The sun had set now. Supper dishes were stacked in the sink, the hotplate was unplugged, like Mr. William Tell showed Hydro he must always do. Hydro was standing out by the pumps looking across the sugarcane fields. The Delta sky was streaked with red and gold. Louis was inside William Tell, sitting on the floor of the pantry, reading Mr. Magoo.
Hydro went in the store and mashed the No Sale key and opened up the cash drawer of the register and pulled out the bills and counted them and turned them so the faces were all looking out in the same direction, like Mr. Tell showed him, and smoothed them flat with his hand.
He said, “Louis, you doing okay?”
Louis said, “Uh-huh.” He sounded like he was in a cave, back in the pantry, with the groceries and whiskey and the broom and the mop and dustpan and buckets.
Hydro counted up the change and wrote down the numbers on a little pad with the date. He folded the bills up and bound them with a rubber band and put the heavy change in a leather pouch with a drawstring and then stuck them both in a metal cash box with a lock and key and put the strongbox in the false bottom of a steamer trunk. He felt like a regular storekeeper. Mr. Tell was nice as he could be, but particular about his money. He told Hydro, “Don’t let nobody steal my money.”
Back behind the counter Hydro reached up and pulled a string on a light cord and a bare light bulb blazed on, no telling how many watts, and sent shadows running all around the store. It was dark outside now.
Hydro took the shovel with him, out in back of the store, and crossed the fence into the sugarcane field, and spaded him a hole in the ground between cane rows and shoveled the watermelon and the cantaloupes into the hole and then put dirt on top again.
There were still a few things to do, though. He washed the few dishes and the pan he’d used to heat up the stew in, and put them on a rack to dry, like Mr. Tell showed him.
He went up to the front of the store and looked out the door to see was anybody coming. He pulled the door shut and shot the bolt, goodnight, Irene, I’ll see you in my dreams. Sometimes Hydro’s daddy came out and sang to him.
Hydro knew Louis had most of the Gerald McBoing Boings with him in the pantry, but that was all right. Hydro had him a stack of comic books up underneath his army cot, Heckle and Jeckle and Little LuLu and Casper the Friendly Ghost. He had some more in a bound trunk of Mr. William Tell’s. He didn’t keep scary comic books out at William Tell, The Crypt and Ghoulish Tales. Casper was scary enough for Hydro.
He looked in his basket to see was there another peach pie in there, but they wasn’t. It was a shame, since all of his spoons were clean. He wondered if Plastic Man wasn’t Gerald McBoing Boing’s daddy in real life. It did make sense, if you thought about it.
About the time Hydro got good and settled in, though, here came somebody up the gravel driveway in a car, a 1953 Mercury with Hollywood mufflers and headlights blaring all through the front windows. Happy Hour’s done come and went, he hoped whoever it was understood that.
He listened to the car stop and to the deep throat of the glasspacks shut down, out by the pumps. Hydro walked out into the front part of the store and peeped out the window to see who it was.
When he saw them, all dressed up in black like they was, girl and a boy, he thought, Well I declare. What are them two doing in Arrow Catcher, Mississippi? He couldn’t believe his own two eyes. This must be Morgan’s Texas friends, from the diner.
Hydro stood beside the front window, real quiet, just watching them. The boy flung his door open and got out of the car and stood there. He stretched himself real good. He walked back and forth in the gravel a little bit and looked at the gas pump and then said something back into the car, to the girl in there.
The boy was dressed in a baggy black suit of some kind, looked like a zoot suit, with blousey legs and wide lapels. He had his hair well-greased and slicked back like a Mexican.
Hydro wished he could tell what they were talking about. He once read a little bitty advertisement about a lip-reading school. You could order lip-reading lessons by mail from the back of a Gerald McBoing Boing comic book. He wished now he’d written off for it.
He’d ordered plenty of other things, including a ventrilo-quist’s dummy that he named Joseph of Arimethea, but he never could make it talk, so he traded it to old Mr. O’Kelly in Arrow Catcher for one of his soap carvings of wild animals. He got him a yellow Dial soap lion but forgot and left it out in the rain and it foamed up and melted and got ruined. You couldn’t tell if it was a lion or a dog. Now poor old Mr. O’Kelly believed Joseph of Arimethea was his grandson. Ain’t you glad you use Dial soap? Don’t you wish ever-body did?
The other door of the car opened up and the girl stepped out in the gravel and stretched herself, too. The girl was dressed up in black, same as the boy, hot as it was, and had red lips.
