Dirty Work (11 page)

“Here, let me get you another beer. This is nice, just us talking. Well. He was dead when Daddy found him. I walked close enough to see a little and then he made me go back. I kept watching, though. He was down on his knees by the front of the plow like he was working on it, Hugh Jean was. Old Joe was still standing in the traces. They’d broke up about half the garden. He didn’t raise much. Some tomatoes and a few peas. A little okry. Enough stuff to get him through the winter. Hell, we raised hogs back then. Daddy and Hugh Jean did. I don’t know, man. It was like they took care of each other. Daddy would go down there on the weekends sometimes and drink with him. He made a little whiskey down there. Mama didn’t like that either. She thought it was going to get Daddy back in trouble again. But they never did get caught making it. Hell I make a little once in a while myself. I run me off a little batch once or twice a year, make enough to last me a while. I used to sit up in the woods with Hugh Jean and watch it come out a drop at a time. He taught me how to make it. Daddy knew he was doing
it. I’ve thought about that a lot. He had a certain kind of relationship with Hugh Jean, and after he died it seemed like things were never the same. I don’t know why. He never would let any black people live on the place after that.

“What he did was beat that fucking mule to death. Yep. Saw my daddy do that. God. He pulled Hugh Jean out of the way and took his shirt off and covered his face up. And I heard him talking to that mule. Said You son of a bitch I’m fixing to beat your fucking brains out. Oh he hurt that son of a bitch before he died. Took a sledgehammer handle to him. I saw some bad shit over there but my daddy beating that mule to death was one of the worst things I ever saw. It took him about thirty minutes. Mama got Max and ran in the house and locked the door. I stood there and watched it. He made sure the sumbitch suffered before he died. And he damn sure suffered. Tied his head to a post and then he went to work on him. He had blood all over him when he come back.

“This is some morbid shit, ain’t it? Well hell. The mule killed his friend, so he killed the mule. But slowly, so the mule would know why it was happening. Not that you would have ever got him to admit that Hugh Jean was his friend. Hell no. The best he ever said was that Hugh Jean was a good hand.

“But I remember that funeral. Me and Daddy were the only white people in there. It was so strange. They didn’t bury him for a week. They had to wait and let all his kin-folks from up North get down. They wouldn’t bury him
until everybody was there. What am I telling you for, hell, you know.

“Yeah, hold on, let me get my lighter. Here. You ready for a drink? All right.

“Naw but you know, Daddy wanted me to go. He said I might not get to see anything like that again ever. I didn’t know what he was talking about.

“It was way up in the woods. This little dirt road, muddy, shit it’d been raining and cars were stuck everywhere. Hell, they had to get out and push the hearse out of a mud hole. And got up there and the church wasn’t nothing but a little old shack, looked like. It was packed full of people. Every pew was jammed. They had to start putting chairs out in the middle aisle.

“Well, we got in there and sat down. Everybody was looking at us. I was afraid they’s gonna kill us.

“A bunch of old women came in from the back, had choir robes on. Some of em looked like they were about eighty years old. I ain’t shitting you, the most dried-up ones there, that was the ones in the choir. The ones who looked like they didn’t have nothing left. Remind me to tell you the one about the piccolo player after while. But anyway they started singing. They didn’t even have any music yet. The piano player hadn’t even sat down yet. And hell, they didn’t need it. They didn’t even have any songbooks. They were just sitting there with their hands in their laps. But it made the hair want to get up on my head. I never heard nothing like it. They sang like angels. I mean, I’ve thought before, if you could hear angels sing,
that’s what it would sound like. They fit together like, well, it was like if one of them was gone it would have been something different. I mean you could hear every one of them. And nobody said anything, man, they just let them sing. I think they sang three songs, and I’d never heard a one of them before, but, man, God, I wish I had a tape of that now. I’d love to be able to hear that now, just one more time. Does that sound crazy? I mean I don’t know how religious you are. But it was like God was up there in the rafters.

“I don’t go to church like I ought to. I usually don’t talk about any of this stuff. I don’t know if they want to operate on me this time or not. It’s risky.

