The Watchman (14 page)

It warms me, smiled the Reverend, with unshatterable gen-ialty, to see your mind still so quick and alert, Colonel. We need your kind at church. For a man of your years, sir, if you'll forgive my pointing it out—well, none of us lives forever, Colonel Bruce. A Sunday in church once in a while? A little touch—maybe a hearty handshake with the Almighty?

Something, said the Colonel, in the order of a lodge-grip, I suppose you mean? Preacher, I shake hands with the Almighty every night of my life—every time I open a good book or look at my Blake—Oh, by the way, Matthew—Blake managed an astonishing escape soon after his commitment

to the asylum, so keep that rope handy and a sharp eye ready. No, Reverend, the Lord and I manage very nicely at home, thank you. I'm entirely too religious to go to church.

Perhaps just occasionally, Colonel Bruce? said the Reverend. Just a little church now and then ? Don't you think you'd profit by a little Jesus?

A little Jesus, said the Colonel, is a dangerous thing.

That's a mighty cynical thing to say, Colonel.

Yes, I judge it is, said the old man loudly. Because isn't "a little Jesus" like talking about a Httle pregnant, a little kindly, a little peace-loving, a little hanged? Can a man stand a little of anything so great and so damned essential to his sanity and survival that a piece of it is nothing more nor less than a half-truth that he can make mean whatever he pleases?

The minister said nothing. And then the front door opened, slammed, and Major Hunnicutt stalked forward a few paces, glared from one face to the other and then went to the darkened dining room and saw the empty table by the window. He turned to the men again.

I am looking for my boy Jason, he said. Has he been here tonight?

Sit down, Will, said the Colonel, stewing sweetly now in the invigorating sauces of his evening out. Sit down and join the rest of the dodo-birds.

He's with that girl—the Sheriff's girl Jill, snapped the Major. Haven't they been here tonight?

When the shadow of the big man appeared in the dining-room doorway, Jibbons started and then smiled: he had known it all along, that he'd seen someone slip in there just as the three of them entered the lobby.

No, Major, they haven't been here tonight, said Luther Alt behind him quietly.

How do you know? snapped the Major, whirling.

Because I have been sitting in there for the past hour, the Sheriff said. Watching for her. She was not home tonight for supper. Is she with your boy, sir?

I would assume that, said the Major. Only tonight did I find out about it. My son. Sheriff, and your girl—and you need not take this as any slur—the plain fact of the matter being. Sheriff, that I would just as soon the relationship break off now before it becomes anything more.

Always at that table, said Luther Alt, with a smoldering,

slow pinpoint of concentration, like the smoking white spot beneath a sunglass. They've been coming here—just like she did with the other one. Always at that table. And so I came tonight, sat back at the end of the counter, watching for her—thinking she'd come here.

Which she plainly did not, said the Major, gathering indignation confidently now because he fancied that the other man was cowering. So it's anyone's guess where they might be. And I don't mind telling you. Sheriff, I have plans for my son and they don't include an early, hasty involvement with a town girl—however respectable.

It has to end, said the Sheriff, saying, in effect, what the Major had said but speaking somehow as if following a train of private speculation so savagely absorbing that he was not even aware of the other man's speaking, I won't have her going with him. I forbid my Jill from keeping any sort of steady company like she did with the other one.

And the watching men by the window, excepting the old Colonel, each began to see the gathering together in the Sheriff's face of something covetous and unnatural: he stood and spoke as if in a furious trance, almost as if he could not see the Major or them at all, and so the men—all but one—read from Luther's face the script of a mean-minded possessiveness, on the one hand, and, on the other, a truckling, back-stepping sheepishness about him in the face of Major Hunnicutt's anger and the Major, seizing on this, grew even bolder in the rising nag of his tirade.

As for the matter of your other girl, he said. He's seeing her, too. I suppose you're aware of that. Sheriff, that he's seeing her, too.

She's probably home by now, said Luther, passing his big fingers across his eyes as if brushing away a web. Yes. She's probably home now—she's fixed my cup of cocoa like she always does. She's probably sitting home waiting for me right this minute. Yes.

