Joe (22 page)

An hour later he noted that all three had fallen back into the ranks silently and were working beside everybody else. Nothing else was said but he paid those three off that afternoon.

It came up one day at lunch that Joe was going to get rid of his old truck and buy a new one when they got finished with their tracts. The boy chewed his bologna sandwich dry and worked up enough spit to ask him how much he wanted for the old one. Joe turned his head and looked at him.

“Why? You want to buy it?”

“I’d like to have it,” Gary said.

“It needs some work done on it.”

“I can fix it.”

“You ever worked on a automobile before?”

“I can learn.”

“Oh. Well, you might have to work on that one a good bit. I
spend about as much time workin on it as I do drivin it. Course it ain’t nothin major wrong with it. Just little shit. Old motor uses a little oil. Needs some brakes on it. Needs that shifter fixed for sure.”

“How much?”

He thought about it. They wouldn’t give him anything for it on a trade-in. Two or three hundred dollars at the most. The body was beat all to hell, the tires were slick. The front bumper was hanging loose on one end.

“I hate to price it,” he said. “I ain’t ready to get rid of it right now.”

“I won’t need it long as I’m ridin with you,” Gary said.

Joe lit a cigarette and stretched out on the ground. He looked at his watch and called out to his workers: “Y’all hurry up, now, it’s almost time.” They were only taking fifteen minutes for lunch now, but everybody kept quiet about it. He was paying them time and a half after two p.m. and double time on Saturdays and Sundays.

“I couldn’t guarantee it, now. That truck’s old. Got a lot of miles on it. You might do better to just try to find you one in town somewhere. Or let me look around for you one.”

“It wouldn’t look too bad if it was washed up. I’d take that camper bed off it. Fix that bumper. All it needs is a bolt in it probably.”

He looked at the boy. Then he looked at the truck. It was old, it was dirty, it was junky. But he guessed he wasn’t looking at it from the boy’s side. The boy had probably never had anything to call his own. He started to just say he’d give it to him.

“I’ll take two hundred dollars for it when I get my new one,” he said.

Gary stuck his hand out. “That’s a deal.”

Joe took the hand, squeezed it, then got up. He put his hands on his hips and called out that it was time to start back to work.

The boy worried about how he was going to pay for it all afternoon. He had to have some way to hide part of the money while he was saving it, and he had to have the money by the time Joe got ready to trade, which wouldn’t be far off. The end of the month. It presented other problems. Gas and oil to buy, and his job would be over. But he reconciled himself with the thought that he could find something else to do. There were jobs everywhere, he figured. You just had to get out and find them. And he needed a vehicle for that. He hit upon it as they were taking a break from the heat that afternoon.

“What if you was to hold some of my money out and keep up with it?”

Joe was taking a drink of whiskey and when the boy came out of nowhere with that, he didn’t know what he was talking about. He squinched his eyes almost shut and searched for the Coke on the dash and grabbed it and took a swallow.

“What are you talkin about, son?”

“To pay for my truck. How bout if you hold out about fifty dollars a week and let me pay for it like that?”

“Well. We probably won’t work but about two more weeks. Hell, they all ready to quit. They been ready. Only reason they’ve stayed this long’s cause I had to hit Sammy that day.”

The boy fell silent. He had fifty dollars hidden under a rock down in the woods behind the house. The whole family was living
off him now. His father robbed his pockets at night until there was nothing left.

“Where were you born?” Joe said.

“I don’t know.”

“Where’s the rest of your family at?”

“This is all of us, I reckon.”

“Where were you raised?”

The boy looked down. He still remembered Tom falling off the truck and the truck behind them going over his head, how everybody gathered around in the hot Florida sun, looking at him sprawled there dead. Was he four or five? And Calvin. Little brother. Gone now too.

“Different places,” he said.

Joe looked at him. He knew nothing of him except that he would work. But his work was almost over. It was a long time from June to December.

“We finish this tract,” he said, “they’ll settle up with me. They’ll shut us off after this one. They won’t be no more work I can give you until this winter.”

“What do you do?”

“You mean when I ain’t doing this?”

“Yessir. When you ain’t doing this.”

Fuck. Drink. Gamble.

“I get by,” he said.

“You know of anything I could do until this winter? I got to keep a job.”

“Y’all can’t stay in that damned old house this winter, can you?”

Gary turned up the last of his hot Coke and drained it. He set
the can on the ground and pulled out his cigarettes. He had taken to smoking regularly since he was making money regularly.

“How cold does it get around here in the winter?”

“Shit. It gets cold as a witch’s titty. We had ice stayed on the ground four days last year. You couldn’t even get out on the road. I stayed up at the store with John about half the time. It didn’t do to try and drive on it. They was cars all up and down the road in ditches.”

“What did people do about goin to work?”

“They didn’t go. The ones that live out here didn’t. It stayed below ten degrees for three straight days. People had water pipes froze and busted and couldn’t get into town for parts to fix em with. We couldn’t work. Ground was froze solid.”

The boy sat there, studying the situation. “I got a little money saved up,” he said, finally. “If we could work two more weeks I believe I can get enough up to pay you.”

“Well. We’ll worry about that later. We’ll work it out. Let’s get on up and hit it.”

