Hatch! Mamma shouted after him, her voice distant, weak, deformed, small, dwarfish, alien. Intent on his target, he moved like a tank in his armored snowsuit, smooth heavy unstoppable anger. Close now. Blunt framed in the doorway, his face trained on her guitar. Her hair was not long and flowing and silver but knotted in a colorless bun. Her eyes were not green or blue or brown or gray but a dull black. She shut them. Aimed her pug nose, arrowlike, at the El platform. Snapped open her mouth.
Baby, baby, take off this heavy load
Oh, baby, baby, lift up my heavy load
Got this beast of burden
And he got to go.
Quick legs, he stepped up onto the curb and almost tilted over in the heavy snowsuit. He kicked the coffee can like a football, coins rising and falling like metal snow, then crouched low and charged like a bull. He felt wood give under his head and loose splinters claw his face. He fought to keep his balance, loose coins under his feet, and in the same instant found himself flailing his hands and arms against Blunt’s rubber-hard hips and legs. Gravity wrestled him down. Dazed, he shook his head clear, gathered himself in a scattering moment, and looked up at Blunt. Her lined face. Her pug nose. Her stork mouth. And the strapped guitar that hung from her body — broken wood, twisted wire, useless metal — like some ship that had crashed into a lurking giant.
His eyes met hers, black, stunned. Wait, she said. You don’t understand. She shook her head. You don’t—
I hate you! he screamed. I hate you! Concrete shoved him to his feet. I hate you! Brutal wind pulled him into motion and led him as if he were leashed. Down the sidewalk, beyond the El’s steel pylons, through warped, unfamiliar streets.
Dog Tags
Begin with … rock.
End with water.
Through a window fogged with his breath, Hatch can see the first and last cars at once as the train curls slowly around the mountain, a giant horseshoe, the other cars — he counts them — like a string of scattered islands, an archipelago. In the green valley below, grass ducks under bladed wind, and trees are naked for all to see, their skinny arms pointing in jumbled directions. The mountain curves up from the valley in a range of stony ridges like knuckles and joints, a peach fuzz of morning light growing from them. Up ahead, the engine disappears into a tunnel, followed by one car, then another. A steady rush of squeezing darkness.
Boy, take this here jar of applesauce to Mr. John Brown. Blunt held out a mason jar, in conventional use a container for storing fruit but in Hatch’s hands a glass zoo for displaying fireflies, holes punched in the lid, metal gills.
Yes’m. His grandmother often entrusted him with such errands.
Free of her, he unscrewed the lid and dipped his finger in for a taste. Moist sauce made from apples fresh from Blunt’s yard. He walked past John Brown’s old red pickup truck, parked on the gravel road, as still as his gray metal mailbox with its little red metal flag. He unlatched the chain-link gate and entered the tree-shadowed yard. He sensed tingling animal smell.
John Brown’s house was exactly like Blunt’s — except that hers was green and white, his blue and white — a long and wide cereal box knocked flat. Hatch banged on the door with practical knowledge. John Brown was hard of hearing. Almost immediately, the door wedged open, inner light spilling out, as if John Brown had been awaiting him in his heavy black shoes, dark brown slacks with sharp creases like raised tents, and crisp white shirt ringed with sweat under the armpits. John Brown poked out his head. A long narrow wasplike face. Hair cropped close, watermelon meat chewed down to the rind. Oil glistening on the scalp. Walnut-colored skin that brightened like a lightning bug in the sun. Hardly a trace of eyebrow, just two dirty smudges. Toothless mouth, puckered, drawstring tight. Razor-slit eyes. Expectant shine.
Blunt send you some applesauce. He screamed the words. She need to send two or three more jars. John Brown was starvation skinny, on the verge of disappearing.
He took the mason jar. Boy, tell Miss Pulliam I thank her kindly.
Yes, suh— But John Brown had already slammed the door shut, bringing a showering of dust down from the porch roof.
Miss Bee pulled a lump of snuff from her mouth and patted it on his cheek. He closed his eyes at the pain.
Hold it in place.
It hurt.
Hold it in place.
He did as instructed, felt his cheek rising under his fingers, swollen like an overstuffed nest.
Keep it on there two hours.
Yes’m.
Two hours.
Yes’m.
If it’s not better in the morning, I guess we’ll have to amputate.
His mouth went tight with concentration.
And keep away from them hedges.
Bent forward in his padded adult-sized seat, he feels light move like hands up and down his back, his face hot with friction against the window’s baked vibrating glass. For as far as he can see, sun covers the world, as thick as honey, a warm buttery yellow over candy-colored houses. Midgets slosh through the valley in rhythmic black duck boots. He is certain that they are singing. A hunting song. They aim their rifles at the sky — a bright shimmering pink — hammers cocked.
Light splinters against the glass and brings a sense of space into the cramped coach. He studies a line of mountains — he has seen many mountains today — and, beyond the mountains, pure distance, until a stiff breeze pushes against the window and breaks his concentration. It continues, a violent rhythm pounding for entry.
Topped with off-white shades and hanging fringes, antique lamps cast soft triangular glow, fine radiance suspended like spiderwebs in the corners. Miss Bee’s store was so dim you had to carry light in from outside, massage it into your eyes. The store proper was pushed back to the farthest room of the house, money hidden in a drawer. A cigar box and a pad and pencil served as Miss Bee’s cash register. An old display case as her counter. Rolls of belly fat pushed her inches from its edge. This woman, akin to no other. Hamster-fat cheeks stuffed with snuff under the constant violence of big greedy horse teeth. She watched you with big round-lidded frog eyes, her face framed by two long skinny snakelike braids. The smell inside the house-store the same as that outside: chicken shit and the stinking ghosts of unborn chicks. Miss Bee had a rooster to crow for day, and plenty of noisy chickens running about her yard, pecking secret codes into the dirt. Every now and then, some lone fowl would escape and wander out onto the gravel road, and you would chase it down.
Thank you, boy. Now, pick you out a sucka.
Thank you, ma’am. That one there.
You a good boy, ain’t you?
Yes’m.
Miss Bee released a space-filling laugh.
She would come to your grandmother’s house smelling like chicken and bearing gifts of food: turdlike yams, runny mashed potatoes, gummy pound cake, warmed-over greens, or a green egg — tree growing inside — from the green womb of one of her hens.
You would crack the eggs and pour the yolks into a big bowl of milk. Blunt would fork bread into the mixture, then fry the slices in a popping skillet. You ate six slices of green French toast and six strips of bacon in a puddle of thick syrup. Chewed slowly, seeking out words in the yeast and meat.