[…] Out in the barn, there wasn’t any light at all except for a kerosene lantern that was hanging by a piece of coat-hanger wire over a wobbly table that held a tray with tools and things, and Cortez Sharp’s gun. He was cleaning it. He’d had it a long time. It still worked fine. He shot it only a few times a year since it made so much noise. Plus he didn’t want anybody to know he had it because he was pretty sure it was still illegal for him to have it. He didn’t want anybody coming over and trying to take it away from him. Somebody would play hell doing that. If there was more than one of them there’d be more than one would play hell.
The wind had stopped sighing through the cracks with the coming of dark. He raised his head from his work and listened, seated at the little table, the faint chirping of crickets leaking through the plank walls. Everything was singing tonight after the rain, frogs in the trees and frogs in the creek, frogs in the grass and frogs in the gravel. And the air smelled different. On it floated all kinds of scents, cow shit and green clover and dried hay from up in the loft and old fertilizer stacked in damp bags in darkened corners and burned oil saved for keeping in milk jugs on the floor of the barn.
Cortez liked cleaning his gun. He cleaned it three times a year whether it needed it or not, and it never had let him down. Never had jammed, never had rusted, never had misfired, never had gotten so hot it cooked off a round in the chamber, never had done anything but exactly what Mister Thompson had designed it to do: shoot and shoot some more.
He wished he could shoot it tonight. Boy, he wished he could shoot it tonight. It would be a good night to shoot it if it wasn’t so dark you couldn’t see anything. If it wasn’t so loud it would probably wake her up. If she was asleep. He hoped she was. She didn’t sleep much. Moaned when she did. Like she was having bad dreams. She probably was. They were probably about Raif. He hoped his were over. About him. They seemed to be. He hadn’t had one in a long time.
He picked up a gun rag from the tray. It was soft with the grease and oil that had soaked into it over the years and it was limper than a dish-rag. He picked up a small plastic squeeze bottle of Remington Rem Oil and squeezed some of it onto the cloth. He also had a spray can of Rusty Duck Premium Gun Action Cleaner. He also had a spray can of Birch-wood Casey Gun Scrubber. Some folks would put WD-40 on a gun but not him. Oh, it made one slick and shiny, sure, for a while, but that shit evaporated later and left you without a thin coating of protective oil. Left you high and dry, buddy. That’s when they started rusting. They’d rust right there in the gun cabinet. You had to oil a gun. You had to take care of it. You had to love it. A gun loved oil the way a goat loved a gourd.
And Cortez loved this one. He’d owned it for so long that he’d developed a deep fondness for it. And who knew? How did you know that one day you wouldn’t be surrounded by government agents with guns intent on taking you away? You didn’t. You didn’t know from one day to the next what the hell was going to happen with the way the country was going now. Hell, look what they’d done in New York City and Washington. Just flew some airplanes right into a bunch of buildings. Killed all them people. Lucinda flew up there and looked at it. He didn’t know why. He didn’t want to look at it. The damn world was crazy and sometimes he was not afraid to know that he was somewhere near the end of his life. Maybe. Hell, who knew? He might make it to a hundred. His granddaddy did. Only had one arm. Lost it at Shiloh. Blind, too. He’d been ninety when Cortez was born and Cortez could remember him sitting in a cane-bottomed chair in front of the fire, spitting his snuff at the edge of the bricks, his long white beard stained with snuff juice. He sat there rubbing the gun with the oily rag, in the little circle of light, with straw scattered around, the air still and laden with the rain and the night things calling out there down by the creek. It had rained more than a couple of inches, and the forecast was for more of the same. That sounded pretty good to him. He thought maybe if it would rain for four or five days in a row, it might fill the pond maybe halfway up. He would have gone over this evening and looked if it hadn’t rained for so long, and if it hadn’t been so muddy. He needed some new ground grips on his truck but he just never had gotten around to getting them put on yet. It didn’t matter. He could walk over through the woods in the morning. Put on his rubber boots. See how deep the water was in it. And he needed to ask Toby sometime when was the next time the big red fish truck was coming. He didn’t want to get behind. He wanted to be there waiting in line when the pond was ready and the fish truck was in town.