Black skirt, black turtleneck, black stockings, even a little black hat of some kind, although Hydro couldn’t think of the name for her hat. What was it called? It might be a boo-ray, or maybe boo-kay, something another.
Hydro shot the bolt and opened the front door to greet them. It startled them a little bit, looked like.
Hydro said, “I ain’t got no tortillas. We plumb out of tortillas.” He thought he’d bring up the subject real gradual, then pop the question: What is a tortilla, anyhow?
The boy and girl looked at each other, and then back at Hydro.
Hydro said, “Morgan ain’t here. He’s done already went home.”
For a while the boy and girl still didn’t talk.
The boy said, “Let me see if I have this straight. You ain’t got no tortillas and Morgan has done gone home.”
The girl with the red lips giggled when he said this.
Hydro said, “That’s it, that’s right.”
The girl said, “You open?”
Hydro said, “I was just fixing to read Heckle and Jeckle.”
The boy said, “We need some gas. Pump us some gas.”
Hydro said, “Oh. Okay.”
He went out to the car and took the hose off the pump.
He said, “How much?”
The boy said, “Fill it up.”
Hydro never had filled up a tank all the way to the top before. He was more used to selling gas in one-dollar two-dollar installments. Sometimes one-gallon, two-gallon.
Hydro said, “Say which?”
The boy gave him a look. Then he turned away and talked to the girl some more.
When the tank was full, Hydro was amazed at how much it cost. He never had seen such a big gas bill.
The boy opened up the screened door of the store and went on in, uninvited, while Hydro was still out by the pump. The girl followed him inside.
Well, Mr. Tell wouldn’t like it, strangers inside the store while he was out at the pumps, but Hydro guessed it was all right this one time.
Hydro wiped off the windows with a rag and checked the oil and checked the radiator and the air pressure in the tires.
He remembered a couple of cans of hot tamales on the shelf in the pantry. He’d have to disturb Louis. That boy ought to be headed on home, anyway; it was after dark. So, anyway, he could fix them the tamales, fire up the hot plate, if they wanted it. Maybe open up some saltines and a bottle of Tabasco sauce.
When Hydro walked inside the store to explain about the tamales and saltines, the boy and girl were standing behind the counter with the cash drawer of the register wide open. They looked up when he came inside.
The girl said, “Where is the money?”
Hydro said, “I won’t charge y’all what the pump says. It’s too much. A couple of dollars ought to about cover it.”
Hydro came walking on up to the counter where they were standing.
The next time the girl spoke, she was holding a pistol in Hydro’s face.
She said, “Listen to me, you fucking moron.”
Hydro said, “I shot a lope off Morgan’s head because I’m so hopeless. We all are.”
The girl said, “You’re hopeless all right.”
The boy said, “Where do you keep the money? We know you’ve got money in here somewhere.”
The girl said, “I’m just aching to cover these walls with hair.”
Hydro said, “Hair?”
WILLIAM TELL was way out in the country, beneath starry-starry skies, and between wide Delta fields of fragrant sugarcane, and so on a Sunday night, when the roads were all quiet except for a pulpwood truck crossing between Money and the river, where the wood would be loaded onto a barge and floated down to Vicksburg to a papermill, or New Orleans, and the sun had gone down and the golden moon was just beginning to rise up out of the gum and cypress trees in the loblollies in the flatwoods, you could hear far away, if the wind was just right, like it was tonight, the big farm bell ringing vespers in the parish yard of St. George by the Lake, a deep clear distant sound, like a dream, or a memory, or a prayer.
Hydro was listening to this sweet music while looking down a gun barrel at the counter of William Tell Grocery, as the big yellow light bulb above his cot swayed and cast comic shadows across the faces of Gerald McBoing Boing and Mr. McGoo and the bare boards of the floor. Back in the darkness, down at the end of the gun barrel, Hydro thought he could see his mama, who was a long time dead.
AND HYDRO’S daddy, Mr. Raney, far away, out at the fishcamp on the island in Roebuck Lake, beneath the same rising moon, heard the Sunday music, too, just as Hydro was hearing it.
Mr. Raney was cleaning fish, out on the island, where the fishhouse stood. The lake below him, where he looked down between his feet, through worn planks, was like a black mirror catching gold and silver traces of lamp light from the pier and moonlight and starlight from the sky.
Each fish in its turn Mr. Raney laid on the cleaning table beneath his knife and bore down and took the head off with a single stroke and a soft crush of severed bone. He turned each fish, and split it up the bottom, from the tail to the head, and reached into the cavity with his fingers and brought out the bright guts and eggs and slung them off his fingers, over the rail and into the water.