“I was gonna finish telling you about that funeral. Well, the preacher came in. Man, it was hot in there. Wasn’t any air conditioning, of course. He was a little old bitty guy with this long black robe. Had glasses. Kind of reminded me of Algonquin J. Calhoun. And he went to preaching. Then he got to preaching and singing. Then he went to hollering. And the whole place got to rocking and rolling. People were hopping up hollering Amen! like they just couldn’t sit still. Then they went to testifying. The whole thing just got out of hand. It took about an hour. Everybody in there was sweating. I’d never seen anything like it.

“They opened the casket after it was all over with. The smell was awful. I think that’s when death really hit me for the first time. We looked at him for a minute. Old Hugh Jean.

“That joke I was gonna tell you. They were having preaching one Sunday morning in this black church and they had a new piccolo player playing along with the choir. Well, they played two or three songs there and somebody all of a sudden hollered out in this real deep voice, The piccolo player’s a motherfucker. Everybody hushed. The old reverend was up in the pulpit and he looked out over the congregation. He was just shocked. He said, Who was that called my piccolo player a motherfucker? Nobody said a word. Everybody was looking around to see who it was. The old reverend stood up there for a minute. Said, All right. I want the man who’s setting next to the man who called my piccolo player a motherfucker to stand up. Nobody said a word. The old reverend was just getting madder all the time. He said, All right. I want the man who’s setting next to the man who’s setting next to the man who called my piccolo player a motherfucker to stand up. And hell, nobody stood up. Nobody said a word. The old reverend stood up there and just got pissed off as hell. Then he hollered, All right! I want the man who’s setting next to the man who’s setting next to the man who’s setting next to the man who called my piccolo player a motherfucker to stand up! Finally there was this one little bitty guy in the back who stood up. And everybody was looking at him. He said, Reveren, I ain’t the man who’s setting next to the man who’s setting next to the man who’s setting next to the man who called your piccolo player a motherfucker. I ain’t even the man who’s setting next to the man who’s setting next to the man who
called your piccolo player a motherfucker. And I ain’t the man who
called
your piccolo player a motherfucker. What I want to know is, who called that motherfucker a piccolo player?”

W
ell, hell, I’d heard it before. Didn’t want to tell him that. Just laughed like I hadn’t. He was talking to me and I didn’t want to mess up no more. That beer was cold and we was laughing and drinking it and I had somebody setting on my bed talking to me, and you know, it was
nice
to have some company. It was so easy to just lay there and tell him to keep helping himself, and listen to him, and get a sip once in a while. Diva had been taking care of me, understand, but this was somebody different. Had a different life. Lived in a different place. His own world outside this one.

Shit, he could talk about movies, man, he knew them
actors. He could tell you the whole story of a movie, who was in it, what they said. But I knowed before the night was over I was gonna have to ask him again about
The Young Lions.
Cause it wasn’t no other way out. Cause nice as it was right then, it wasn’t going to last. Sun was gonna come up again. And I’d be laying here with no place to go. I was tired to my soul, Jesus, hope You understand. And be merciful. Hope You was merciful to Hugh Jean, whoever he was. Might’ve bent over behind that mule on purpose. Might’ve been toting too much pain. A man can get more than he can tote. You know that. Didn’t You ask for the cup to pass on? And I’m sorry for what they done to You. Wish I’d been there to help You. I’d have laid em to waste. Put em to the sword. But Your will be done.

“Y
ou got a clock around this place? Where? This drawer here? Let me see. Twenty after two. You sleepy? Me neither. Don’t they ever come in here and check on you at night? Hell, we’ll just lay down if we see somebody come in. Make out like we’re asleep.

“Is Diva working now? She gonna come back by and see you before she leaves? Man, she’s good-looking. She ought to be in
Playboy
or something.

“Ah shit, you don’t want to hear all my problems. Probably just make you more depressed than you already are. How do I know?

“Well goddamn. You were talking about killing your
self, weren’t you? You ain’t got any way to do it even if you really wanted to.

“I don’t know what you’d do, man. Hell, Braiden. You sound like Mama.

