Hardcastle (20 page)

“You didn’t hear anything?” Music asked.

“Nosuh …” Too Sweet scratched his head. “Yassuh, I thought I did, but didn’t seem lak no business of mine if somethin want to go boom.”

“Stranger wandered into town,” Music said. He patted the Walker Colt under his coat. “I just helped him leave.”

Too Sweet seemed to find nothing to say to that; the focus of his eyes—alarmed, thoughtful, furtive—shifted to one side of Music, to a section of the cement floor midway between them, to his can of beeswax.

“Just didn’t want to wake up ole Regus there,” Music said. “He’s not fit to live with if he don’t get his sleep.” He let himself out and shut the door behind him again.

He was almost to Mink Slide before he realized he was walking like a man who actually had somewhere to go. That was the trouble with the job. There was nothing in particular to do, no place in particular to be. It made him nervous, gave him the willies, made the hair on his neck rise. No wonder he had taken a fit. Even without Merlee Taylor, he would have probably acted a fool sooner or later. He wondered: had that son of a bitch who had shot her husband just taken some sort of crazy fit? He wasn’t so sure anymore. If you put a man on such a job and gave him a gun, was the silly bastard just going to use it sometime, whether it made any sense or not? Mercy, he thought. Jesus Christ. He was going to have to be careful. Watch for signs of craziness, and no matter how much he owed Regus or Ella, if he caught himself at any more funny business, he was going to have to drag up. Six months or so of riving out shingles and boards, six months of using a crosscut saw, of riding a sledge loaded with oak off Howard’s Knob, of looking across some mule’s ass at a furrow, would sweat all the craziness out of him, and maybe Chicago and a bunch of other places too, and he’d get right with himself. The thought comforted him a little, and casually, like a man taking a stroll, he went on toward Mink Slide.

But he didn’t get far. He was no more than twenty yards up into the hollow from the pike before first one nigger’s dog and then another began to bark and yap. Perhaps they heard him, but since such breeze as there was seemed to be at his back, they could as well have smelled him. Spent black powder was strong stuff, and the Walker Colt, warmed in the space under his coat, stunk like a fart in a paper sack.

It didn’t matter, he thought; what the hell was there to see in Mink Slide? He went back down to the pike and walked a half mile or so toward the Bear Paw mine and then turned back toward Elkin again. It wasn’t until a little past midnight that he did see something. He was standing under the shed roof of the old movie house when he saw it. A shadow moving behind one of the company houses on the second row. At first he thought it was some miner who had decided to use his outhouse rather than a chamber pot, but then, two houses up, he saw a second man come slinking down a path to another of the company shacks. He was still puzzling over that when he heard a third, or at least gravel being scuffed somewhere off to his right; whoever, or whatever, made the noise never came in sight. Music neither spoke nor stirred until, at last, coming down the mountain behind Bydee Flann’s shack, he saw yet another man. The little preacher himself, to judge by his size, disappeared behind the shack with the simple wooden cross fixed to the porch roof, and he never came out.

For at least half an hour Music did not move, but he didn’t see or hear anyone else abroad in the night. At last he let his back slide down the wall behind him until he was squatting. His hands were sweating. He had difficulty rolling a cigarette, but he got it made and lit it. All right, he decided, at last, he would tell Regus what he’d seen. Right or wrong, he owed him. If he could do it without doing anyone harm, he’d stick it out until Friday, which was payday, but not beyond. He was no company goon. He’d read Ella Bone half the Bible if she wanted. Perhaps he’d cut the bee tree and at least rob it for them. Likely they wouldn’t be able to deal with a gum of bees even if he didn’t fuck up and drown half of them in their own honey, even if he could find the queen and get her in the new gum. He felt bad about it. He felt sorry, but he’d be damned if he was going to wind up pushing a bunch of half-starved miners around at the point of a gun. He’d have to tell it to Regus just that way.

11

THE SECOND SHOT FIRED

BUT AT TWO o’clock he nudged Regus awake without making any mention of the men he’d seen slipping into company housing. Ten minutes later he was lying on his back, staring at the ceiling when Regus, still more asleep than awake, came back through the powerhouse door and stood looking down at him. “Gimme my watch,” Regus said. Music handed it over, and Regus rubbed his muggy face and shook his head. “Hit don’t make any sense,” he said, turning away; “I’m wandering around outside with my eyes shut and you’re a-layin in here with yourn wide open.” He rubbed the back of his neck, shook himself all over like a wet dog, and went out of the door again.

