A few days later the old man stood in front of the liquor store for a long time with his hands in his pockets. He eyed the rows of brown bottles within, Dickel, Daniel’s, Turkey, and wetted his dry lips slowly, as if he were astonished at the taste of his own tongue. It was ten-thirty and the regular winos were briskly conducting their early-morning business, shapeless men in rumpled clothes who emerged from the front door looking neither right nor left. He stood there until one went in that he thought he could handle and then he walked down to a laundromat and waited, squatting on the cracked concrete against the bricks, idly watching the cars move about in the parking lot. He whistled a low and tuneless hymn. Next door in Shainberg’s, some women were adjusting stacks of jeans and moving over the polished floors and talking in voices that had no sound. He picked up a scrap of wood and turned it in his fingers.
An old black man came out and turned down the alley between the stores and shuffled past with a nylon windbreaker over his arm. Wade didn’t appear to watch him shamble around the corner. He waited a few more deliberate minutes. He got up and dropped the piece of wood and stepped around the corner. There was nothing but discarded tires and mop handles and a broken compressor with one wheel missing, all piled against the back side of the building. For a moment he lost the shuffling figure. Then he looked toward the bypass and saw him in the act of halting his climb up the bank, putting one hand down, easing himself to rest on the sparse grass of a red clay hill. Wade watched. The black man put his coat down and drew his knees up and opened the bottle he had and tilted his head back. Wade started across the parking lot. With his head down he lifted his eyes and marked the man’s position, noted the stream of cars flowing past behind him, high on the hill. The parking lot ended abruptly in a choke of kudzu and honeysuckle.
He stopped at the ditch and looked up at the man forty feet above him, lifted one hand in greeting.
“Hey,” he said.
The black man said nothing, didn’t look. He capped his liquor and wrapped it in his coat.
“I’s wonderin if you could tell me how to get to Water Valley,” Wade said. “Wife’s in the hospital down there and I just now got here.”
The old black man raised one long bony finger and pointed due south. His face was the face of stone, sullen, the eyes red and malevolent, his countenance ruined with the scars of small drunken wars. He bore small scraps, perhaps of cotton, in the dark wool of his head.
“How far is it?” Wade said. He stepped across the ditch and stood there looking up. He had his hands in his back pockets but his eyes searched the ground. He stepped a little higher and the black man rose in a crouch. One hand rested on the ground, the other clutched his precious bundle tightly.
“That the highway goes to it?” he called up.
The scarred head nodded yes. Just once. Don’t come no closer.
Wade stepped forward another five feet, grasping a sapling to aid himself. He stopped and looked behind him. A boy was changing a tire on a tiny car behind Otasco, and a freight truck was backing up to Big Star. Blue milk cartons were stacked higher than a man’s head on the dock.
“I just wondered was I goin the right way,” he said to the ground.
The head above him nodded again.
“You don’t care for me comin up there, do you?”
The man shook his head, soundless wonder etched on his face. In his troubled gaze he seemed to hold some terrible secret.
The old man went up the bank like a mountain goat and squatted next to the drinker. The black man didn’t look at him.
“What are you drinkin?” said Wade.
A demented smile crept onto the face of the wino, three long yellow fangs bared in the purple gums.
“Fightincock.”
“You ain’t drinkin some wine, are you?”
“I may,” he said.
“Yeah? Why, hell. That’s all right. Lot of folks think a feller ought not drink at all.” He wasn’t looking at him. He was smiling to himself, talking to himself, looking out over the parking lot. “Little drink never hurt nobody.”
The black man was watching him carefully now, perhaps seeing him in a new light.
“Shoot,” Wade said. “I get me a little drink when I can but the old lady raises so much sand I don’t drink much around the house. I just usually get me a drink when I’m uptown like I am now.”
“You wife in the hospital?”
He paused for a moment, thinking. “Aw yeah. Well, yeah she is —today. I got to get off down here at Water Valley and go see about her. That’s where I was headed. What it was, I’s supposed to got paid this mornin but the feller that was supposed to paid me ain’t never showed up. I’s gonna get me a little somethin to drink and head off down here to Water Valley and see how she was doin.”
The man drew his bottle up to his lips, arms still wrapped in his coat, and untwisted the cap. He sipped it as if it were something forbidden. He wiped his lips and his face.
“What all wrong with her?” he said.
“Got cancer,” Wade said immediately. “Got cancer of the leg. Just eat up with it all over, can’t even walk. Gonna have to put her in the rest home, I guess.”
The black man was sucking bubbles from the mouth of the bottle. He put it down and said: “Aw.”
“Yep. A feller don’t know from one day to the next which one’ll be his last.”
The scarred head nodded mute agreement to this undeniable truth. But he didn’t offer the bottle in commiseration. The old man watched each swallow, each sip, like a hungry child. Clouds were bunching up high in the east, a dark bank of them that loomed up suddenly to banish the sun. In their hillside glade the shadows bled together. Wade saw that the rain was not far off. He hunched his shoulders against it even as he scanned the ground around him. But he was sitting on something, a hard bump beneath his shoe. He moved one foot and nudged it with his toe and it rose up from where it was half buried, brown and heavy and coated with a brittle corrosion that flaked away as he worried it with his toe.
“I believe it’s fixin to rain,” he said.
He let his right hand drop and pulled on it and broke the dirt around it free, a ringbolt twelve inches long, buried where some construction worker, long ago laboring on the shopping mall below, had perhaps flung it one day.
“Yes,” he said, “I believe it’s fixin to rain some.”
He whipped the bolt straight across his body without looking and it landed hard on the forehead of the black man, who was in the act of passing the bottle, and knocked him whimpering into the grass with his eyes full of blood. He curled up and began a spasmodic kicking, until the old man hit him again, and then he stiffened and quivered. A sodden thump, a hammer on rotten wood.
He rifled the pockets quickly. Thirteen dollars in cash, three U.S. Government food coupon booklets worth sixty dollars each.