With the knife blade then, he scrape-scrape-scraped a fish, first one side and then the other, until it was clean of scales, and then dropped it into a great tub of chipped ice with the other cleaned fish. His arms were covered with the scales of crappie and bluegill, and in the moonlight they looked like silver.
He thought about taking a small mess of fish out to Hydro at William Tell. They could dig a pit out in back of the store and open a can of lard and a bag of cornmeal and chop up an onion and stir up a batch of hushpuppies and have a regular fish fry. He could sing a song or two.
Well, no, not tonight. It was late. Hydro had already eaten, probably. But maybe it wasn’t too late to go out and sing to him, though. Maybe that’s what he would do instead.
HYDRO SAID, “Y’all ain’t from El Paso, are you?”
The boy said, “He saw the Texas plates.”
The girl said, “He won’t be talking to anybody.”
She cocked the hammer of the pistol.
She said, “Where do you hide the money?”
Hydro said, “In the trunk.”
She said, “In the trunk?”
He said, “Mr. Tell’s trunk, over yonder.”
The boy said, “Open it up.”
Hydro walked over to the trunk and unbuckled the belts around it and opened the latches.
When it was open, the three of them stood looking at Hydro’s stash of comic books.
Hydro said, “Plastic Man is Gerald McBoing Boing’s daddy. It’s a theory I’ve got.”
The boy took the pistol away from the girl and held it to Hydro’s head.
He said, “Listen here. We want the money. Where is it?”
Hydro said, “Pull out the shelf. It’s got a bottom up underneath the bottom.”
The boy said, “You pull it out.”
Before Hydro could move, the girl ripped the comic books out of the top of the trunk and flung them all over the store. She jerked the false bottom out of the trunk and revealed the roll of bills and the bag of change.
Back in the pantry, Louis heard this and laid down his comic book and peeked around the edge of the half-open door.
The girl said, “Jackpot.”
Hydro looked around at the comic books, where they lay in pieces on the floor. Louis eased the door shut and stepped back inside the pantry. He saw the pistol the boy was holding. He reached up and turned the switch on a hanging light bulb and made the pantry dark. He listened at the door again.
Hydro said, “Mr. McGoo ain’t Gerald’s daddy. Some people might say he is, but he ain’t.”
The girl took the money out of the trunk and snapped the rubber band off the roll. She wet her thumb and peeled off bills, counting them.
She said, “There’s a lot of money in bootlegging, looks like.”
The boy said, “Get a couple of cases of whiskey and some food while you’re at it.”
The girl said, “You get it.”
The boy was still holding the gun. He looked at her.
She threw the roll of loose bills down in the bottom of the trunk and dropped the bag of silver down beside them. She picked up a clean croaker sack from a stack and started raking canned goods off the shelves into it. She took peanut butter and cheese and sardines, too. She found a drawer with ammunition in it, and picked out all the boxes of .38 caliber cartridges and put them in the sack.
Hydro said, “That Dinty Moore is extra tasty.”
The boy said, “Have you got a shovel?”
Hydro said, “I buried a watermelon this evening.”
The boy said, “You going to be burying something bigger than a watermelon tonight.”
Louis eased back inside the pantry again and tried to make his breathing more regular.
The girl said, “Have you got a can opener?”
Hydro said, “Yessum.”
He reached in a drawer and pulled out the can opener.
The boy fidgeted with the pistol. He was nervous watching Hydro open a drawer.
Hydro handed the can opener over to the girl.
She took it out of his hand.
She said, “We ain’t got time to be digging a hole.”
She took a loaf of bread and some cold beers and that filled up the second croaker sack.
She said, “Bring the money. And the whiskey. I can’t carry a case of whiskey and all these groceries.”
The boy followed her out of the store, both of them loaded down, and they put the supplies in the trunk of the car.
Hydro followed them out the front door and tagged along out to the car.
Louis stayed in the pantry. He didn’t know what to do.
Hydro said, “I never did understand what a streetcar was.”
The girl slammed the trunk shut and looked at Hydro.
She said, “A streetcar?”
Hydro said, “Look like all cars are streetcars.”
The girl and the boy looked at each other.
The boy said, “Let’s do it. We got to get out of here.”
The girl said, “Can a big-headed idiot like this get it up, do you suppose?”
The boy said, “If we don’t have time to dig a grave, we sure as hell don’t have no time for you to be pulling down your pants for this fool.”
