“You a hard feller to find.”
“I didn’t know I was lost.”
Winer was alone. Fearing more papers or something that required his presence before an oaken bench Motormouth had faded back into the brush. But Bellwether had not even inquired after him.
“Well, you may not be but your mama thinks you are. She asked me to try and find out where you was.”
“I haven’t broken any laws I know about. And if she wanted to see me I was working right up the road at Hardin’s.”
“There’s nobody accused you of breaking any laws. I told you I was just doin a favor for your mama. She said tell you to come home. She wants to see you about somethin.”
“What?”
“Best I can gather her and Leo Huggins is gettin married. He’s got promises of a job over in Arkansas and you and your mama’s supposed to go with him.”
“Who said so?”
“I just said I’d try and get word to you. What you do is your business.”
“Well. Thanks for telling me anyway.”
“You goin down there I’ll run you by. I told her I’d let her know if I saw you.”
“I’ll just have Motormouth run me down there after a while.”
But he didn’t. It was the weekend before he went and that was a day too late. There wasn’t anyone there at all.
4
Winer and the girl were standing in a corner, hidden from the house by the weatherboarded walls.
“Why would I want to do a thing like that?” she asked him. “I’d be liable to get caught.” She seemed to be teasing him, everything she said had an ironic quality as if she were reserving the right to take back anything she said.
“So what if you did? What is he to you? It looks to me like anybody could slip out of a honkytonk for a few minutes.”
“I can’t.”
“Can’t or won’t?”
“Anyway, why should I have to slip out and meet you in the woods? Why can’t you get a car like anybody else?”
“Well. I got my eye on one. I just wanted to see you.”
“Then I guess that’s your reason.” She smiled. “Have you got one for me?”
He leaned and twisted her face up to him. She didn’t resist. He could feel her hair around his fingers, the delicate bones beneath her ear. She opened her mouth beneath his. Her breath was claim and sweet. She leaned against him. “You know I want to.”
“I’ll know you want to when I see you coming,” he said. His throat and chest felt tight and constricted. He felt as if he were drowning.
“I’ll try,” she said.
He lay on a tabled shelf of limestone and watched the slow, majestic roll of the fall constellations. He realized with something akin to regret that he had no names to affix to them though he’d known them all his life. The stars looked bright and close and earlier an orange harvest moon had cradled up out of the pines so huge he felt he could reach up and touch them. By its light the Mormon Springs branch was frozen motionless and it gleamed like silver, the woods deep and still. It seemed strange to lie here and listen to the sounds of the jukebox filtered up out of the darkness, windbrought and maudlin plaints, but no less real for being maudlin. Once or twice cries of anger or exultation arose and he thought he might go see what prompted them but he did not. He just lay with his coat rolled beneath his head for a pillow and listened to all the sounds of the night, ears attuned for her footfalls.
He wondered what time it was, felt it must be past midnight. The night wore on and he did not hear the jukebox for long periods of time, nor the cries of drunks, and the occasional car he heard seemed to be leaving rather than arriving. A while longer, he thought. He was keyed up and tense as if expecting something to happen in the next few minutes that would alter his life forever.
An owl on the wing shuttled across the moon and after a while he heard it or its brother calling from out of the fabled dark of Mormon Springs. Where dwelt the ghosts of murdered Mormons and their convert wives and some of the men who had come down this hillside so long ago, the slayers slain. He wondered had the face of the country changed, perhaps they passed this upheaval of the earth. Had folks learned from history, from the shifting of the seasons?
She is not coming, he was thinking. At length he rose. It had turned colder and time seemed to be slowing, to be gearing down for the long haul to dawn. He put the jacket on and buttoned it and picked his way through the stark and silver woods. He crossed the stream at its narrowest point and ascended through ironwood and willow until he came out in the field. In the fierce moonlight the field was profoundly still and his squat shadow the only thing in motion, a stygian and perverse version of himself that ran ahead distorting and miming his movements.
He angled around the hill until he could see the house. He sat on a stone hugging himself against the chill and watched like a thief awaiting an opportunity to steal. After an hour or so a bitter core of anger rose in him and he got up to go but then a figure came out of the house and moved almost instantly into the shadows the woods threw and he could barely watch it progress toward the spring.
Winer changed course and moved as silently as he could into the thickening brush. Anticipation intense as prayer seized him. Tree to tree stealthily to the edge of the embankment and after a moment he heard a voice that appeared to be in conversation with itself. A stone rolled beneath his feet and splashed into the water and he was looking down at a soldier urinating into the stream. The soldier looked up blearyeyed toward the source of this disturbance and leapt backward fumbling with his clothing. Moonlight winked off his upturned glasses and he looked pale and frightened as if some younger variation of the grim reaper had been visited upon him or a revenant from some old violence played here long ago.
When Winer did not vanish or leap upon him the soldier steadied himself and staggered back down to the stream. He adjusted his campaign cap. “What outfit you from?” he called to Winer. Winer spat into the listing stream and made no reply save departure.
She came at midmorning and spoke to him but he was cool and distant and disinclined to conversation. “Be mad then,” she told him. She left but he hardly missed her. Winer’s head hurt from lack of sleep and his arms and legs felt heavy and sluggish and were loath to do his bidding.
He made it through the long morning and when he broke for lunch she came back. He hadn’t brought any lunch but he had a jar of coffee and he was drinking that when she stepped up onto the subflooring.
“I can’t stay but a minute and if you’re goin to fight I’ll just go back in.”
“I never sent for you.”
“You sent for me last night, whether you know it or not”
“Yeah. For what good it did.”
“I wasn’t goin to tell you this but the reason I couldn’t come was he made me set with a man.”
“Who did?”
“Hardin. Dallas.”
“He made you, did he. He hold a gun to you?”
“No.”
“I don’t guess he had to.”
“Just shut up. You don’t know anything about anything.”
“I know I sat up all night in the mouth of that holler like a fool holding the sack on a snipehunt. That’s all I know.”
“Well. I couldn’t help it.”
“Sure, you couldn’t. I bet you couldn’t help telling every soldier in there about it too. Well, you better enjoy it because it’s the last laugh you’ll get out on me.”
“Nathan, I really wanted to. I swear to God I did. His eyes were on me every minute.”
“How come he made you sit with a man? Who was it anyway?”