He had a little linseed oil in another can and he unscrewed the metal cap from it and poured some of it on a clean piece of cheesecloth and rubbed some on the stock, sliding the gun across the padded surface of the wobbly table, watching the scratched and dented wood shine under the kerosene lamp. He rubbed some on the fore end as well. Then he put the rag down and pulled the gun over in his lap.
He opened the bolt and checked the tension on it, watching it slam shut when he let it slip off his finger. The round canister clip was sitting there and he stuck it into the belly of the gun and opened the bolt again, watched the brass-cased slug slide up out of rotation, and he let the bolt slip again, sending one into the chamber. He sat there with it on his lap, pointed up. The muzzle had little grooves cut into the end of it to let the excess gases out. It was just like the ones they used to have on The Untouchables, that old TV show. Eliott Ness. Now that was a good TV show. Not like this stupid shit now. He put it to his shoulder, aimed at a bag of feed, almost touching the trigger. Then he put the safety on and got up with it. Fully loaded.
He reached up and lifted the kerosene lantern from the coat-hanger hook and used it to light his way to one of the back stalls. His shadow loomed large around him as he walked, throwing scant light into dark corners, the lantern swinging in his hand, the gun heavy with its belly full of lead.
The harness room had a cobwebbed wooden door and Cortez pushed the sliding latch aside and opened it. He stepped up into a walled box that held leather mule collars, his wife’s old cracked sidesaddle spewing its stuffing, some singletrees hanging by nails from the walls, and an old trunk of the kind people used to haul around on steamships and trains. He knelt and set the lantern down and opened the trunk.
He started to put the Thompson inside, in the top tray, but then set the gun on the boards of the floor and lifted out the tray instead. It was full of old things: rusted red-and-white bass plugs, a rusted bayonet that was still sharp. He tested its edge with his thumb. Last time he’d used it was to stab a deer to death. Dried blood still showed on the blade. He set it back and looked around in the tray. He always did. There was a small tobacco sack and he lifted it out. The strings that pouched its mouth he drew open with his fingers. And reached in. Caught hold of the chain and drew it out, then the locket followed it. His knees were hurting, so he sat down. The white gold glowed dimly in the wavering light from the lantern, and he heard an owl hoot down in the woods. The chain was supple in his fingers. The cool of the metal. Money he’d spent on her himself. At Elliott’s on the square. He didn’t need to open the locket. He didn’t need to look at what was in it again. But he’d known all along that he would. And he did.
She looked like she always had, smiling stiffly, standing in a South Carolina photographer’s parlor in 1946. Just before she moved here to be with her mother and help her work for Cortez’s mother. Just down the road. At fourteen. He said to himself, I loved a nigger. Damn me but I did.
Cortez sat there for a long time, silent, studying her image, knowing his wife was probably sitting in her wheelchair in the blue glow of the television, wondering where he was. He closed the locket, stuck it back in its little bag, dropped it back in the tray. And started to set it back in there, and then put the gun away, but he didn’t. He set the tray aside, and reached into the bottom of the trunk, and pulled a folded quilt up out of the way, and pulled out the long robe. It was yellowing now, and starting to rot, and he brought it closer to his nose, and it still smelled faintly of wood smoke. And pine tar. Maybe even blood. He couldn’t tell.
He looked at the once-white hood, its eyepieces making it a vacant mask. It had been a long time since he’d worn it. And he knew he’d never wear it again. Why then did he keep it around? He didn’t know. Maybe the same reason he kept the locket. To have something to hold on to. A man needed something to hold on to, even in this world today, which had certainly gone straight to hell.
He sighed, something he hardly ever did. He was hungry and he didn’t know if there was anything good to eat in the house. He could have a peanut butter sandwich he guessed. Or a tomato sandwich. Except he’d fixed one of those for lunch. He could fry some bacon to put on it maybe.