The girl said to Hydro, “Do you know what sex is?”
Hydro said, “A grave?”
The boy said, “Let’s go. I’ll take him out back and do it, and then we’ll go.” He said to Hydro, “Get back in the store. Get moving, right now.”
The girl said, “I’ll do it.”
The boy stopped. He said, “You want to do it?”
She said, “Give me the gun. I’ll do it.”
He said, “What else are you going to do?”
She said, “You wait in the car.”
He said, “We don’t have time for this, Cheryl.”
She said, “You’ve given him my name and address, why don’t you give him my telephone number, too.”
He said, “We got to get moving.”
She said, “You keep watch over these groceries. Me and Gerald McBoing Boing here got some talking to do.”
He said, “Be sure he’s dead.”
MR. RANEY finished up work out on the pier and turned on the water at the spigot and stuck his hands and arms up under the stream and let the fish scales wash away. Up on the railing there was a thin red sliver of Lifebuoy soap, which he took and lathered up under the cold water as well as he could and used that to wash off more of the scales and fish slime.
When he was finished he slung the water off his hands and was careful not to wipe his hands on his overalls, so he wouldn’t have to start all over washing them again. He went inside the fishhouse then, and stepped out of his boots and then out of the overalls and hung them on a nail and pulled on his regular boots, the brogans. He was wearing clean khakis and a white shirt underneath his overalls. He checked himself in a cracked piece of mirror hanging up on the fishhouse wall and ran his fingers through what was left of his hair.
He had a little pistol that he kept on the sideboard, .25 caliber, so he picked it up now and fired off a couple of shots into the refrigerator, up against the wall. It was an old refrigerator, unplugged, worthless. Shooting it once or twice a day was just something Mr. Raney liked to do. It relaxed him, made him remember the old days, when his mama and daddy were still alive.
He had one more peach pie in the good refrigerator, the one that worked, so he took the pie out and put it in a burlap bag and stuck the pan of newly cleaned fish in the lower part of the icebox and then switched off all the lights in the fishhouse and headed down the stairs to the landing. It wouldn’t hurt Hydro to have an extra peach pie on hand, if he woke up hungry.
Darkness had fallen across the Delta, and it was especially dark down on the landing, near the boats and under the trees, where the moon didn’t shed much light, but Mr. Raney knew the way, he didn’t stumble. There was a board sidewalk, made out of washed-out, silver-gray two-by-fours, down to the water, onto the dock. Sometimes it was slick, but not tonight.
He made his way along the walk, in the dark, carrying the peach pie in the sack. He might sing “Rescue the Perishing” to Hydro. It was Sunday, after all. Maybe not. Hydro wasn’t partial to church music. He might sing “Money Honey” or “Sixty Minute Man” instead.
He knew where the boat was, the one he would take through the bayou over to the mainland, the leaky old wood boat with nets and poles and tackle boxes and his daddy’s little motor on the back. It was dark, dark down by the water.
He couldn’t see much. He said, “Where are you, boat?” He bent down and felt around in the dark, this way and that way, until he found the bow. He said, “Here you are.”
He pulled it up alongside the landing and stepped in the front end. He unwound the rope from a spar on a creosoted post and picked up a Feather paddle in the bottom of the boat and poled along in the shallow water until he couldn’t reach bottom anymore, then he sculled behind the boat with the paddle.
The dark lake water buoyed him up and lapped softly against the gunwales, as he drifted backwards into the moonlight and rocked back and forth like a baby in a cradle.
He found the pull-rope for the little Evinrude engine, down in the floorboards, and wrapped it around the crankshaft, one-two-three, and set the throttle and pulled out the choke and leaned back and gave the rope a good yank.
The little motor started up on the first pull, putt-putt-putt, rattle-rattle-rattle. A fragrant, familiar mixture of warm oil and gasoline filled his nostrils.
Mr. Raney turned the bow out into the bayou and pushed the throttle over to High and set out in a cloud of oily smoke, slow as a turtle, under the moon and stars, across the swamp and towards the Runnymede bridge and town.
In the narrow channel he had to steer a little. He slid around a cypress knee, he avoided a stob sticking up out of a bream bed, he slid alongside a trotline and didn’t get it tangled up in the propeller.
Then, out in the wide bayou, he drifted past a log filled with sleeping turtles, past alligator nests and snowy egrets and blue herons sleeping on one foot out in the bulrushes and willows, a water moccasin swimming, gar rolling in the moonlight.