The other hands rose in a group like a herd of cows or trained dogs in a circus act when they saw the bossman stand up. They picked up their implements and thumped their cigarettes away. The whole party moved off into the deep shade with their poison guns over their shoulders, the merciless sun beating down and the gnats hovering in parabolic ballets on the still and steaming air. The heat stood in a vapor over the land, shimmering waves of it rising up from the valleys to cook the horizon into a quaking mass that stood far off in the distance with mountains of green painted below the blue and cloudless sky. Joe stood in the bladed road
with his hands on his hips and watched them go. He surveyed his domain and the dominion he held over them not lightly, his eyes half-lidded and sleepy under the dying forest. He didn’t feel good about being the one to kill it. He guessed it never occurred to any of them what they were doing. But it had occurred to him.

The shelves in the old wooden safe that stood in a corner of the log house were now stocked with food. Gary couldn’t remember when they’d ever eaten so well. There were proper pans to cook in and Joe had given him a little green Coleman stove that burned each evening with a cheery blue flame. Their windows were tacked over with Visqueen, which admitted, in brightest sunshine, a pale murky light, like half-light, that kept the interior in a gloom through which their restless figures moved without shadow. He’d chinked the cracks between the logs with old cotton found in a pen in a field. In the dead of night under their mildewed quilts recycled from the hands of the haves, these have-nots lay with their ears pricked in the darkness as the drone of the mosquitoes moved toward them like supersonic aircraft, their radar just as deadly, just as accurate. He bought poison and sprayed for ticks, whacked with a broken joe-blade the assemblage of overgrowth surrounding the house into some semblance of a yard. He kept an eye out for a castoff screen door, but these seemed hard to come by.

His routine was to charge his things and get Joe to drop him off
by John Coleman’s on Fridays to pay his bill. This Friday Joe put gas in his truck while the boy was inside and then followed him in to pay his own bills. The storekeeper was counting some money back into the boy’s hands. The boy said thank you and went out and got in the truck.

“How about addin up my bill, John?” The old man reached for a pad of notes and a pencil. He started punching buttons on his adding machine, sucking on a cold cigar.

“Y’all bout to get wrapped up?” he said.

“We like about another week, I believe. We ought to done been through but we just had so much to do. All that rain early.”

John rang it up. “Looks like twenty-two fifty.”

“Thirteen gas, John.”

Joe gave him the money and took his change back and stuck it in his pocket.

“Thank you, John.”

“Thank you. Listen,” he said, his eyes cut toward the door. “That boy there that works for you.”

“Him? Yeah. I wish I had about ten of him. We’da done been through.”

“Is he not that Jones’s boy?”

“Who?”

“Wade. I know that was him come in here the other day and wanted to charge some stuff to that boy. Said they both worked for you. I wouldn’t let him have nothin till I talked to you. But the more he stayed in here the more familiar he looked. If I ain’t mistaken he lived here a long time ago.”

Joe looked toward the door and pulled out his cigarettes.

“That boy’s last name is Jones. His daddy’s sorta fat and don’t ever shave. I don’t reckon he ever takes a bath, either. Smells like he ain’t had one in about twenty years.”

“That’s him,” John said. “I knew that was him. Have you not ever heard em talk about all that shit that happened down there on the Luster place a long time ago?”

They had leaned closer to each other over the counter and were talking in low voices like assassins plotting, like revolutionaries talking revolt.

“Seems like I heard Daddy and Uncle Lavert talk about it one time. It was somebody hung down there, wasn’t it?”

“Hell yes. It was three years before I went to Europe. That boy’s daddy was in on it, they said. He left out. Oh, it was a hell of a mess. It was Clinton Baker they hung. He was down there three days before they found him. Hangin in a tree and buzzards eatin on him.”

“Aw hell.” He had to think about that for a moment. “How come em to kill him?”

“Don’t nobody know. J. B. Douglas was in on it, him and Miss Anne Maples’s oldest boy. Buddy. And that boy’s daddy, they said. But he run off. I thought that was him.”

“Well damn,” Joe said. He looked out at the boy. The boy was in the truck looking down at something, saying silent words. “What did they do to em?”

“Well, they all run around together, Clinton and Buddy and all of em. They had a old house they gambled in down there. After they found Clinton and went and got him down and all, they went over to J. B.’s house to talk to him, see if he knowed anything
about it. Sheriff went over there. That was old Q. C. Reeves. He pulled up in the yard and started across and J. B. come out the door with a shotgun. And fore they could even decide what he was up to, he set down on the porch and stuck it in his mouth and blowed his brains all over his mama’s porch. With her standin in there in the kitchen fixin to put dinner on the table. I never seen so many flowers at a funeral as his had. It was the worst thing to happen around here in a long time. Buddy Maples went to the pen but he died or got killed down there, I still don’t think the truth was ever told about that.”

“What, did he admit to doing it?”

“He admitted he was in on it. Or admitted enough to where they talked him into pleadin guilty to murder. Hell, they didn’t even have a trial. But he never would tell how come they done it. That was the thing of it. They was every story in the world told about it.”

“Like what?”

“Aw, hell, you can hear anything. It was told they poured gas on him and struck a match to him. I don’t know if it’s true or not.”

“Goddamn,” Joe said. “Well, could they not still get him? His daddy, I mean?”

“Shit, I don’t know. It’s been so long ago. I knew damn well that was him come in here other day.”

Joe looked out toward the truck again. “I wouldn’t let him have anything if I was you. That boy would be the one that would have to pay for it. He owe you any money?”

“Him? Not a penny. He’s bought a good bit but he’s always paid.”

“Well.” He looked up at John Coleman. “What in the hell would they want to burn him for?”

The old man lit the cigar and took a long slow puff of it and laid it in the ashtray. He leaned on his elbow and turned his head away.

“They’s probably drunk,” he said.