The other girl, snapped the Major, his capon-spirit swelling bravely now to match the surly rooster of its outward armor. I don't think Fm saying anything that should insult or embarrass you, Sheriff Alt, in the presence of these men —nothing, that is, that you and they don't already know— that my son's relationships with your other girl are nothing to be taken too seriously. I'm a man of the world, sir. I know what sort of liaisons are dangerously involving and what sort are transitory—a part of every boy's growing up.

So that I have no real feelings one way or the other about my son and your other girl—what's her name? Cristi. These things pass—things between a hot-spirited boy of good breeding and a town-girl. No offense meant, as I say: these facts are generally known to you and to these gentlemen mutually, so you need not take this as any kind of public, exposing insult. Town-girls, as we all know—

Yes, I feel it, the Sheriff was saying, already moving slowly toward the door, his great face bowed in thought and his deep and somehow broken eyes already lighting with fresh reassurances. I feel that my Jill's home waiting for me. So I'll go home.

Not done with his game, the Major blocked the Sheriff's way; his nostrils pricked with first-blood's scent: he wanted to play with the big man a moment more.

Town girls, as I was about to say, he continued, are a part of all our early lives. Sheriff. The fallow field that lies open and inviting to every boy's wild oats. What would we do without them, actually? They keep our nice girls safe, don't you agree? Nice girls such as, perhaps, your other girl—^what's her name? Jill. Now, on the other hand—

Luther moved forward, found himself obstructed by the flush-faced martinet; the Sheriff bowed his head patiently and closed his eyes.

Excuse me, Major Hunnicutt, he said. I'd like to pass. I want to get home to my girl.

On the other hand. Sheriff, if you will hear me out a moment more, said the Major, his voice strutting cocky up and down before the men by the window. You never know too much about any female when she's that age.

Pardon me. Major, said Luther, his eyes still closed, his big head still bent and shadowed. Would you please to step aside and let me by.

If your girl Jill, for example, cried the Major, cramming in as much as he could in the inch of time left. If she turned out to be something quite different. Sheriff. What I mean to say is this: I think my son would have a little too much on his hands with two town girls, don't you agree, Sheriff?

Don't I agree to what, Major? said the Sheriff, without lifting his head by so much as a hair, without opening his eyes by so much as a slit, hearing the other one out with that large and awful patience.

Well, I mean if the other one turned out to be a town-

girl, too. Wouldn't that be a little too much for one boy, Sheriff?

Hunnicutt turned his face to the eyes of the others and winked elaborately and then he grinned back into the SheriflTs unseeing lids.

A boy like my son, said Major Hunnicutt. He's every inch a man. Sheriff. But he's not a stud.

Luther opened one eye now a barest slit and looked with it at the place in the Major's vest where the necktie disappeared. He spoke with a tight-stoppered, temperate calm, and with that one thin, glittering wound of eye-brightness running swiftly up and down the regimental stripes of Hunni-cutt's cravat.

Major, are you quite sure that's what you meant to say? he murmured.

Why not. Sheriff? I speak carefully—I say what I mean.

All right. Let it stand. Now, I'll ask you again to move out of my way. My girl Jill's likely got cocoa ready for me—sitting home waiting for me. Please, Major. Move away from the door.

Waiting at home—maybe, said the Major. Or maybe spread out in the back seat of my boy's car waiting for something else.

The other eye shot open a slit to match its mate and Luther seemed hunched and straining with some dreadful struggle behind the walls of his massive, terrible composure: his face sweating now, a single droplet of it trembhng like a crystal on his nose tip.

Will you stand aside. Major Hunnicutt?

Sheriff, I swear to God I believe you're afraid of me, whispered the Major.

That's right, murmured Luther hoarsely. I'm afraid of you. The more you talk the more afraid I get of you, soldier-man. The more I listen to you and smell you the more scared I get. Scared of what you make me want to do to you. Stand aside.

Aren't you afraid of something more, Sheriff? said the Major. Afraid maybe that your girl Jill might turn out to be the street-girl her sister is already?