He put everything away and closed the lid of the trunk and shoved it back under the pile of empty feed bags and then scattered some of them over it again. He had money stashed in a bunch of places in the barn. Under bales of hay in fruit jars. Inside old feed bags in Calumet baking powder cans with plastic lids. Hidden from his wife. Inside the house, too. He didn’t know how much. Enough.
He got the lantern and shut the door to the harness room and slid the latch closed again. He went out through the hall of the barn, his steps soft in the dry dirt and crushed bits of hay. He slipped out between the two big doors but left the crack open. Wasn’t any need to close it. He’d be back out here tomorrow. He had a cow that needed a shot for her cough and he’d have to find the needle in all the shit he had stashed out here. No telling where it was. Then he’d have to get her in the chute and maybe tie her ass up. Sometimes he wished he had a head gate. It would make it a lot easier to fool with one. Especially for something like that. Maybe he ought to just go ahead and get one. He could stick a thermometer up his bull’s ass if he had a head gate and there wouldn’t be anything the bull could do about it except take it. He had a catalog in the house and he thought he could get a good one for about eight hundred. Then he’d have to get some big posts, dig some post holes, put the posts in the holes, get some concrete, mix it up, pour it in the holes, bolt the head gate to the posts once the concrete set up. It’d be a lot of trouble. Sure would make it a lot easier to give a cow a shot, though. They always liked to try and kick your head off when you did that to them.
The ground was muddy between the house and the barn. Cortez blew the lantern out before he got to the back porch, and he stopped and looked up. The sky was still cloudy and he was hoping the forecast was right. There was some faint rumbling far off in the sky, and he saw blooming yellow light somewhere a long way down the country toward the east. It was very dark. He set the lantern on the back step and went on in.
As soon as he looked at her he knew she was dead. The TV was still playing, and she was still sitting in front of it, but now she was leaned over sideways in the wheelchair, with one of her arms out at an odd angle, and just as still as could be. He leaned over and lowered the volume some.
He walked around in front of her and looked down at her. She was looking at nothing. She wasn’t breathing. He could see her scalp plainly through the thin white hair on top of her head. She was seventy-six years old. She had been twenty-two when Cortez married her. And he was only eighteen then. She must have had another stroke.
There was a daybed in the front room and Cortez sat down on it. He glanced at the TV. That old woman with the sex show was telling somebody who had called in how to lubricate somebody with some jelly and Cortez wondered what flavor they used. He looked at his wife and reached out his hand to touch her on the arm. It was cool. He pulled his hand away. Well. She was gone. After all this time. She couldn’t cuss him any more or call him to the house on her bullhorn. But now he’d have to bury her.
He didn’t know who to call first, Lucinda or the funeral home. Maybe the sheriff’s office? No. He didn’t want them out here. But they might have to come take pictures. Seemed like they had to whenever somebody died at home. They didn’t used to, but he thought now they did.
He wondered how long she’d been dead. He wondered how long he’d stayed out in the barn. Couple of hours. Reading some of those Hustler magazines again before he cleaned his gun. Piddling around looking at that stuff. But when was the last time he actually saw her alive? He tried to think. She was alive this afternoon around four, when he stopped in to get a handkerchief. Wasn’t she? Hell, he didn’t really know. The TV had been going. Which had always meant she was sitting there watching it. But how did he know she wasn’t already dead then? He hadn’t talked to her. She hardly ever turned around when he walked in the room anyway, so it was hard to say. She might have been dead since lunchtime, since he didn’t actually talk to her at lunchtime, figuring she could roll her wheelchair into the kitchen and get something out and microwave it. She kept stuff you could microwave. Macaroni and cheese. Stuffed potato skins.
