“I wouldn’t know any more if I looked than I do now. Somethin’s not right here. I’ve been sendin the money in here every week.”
“Well, for a long time you did. Ever since you was workin for Weiss. You or your mama’d come in and settle up and get your grocers. You always paid off like a clock tickin. Then about a month or so ago your mama started comin here with that Huggins feller sells them pots and pans. She quit payin but she kept on buyin. I didn’t think nothin about it for a while cause you always been good for it.”
Winer didn’t say anything for a while. When he did speak he said, “All right. How much is it?”
“A little over a hundred dollars.”
“How little over?”
“A hundred twenty-three is what it is.”
“Well, you’ll get it, but from now on nobody buys so much as a Co-Cola on my ticket unless I say so. All right?”
“That’s fine with me.”
Huggins was there the following Friday evening rocking gently in the porch swing, a proprietary air about him, claiming squatter’s rights. Winer went on into the house and collected his mirror and razor and soap. He went out the back door and down the path to the spring. He had already bathed and was shaving, kneeling on the bank, when the voice came. He nicked his face with the straight razor when Huggins spoke.
Huggins had made no sound approaching, easing through the brush with a kind of covert stealth, paused standing behind him, framed in the mirror behind Winer’s face. Winer watched a scarlet bead of blood well on his jaw, trickle down his face. He wiped it away and lowered the mirror.
“What do you know, good buddy?”
Winer turned. Huggins stood waiting, arms depending at his sides as if Winer had summoned him and he was waiting patiently to see what was required of him. He stood stooped as if he were composed of some strange material slowly turning liquid, a pear-shaped lump of loathsome jelly gravity was slowly drawing misshapen to each, barely contained by the mismatched clothing he wore, clothing he seemed to have stolen under cover of darkness from random clotheslines.
“What is it? I came up here to take a bath.”
“I know ye did. I just needed to talk to ye a minute and wanted to catch ye by yeself.”
Have you got a couple of dollars till payday? Winer asked himself.
“Reckon you could loan me about five till Wednesday?”
Winer mentally chided himself for underestimating the reach of Huggin’s ambition. He washed the lather of his face and dried it on a towel. He wanted done with Huggins, wanted him gone, he felt constricted and short of breath as if Huggins somehow affected the atmosphere, sucked from it more than his due of oxygen, left it hot and lifeless and barren. He was fumbling out his wallet, thumbing through the money Hardin had paid him. “I guess I can.”
His alacrity took Huggins by surprise. He licked his already wet lips, eyeing the money. “Just let me have ten if you can spare it, good buddy. I’ll catch ye Wednesday.”
Winer paused. “If five’d do a minute ago how did we get up to ten?”
“Well. Five’ll do, I reckon. I’ll get by on it, I guess.”
Winer stood up. He reached Huggins the five-dollar bill, watched him fold it, palm it rapidly, and slide it into his watch-pocket, knew even as he watched that he would see it no more. “You’re going to have to get by on it,” he said. “I’m paying my own grocery ticket this week.”
“Do what?”
“I’ve been meaning all week to ask you about my grocery ticket out at Long’s. I’ve been sending money out there every week and somehow or other I seem to owe him more money all the time. Do you know how a thing like that could be?”
“Lord, no. I guess you better ask Sam Long. His tickets must be messed up.”
“His tickets are all right. Mines are the one messed up. What are you trying to pull on me.”
“You need to talk to your mama.”
“You say talk to Sam Long. Or talk to my mama. I’d about as soon talk to you as anybody I know.”
“I ain’t no bookkeeper.”
“No. You ain’t no bookkeeper. There’s two or three things I can think of that you are but you ain’t no bookkeeper. And I’ll tell you something. I work for my pay. And if you think I’m busting my ass every day so you can drink it up at the poolhall or pay for goddamn pots and pans then you’re living in a dreamworld.”
“You got a good bit of a mouth on ye for a youngen, ain’t ye?”
I’m going to hit him, Winer thought. Then he thought, no, I’d have to touch him.
“Boy, me and you’s goin to have to get somethin straight. Now, you work with me and I’ll work with ye, you make it hard on me and I’ll hand it right back to ye. Your mama thinks a right smart of me and we gettin purty serious. We might be gettin married one of these times, we might just all pick up and go north. Me and you’ll be in the same family then and you know as well as I do that a family ain’t got but one boss.”
“Why Goddamn you.” Winer dropped the razor and mirror, heard the clink of glass breaking on stone. He grasped the collar of Huggin’s shirt, twisted, felt the soft tug of thread breaking, the collar button pulling away. He kept the fabric between his fist and the white, hairless flesh of Huggin’s throat. “I’ll tell you right now,” Winer said. “What you and her do is your business. But it’ll be a cold day in hell when you boss me around.”
Huggins was walking awkwardly backward, trying to get away. He had thought Winer a boy, nothing to contend with, but he had never really looked at him. Now he was seeing the hard brown shoulders, the corded arms, and Winer watched fear rise up in Huggin’s eyes like liquid filling a glass, before it his own twinned image, the tiny faces cold and remote and malevolent, leaning into the back little eyes.
He released his grip and Huggins staggered backward, almost fell when a stone turned beneath his foot. He winced and stood massaging his ankle. “You stuckup little prick,” he said. “You sorry shitass.” He was breathing as if he had run a long way, a harsh, sucking rasp. He buttoned the shirt with what buttons remained and ran a shaking hand through his hair and went shambling back through the brush. When he judged himself safely out of reach he said, “We do get married the first thing I’m doin is puttin your ass on the road.” He went on.
Winer gathered up his gear again. The mirror lay in triangular shards, each reflecting its own blue sky or baring tree, a shattered glass landscape. He waited awhile until he heard the car start up and drive away before he went to the house. When he got there he saw that wherever Huggins had gone his mother had gone too.
3
His father had built the house, a man conscientious of the plumbness of corners, the pitch rafters. All these years had passed and the floorjoists were unsagging, the ceilings level and true. Would that other things had seen fit to endure so well. For the house smelled of waiting, of last year’s winter fires, it seemed to have been constructed solely in anticipation of some moment that had not arrived yet, or passed unnoticed long ago.
He drank a cup of coffee on the doorstep and after a while he went back in and he was surprised that so little time had passed. He turned the radio on. “From WJJD in Chicago,” the radio said. “Here’s Randy Blake with the Suppertime Frolic.” A song began, the scraping of a fiddle. He ascended the ladder into the attic.
When he descended with his toilet articles and a change of clothing in a brown paper bag the radio was singing, “I didn’t hear nobody pray, sweet Jesus, I didn’t hear nobody pray. Whiskey and blood run together, but I didn’t hear nobody pray.” Winer stood clutching the bag, staring about the room. He turned the radio off and went out.