Music was awake when Too Sweet blew the five o’clock whistle, and a half an hour later, when Tom Harmon came in to check all the dials and pressure gauges and, finding everything in order, got after Too Sweet for not keeping the place swept up enough. “You got to keep on a nigger,” he’d told Music weeks before. “If you come in one mornin and fail to find somethin wrong, then the next mornin, they’ll be somethin fucked up for certain; and if you don’t say nuthin, then the next mornin they’ll be two things fucked up.” He’d given Music a friendly wink and grin. “If you want to work a nigger, you better find somethin wrong whether there is or there ain’t.”

The morning was misty and cold. Low clouds the color of smoke hid the mountaintops when Bert Maloney drove up at quarter to six and parked. At that moment Music was pissing against the far corner of the powerhouse where men, like dogs, had marked the spot for so long the corrugated iron was rusting away. Maloney, always in a hurry, didn’t seem to notice him. Maloney entered the powerhouse and almost at once came out again with a clipboard in his hand and Harmon behind him.

“Get that big buck on it,” Maloney was saying. “Hell, I got a slate fall last evenin and track fucked up, and that’s where my goddamned work crew’s gonna be; you can put Big Cigar and Too Sweet both on it, but don’t ast me to get you no coal in here today.”

“If I do that,” Harmon said, “who’s gonna keep the boiler stoked?”

Maloney turned toward the other man. His eyes level with Harmon’s chin, his voice womanishly high but with a hardness in it like struck steel, he said, “
You
are going to keep the boiler fired, goddammit!
You
are! And if I had the time, I’d come and watch you, just to see what you look like when you ain’t sittin on yer ass.”

Tom Harmon took a step backwards and raised his palms as though to hold Maloney back. “Okay, okay,” he said, “Christ, Bert …” but the mine foreman had already started down the siding toward the tipple, where half a dozen men had collected.

Harmon turned to Music. “Now, does that seem right to you?” he asked. “Christ, all I wanted was some coal in here. I can’t generate power without I got some shittin coal.” Harmon went back inside the powerhouse. “You can set down that lunch pail, nigger, cause you ain’t goin nowhere,” Music heard him say.

Lean, in blackened work clothes, a few men were coming across the bridge like so many scarecrows slouching in from winter gardens. Up by the drift mouth, just beneath the belly of the clouds, a mine mule brayed.

Music stood by the corner of the powerhouse, his hands in his pockets, his arms pressed against his sides, his teeth close to chattering. But he was otherwise occupied and aware of being cold only in the most distant sort of way. He felt guilty, as if he were somehow personally responsible for Switch County and Hardcastle Coal Company, responsible even for the sulfurous stink of coal in the air and the chilly morning, gauzy with mist. Hell, he thought, hellkatoot, ain’t none of this my lookout.
Regus
, he would say,
I can’t make peace with it. I can’t carry around this five-pound, god-awful pistol—folks expectin me to shoot somebody with it every minute. I’m goin on home
. And to Ella, who would be standing by, her head bent deferentially to one side, her gaze askew toward his shoe tops:
Ma’am, I appreciate you takin me in. I’m much obliged, for I’ve never been better treated, and I
… His jaw went suddenly rigid. He had twenty-two dollars in a tobacco sack hidden under the tick she had filled with hay for him. He’d leave fifteen dollars where Ella could find it. He’d put five dollars in an envelope and address it to Merlee Taylor, and he’d get his ass down the road. That would be as shameful as trying to explain himself. More. But at least he wouldn’t have to listen to himself talk.

His teeth rattled for a second or two. Big Cigar Green was coming across the tilted bridge over the river. He was pitch-black, but not with coal dust; he was purple where the lining of his lips showed and where his arms bore old scars. He did not appear to be cold, even in the sleeveless shirt he wore. Behind him, rattling the planks on the far edge of the bridge, the Burnsides’ Model A was coming. Cawood was behind the wheel. He blew the horn, but Big Cigar did not alter his pace even though the right front fender all but brushed him as he stepped from the bridge to the cinder and gumbo road. As the Model A passed him, Big Cigar touched his cap as though in answer to a pleasantry, as though someone in the car had said, “Good morning to you, sir.”

