WE WENT DOWN there because she was easy. She was always easy, watching us later across the stubbled field, dried-out West Virginia winter and she stood by the window braiding that long swatch of hair that smelled of smoke and fruit, of burnt apples. Sixteen, she was sixteen, moving on you, rolling flat and hard against you like some aging waitress. Feeling that hard scissored grip, you smelled her mechanical musk; her mouth on your face opened and her soft sounds spilled out empty and sugared in that filthy room. Her sheets were gray with men’s dust, heavy black dust of the tunnels, and sweats mixed on her skin.
Shifts changed, that long empty whistle howling like a dog. Wizard dog, empty whirling dog. The light was flat, broken on the hills. We walked to the truck and burned up that dirt road to her house. House so close the mine she heard that doggy moan and waiting for us on the porch, knife in her hand, she peeled potatoes around and around. Eyed skins dropping limp and curled on faded boards. She thin-legged in her man’s boots. Budded breasts and that dark, high-boned face. Mouth petulant but its hardness in it, behind it. Looking at that mouth you felt her teeth in you, hard white negroid teeth, and the town looked on the whole family as niggers. This in ’59, dark beauties taunted in schools. In that old brick school on dented river land, governor’s picture in the hall smelled of river sop and the dark tiger-eyed were taunted as they are, I guess, still, in those towns. She had that gaunt full-hipped Appalachian stance till she opened those lips and spoke, moving in flimsy cotton dresses, her voice singsong like she was sleeping. She moving smooth-bellied in fields, swell-thighed, and the harsh nettled grass gone bleached behind her.
He, Billy, found her first. Said she was down at the company store with her pap and a string of brats. Said she was standing sucking her scarf, them hauling those thirty-pound bags of staples to the truck. Flour filmed in her napped hair and he said he like to burn up looking at her. Billy and me came down from Youngstown when the mills closed. For months I watched Billy grind at pouty women in gritted Ohio bars, us working those hot mills too long, going lean in a nothing town. Him a city boy working steel and ships, tired of going back broke to married girl friends, Lower East Side sweat-handed girls afraid of their dock-worker husbands. Said he had an uncle, mine boss in the South, and when the mills laid off we came down in his truck, me having sold my junk car to get him out of jail. Drunken Billy ended his good-bye bender smashing windows and the jaws of some fat Puerto Rican pimp. We rolled all night into no-man’s-land West Virginia, and gas pumps alone by the side of the road went gray. Winter then. Deserted early-morning towns dusted gauzy; wooden-eyed perpetual thirties and Mail Pouch barns. This ain’t the South, Billy muttered, hung over, his head in his arms on the steering wheel, This is the goddamn past. And passing, just passing through, rolls you like a smoke train. Those heaped mountains lower the sky and roll you like some slow-limbed heavenly whore. And she, Billy said, that day at the store, carried bags a man would feel. Her face was hard and passive, the sensual hard of those women. He looked at her, thinking half-breed and sexual tales. She knew it, seeing him look as men look.
Her pap worked the Century mine down at Hundred, worked the swing shift. Billy said he stood in the woods at the edge of their fifteen acres of farm, waited, watched him swing his pail and hat up the seat of that broken bed truck. Truck started up and her pap just sat there in the shaking cab, a brawny-armed man near fifty touching his sandy hair. Billy said he watched him there so long he forgot the girl in the house. Something about the way he only sat, fingers edging his face. They lived, she told us later, in Detroit a few years when he tried to leave the mines. Said he came home from the Chevy plant stretched tight those nights. She cooked whatever she could get for the kids, his woman having left him by then. The mines, he told her, has got that dust settled in you and the black in your gut down deep. You work in small light to tear the wall, chink it out, then suddenly comes the monster clack of the cars. And when they’re gone, coal-heavy, the picks make the same hard ticking up and down the rails, ticking the muffled black. In Detroit that factory city oil smelled all night, motors on the assembly line going till there’s no rest from it. Nothing has a weight there on the line. Just smooth whir of motors in your head. He told her this, kneading his big hands, late nights drunk in their neon-windowed place. Touching her, saying, Them lines gets tight, thin cat gut lines like ties off bellies. Them workers in line by the belts got such nothing in their chests, after a while even the black coal dust, stealing air, is a relief. That way he could see, he said, his years leaving him—at least he could feel them going. He felt it mornings in his broken truck, listening. Hounds bayed the light and field smoke rose off the frost. The truck caught low and rumbled and he in the shaking cab touched his face. Like something pulled his hand and its laced black cuts to his face.
Her mother was mulatto but she was gone. The grandmother, sometimes crazy, turned circles in the floor. We heard her outside the bedroom door, chanting, or she walked through the house holding eggs in her hands. Old woman at the foot of the bed motioning us to come butta butta butta. She talked nonsense but all of them, seven kids and others drifted in from up and down the road, they watched her. Some days, boiling jimson in a pot, she hung wild dope in a shed they’d used to keep hogs. Shit walked to a powder on the warped floor. She walked sometimes all day back and forth. Billy laughed, called her Ole Lady Mindbender. Hey looka that, he said, his thin lips curled, and she traced eights in the air. Gnarled fingers jabbing close, she cackled. I kept seeing their faces together, the old woman and the girl. The old woman cackling and she, young, with her beige Negro face, had those same gold-irised eyes, but paler against her dark skin.
