“Then let em come,” Hardin said. “I don’t reckon the roof’ll fall in on em.”
She turned back to the window. Two women stood by the wagon in the earth yard, a third climbing down awkwardly from the wagonseat. Sunday finery, lavender and blue and green catching the summer light and flicking it away, a trio of radiant peacocks approaching halfquerulously this den of iniquity. Parasols clung along though the sky held no hint of rain. A knock.
“Reckon what they want?”
He made no reply save a gesture toward the bed where Hovington lay.
A knock, more assertive.
“Well, let em in.”
He arose, standing his glass by the edge of his chair. He crossed the room and turned the wooden latch and opened the door six or eight inches, peered down into a smooth country face beneath a gathered bonnet. He didn’t speak.
“We come to see about Brother Hovington,” the woman said.
He opened the door wider and stood aside. Pearl turned toward them, awkward gracelorn. “Come in,” she said.
“How is he?”
Hardin took up his glass, drained it. “You can see for yourselves,” he said. “Yonder he lays. Brother Hovington has fell on hard times.
Hovington lay under a comforter, an electric fan whirring the listless air toward him. In truth he seemed to know no times other than hard. He was skin and bones, his knees drawn against his chest. His skin was sallow, the bones delineating the yellow flesh. All that seemed alive in this face was the quick black eyes darting about. When he opened his mouth the teeth were long and wolfish and yellowed.
As the visitors entered the austere room Hardin went through the kitchen door with his glass. The women stood uncertainly looking about. All these decadent wonders. The silent jukebox. Stacks of cased brown bottles.
“Get yins a seat,” Pearl told them. “Rose, you get some more chairs out of the kitchen.”
The darkhaired girl arose silently and went through the doorway. She came back carrying three ladderback chairs and aligned them by the bed. Her longlashed eyes were downcast. Pearl fussed with the chairs, realigning them to her satisfaction. “Set down,” she said. “Can I get yins bonnets?”
One of the women touched the girl’s shoulder in a gesture of fleeting kindness. “Ain’t she a little lady? And ain’t she the prettiest thing you ever saw?”
The girl seemed not to notice. She seated herself in an armchair by the window and sat staring out at the yard, remote, as if in some manner she was able to will herself somewhere else.
The women subsided into chairs and took out cardboard fans and began to wave them about. Pearl stood behind them, harried, distraught, as if she were the uninvited guest here. “Can I get yins a cold drink? We never thought about no company.”
The woman in the middle loosened her bonnet strings, let the bonnet fall onto her shoulders. Her gold hair lay in intricate rococo plaits. Sweat beaded on her upper lip, a glycerinous mustache. “Nothin for me, thank ye.” The other two shook their heads. “We just come up here from church. Brother Hovington’s name come up in the service as one afflicted and we prayed for him. We come by to see did he need anything.”
From where Brother Hovington lay he seemed past the need of anything they might have about their persons. His eyes were closed, he might have slept. Or yet he might have been dead save the soft, liquid movement of the eyeballs beneath the near-translucent lids, the slow, hypnotic blue pulse of his throat. For Brother Hovington lay in agony, in an alteration of time juryrigged so by pain that its passage seemed scarcely discernible. In the molten fire where he lay he could watch the slow machinations of eternity, the cosmic miracle of each second being born, eggshaped, silverplated, phallic, time thrusting itself gleaming through the worn and worthless husk of the microsecond previous, halting, beginning to show the slow and infinitesimal accretions of decay in the clocking away of life in a mechanism encoded at the moment of conception, withering, shunted aside by time’s next orgasmic thrust, and all to the beating of some galactic heart, to voices, a madman’s mutterings from a snare in the world.
“Pearl?” Hardin called from the other room, and she arose, smoothing her skirt with her big hands, hesitated.
“I’ll be with yins in a minute. Let me see what he wants.” (As if Hardin were the husband, the women would tell each other later. Not this frail vessel already faulted, life seeping from every fissure. Hovington might have been some stranger, or worse, an unwanted relative come to visit, remaining to die).
Then voices, his mocking, conspiratorial, hers interrogative, faintly protesting, both made at once indecipherable and unmistakable through the thin walls, laughter vague and androgynous, and they all felt rather than heard the descension of flesh onto flesh, timeless, the protest of the bedsprings, an involuntary gasp, sounds they seemed to have possessed all their lives as inherent knowledge. Silence then save the whirr of the fan tracking in its mechanical orbit and then, unbelievably, the creak of the bedsprings commencing in earnest, intensifying, attaining the desired rhythm. The front door opened and closed and they saw that the girl Amber Rose had gone out.
The women sat in a hot, aghast silence. Color crept into their faces, they did not look at each other but all stared at the dying man who seemed charged with the performance of something that might break the furious agony of silence, propel them on to whatever their next action might be. When he made no move the woman in the middle rose, peered at the wasted face. “I believe Brother Hovington’s gone to sleep.” The other two arose with a thick rustling of silk, turned to the door. “Poor soul. I expect he needs his rest.” The door pulled to when they crossed the porch and passed into the sun, parasols fluttering open, their foreshortened shadows darting attendance like dark fowl underfoot.
The horses turned to watch them come, moving a little already in anticipation, the wagon creaking, the traces rattling musically. The girl watched them clambering into the wagon, their faced flushed and flat with revulsion. “Come around here,” one of them yelled peremptorily to the horses, snapping the lines. The wagon turned itself laboriously in the yard, dust billowing up from beneath the horses’ feet, rising in a palpable cloud that had them at their fans again, turning the wagon then onto the road in a sigh of prolonged noise.
Amber Rose smoothed the dark wing of hair from her eyes. It seemed to her the world was full of things she had no control over, and she watched them go with no look at all on her face.
Weiss parked the car in front of the Utotem Market and cut the switch off. “Say he works in here?” he asked Winer.
“He did the last time I was in there. He was picking chickens and cutting em up.”
“A man of experience then,” Weiss said dryly. “Just what we need. I don’t know whether I remember Hodges from the last time we caught. Was he the tall, redhaired one with the shifty eyes?”
“He’s all right.”
“Then get him. But if you can’t, call me so we can get someone else.”
“All right.”
Winer got out of the car and crossed the sidewalk to the front of the grocery. It was hot on the street but inside the Utotem a fan whirred somewhere above him and he could feel cold air blowing from somewhere. It was almost closing time and there were few customers in the store. He walked past the checkout counter and down the aisle to where the drinkbox was. He had the lid back and was peering inside making his selection when a voice hailed him.
“Hey Winer.”
He turned but couldn’t see anybody he knew. It had sounded like Motormouth but he was not about, only two women shopping, making their selections from shelves and putting them into shopping carts.
“Hey Chicken Man,” the voice said. A chicken was ascending slowly past the chrome rim of the meatcase. Winer stood clutching a dripping Coke and staring at it. The chicken rose until its feet rested on the chrome rail. A human thumb and forefinger gripped each yellow foot. The chicken pranced across the length of the metal lip with delicate little mincing steps. It pranced back. It was halfplucked and its head lolled drunkenly on a broken neck. Its eyes seemed to be leering at Winer through their blue eyes.