Why hell. What was the last thing she’d said, and when did she say it? He had to think. He came in here about the middle of the morning and she was alive then, he knew, because he told her he wished to hell it would rain, and she said he’d already said that about a million times and wished he’d shut up about it. And then she’d picked up the remote and flipped the channel over to Bonanza. It was one he’d seen before, the one where Hoss went temporarily blind, so he didn’t watch it. He went on out into the garden and started picking tomato worms off his tomatoes and pulling suckers […].
Hell. No telling when she died. She might have been dead since this morning. It was about eight o’clock now. If that was true, she might have been dead for ten hours. He touched her again to see if she was stiff. Only a little.
Shit. He didn’t know what to do. The sheriff came out when all that happened with Raif. But that was a long time ago. God. Damn near forty years. He didn’t know who to call. He’d have to go find Lucinda’s number if he called her. And she might not be in. He thought she went out sometimes with that retard. She had an answering machine that usually answered if you called. He never had called much after he found out that she was living in Atlanta with a retard. Afraid he might answer.
And where was the damn number at? No telling. He’d have to look. He got up and walked over to the wall and flipped the switch to turn the overhead light on. His dead wife sat there in her chair. The bottoms of her legs were very dark. He looked at that and understood that it was blood that had drained from her upper body down. It was the same thing that happened to a pig when you hoisted him up by his hind feet and cut his throat, only he was upside down and all the blood ran the other way.
There was a table with a bunch of envelopes and junk mail and a small bound book he thought might hold phone numbers for various businesses and people, emergency numbers, that sort of thing. He never had looked through her stuff. A long time ago she used to order flower bulbs and seeds over the phone from some nursery up in Tennessee. He flipped open the book and started looking through it. He didn’t have any idea what Lucinda was going to say. He knew they hadn’t been real close. Not close like a mother and daughter ought to be. Lucinda rarely wrote. Rarely called. Didn’t much want to come home for Christmas. Sometimes didn’t. Just stayed in Atlanta with that retard. Had some excuse or other. And when they were here they made him nervous anyway, because that retard cussed something awful and sometimes he barked like a damn dog and his head jerked and his legs and his feet and he was just a blinking mess. No wonder they didn’t have any grandchildren.
He found the old nursery numbers. Some of them had been scratched through. He found some recipes tucked into the pages, one for cat-head biscuits. He pulled that one out and laid it aside. He knew how to make gravy but he never had been able to make biscuits. She could, when she used to be able to cook and get around in the kitchen. Made good ones, too. For about fifty-four years. His wouldn’t be worth a shit.
He raised his head and looked at her. And the phone rang. Loudly. Right beside him. Without even thinking he almost picked it up. But then he thought, Hell, what if it’s Lucinda? It rang again, and he started to pick it up. It was probably just one of her friends. The other old biddies she talked to and checked on throughout the day. They called each other so much that Cortez had gotten to where he almost never answered the phone in his house. It rang again. He had his hand on it. Whoever was calling was going to hang up if he didn’t answer it in a few more rings. It wouldn’t be Lucinda, surely. Hell, she never called. It rang again and he picked it up.
“Hello?” he said.
“Hey, Daddy,” Lucinda said.
“Oh,” he said. Oh crap. “Uh. Hey.”
“What are you doing?” she said. Sounded pretty happy.
“Not much,” he said. He sat on the day bed. “Setting on the day bed.”
He looked at the TV.
“Watching TV,” he added.
He could hear some kind of music in there with Lucinda and he could hear what sounded like a bunch of people talking, too. He didn’t know what he was going to say. He didn’t know how he could tell her like this, unexpectedly, without being ready, exactly what was going on. He didn’t know how to do that. He wasn’t good on stuff like that. Never had been.
“Oh,” she said. “Well, I just called to check on y’all. What’s Mama up to?”
“She’s done conked out on me,” he said. Okay. There it was. She could pick up on it if she wanted to. But she didn’t.
“Oh,” Lucinda said. “Kind of early for her, isn’t it? I thought she always stayed up half the night watching TV.”
“I reckon she was wore out,” he said.