Afterwards none of them was able to describe what happened after that accurately or at least in the same way: Jibbons always said he did it slowly, like a crane or bulldozer might nudge and tilt a giant obstruction of rock or earth; Hood the hangman said that Luther, uncoiling, snapped

upward with such a blurred speed that he had not, in fact, seen it at all: both remembered the big man's memorably stoic face incredibly clenched in a grimace of weeping. All that any of them could, in fact, be certain of was the fixed, static, ridiculous posture of the big man Hunnicutt flat against the wall, some three feet from the baseboard, and Luther's hands holding him there, beneath the armpits, the whole upward swooping movement one of such effortless impact that it might have not been a two-hundred-pound man he had lifted up and slammed there but a child of five or six years: slammed not brutally but with a firm, sudden and accurate attachment to the wall: a tremor that jarred the wall beaneath the undertaker's clock which, despite its hands that pointed twenty-past, suddenly, awakened and startled, repeated the strike of eight as if in some unsprung consternation of its own.

After the initial shock, Hunnicutt cursed hoarsely and began struggling, and then Luther, lifting him a little out from the wall, almost delicately slammed him back again: not as if he were conscious of an assault at all but banging him as he would pound his fist upon a table in rhythm to his sobs and Hunnicutt began with his knee then—something he had learned in the Army, Jibbons said later—bringing the cap of his thighed-leg up in hard, swift punches into Luther's midriff, below the sternum, and then Luther's own leg lifting slowly and almost as mechanically as the claw of a power-shovel catching the tops of both the Major's shoes in the arch of his boot and pinioning them back against the plaster, till they all heard the faint tear of his black-lisle socks, and then Luther suddenly when the Major seemed suddenly tired of it all and lay back there, crutched up in the Sheriff's big-thumbed hft; suspended like an ikon, helpless and almost acquiescent, Luther shouting into his neck, still keeping his eyes from that face as if he hated it so murderously that he actually dared not look any higher than the collar-points: Don't you know, damn you! Don't you have any idea, damn you, what you're saying, damn you! Don't you? Don't you? And each time slamming the Major with short, shocking thuds against the wall as if that body were an orator's palm driving home a terrible and fateful point: Don't you know, you, you damned, dumb brass-assed fool, that if what you said ever happened—that if your boy ever laid a finger of seduction on that girl Jill that he'd be lying dead like his friend is now! Don't you know that? Oh my

God, you poor, damned, helpless fool! Don't you? Don't you? Don't you?

He slammed the Major once more and the clock, though it did not strike, growled a brassy disturbance and the Sheriff, holding his man still three feet off the floor and against the chipped wall flat as a martyr on his cross, glared a moment more and then his face, slowly gathering itself up and together, resumed its customary mask of unshakable, indifferent enigma; and the tears and the sweat that streaked it, lay upon all that sculpted plain of impassive physiography as if they were only rains that had blown there briefly and stopped. He lowered the major as delicately as he might lift a child from the horse of a carousel, looked at the faces of the others a moment in silence, stood fingering the empty holster on his studded, bright belt and went slowly and gently out the door, closing it softly behind him.

I could have killed him, you know, said the Major, straightening his suit jacket a moment later, and brushing at himself as if the shreds of humiliation were some sort of invisible lint. Judo, he said to the men. I could have killed the son of a bitch. But I have the feeling, gentlemen, that if I wait a while I'll see him come to a tougher end. Step over here, Mister Jibbons, and lift me the way he did and I'll demonstrate how I could have killed him. I won't hurt you, of course.

No thanks, Major, said the horse trader glumly.

No, come here, snapped Hunnicutt. I won't really hurt you.

Now, Major, you know I can't, whined Jibbons.

You mean you're afraid of me, too, eh?

It's not that! Major Hunnicutt, you know I wear a truss. Doc Snedeker says I shouldn't even get out of bed too suddenlike of a morning and lift my own shoes!

Beautiful! Beautiful! boomed Colonel Bruce, banging his palms together in slow, chopping applause: a beaming and venerable claque of one. Oh, beautiful! By God now, what a curtain-speech to such a piece. Oh Lord, I think I may have to double my explorations into this jungle and come here twice a month! Beautiful! Gentlemen, tonight a star is bom. Will Hunnicutt, take at least six bows!

All this seems to strike you as humorous. Colonel Bruce?

Oh Lord no, Will, humorous is not word enough! Your little study tonight had wit, irony, charm—by God, sir, when I saw you poised there against that wall with the grace