He struck out across the field, following in the wake of the sun. The western sky was mottled red as if the town he moved toward lay in flames. Behind him at the wood’s edge darkness gathered, pursued him stealthily across the field. At its edge he paused uncertainly, sat for a time on a stone. He did not know for sure where he was going or even why he was going there. He laid the bag between his feet and sat with his hands clasped across his knees, staring back the way he had come. “Hellfire,” he said. “It’s my house.” He thought for a moment he might go back but he did not arise from the stone. A dull weight of anger seemed to hold him where he sat.
Dusk drew on, the dark stain of night seeping across the field. The sky turned a washedout lavender, darkened incrementally, a star came out. Another, pinpricks through the tapestry of night. Against the purple heavens the pinewoods turned oblique and foreign, took on the texture of flocked velvet. A chorus of whippoorwills arose, the steady onenote whirr of dryflies. The world of detail was vanishing, all the world he could see merging color and shape, changing, the horizon of trees dimensionless and dark against paler dark like pinchbeck trees stamped from tin.
He got up. He took up the bag and skirting the field followed an old near-lost wagonpath, came out from under the stoic and eyeless gaze of a scarecrow into a cornfield, passed through the stalks with the blades making dry sibilant whispers against his clothing. Faintly beyond the twisted stalks of corn he could see the blacktop highway like a moving river of ink. His faint shadow appeared like a spectral image. He turned and the moon hung poised over the spiked treeline. It was full and clouds shuttled across its remote face. They shifted constantly in the press of some high wind and against the yellow face they were near translucent so that the moon was an amorphous world in turmoil, seas and continents in perpetual flux, forming and reforming in patters eternally random. He came through the last of the corn and down an embankment and onto the blacktop. He went on toward town in silence save the hollow slap of his shoes on the pavement.
The wrecked Buick had been there as long as Winer could remember, a casualty of some forgotten accident. It sat below the tieyard slowly vanishing in a riotous sprouting of honeysuckle and kudzu as if the years had altered its chemistry, made it arable so that in summertime fireorange bells of cowitch bloomed from its quarter panels. He opened the front door against the gentle resistance of honeysuckle, threw the sack onto the floorboard. He closed the door soundlessly, peering across the car toward the lights of the shacks bordering the railroad tracks. Temporary looking, accidental houses hinting some connection with the traintracks, some misbegotten byproducts themselves of the trains coming and going. He walked past the dark bulks of stacked tires onto the street and went on toward town. A cur dog on a length of chain suspended from a clothesline followed him to the ends of its tether, the chain skirling on its clothesline faintly musical. When the line tautened the dog sat on its haunches and watched him go.
In the Snowwhite Cafe he ate two grilled-cheese sandwiches and drank a large glass of milk. He paid and sat for a time listening to the jukebox and the clanging of the pinball machine, watched past his reflection in the glass the near-dark streets where Friday night’s business began to accomplish itself, strolling couples arm in arm, girls bright as justpicked flowers, halfdrunk belligerent men herded homeward by fierce women with bitter persecuted faces.
“Goddamn if it ain’t old Winer,” a jovial voice said. Winer turned to see a broad red face grinning down at him, a face he remembered from school. Chessor’s name was Wendall but no one remembered it anymore. His father nicknamed him Buttcut because he was the first son and his father had said he was as tough as the butt cut off a whiteoak log and the name had stuck. Buttcut had conscientiously lived up to his name. He had been a tackle on the football team and though he had been out of school for two years he still wore the black-and-gold school jacket and seemed to be making a career out of being a former athlete.
“Hey, Buttcut. Sit down.”
Chessor seated himself in the booth across the red formica table. “Boy, where you been keepin yourself? We figured you was dead or off to the wars one.”
“Naw, I’m still around. I’ve been carpentering down at Mormon Springs. Building Hardin’s honkytonk or whatever.”
Chessor turned toward the general area of the counter. “Hey, bring us a Co-Cola,” he called. He turned back to Winer. “You seen old Shoemaker?” When Winer shook his head Chessor said, “I heard he was lookin for you. Tryin to fix up some way for you to graduate or somethin. He had somethin or another lined up for you and then you didn’t come back in the fall. And say you ain’t seen him? I heard he went out and talked to your mama.”
“I don’t know. If he did she never said so.”
“Maybe not then. You ought to be there this year though. They’re drivin old Toby crazy, the seniors is. Just like we done when I was here. Carryin on the old tradition. Nobody even crackin a book, just fuckin off is all.”
A girl in a white lisle uniform set two glasses of Coke and cracked ice on a table. She laid a ticket upside down beside them. “Watch your mouth or you’ll be drinkin these on the sidewalks,” she said. “It’s ladies in here if you didn’t but know it.”
“If you see one holler at me and I’ll tone it down,” Chessor told her.
The girl turned and went toward the front of the restaurant, her left leg bent slightly outward at the knee and the tennis shoe she wore on her left foot hissing softly against the slick waxed tile.
“That gimplegged slut,” Buttcut said. “Im goin to have to straighten her ass out.” His face cleared, the old jovial look returned. “Old Toby won’t never make it till graduation time. That son of a bitch’ll be in a asylum long before then. I seen him in the drugstore, you can see it in his eyes. I member when I was in school he had this gray hat he was real proud of. He’d ordered it from somewhere. I got it and cut it up on the bandsaw in woodworkin class, it made the purtiest little gray strips. I took em and hid em in his desk drawer and when he found em he cried like a baby. I swear. I think he’s about three-quarters queer anyway.”
Buttcut looked all about, leaned farther still toward Winer, and lowered his voice. “This year Ann Barnett, she put a rubber on his desk. Put lotion or somethin in it so it looked like a used one. Old Toby come in and started French class and seen it and turned white as a bedsheet. Set there lookin at it with his nose flared out. You know how scared of germs the son of a bitch is, always scared he’s goin to catch somethin. Well. Anyway Ann said everbody was just fallin out of their seats. Toby finally took out his handkerchief and spread it over his hand and picked up his pencil by the point and worried that rubber around till he got the pencil stuck up in it. Then he picked it up and run across the room holdin it way out in front of him and a little off to the side like germs was blowin off of it. He throwed it in the wastebasket and then the pencil and then he throwed in the handkerchief. Never said word one. Went back and set down and went to conjugating French verbs like nothin ever happened.”
Winer sat smiling distractedly and listening, occasionally sipping his Coke. Behind the mask of his eyes he was trying to get a fix on Ann Barnett’s face, to single hers from the throng of faces swarming in his mind, but he could not. All he could recall was blond hair and iriscolored eyes. He could see Toby Witherspoon’s gentle, beleaguered face but all these things Buttcut was telling him sounded strange and foreign, the obscure rites of some race he’d barely heard of or one he’d forsaken long ago. He felt a cold remove from them, set apart, like a spectator never asked to participate, a face pressed against a window of frozen glass.