“I got you,” Lucinda said. Somebody laughed really loudly behind her and somebody else yelled something that sounded like Bust it open, baby, just bust it open! Lucinda said, “Well, I hate I missed her. I know I ought to call and check on her more. How’s she been doing on that new medicine the doctor gave her?”
“She never did say.”
“Tell her I called,” Lucinda said.
“Is it hot in Atlanta?” Cortez said.
“Lord yes,” Lucinda said. “It’s been awful. Albert’s gotten a really good tan working in the yard this summer. You and Mama should come visit sometime. You could get somebody to drive you to Memphis and it’s only a one-hour flight. It’s about fifty minutes, actually. I live ten minutes from the airport and I’d be right there to pick you up when you got off the plane. Albert would love to show you his new paintings.”
“I ain’t getting on no airplane,” Cortez said.
“Oh, Daddy,” Lucinda said. “There’s nothing to it. I’ve taken Albert on flights with me before. You know if he can do it, you could, too.”
“I thought he throwed up on one one time.”
“He just had a little bit of an upset tummy that day.”
“Why don’t you come over here?” Cortez said, not knowing what else to say, trying to decide what to do. It was kind of awkward over the phone like this, because you were having to juggle two things at once: keep up your end of the conversation by listening to whatever she was saying while at the same thing trying to figure out what the hell to do while she was talking. And then you had to come back with something, wham, bam! It didn’t leave you enough time to think. He was kind of sorry he’d picked up the phone now. He could have just let it ring.
“I can’t right now. We’re just too busy. We’re having a dinner party tomorrow night and we’re getting ready for that. Albert’s got a pretty bad cold and we’re trying to get him over that. Maybe we can get over at Christmas and see y’all for a few days. Or maybe we could come over sometime around Thanksgiving.”
“Well,” Cortez said. He started to just go on and blurt it out, but he didn’t think he could do that. He wished to hell she hadn’t died right before Lucinda called. Lucinda hadn’t called in about two months that he knew of. She might have called that he didn’t know of. For all he knew his wife might have talked to her every day while he was out of the house because he stayed out of the house all he could. It was tougher in the winter. You could only sit in the barn so much without some kind of heat. It got cold as hell out there in the wintertime. Ice would freeze in a bucket. And in the cows’ watering troughs. You had to take a hammer to it and bust it.
“What you been doing?” Lucinda said.
Cortez was glad for that question because he had a ready answer and had secretly been hoping that she’d ask him what he’d been doing. Besides killing flies on the front porch. And picking worms off his tomatoes. And listening to the damn TV screaming night and day like some unwanted houseguest he wasn’t allowed to kill.
“I been waiting on my pond to fill up.”
“Pond? You mean that old muddy thing down in the pasture the cows wade around in?”
“Naw. This is a new one. I just had it dug this summer. It’s up on the hill.”
“Whereabouts up on the hill?”
“Up there on the ridge by the road. Up there where all them big white oaks was.”
“What did you do with the trees?”
“He bulldozed em down.”
“Who did?”
“Newell Naramore.”
“All those big white oaks?”
“Yep.”
“Oh my God, Daddy. Do you know what that timber was worth?”
“I don’t give a shit what it was worth. I wanted a pond built.”
“Where did you find this Newell Naramore?”
“Schooner Bottom. He used to live over in Muckaloon.”
“Oh. Well, how big is it?”
“It’s pretty big. He took out two hundred and sixty-seven cubic yards of dirt.”
“I don’t know how much that is,” Lucinda said. He could hear her blowing the smoke from her cigarette back out in Atlanta. In a bar. No telling who all was in there with her. No telling what they’d do when the bar closed. He figured it was dangerous over there. He didn’t figure it was safe to walk the streets.
“It’s a shitload,” Cortez said. “I’m gonna put some catfish in it soon as it fills up. I just been waiting for it to fill up. We had a big rain today. Supposed to get some more tomorrow.”
“You just can’t get good catfish in Atlanta,” Lucinda said.
