“I’m goin to see her.”
“Goddamn it, Winer. Does it have to be spoonfed to you a word at a time? I’ve got money tied up here. I’ve bought her clothes and fed her and by God raised her and now you think you’ll get her off somewhere and get her to thinkin about dishes and baby buggies and such shit and it all goes out the winder. Like hell it does. Folks around her beginnin to think they can shove me this way and that and I reckon I’m goin to have to bang some more heads together. They think I’m mellerin down or somethin. But we’ll see. Now, pick up that long face and that draggy ass and get out of my place. I’m sick of it, do you hear me. You and your money ain’t no good in here.”
“I’ll tell you what, Hardin. Why don’t you put me out?”
“No, you won’t tell me what. You won’t tell me jackshit. I’ll tell you what. I don’t have to put you out. I told you Jiminiz does my light work. He’ll have you out of there so fast all you’ll remember about it is how bad it hurt.”
Winer was watching Jiminiz. The man sat cupping a tiny shotglass of bourbon in his hand. He seemed unaware that he was under discussion. But Winer wasn’t really seeing him, he was seeing the long, slow days of Indian summer, days of dreamy peace, the rafter going up in the heat of the sun, the feel of the icy fruitjar against his face. The ebony fall of her long hair against the whitewashed wall. The way his arms were thickening day by day with the raising of the heavy oak timbers and the smell of the hot green wood curing in the sun. I can do it, he was thinking. The tenseness left him, he stood loose against the bar, light and arrogant on the balls of his feet.
“Take me out, Jiminiz,” he said.
Jiminiz smiled a small, onesided smile. “I don’t work for you,” he said. “The man pays me off on a Friday gives my orders.”
Hardin stood watching Winer and something in the boy’s posture or in his face was evocative and recalled to him another who had snapped at his heels long ago. He knew by the way he was standing what was on his mind and he could see the imprint of the knife through denim and he thought in wonder. The same knife. For a millisecond the past seemed to engulf him, as if old deeds were never done and over with and there were things that must be done in perpetuity. As if he must go on forever taking this selfsame knife away from folks.
“He’ll have a knife,” he said tiredly.
“He won’t use it,” Jiminiz said offhandedly. “I’ve seen a thousand of him.”
“Then take him out,” Hardin said.
Jiminiz drained his shotglass and set it aside. “Easy money,” he said.
Winer waited. When Jiminiz approached him he swung as hard as he could at the calm, dark face. Jiminiz ducked and Winer felt his fist glance off the slick black hair and his momentum carried him sideways. Jiminiz straightened and positioned his feet and though his fist seemed to travel only six or eight inches before it struck Winer’s ribcage, Winer felt his lungs empty in a sharp explosion of pain and he went reeling backward.
The covey of drunks flushed like startled quail when Winer struck the table. It overturned and he fell in a cascade of playing cards and falling glass and the drunks erupted from toppled chairs and developed a simultaneous interest in what lay beyond the door. Winer got up on all fours slowly shaking his head from side to aside like a bear set upon by dogs. He was trying to breathe. His breath whistled eerily in his throat and the room seemed to have tilted to a forty-five-degree angle and poised there, Winer waiting for the furniture to slide sideways and pile up on the left periphery of his vision. Marvelously defying gravity and tilted as well, Jiminiz was crossing the room toward him, his fists cocked. Behind him a tilted Hardin watched as if this were all beyond his interest.
Winer got up clutching a chair and when he threw it Jiminiz just grinned and fended it away onehanded and kept on coming. Winer stiffened and hit Jiminiz in the belly with his right and crossed with his left and a slight shudder ran through Jiminiz and then he hit Winer full in the face.
Lights flickered in Winer’s head and he hit the floor limbernecked with his head slapping the hardwood flooring and they flickered again. Perhaps he dozed for a moment for when he came to himself Jiminiz was standing over him with look of infinite patience on his face. Winer was lying on his back and he rose to his elbows and lay staring out across his prone body. Nothing seemed to have changed. The chairs were still scattered and the table capsized and Hardin still sat on a stool drinking. Winer had fallen in broken glass and his arms were bleeding.
Then Hardin spoke. Winer could hear him though there was a roaring in his ears like far-off water. “Mark him up a little,” Hardin said. “Mess them smooth jaws up. Ever time he looks in a shavin mirror I want him to remember how sweet that pussy was.”
“Then let him get up,” Jiminiz said. “I don’t like hittin a man already down and I don’t like hittin a man already out on his feet and don’t know when he’s whipped.”
“He’ll get up,” Hardin said contemptuously. “You couldn’t keep him down with a fuckin logchain. He ain’t got sense to lay down and quit.”
Winer was trying. It hurt him to move and it hurt to breathe and it hurt to talk. “You better make him kill me,” he said. “Because if I live you won’t. You’re a dead man.”
“I know the words to that old song,” Hardin said. “I’ve heard it often enough.”
“You gettin up or stayin down?” Jiminiz asked.
The price he paid was dear but Winer got up. There was blood welling in his mouth and his eyes had a slick, shiny look like glass. For a few moments he managed to evade Jiminiz but the Mexican moved like a boxer, graceful despite his size, feinting, jabbing through Winer’s flimsy guard at will. Winer sat down hard with his vision darkening and the last thing he saw was the dark bulk of Jiminiz coming on and Jiminiz hit him some more but he had stopped feeling it.
The water had turned red. Winer squeezed the washrag out in it and went back to cleaning his face with the pink cloth, studying his cut in the mirror.
“Who was it done it? Hardin?” Oliver sat straddling a ladderback chair, his dead pipe clutched in his teeth.
“He subcontracted it out to some Mexican.”
“Mexcan?”
“Some bouncer or something brought up here from Memphis.”
“Big feller?”
Winer was gingerly daubing his face with alcohol. “I hope I never see one bigger,” he said. “But it wouldn’t have mattered anyway. I had some idea I was tougher than I turned out to be.”
“I seen you come by the house right slow driving like a drunk man. I knowed you wouldn’t be drunk so I figured I might ort to step up here and see would you live. Do you reckon you will?”
“I expect so.”
“You shore ain’t goin to be much in the purty department for a good long while.”
“I never was anyway.”
“Looks like you may have ye a scar or two to remember that Mexcan by. What’d he whup you with? A stick of stovewood? Or a choppin axe?”
“I think he had a ring on and he sort of twisted his fist when he hit me.”
“Boy, I just don’t know what to say. Goddamn it, there just ain’t nothin to say. You ort to go to the high sheriff. Bellwether’s a fair man, what I hear.”
“Hardin’d just swear I started it. Which I did. He gave me every out there was and I just wouldn’t take them, I had Pa’s old knife and I was going to cut one or both of them. Then he chopped me right good in the ribs and all my intentions just few away.”