For a little while two small dolphins slid in alongside the boat and swam as slow as he was going. Then they swam far out from the boat, they rolled like wheels and showed their oily humps, they dived, they disappeared, they surfaced near him, they swam in circles around him, and then they were gone.
In a minute he saw the Roebuck bridge, and then before long he was tying his boat to one of the stanchions, and laying the pie on the front seat of his pickup truck, which he left up on Harper’s Road every day where nobody ever bothered it.
He reached up under the seat and found the ignition key, right where he left it, and started up his truck and headed out Highway 49 to William Tell.
THE BOY in the zoot suit saw the lights of Mr. Raney’s truck coming, as it pulled off the highway and headed down the gravel road to the store.
He said, “Shit.”
He flung open the car door and went running up past the gas pumps and then up the steps and inside William Tell.
He said, “Somebody’s coming.”
Cheryl was naked, standing beside the cot where Hydro lay. Hydro was naked too, not looking at her, or at anything.
Louis could see this from behind the pantry door. He was trembling. He took off his little pink-rimmed glasses and cleaned the lenses on his shirt and put them back on. He stared at Cheryl. The sight of her nakedness, this girl’s flesh and bones, her milky skin, her skeleton-thin frame and tiny breasts, the wide, womanly patch of hair between her legs, broke his heart. He tried to ease away from the door again, but he was so nervous he pushed too hard and it closed with a click of the lock.
The boy in the zoot suit looked up.
Cheryl was holding the pistol to Hydro’s head, his temple, where he lay on the cot. The hammer of the pistol was cocked.
She turned away from Hydro and looked at the boy in the zoot suit.
She said, “What?”
He said, “Did you hear something?”
She said, “What?”
Louis was standing in black darkness.
He said, “A truck. Somebody just pulled up, out front.”
She said, “Shit.”
She lowered the gun, and let the hammer down, real careful, with her thumb. She didn’t dress yet, she only moved swiftly past the boy, around the counter.
She hurried across the store to the front window and looked out. There was somebody coming, all right. It was an old pickup, bouncing serenely down the road from the highway with its headlights jiggling.
She said, “Goddamn.”
The boy trailed behind her to the window and looked out, too, but now she was already gone, already moving. She raced back to the rear of the store. Louis could hear her standing just outside the closed pantry door. He knew she was naked. He was afraid she would try to hide in the pantry.
Hydro had not moved.
Cheryl laid the gun on a chair and started pulling on her clothes.
The boy said, “If you’d gone on and done it, we’d be out of here by now.”
She said, “Put your clothes on.” Talking to Hydro.
She grabbed up Hydro’s pants and shirt and threw them in his face.
Hydro did not move, did not seem to have heard her.
She said, “Somebody’s coming. Get moving. You’re going to see who it is.”
The truck stopped out in front of the store. The tires ground to a halt in the gravel when the brakes were applied, and then something in the bed of the truck seemed to shift forward, a toolbox or an ice chest, something heavy, and made a loud metallic sound when it did, a scraping, and then a thump, or clunk, when it stopped.
The girl said to Hydro, “Put your clothes on. Right now.”
Hydro pulled on his pants, then his shirt.
Louis hoped to get one more look at the naked girl. He opened the pantry door again and peeked around the side.
Just then a light turned on in the little store, where Hydro and the boy and girl stood. The light was as bright as the sun. The whole store lit up. You never saw such an amazing and sudden light. It might as well have been the center ring of the bigtop at the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus, it got so bright in that little grocery and whiskey store, William Tell. It was like the spotlight at the air show, one time, when two-winged cropdusters did loops and turns above the fairgrounds at night.
What an incredible and magical light, like sunshine! Louis felt almost good about his life, peeking around the doorjamb and seeing such a light. Cobwebs in the ceiling corners, the labels on soup cans, a broom that had been lost, misplaced, days before—everything became visible, all of a sudden. Nothing in that store was hidden anymore when that light turned on.
That’s what seemed like had happened, when the first shot was fired. Not just Louis thought this, either. The boy in the zoot suit thought it, too. He thought somebody had turned on a bright light, or maybe that the sun had started to shine indoors all of a sudden.
Partly this was because a flame a foot long leaped out of the end of the gun barrel. It did provide a certain amount of sudden and unexpected illumination, that was the truth.
And partly, also, it was because only sudden light, or maybe sudden insight, was ever so startling as the sound of that elemental and unexpected explosion in this small room, especially in this well-dressed boy’s mind, in his ringing ears.