It sounded like a whole bunch more people had just come in because it was getting louder in there with her. It sounded like they turned the music up, too. It was getting harder to hear her. Maybe the battery in his hearing aid was getting low. He’d have to check it. But on the other hand, sometimes he didn’t mind being almost deaf. If you were almost deaf, there was a lot of shit you didn’t have to listen to.
“Maybe you can come fishing later,” Cortez said.
“Maybe we can.”
“Does he know how to fish?”
“His name is Albert, Daddy. And I can show him how.”
“He needs to be careful he don’t get finned,” Cortez said.
“Albert is very smart, Daddy,” Lucinda said. “And I’ve told you over and over that he can’t help what he says sometimes.”
“Yeah, but he sure does cuss a lot,” Cortez said. “I don’t guess you can take him to church much.”
“Daddy. I’ll hang up on you,” she said. Then she muttered, “Goddamnit. Call over there to see how you’re doing and you start that shit up again.”
“Where you at?” he said.
“I’m at the Ritz-Carlton Buckhead. In the bar. We come over here for drinks sometimes.”
“You using their phone?” Cortez said.
“Whose phone?” Lucinda said.
“I don’t know. Hotel phone, I guess.”
“I’m on my cell phone, Daddy.”
“Oh,” Cortez said. He’d heard of them. Then he couldn’t think of anything else to say. It was like his mind was going totally blank. He kept looking at his dead wife sitting there in her wheelchair. He started to ask Lucinda if she was dating any regular men, but he already knew she didn’t like that question, so he didn’t ask her that. She was strong headed sometimes. Ran away from home once when she was seventeen. Said nobody understood her and nobody could understand what her life was like or how horrible it was. The police picked her up in Memphis and they got her back home. Cortez knew she’d been lucky not to be found naked and raped and stabbed to death in a field out by the airport.
“Okay. I was just calling to check on y’all,” Lucinda said. “I guess I was feeling kind of guilty because I hadn’t called in a while. I just get busy with everything I’m doing. Work. Albert. You know.”
“I don’t know nothing,” Cortez said. “I know I’m gonna walk over in the morning and see how much it rained in the pond.”
“Well. I don’t want to get too close to it. I never did learn how to swim. Wish I had. I’d like to take a cruise, but I’d be scared to get on a ship in case it sank.”
“They got lifeboats,” Cortez said.
“Did you ever see Titanic?”
“Naw.”
“If you had, you’d know what I’m talking about.”
He could tell that she was getting ready to get off the phone and he still didn’t know what to do. Just to blurt it out seemed wrong. To have to call her back tomorrow and tell her that her mother had died last night seemed wrong, too.
There was silence on the line, and Cortez couldn’t speak. He could hardly hear her with all the shit going on wherever she was.
“Well,” she said. “I guess I better let you go.”
“Well,” Cortez said. “Okay.”
“Y’all think about coming over to Atlanta sometime, now.”
“I don’t know,” he said. He wished she’d shut up about it. He wasn’t getting on an airplane. Not unless they held a gun on him and tied him down in it. And they’d play hell if he knew they were coming for him and he could get to his Thompson. Splinter the whole damn wall of the barn with that son of a bitch. He could see himself shooting it out with these imaginary people, whoever they were. He wondered if anybody else ever thought of the crazy shit he did. Probably not. But then again, if he did, why didn’t other people?
Lucinda spoke to somebody for a moment and he thought how strange it was to be listening to a small part of her life in Atlanta, sitting right here at home with his dead wife. Lucinda was out in a place in Georgia with lights and tables and chairs with some people he didn’t even know, drinking. Whooping it up. Probably laughing and telling jokes. Not caring that she didn’t have a regular man. Content that she had a retard. And slept in the same bed with him. He heard her say something else and then she was speaking to him again.
“I think we’re closing our tab, Daddy, so I guess I’ll let you go. You take care of Mama, okay?”
“I’ll take care of her,” he said.
Then he hung up the phone. Right in her ear. Same way he did everybody. Even Toby Tubby.