Later she talked of her thin brown mother leaving those mines her pap worked, him a doghole miner then, so poor his wife took three of the kids and went to D.C. They rode buses, riding to bars where her mother sang for hamburgers and band’s donations. Finally she whored out of Baltimore hotels, the kids waiting outside on the stoop. Ten-dollar tricks and swarthy short-order cooks. Movie house janitors’ nicotined fingers and doughy thighs of the satin-haired dago cops. Most nights the kids slept below in alley porno shop, warmer there, and Baker, black faggot, kept mattresses in back. Baker, his moony bagged eyes, his old bottles in windows, gave them white gravy and bread at 3 A.M. Alley feet stumbled by his grilled basement windows, size of tomato boxes. It was ’49 and he talked about the war, hiding his knobby hands. Sunk easy in a flushed barbiturate high, he gave the kids Japanese fans GIs had traded for pinups. Filmy cataracts liquid as spaniel’s eyes, he said he ‘got to move dis place up da street, up dere woan hafta burn dese lights all day.’ She and her brothers stole opiated cough syrup he heated in a pan. They stole tuna and steak from the grocery and they ate good some days, upstairs not so cold come spring. Then it was hot, so hot they breathed their own sweat. Their mother laughed, broad mouth stretched tight, eating on carton table in empty grime city rooms. Fans on full, she wore a bra and panties, fed them beer and fried meat. Brown woman, her black hair kerchiefed or pulled back in a knot. High-cheeked opal face, thick-browed, her smell raw in rooms. The heat that summer, and at the hotel there was backed-up plumbing, sad junkies on the roof, hotsummer Baltimore hepatitis. Their mother taken from mattress on floor not talking. At the crowded hospital, they were separated, beds on different floors, white wards, and she, seven years old, thought it was because someone knew they had stolen the food. She and the brother left were sent back to the country, where their father had a woman, more sons.
She had an older brother at Moundsville, sent up I guess for car theft, big-time state-pen theft. She wrote him letters on schoolgirl’s lined paper, careful not to smudge pencil sketches of the hounds she kept for him. Billy making her laugh would kiss the dogs passionate, holding them tackled in his arms until she ran to him. The dogs jumped, yelping their womanish sounds. Working with her pap on their truck, we drank Dickel, and the dogs, five big loose hounds, nuzzled our hands with their pink snouts. Billy went back to town in the late evening. The rest of them left through the woods to the mission church where the grandmother spoke in tongues and translated what they called the Word. That full-mooned night her pap and me had the engine out in the quiet. We worked together and the church sounded faint through the trees, a distanced animal music come to echo by the house. Don’t like my kids going, he said. It’s hypnosis, some part don’t no one need see. And the women raving, he said, Jesus no lover for a woman. He said it low, corners of his mouth gone soft, his hard face naked. He looked at me, and I thought for the first time that he must have been with her, not now, but long before, and more than once. He seeing me know stood confused and then brought his big arms down fisted. We rolled in the yard and I felt her in his arms in that Detroit room. I tried to say it was all right, I thought she would be all right, but I hit him because he wanted me to. He wanted to be hit, beaten, but he came at me so hard I fell under him, then saw his brutal face go sad. We said nothing, sat there in patched snow.
Toward spring, Billy left for the last time. Billy in New York with his East Side girls laughed no doubt then seriously talked of this cool-faced girl in her miner father’s house. You’re the good boy here, he told me. I go, he said, you stay. When I first went there alone (that is, everything was changed), we stood in the yard. She feeding chickens made a ck ck ck sound, sucking her cheeks. I watched her lips move, feeling oddly freaked there in the mud yard near the scraggly chickens and their round soulless eyes. Their washed yellow beaks were faded and sharp and her mouth moved, talking them close with some gentle sexual sound. I felt like I’d never slept with her, like both of us, Billy and me, had really only watched her, watched her strange small house and the dirt-scratched farm in big fields, watched the crouched mountains. At first it was like she said, no one around here going anywhere. Then things started moving, sliding; she got to us. When she talked, her curved-edged words ran together, her voice coming low in her throat. There in the yard, early daylight flattened space between us. Seemed I’d never seen her in such light. Always before it was pale. Subdued winter midnights till 6 A.M., the one big bed. Coal stove going and kids asleep in the house. One or two up in the night came in to sleep with us, whimpering. Billy got up first and sat in the chair, reading Revelations out loud drunkenly to himself and she slept close to me. I watched windows in by-then late winter, trees wobbly and the shack buildings pale through the plastic-covered windows.