Everything became suddenly so clear to him, so crystal clear. Things the boy had never understood were now, all of a sudden, plain as day, past and present, the meaning of life and death, how to break into show business. Suddenly, and for the first time, he understood the expression “This sheds a whole new light on things.”
He turned just in time to see the back of Cheryl’s head blow off and go flying past him, blood and hair and bone, and onto the wall of the store, in amongst the canned goods. Louis saw this, too. It was almost like Plastic Man’s head was stretched halfway across the room. Cheryl didn’t fall backwards, though, and not even forwards. Louis all of a sudden remembered that expression “fell in a heap.” He remembered the expression “like a sack of potatoes.” That was Cheryl. That was how she died. With a bullet between her eyes and her hair all over the walls and Vienna sausages, and then, flop, like a heap of potatoes.
Louis opened the pantry door all the way. He might as well get a good look at this. He wiped his glasses on his shirttail again, and then fitted the earpieces around his ears and pushed the glasses up on his nose.
The boy in the zoot suit imagined another bright light then, and more clear vision and lucid insights into the past and present and future, and for maybe one one-millionth of a second he thought he might have heard a repetition of the phrase “We are plumb out of tortillas.”
And then he even imagined his own hair all over the walls, and another sack of potatoes in a heap, similar to Cheryl, but he may have been mistaken about most of this. In fact he probably was, because before he could have heard or seen anything like it, Hydro, the big-headed lover of peach pie who had just killed Cheryl, had already turned a few degrees to his left, in his hopeless way, and had already swung the pistol around, out in front of him, straight-armed. The hammer was already cocked again.
And in fact, the boy in the zoot suit was already dead with a bullet in his forehead, so there is little chance that he might have had these insights, no matter how clear they might have seemed. The boy in the zoot suit was dead before the light and shape of the foot-long flame of the second shot could have registered on his optical nerve; his brain pan was already resting among the canned corn beef and Dinty Moore and Campbell’s pork and beans before any such insights or even firelight might have reached it for interpretation.
Louis saw it, though, and regretted that he had no one to tell this to. This was by far the most interesting thing that he had ever seen, and it seemed to him impossible that the sight of it would not ruin his whole life forever if he did not tell someone. He could tell his sister Katy, except just hearing it might ruin her life too, he supposed.
Hydro wondered how an elephant might feel at the end of a long day, after toting all that extra weight around with him. He’s just got to be tired, don’t he? That’s how tired Hydro was. Tired as a durn elephant. He felt like his legs all by theyself must weight two three tons.
He was still holding the pistol out in front of him, but now he let his arm ease down, real slow, to his side. He turned again, another few degrees, and faced the front door of the store. The gun was just hanging there on his fingers for a minute, while Hydro let his breathing become regular. It didn’t fall, though, the pistol, he didn’t let it drop to the floor.
Hydro was dressed, in a careless sort of way. He was still barefoot. Just standing there, with the gun dangling by his side, as if at ease. The whole store smelled like cordite and burned gunpowder. The air seemed thick with something, maybe smoke, maybe only portent. There was another smell, too—blood, he thought. He hadn’t given the first thought to how much blood there would be when he pulled the trigger, let alone what it would smell like.
Hydro held onto the pistol and didn’t let it fall out of his hand, because he wasn’t quite done with it yet. He was about to use it one more time. He had heard the truck pull up out front. He didn’t recognize the sound of it. Don’t blame Hydro for not recognizing his daddy’s pickup truck. He didn’t recognize much of nothing. He was under a right smart amount of stress.
He didn’t know who was coming up the drive, in the store. It could be anybody. It might be friends of the boy and the girl. Well, see, that was the thing. He wasn’t planning on taking any chances. Hydro was fixing to shoot the next person who walked through the door of William Tell.
He heard the pickup door open and slam shut. He heard steps in the gravel. He heard boots on the wood steps. He cocked the pistol a third time and held it out in front of him, aimed at the door. Come right in, can I help you? We are plumb out of tortillas.
MR. RANEY, coming down the drive-road in his truck, had heard the two shots, loud, too. He saw the flash. It looked like lightning inside the store.
He was already pumping on the brakes, hoping he could get this sorry old truck stopped. Morgan or some of the other boys from Arrow Catcher must be out here visiting, keeping Hydro company, wasn’t that nice. They were shooting up the store a bit, having some fun.
But even before that, before he heard the shots or saw the flash, Mr. Raney saw the boy in the black zoot suit, scurrying out of a strange car with Texas plates, and in through the front door of the store.
