Old Powder Man (30 page)

“You mean I've finally run out the big boys too?” he said, simulating surprise.

Mr. Ryder seemed close to tears as if it were a long climb they had made together. Son stuck his nose into the glass of beer they had given him and for a moment could not look up. Mrs. Ryder said, “Could you take some supper with us, Mr. Wynn?”

“Much obliged,” he said. “I hope you'll give me a rain check but I been gone two weeks and I promised to take my wife out when I got home.” They never offered him a second beer; being Baptist, it was the only time Mr. Ryder drank at all. Mrs. Ryder kept two beers, in case Mr. Wynn came; when they were gone, she bought two more. He put down his empty glass and Mr. Ryder followed him to the car. Going out, Son thought back to when Mr. Ryder had met him with a team of mules and how this had been country; now it was part of Delton, just a street of little bungalows and street lamps at intervals; it could have been anywhere. As Delton had spread, he had twice had to move his dynamite magazine farther, by law having to have it so many miles from the city limits. Mr. Ryder bent to the car window; his voice seemed more frail, his eyes again seemed moist. Son thought the beer might have gotten to the old man, but he put his hand through the window and said, “Mr. Wynn, you been a fine fair man to work for all these years.”

Son took his hand and himself felt the need to swallow. “Hell,” he said. “If you'd a got shot up in Cai-ro, I might not have made it either. You've eat up as much dust as I have, I appreciate it.”

Mr. Ryder let go of his hand and abruptly went into the house.

Coming into the living room after dinner, Kate twirled in her new dress.

“Damn, if you don't look like a dressed-up whore,” he said.

“Frank, I swear, is that all you can say?” she said.

“Hell,” he said, “that's a compliment.”

They were meeting Will and Martha, Buzz and his wife and a few other couples. After taking Laurel to spend the night with a friend, they drove to a club at the edge of the city. Its name was spelled in blue lights that cast a dim and eerie glow over the parking lot. Inside it was almost as dark; above the dance floor a glass chandelier whirled, casting vari-colored light like flecks of rainbow. When he got ready to drink, Son peered closely at the bottles on the table. Will drank Scotch; he did not want to get hold of any of that stuff by mistake. He danced once around the floor, pushing Kate backward as if she were a carton he were moving, then danced no more. Kate said it was all right with her, announcing he couldn't tell the difference between Yankee Doodle and Dixie. Buzz's wife did not dance either. But Buzz once had won a contest proclaiming him “The Vernon Castle of Hernando County.” Watching them, Son suddenly wondered why Kate had to buy that dress at all; she had some dresses. But he thought she was a good-looking woman still, had not started to fatten up on him like a lot of the wives; he never had liked a woman with too much meat on her.

It was toward midnight, coming back from the men's room, he saw a couple of fellows go out a side door and in a direction opposite from the parking lot, knew as well as he knew his own name where they were going. Buzz always said he could sniff out a game like a hound a coon; he guessed so. He gave a waiter a dollar, asking where it was, and the boy told. Taking his bottle, he went to the back of the building and into the basement. He did not have any idea how long he had been there when he quit, a winner, and came out as the night was ending; birds sang in the woods beyond as he stumbled along the path back to the eerie, blue-lit parking lot and finally found his car. He followed one narrow road from the club, through woods, until it ended at the highway back to Delton, almost a straight shoot to his front door. At this hour, free of traffic, the road was revealed beneath a pale grey, pre-dawn sky, and he drove slowly, knowing his condition. To the open sky and the open road ahead he said suddenly, I did it. Goddamn the big boys too! Inexplicably tears came to his eyes; he brushed the palm of his hand against them, turning too shortly into his drive, bumping one wheel over the curb and blaming the mistake on the amount of whisky he had drunk. Going into his own house, he shut the door hard, locking himself in, and shouted, “I got a right to get drunk if I want to,” and waited for an answer that never came. “I got ever right in the world,” he shouted loudly, thinking, any man had done what he had. Immediately, he fell into heavy sleep and the persistent shrill ringing of the door bell sometime later seemed part of that sleep until at last, opening his eyes, he heard the ringing consciously. A moment he lay looking at daylight on the ceiling, his brain twirling as the glass chandelier had, until he realized where he was. He went to a front window, opened it and yelled, “What the hell you doing waking me up this time of night?”

