of her except in fall, and he could not have said why that was. Something in the way the skies looked or the woods smelled sent him reeling down the years. The leafy hill he and Winer were climbing became transient in time, could have been the same hill forty years before.
Course, I wouldn’t change things now if I could, he thought hastily. Except about Willie and maybe if that changed the rest would too, for that was the root it growed from. But I wouldn’t beg her to stay even now. I never begged man or woman for any blessed thing. But if it would do any good I would about the boy—
“Let’s blow awhile,” he said aloud. “I can’t tramp these hills like I used to.”
Winer paused and seated himself on a stump on the hillside.
“We ain’t goin to find no sang in this holler anyway,” William Tell Oliver said. “Damn cordwood trucks and saws had ruint it. I reckon they’ll keep on cuttin till all timber biggern a broomhandle is hauled off to them chemical plants.”
“I guess the country around here’s a lot different that it was when you were a boy.”
“Oh Lord, yes. But you know, you always hearin about how things is growin but I don’t know. The way I see it it’s gone down. They was thirty-five hundred people livin at Riverside then and now they ain’t nothin but a grocery store. That and them old wrecked furnaces. The railroad tracks run all the way to Centerville then and the train run ever day haulin out pigiron. Boy, that was a rough place. Saturday nights Riverside was lit up like a Christmas tree.
“And Napier was boomin too, they was minin iron ore over there. Worked over there for a while. Me and this other feller swung fifty-pound sledgehammers. All this raw ore come down a big chute with water runnin through it to wash the dirt out. They had it rigged where it come out of the river, didn’t have no pump or nothin like that. These big chunks of ore comin tumblin off the chute and we had to bust em up. He’d swing and I’d swing. All day long. They Godamighty. Fifty-pound hammers. Now I doubt I could pick one up.”
“I bet it was rough around here back then.”
“Well. It was tolerable rough. That bunch around Riverside was more roughhouse than mean, though they was a few cuttins and the like when they got to drinkin. But I’ll tell you what, I’d take a week of it over thirty minutes down at Hardin’s on a Saturday night. We used to have a lot of dances down there back then. Wasn’t much else to do. Course, they wasn’t enough women to go around but everbody would get drunk and listen to the music.”
The night he met her the fiddle played: You ought to see my Cindy, she lives away down south…
They came out of the dance arm in arm to a balmy Saturday night and the local boys had run off his mule. She’d been tied to a tree in the schoolhouse yard but she was long gone now. He’d walked Cindy home and kissed her. As he’d been walking (twelve miles, to this day he could not remember passing through Rockhouse, or crossing the river, though that was the only way. As if he’d floated or been in a trance) home out of Riverside someone had thrown a railroad spike at him and it had sung past his head, turning end over end. He could still hear the vicious fluttering sound it made in the air. He’d whirled but there’d been no one there.