Or I saw her in dim lights, warm, like in the pool hall in town those afternoons, dark, and the balls cracking sides under one low light hung from ceiling. She on flat stool by the bar talked maybe to Lowry, the owner, whose breath smelled always of black beans, whom she knew well, having helped his old lady midwife in the county since she was a kid. Solemn by steaming cunts of cousins and her father’s women, she held pans for the hamlike hands of Elva Lowry. Telling me later (long after chickens in cold spring), once they went clear to Pickens in Elva’s Ford, a not-bright woman whooing like a cow for two days. Her one-armed man in the kitchen yelled Shut that up now, and finally the baby birthed breech. Elva, sweating, wrapped it, he frying fat in a shallow pan in the kitchen where she went to wash it. Elva was gone and the woman blathered about jams, about crookberries. Get out there at the pump now, Elva said. Get water, ain nobody finished here. Another baby came. It was blue, its head dented. Elva laid it down. There, she said, let the poor thing go. Women, she said, got the sense of camels.
In the poolroom Lowry told stories. Elva, he said, was a good doctor till she died her own self. Ain’t that the way. He laughed in the rosy light and wiped glasses with a rag. Behind him the cheap beer signs threw shadows and made his head big on the wall. In that light she was easy to look at, her crossed legs shiny in dollar nylons, her head bent in her hair. Making a shot she never smiled, just chalked her stick and waited. Billy guzzled cold beer and sharpened in the fuzzy room. He sharpened, his face seemed clearer in those half-lights (he said to me in private even then, I got to get out of this). Afterward we’d give her a ride to her place with the groceries. The town looked abandoned with its slope-roofed buildings, even old men on stoops sat alone. Those late afternoons everyone was gone to the mines or to the Carbide plant. Me and Billy full of male laughter told tales, entertaining her but really gaming each other. She scratched her nails slow on the coarse bags in her lap. Billy, mock serious, said he was going to paint this truck in red letters, name it The Triangle. The whole truck smelled of him and beer. His shirt open he howled Hoo Whee, the peddler the priest and the miner’s daughter. She laughed, all of us suddenly sweating. That spring turned hot before he left. He poured cold beer down his neck, in his hair, saying Why does he have to drive this bus Why the hell does he always have to drive. She said Why Billy because you’re the only one got sense enough not to ask questions. All of us got drunk on beer and Cutty Sark and then lay in the creek to sober in cold water.
She told me later (Billy running coke in the Bowery, heisting TVs in sad-faced apartments for bucks) she’d heard Billy talking. She said sometimes he’d get so drunk she’d find him in the woods outside the house, unconscious, open-eyed, unable to move and mumbling terrified about avenues and sharks. Early spring in the yard that morning it was still cool but the sun was a glassy promised heat. Billy’s eyes were gone but they were close—I felt them in her dress, where she held feed aproned in the cloth, her sounding ck ck ck and the stupid staccato chickens. Going in the house she tripped, the chickens clouding her feet. She called one of the kids in from the woods. He was the youngest, the rest were in school by then. Bubby, she yelled. Come on back here. But he stood still in the yellow field. We started for him and he came, dragging what we thought was rope but as he came closer we saw it was a big blacksnake gaping its harmless mouth. He held it up and we saw its eggs rounded under the hide. He touched its end on the ground and an egg eased out on the grass. The snake, elastic around the shell, tried to coil. The boy looked at us, seemed to forget the snake and left it there on the steps. She stared at it in a way that scared me. I pulled her into the kitchen and she began filling up every pan and kettle in the house with water. The old woman caught on and hauled buckets from the pump. The kid, crowing, hitched up his pants and ran, following her, scuttling in the dirt. The woodburning stove was fired up and thickened the air. The sun got hotter, rubbing on the glass. We opened windows and doors, both of us seeing the swollen snake still on the porch. We moved the big tub to the center of the floor and she burned her hands lugging the heavy kettles. I moved behind her to take them and pressed against her by the wooden tub. The water steamed and I felt her skin under flannel. She was so familiar, the granted smell of her, the dark hay smell. Seeing her firm full-lipped face, I was frightened again by the old stare in her eyes as she’d watched the snake, her stare as she’d watched pitted windows in Billy’s rainy truck. Stopping for gas the day before he left, we’d talked past her and she watched numbers turn on the pumps. Listened. Harsh rake of the nozzle, clunk of its handling.
I got in the water with her, the big tub smelling of soaked pine. The old woman turned garden outside and the woods were overgrown already (was it April?). We bathed each other, soaped her black-nippled breasts, and the little boy between us was slippery, shivering against us. She rose, dripping water. The wet floor was shaded dark. She wrapped the boy in blankets and put him in a chair. All of it, everything, so slow. Seeming we are in the water for hours, her kinky hair pasted to her back and face in tight curls, she stepping over dogs asleep on the damp floor and me dreaming of us alone in some Southwest, some Canada. She dried me with her hands in bed, her mouth on my eyes. Kunk of old woman’s hoe at the side of the house. We had each other slow, looking at ourselves. Like when he and I came from the mine that first time she took our clothes, put her face to our white stomachs. We drank cheap hot whiskey, kissed her whiskied mouth and she laughed. Our black faces rubbed her shoulders gray. And it gets confused, she, her face on me, silent, oh god easing into her we’re in the dark.