Where the hell was Regus, Music wondered. He wanted to be on his way. He wanted to take the Walker Colt off and pick up his paper sack. It would have two extra shirts and a second pair of pants in it now, and he’d have two dollars and some change in his pocket. That was plenty. Hell, that was way more than enough. He could go halfway around the world on that.

Without really quite seeing them, he was aware of Grady standing with one foot on the running board of the Model A, lighting the stump of his cigar, and Cawood coming toward him, the straw skimmer sitting on the back of his head. But he was thinking of swinging up on a freight car, light as thistledown without the bulky pistol. No badge pinned on his shirt to tap against his chest like an accusing finger, to draw the eyes of everyone he met as if it were a printed sign saying: goon, gun thug, sworn son of a bitch. Just the idea of being free of those things raised his spirits and seemed to sweeten the air he breathed. He could see himself broke, humbled, but going home, walking the county road, say, from Shulls Mills to his father’s farm, where anyone he might meet stood a chance of being a friend, or at least not an enemy. It made his eyes wet just to think of it.

“What?” he asked, for Cawood had said something or other.

“How long you been gettin in her britches? I said. Shit, boy, has it made you deaf?”

“What?” Music said, seeing, at last, Cawood’s grinning face leaning close.

“I don’t doubt a minute that’s fine poozle,” he said and laughed, “but what I hear is that it’s terrible expensive. Now, I can put you onto a little nigger gal, ain’t but thirteen, will fuck yer ears off fer a dime. Won’t cost you no ten pounds of pinto beans ner five yards of dress material ever time you want to dunk yer wick.”

For a moment Music studied Cawood’s face. Except for the ageless glint of cruelty deep in the eyes, the face was nearly boyish, the nose pug, the cheeks round, the eyebrows sparse and colorless over heavy bones; and, oddly, what there was in Music of forbearance and good sense abdicated without warning. He took his hands out of his pockets slowly, or so it seemed to him; but Cawood was still leaning conspiratorially close when he knocked him out from under his straw skimmer; He tried to hit him again as he was falling but missed, the violence of his swing causing him to fall as well. “Whoa, Bill, goddammit!” he heard Regus say behind him and for a second felt a hand grab at his shoulder and slip away. Then he was on the ground with Cawood, both of them thrashing and grappling at each other. A blow on his ear made it ring and another chafed his forehead just above his eyebrow, but he had landed a wild, vicious blow of his own into Cawood’s face and another upon his neck. Then Regus’s boots, doing a kind of jig, got in the way between them, trampling both of them indiscriminately. “Whoa, shitfire,” Regus was shouting, “you boys just let me git goddamn whoa the Sam Hill wait a fuckin no pistols you …” and then the boots flew up and away; and on the other side, Cawood, with bloody teeth and chin, was rising; and indeed Music could see the barrel of a pistol coming up like the sun over a mountain to shine on him; and there was nothing to do but roll on his shoulder right at Cawood in order to get in the lee of the muzzle. At the same time the explosion slapped a high-pitched ringing into his ears and seared the underside of his right thigh, he felt Cawood go over backwards again. He was trying to draw his own pistol, but the Walker Colt came out of the shoulder holster as slowly as if it were a three-foot piece of pipe, so there was no time left to cock it, and he merely brought it down across Cawood’s skull exactly as he would have swung a length of pipe.

Cawood quit thrashing, and Music rolled up on the left cheek of his butt, since the bottom of his right thigh felt as though a hot iron had been laid across it. It made him breathe through his clenched teeth. “You stupid son of a bitch,” he told Cawood through his teeth.

“I don’t think he can hear you,” Regus said.

Music turned toward the sound of the voice, trying to keep his right thigh off the ground. Regus had fallen some feet away and had his pistol drawn too. It took Music a moment to realize that it was pointed at Grady, who apparently hadn’t moved at all. He still had one foot on the running board of the Model A. He was smoking his cigar thoughtfully and looking at them, looking with particular interest at the ancient Walker Colt, which, in the next moment, Music hid away in its shoulder holster as if it were something obscene and shameful.

“Are you all right?” Regus asked.

“I don’t know,” Music said. “I think I’m shot.” For the first time he inspected his leg and the scorched holes in his pants; he didn’t seem to be very bloody.