Well, wasn’t that nice, too. You don’t see many zoot suits in this modern day and age of ours. He might ask this boy for some fashion tips, pass them along to Hydro. You couldn’t go wrong befriending a man in a zoot suit. That was Mr. Raney’s own personal appraisal of the current fashion scene.
Then he saw what looked like two faces inside the front window of the store, neither of them Hydro.
Mr. Raney thought Hydro was pretty lucky to have friends with a pistol, every man needed a friend, it didn’t matter how big his head was. A friend with a firearm was a special blessing. And a zoot suit! He couldn’t remember the last time he saw one. Hydro himself would look mighty fine in an excellent suit of clothes like that.
Mr. Raney carried a gun, too, and not just the little .25 on the sideboard. A big gun, ten-inch barrel. He kept it in a locked toolbox out in the bed of his truck. So he knew firsthand the value of firepower in friendship.
Sometimes there was just nothing as satisfying as shooting a gun inside a house. It didn’t have to involve a refrigerator. It relieved stress. It cemented relationships, strangers or partners in marriage. It helped most anybody, the least of these my brethren, as Preacher Roe might say. It cleared the air.
You wouldn’t want to be careless with it, you wouldn’t want to hurt anybody, but to fire a shot out your bedroom window, say, into a neighbor’s garage, or in your own kitchen, into a large appliance, maybe, or just through the ceiling, when you were singing the blues, when you had lost your dear wife in childbirth and your only son had come out a waterhead, well, there was not a thing in the world to criticize about shooting off a pistol in that case, now was there, nothing but a good idea to spread a few rounds through the house, nail a few nails in the wall, so to speak, melt a little ice cream.
When Mr. Raney was a boy he worked behind the soda fountain in old Mr. Durham’s drug store. There was a man back then named Childe Harold who Mr. Raney used to admire greatly, lived in Arrow Catcher in a house called The Green Door, for some reason, out near the dump.
Childe Harold was a fat man, with a long white beard, and sweated bad. He smelled like Korea, once he got started sweating. He wore a red bandanna around his neck, and for some unknown reason, he wore a silk stocking tied around one ankle.
Every day when Childe Harold came into the drug store, with Red Man stains in his beard, and had flopped his big old sweaty fat butt down in a booth, Mr. Raney, just a boy working behind the big marble soda fountain, would go up to him and he’d say, “Can I get you some coffee, Mr. Childe Harold?”
Childe Harold would stroke his beard with one hand and give his silk stocking a good yank with the other hand, and then he’d drag his enormous old fat ass out of the little booth, pulling and straining, heaving and puffing, sweating, and the gun in his holster would be swinging this way and that way, knocking up against the booth, getting stuck up underneath his leg and poking him in the butt.
He talked through his nose. He would say, “Goddamn.”
Then, once he did finally get himself pulled out of the booth, he’d yank the pistol out of the holster, ten-inch barrel Colt .45, fully loaded, and hold it out in front of him. He did this every day.
In his nasal way, Childe Harold would say, “Hold my gun, son, I got to shit.”
Dooney Man Drake, the town lawyer, wrote Mr. Raney a letter one day, when he was still in high school, told him Childe Harold was dead, died of a heart attack, and Mr. Raney had inherited his pistol. Dooney Man said in the letter he hated for a bearded man to die and never learn to talk right.
Mr. Raney’s daddy said, “A letter? You got a letter?”
His mama said, “Well, but ain’t that nice, though.”
They were more interested in the letter than in the inheritance.
Later on, Mr. Raney showed the pistol itself to his folks.
His daddy said, “And a letter to boot. I swanee goodness.”
His mama said, “Don’t shoot it off in the house without asking first, honey.”
His daddy said, “A schoolboy—my boy—receiving his very own letter, through the United States Post Office. I’m just so proud of you, son, I could almost cry.”
When Mr. Raney thought these old friendly thoughts of his childhood, he also thought, well, he might as well get in on the fun. He wouldn’t shoot another man’s refrigerator, even an old friend’s, that could be considered pushy, he understood that, but it sure couldn’t hurt nothing to put a plug in one of Mr. William Tell’s cans of pork and beans, now would it, nobody could blame you for shooting the pork and beans.
So he reached back in the bed of the truck and dragged the heavy old toolbox over to the side and opened it up and reached around in the dark and found the leather bag.
The pistol was so big, it was about the only thing that would fit in the toolbox, though there were a few other things in there, a couple of wrenches anyway, a half-pint of whiskey, a claw hammer, and a box of ten penny nails. He hauled the leather bag out and pulled open the drawstring.
