She had dragged it almost to the smokehouse door, its legs leaving skidding indentations in the rough flooring. He stood looking down at it. It looked ungodly heavy. She watched him from the kitchen door, buttoning her blouse. He squatted in the earth by the door, studying it. Figuring the easiest way to move it. He could not remember how he had gotten it there in the first place.
He looked up. The sun was nearing its zenith but the light had a thin faraway quality to it, the red orb stingy and remote, and it seemed to him that it was speeding away from him, the earth settling incrementally into some age seized in ice. Baring branches rustled softly, told sweet ageold secrets he’d never know. He was thinking about Blalock. He could see him opening the door of the stove, throwing a stick of wood in, stirring the roiling coals with a poker. Settling back in the armchair, sighing, feet clocked aloft to the warmth of the heater, now opening his farm magazine.
“Piss on you,” he told the stove.
He started toward his car.
“You dirty son of a bitch,” she shrieked at the immutability of his back. He had heard it all before and he went on. He wheeled the Chrysler back into the yard and then it leapt forward, spun smoking across the ditch and onto the gravel road. He sped off toward town.
Winer went down the embankment through the cold gray drizzle. The bracken was already wet and by the time he reached the car he was soaked to the thighs and angry. Motormouth had a fire built in the stone grill constructed for campers and a pan set atop it but the fire was guttering in the rain and smoking and heavy smoke bellied bluely away down the riverbank. Winer could hear the soft hiss of rain falling in the river.
He opened the car door and got in. Motormouth sat behind the wheel. He was staring out the rainwashed windshield toward the blurred river as if at some landscape he was hurtling fulltilt toward. Winer slammed the door. “You’re a hell of a lot of trouble,” he said. “You moved. You could have told me where you were movin to.”
“I didn’t know myself. It come on me sudden.”
“All this stuff coming on you sudden is going to put you in the pen or under the ground,” Winer said. “Rape comes on you sudden. Living like a crazyman in an automobile parked in the bushes comes on you sudden. You move but you don’t move good enough. All I had to do was ask at the grocery store. I guess it come on you sudden to tell Patton, just in case anybody wondered where you were or had any warrants to serve or anything.”
“Yeah. Well, hell. I told him to just tell you.”
“Well, you’re a trusting soul. The power of a ten-dollar bill may be lost on you, but it’s not on Blalock or Patton.”
“Is Blalock huntin me sure enough?”
“That’s why I come down here. He’s told it all over town what he’s going to do when he catches you. He says you raped her and beat her and he says he swore out a warrant against you. Likely he’s just blowing about the warrant, but he’s told so many folks he’s going to whip your ass he’s just about bound to do it whether he wants to or not.”
“Do you think he can do it?”
“Has a cat got an ass? Of course he can do it. Hell, he’d make two of you and enough left over to referee.”
“No, I mean that rape stuff. Can he make that stick. You can’t rape your own wife, can ye?”
“I don’t know.”
“I don’t mind gettin a asswhippin, he wouldn’t get no cherry, but thinkin about hard time up at Brushy gives me a chill.”
“I’d have to ask somebody. How about cranking this thing up and turning the heater on? I’m cold all the way to the bone.”
Motormouth cranked the car and it sat idling, vibrating rhythmically. Winer turned the heater on, shuddering at the onrush of cold air, turned it back off. “Does this thing not work?”
“It has to warm up. Ask who?”
“Somebody that knows something about the law. A lawyer, a judge, you know.”
“I know you best keep away from them kind of folks. You’ll have us both in the pen. Anyway, I never raped her and I damn sure never laid a hand on her. I know exactly what’s the matter with him. He’s mad because he had to put up that Goddamned heating stove by hisself.”
“Maybe. Anyway, he’s hunting you.”
“I’m fixin to leave as soon as I get a stake. I’m burnt out on this place anyhow. I’m sick of it. The only place I ever want to see this place is in a rearview mirror.”
He fell into a ruminative silence. Winer turned the heater on, held his hands cupped to the warming fire. “I’m going north,” Motormouth said. “Chicago. That’s a place for a feller like me. I could make it big in a place like Chitown. There ain’t no angles to play in a dump like this. There’s a world of angles in a town that size. That’s what I need.”
“What you need is a keeper,” Winer said. “And about thirty feet of heavy-gauge chain to hold you back by.”
6
A wan and sourceless light guided his steps off the road and into Oliver’s yard. He had the paper under his coat, for the air was full of moisture, a cold mizzling past mist and not yet rain. It was just past daybreak though there was no sun nor promise of one. He passed through a dull leaden dripping from the trees. Three bedraggled cocks already risen had taken shelter beneath an old white cooktable in Oliver’s frontyard. They watched him walk by disconsolately with eyes like bits of colored glass.
Yellow light flared through a window. Smoke rolled from the old man’s flue and Winer knew he was just up, for the smoke had a blue, greasy look to it and smelled of kerosene. He crossed the porch and knocked on the door and waited, tucking his shoulder in and hugging himself with his arms.
“It ain’t locked,” a voice called.
He opened the door and went into the front room. It was almost as cold inside as out. The old man was crouched before the open stove door cramming newspapers into the orange-red maw of its throat. He turned a harried face up toward Winer. The room reeked of kerosene.
“Boy, I’m about froze to death and I think this thing has gone on a sitdown strike or somethin.” Oliver began to feed the fire long, curled shavings of yellow pine.
“It just turned cold in the night. I went to sleep warm and woke up about four o’clock freezin to death.”
“I looked for a bad winter.”
“I think you found one,” Winer said. He spread his hands for the feeble warmth radiating upward from the heater.
“Is it snowin yet?”
“I believe it’s too cold to snow.”
“We’ll make us some coffee here directly this thing ever decides to burn.” Oliver blew out the lamp and they sat silently in the flickering light of the stove and the spectral gray dawn at the window. The fire caught and the area immediately surrounding the stove began to warm though cold held to the room and it was impossible to sit where the old man’s couch was. Oliver filled a pan with ice and water and set it on to boil. He looked halffrozen. His face looked gray and bloodless and he stamped about trying to get the circulation going in his feet, rubbing his hands together briskly.
“What’re you doin out so early anyway? You ain’t workin in this mess are you?”
“No. I don’t work there anymore.”
“Say you don’t? How come?”
“I quit. I just thought I might go out to town today. I was just waiting to see how it’s going to be.”
“I know how it’s goin to be,” Oliver said bleakly. “By God cold just like it is now clear on through till spring of the year.”
“It’ll warm up again. This is just a cold snap.”
“I don’t look for it to.”