“What the hell you doing going off and leaving your wife?” Buzz yelled back.

“I don't even know what you're talking about,” Son said.

“He's talking about me,” Kate said. “Hush and open the door before you wake up the neighbors.”

“I don't give any Goddamn about the neighbors.”

“Open the door,” Kate said.

“Open the door you old drunk,” Buzz said.

“Who's drunk?” Son said.

“Open the door,” Buzz said.

“Open the door,” Kate said.

“Keep your shirt on,” he said, turning the lock.

“You ought to have a punch in the nose,” Buzz said.

“You want to try to give it to me,” Son said.

“What'd you want to go off and leave Kate for?” Buzz said.

“Hell, I didn't leave her,” he said. “I forgot she was there.”

Kate slept in Laurel's room. He had to have a couple of drinks to fall asleep again and when he woke was starving. He waited for Kate to fix breakfast and had to have a couple of drinks because of the way he felt. Ahead was the open road and the white dawn and the best friend he had wanting to punch him in the nose; against Buzz he could not have defended himself and he cried, Buzz! Ohhh Buzz …

“Frank, will you hush,” Kate said, opening the door. “You been in here drunk, hollering, four days.”

He turned on the tumbled, whisky-smelling sheets and said, “I'm just waiting for my breakfast.”

“I offered you breakfast two hours ago,” she said. “You wouldn't eat any.”

“What day is this?” he said.

“Thursday,” she said.

“Hell, I thought it was Sunday,” he said.

“It was Sunday after we came home from that nightclub and you haven't been out of here since.” She went to the windows and let up shades, stabbing him with light. He felt as if he were on a merry-go-round; everything in the room went either up or down; in the bathroom he was sick. He looked into the mirror and saw his eyes were the same color, stared at a face he hardly recognized, covered with a beard he saw for the first time was tinged with grey. “Hell, I've got to be a ooo-ld man,” he said. “I might have to have a drink to that.”

“No, you're not,” Kate said. He came back into the bedroom as she was changing his sheets. “You've got to get away from the house. Laurel and I are about to suffocate. I've had to keep the windows down so the neighbors won't think you've gone stark, raving mad. Laurel says she's going to run away from home and I wouldn't blame her.”

He was so weak Kate had to help him dress. There was something the matter with his stomach he said; but he thought he could eat a steak. He went into the living room where Laurel was playing the piano. An instant he put his arms around her and tears rolled down his face. “Your mammy says you want to run away from home. You wouldn't leave me, would you?”

“No,” she said. He went on out and Kate came saying, “He's really had the wind taken out of his sails, hasn't he?” Laurel watched them get into the car. It was the first time she could remember his ever letting Kate drive. He sat hunched and pale on the front seat; she watched them out of the drive, turned back to the house lonely and began to play again, thinking of the place she would go when she was grown where nothing would hurt.

It was done. by the early forties the levee stretched, unbroken, from Cairo to New Orleans. Son termed what began then “the second go-round.” For the next ten years their work would be enlarging, rehabilitating, reinforcing work already done: clearing and grubbing, clearing borrow pits, making roads, draining swampland. The Engineers would widen, deepen and change the river's channels, making more cut-offs, until the Mississippi River would flow the way men wanted it to, not the way it was intended. They would need as much dynamite as ever, if not more, Son said.

Old Red Johnson warned still, the last time Son saw him, that the river could still win. No matter what we do, he said, the big flood can still come. A few days later, Shut-eye went to wake him and could not. Some years before he had moved back into the house but had kept the levee tent always. From all over the territory familiar to Son, men came to Red's funeral. He was old times gone, even to the young men. Negroes he had known stood behind his white friends; hats in hands, everyone looked freshly scrubbed. Walking away behind Will, Son noticed a pinched old man's look to the back of his neck, a faint hesitancy to his walk, and thought, We're the old timers; no work anyone here would do again would be as hard as the work they had already done. They had come a long way together and had not too much farther to go.