He took the pistol out of the bag, real careful, because it was covered with grease, packed in it, and he didn’t want to get grease all over his shirt. He pulled a big rag out of his back pocket and wrapped the pistol in it and rubbed it good, to get some of the grease off.
He wiped the long blue barrel and the checkered handle grip; he seesawed the rag through the trigger guard. It was still pretty greasy, but you could handle it. He wiped grease off the hammer.
He let the cylinder drop, to see if the gun was loaded; the sound of metal on metal was like the sound of silk on silk. He wiped grease off the cylinder too, and the gate, and clicked it back in place and gave it a spin, for good measure.
He stomped on the board steps on his way into the store; he pounded each step hard, in case there was still some mud from the island caked onto his boots. He didn’t want to be tracking up Mr. William Tell’s floor with gumbo.
WHEN THE front door of the store opened, Hydro was already holding the dead girl’s pistol out in front of him, straight-armed. It was no small caliber weapon itself. The hammer was already cocked. His hand did not tremble. The large figure that filled up the door frame was unrecognizable to Hydro.
The first shot was Hydro’s. He let the hammer fall. It was like simultaneous lightning and thunder.
The second shot was Mr. Raney’s, Childe Harold’s ancient enormous sidearm, and the sound and blaze that erupted from it were even more elemental, essential, volcanic than the crash and yellow illumination of the pistol in Hydro’s hand.
The report from this ancient weapon was so large, so impressive and heartfelt, you had to say it was historical, it was geological, geographical, it was the Army Corps of Engineers, it was the dam on Grenada Lake with the locks open, it was so loud, and the light it produced was the hydroelectric generators in the dam as they turned on all the electricity in Grenada County, or Buffalo, New York, with one switch, lights on. The echo lasted a century, it seemed like; eyes that saw the fire from the barrel were seared permanently, like eyes that had looked straight into the sun. The sulphur and cordite, burning, might have come from the bowels of hell, they stunk so bad, they produced such a cloud of noxious smoke.
There were no other shots, only those two. The firefight was finished.
Far across the sugarcane fields, across acres of water, deep in the swamp, wild creatures heard the gunfire. Some of them might have thought it was thunder, the innocent didappers who looked for rain, the gentle alligators who were too bored to care, the nutrias who stood on gum stumps and shook water out of their fur like slinging silver coins in many directions at once.
But turkey vultures, roosting in the tops of dead trees in sight of the Indian mound, where stone-age civilizations lay quiet for so long, they heard it and opened one eye, perhaps, and shrugged their big poultry shoulders, shivered, as if to shake off a bad dream, and slept again.
Sly foxes heard it, and wrapped their red tails across their half-sleeping eyes and crept an inch deeper into their dens.
Wild dogs heard it, and dreamed of armadillos without shells.
Louis McNaughton heard it, the fat little boy with pink-rimmed glasses, and stepped back into the pantry and turned on the overhead light. He wished there were more choices for a person whose life had probably just been ruined by what he had seen. If there were choices, he couldn’t think what they were right now. He sat down again to try to finish reading Gerald McBoing Boing.
Mr. Raney said, “What a racket! Wasn’t that something special! My eyes are still seeing black spots.”
Hydro said, “Daddy?”
Mr. Raney said, “Let’s get some lights on in here. Let’s see what we hit. I probably should have warned you about shooting Mr. William Tell’s refrigerator. Them things are expensive.”
Hydro said, “Daddy? Are you all right?”
Mr. Raney said, “I’m not promising nothing about my marksmanship. I was only half-remembering where them pork and beans used to set. No telling what I put a plug in.”
Hydro dropped the gun to the floor. It sounded like a tire iron.
Mr. Raney said, “Turn on some lights, son. Let’s see what we got here. If I hit one of them cans of Campbell pork and beans, I’ll buy you a Co-Cola.”
Hydro said, “I missed you. How did I miss you?”
Hydro reached up above him and yanked on the light cord. The door directly behind his father had a piece missing as big as a wedge of pie.
Mr. Raney’s eyes were still getting adjusted to the light. He said, “Introduce me to your friends, son, let’s don’t be rude. I saw them through the window. I got to tell you, I admire your young man’s sense of style, sure do.”
It wasn’t until right then that Mr. Raney noticed that Hydro was barefooted and there might be some dead folks in the room.
Mr. Raney said, “Sugarplum?”
He walked through the store, closer to Hydro.
Mr. Raney said, “What has happened? Why are these two lovely children laying here dead on the floor with their heads blowed off? Where are your shoes?”