“Nah, hell, I don’t think they saw me. I don’t think they were up yet. I don’t guess Mama sleeps much. But her room’s on the back side of the house anyway. I just climbed back in through my window and went to sleep. It was so hot I had to turn the air conditioner on. I can’t sleep in that heat. Gives me nightmares.

“What surprised me was her coming back to see me. I was going to watch a movie. I got up late that evening and opened a beer. I drank about half of it. Next thing I knew, somebody was knocking on the window and it was dark. I’d had another spell and I didn’t even know it. I didn’t even know it was her at first. Kind of like when I woke up in here. It took me a minute to figure out what was happening. It always does. Usually I wake up on the floor. Or the side of the road. Or a car where somebody’s left me. I’ve been robbed outside bars like that before. Motherfuckers have done that to me too.

“I guess Max and Mama were gone. He takes her down to this catfish place down the road sometimes. I got up and went to the window and said who was it and it was her. I’m always confused when I wake up. It takes me a few seconds to adjust. And I just had on my underwear anyway. I had to put some pants on. She said she’d come to see me. So I went over and pushed open the screen. I felt like a dilbert, of course. It’s a real low window. It’s
easy to get in and out of. She had a big sackful of beer with her. I set that on the floor and then helped her on in.

“You’d have to see my room to understand this. It’s just a damn big mess. I’ve got books all over the place and movie posters. I’ve got a bunch I sent off for from back in the sixties. A bunch of psychedelic posters and stuff. She just stood there and looked at everything for a minute. We had a combat photographer with us for about a month. He was working for
Life.
He made a bunch of pictures of us and I’ve got some of them on the wall. They’re all of the way I looked before. Before I got hit. One of them I’m crossing this river with the M60 over my head, keeping it dry. And he was with us the day I got shot the first time. I’ve got blood all over me, and the guys loading me in the chopper have got blood all over them. Everybody’s screaming. The gunners are laying about a thousand rounds a minute out the doors. It’s a hell of a photograph. Anyway she stood in front of it for a long time and looked at it. Then she finally asked who that was they were putting on that helicopter. I said that was me. I said that was what I used to look like.

“She touched the picture, touched my face on it. I asked her how she knew which room was mine and she said she’d watched me that morning when I went in. I told her to sit down and we got us a beer out. She laid down on the bed over there. She said she’d been kind of afraid to come up to the house. Said she didn’t know if we had any dogs or not. I told her that we hadn’t had a dog in a long time, that we couldn’t keep one there, that they kept getting
run over, so close to the highway and all. She said well she was glad of that because she hated dogs. Said she got bit real bad by one when she was little. And I still didn’t know. This was before we really got to talking.

“I asked her something else about it and she said yeah, a dog got ahold of her when she was five and almost killed her. Said she had scars all over her, all under her clothes. I told her I couldn’t see any. She didn’t say anything for a little bit. Then finally she said she couldn’t wear shorts. Couldn’t wear a swimming suit. Said she didn’t want anybody to see her legs.

“I told her I was sorry. Hell, I didn’t know what to say.

“She said that was okay, that she was just glad he didn’t kill her. That he almost did.

“She got up and went over to the bookshelves and started looking at my books. I’ve got a bunch of them. She asked me if I’d read all of them. I told her yeah. She said she wished she liked to read. And I couldn’t understand that. I told her that I thought the more you read, the more you wanted to read. She missed so much school when she was little, she never did learn to read very well. She was in the hospital a lot. You know, having operations. Plastic surgery and all. She said she missed so much, she never could catch up, so she just quit.

“I hated it. What are you supposed to say? She turned around and told me she knew what I felt like. Said her mama couldn’t stand to even look at her after that dog got ahold of her.

“I told her it took my mama and them a long time to
get used to me. That I didn’t really know if they ever had or not. She wanted to know if I ever felt sorry for myself. She said she used to, but she didn’t anymore. Said it was a waste. And then she asked me again. I mean she really wanted to know.

“Hell, I thought about it. I told her that I’d accepted it the first time I looked in a mirror in the Philippines. Which I think I did. I knew I’d never look right again. I knew the face I’d been born with was gone. And nothing was going to bring it back. Oh hell, I’ve felt sorry for myself plenty of times. But I’ve always known nothing was going to bring it back.