The final big section of work was to be let in Little Rock after Red's funeral; once only small jobs were left, people would not drive from all over the territory to lettings. But everyone had come to this because it was the last. Son saw even the hothouse flower. After supper, entering the hotel lobby, he got on the elevator with Son, Buzz, Winston and Will who were heading for a game on the top floor. No one wanted to when the elevator boy asked if they wanted to meet a girl, until the little fellow got off; then Winston gave the boy money, told him to send a girl to the little fellow's room; he had been too shy to ask. Son gave him another bill. “Get that big Rosie you got,” he said describing roundly with his hands; the girls belonged to a chain of hotels spread across the state, moved from one to another, were known to all the men whether well or not. As they got off, a Little Rock contractor with a hotel girl went into the room next to theirs. Shortly after the game started, Buzz telephoned the room. “Desk Clerk, sir,” he said. “Your wife got into the elevator and is on her way up.” They listened to thumps in the next room as if people hurried; the door opened, heels crossed the doorsill, a woman brushed by. Laughing, they went back to the game. Son regretted these good times soon being over.

The next day it rained. Impatiently he waited in the lobby for the bids to be in. The major work being let was in East Tennessee, involved rock blasting and quarry work, things with which he was unfamiliar. A dynamite salesman from that part of the state had come to the letting, told Son he expected to get some of the business, his speciality. Son said that was mighty fine, wondering who he was going to get it from; but having a little competition made him feel like a young man again, he said. From the way Buzz burst into the lobby, Son knew he had won the big job which put him in the big time. Everyone said so, congratulating Buzz, began to woo him buying drinks. Son, having a bar in his room, had little time to circulate. It was almost daylight when the crowd thinned out and Winston, coming in, said he heard Buzz had bought some dynamite from the other salesman. What motivated him, Son called his juice; he felt it boil. “Boy, don't come in here with no tales,” he said.

“That's just what I heard,” Winston said. “I carry rumors too.”

Everywhere Son went looking for Buzz, he heard it was true. People tried to tell him Buzz was too drunk to know. Son said it didn't make any difference; even full of bug juice he didn't expect his best friend to do him thataway. He was madder than ever, circling back, to find Buzz in his own room. He had already made plans, had ordered a hundred pounds of crushed ice dumped into his bathtub. He stripped Buzz to his underwear and put him in. Before Buzz could yell, before he could even flail ice, Son had him face up under the running faucet, ducked him under again and again. Struggling, now flailing ice everywhere, Buzz realized in a deep layer of consciousness he was truly about to drown; only as he began to lose consciousness did Son let him out. Shivering, Buzz said, “Jesus Christ, you like to drowned me.”

“You ought to,” Son said. Dried, wrapped in a towel, Buzz went into his connecting room to bed; all night he sank gloriously into darkness, told at breakfast he had had the most beautiful, wonderful dreams he had ever had in his life, in color; then, in amazement said again, “That old man really like to drowned me.”

Two things happened after the letting. On his way home, a salesman Son knew had a heart attack, pulled to the side of the road and was found by a stranger. What Son remembered most was that after lettings the old man toured cemeteries copying names off gravestones to put on his expense account. Son had a drink to him feeling sorry about the old man dying out on the road like that, just a salesman all his life.

Secondly, he received a letter from Shut-eye who had told him at Red's funeral he was coming to the letting. The letter said he had started out but could not make it: the roads were tore to pieces. But I would like to have see your loving face. I got stalded on the road. My heart got full and I feel like I want to shout. Be a good man till I sees you again if life lastes. In one corner it was signed with an x; in the opposite corner it read, Dictated but not read over. Son thought someday he was going to stop over in East Delton and see the old man; he lived there in his own house, well provided for by Red's will.

Still it rained and still he rose with dawn and was on the road when daylight came. He crossed Tennessee to Buzz's job, going through gutted red hills and on into pretty mountainous country thick with trees. As if it were a gift, he carried the joyful news that he had been invited to join the Shriners, something he had long wanted; it gave him a good feeling, belonging. He wanted as quickly as possible to buy a diamond lapel pin of the Shriners' symbol, to put Buzz up for membership. The white men on Buzz's job were staying at the same motel. For three days while it rained, they played cards, at night ate in the nearest town's one cafe. There was a waitress there Son got to know pretty quick.