The Orchard Keeper(22)

I’ll get back, he said. I got some things to do.

He was standing on the runningboard, one foot in the street at the corner of Gay and Main. Here, Mr Eller said, leaning across the seat, holding his hand down.

What?

Here.

I got money, he said. It’s okay.

Go on, damn it, the man said. He was shaking the quarter at him. Behind them a horn sounded.

Okay, he said. He took the quarter. Thanks, I’ll see ye.

He slammed the door and the truck pulled away, Mr Eller lifting his hand once in parting; he waved at the back of his head in the rear glass, crossed the street and went up the walk to the courthouse, up the marble stairs and inside.

There was a woman at a small desk just inside the door fanning herself with a sheaf of forms. He stood for a few minutes looking around the hall and reading the signs over the doors and finally she asked him what it was that he needed.

He held the bag up. Hawk bounty, he said.

Oh, she said. I think you go in yonder.

Where’s that?

Over there—she pointed to a hallway. Much obliged, he said.

There was a long counter and behind it were other women at desks. He stood there for a while and then one of them got up and came over to him and said, Yes?

He hefted the ratty little bag to the counter. From the sweat-crinkled neck exuded an odor rich and putrid even above the stale musty smell of the old building. The woman eyed the package with suspicion, then alarm, as the seeping gases reached her nostrils. Delicately with two fingers she touched the pinked mouthing of the bag, withdrew. He upended it and slid the malodorous contents out on the polished wood in a billowing well of feathers. She stepped back and looked at it. Then she said, not suspiciously or even inquiringly, but only by way of establishing her capacity as official:

Is it a chickenhawk?

Yesm, he said. It’s a youngern.

I see. She turned sharply and disappeared on a click of heels behind a tier of green filing cabinets. In a few minutes she was back with a little pad of printed forms, stopping further down the counter and writing now with a pen from a gathering of inkstands there. He waited. When she had finished she tore the form from the pad and came back and handed it to him. Sign where the X’s are, she told him. Then take it to the cashier’s office. Down the hall—she pointed. He signed the two lines with the pen, handed it back and started away when she called him back.

I wonder if you would mind, she said, wrinkling her nose and poking a squeamish finger at the little bird, mind putting it back in the bag for me. He did. Holding the slip of paper delicately in one hand and waving the ink to dry he went to collect his bounty.

He left through the open door with the wind hollowing through into the hall and skirmishing with the papers on the bulletin board, warm wind of the summer forenoon fused with a scent of buckeyes, swirling chains of soot about on the stone steps. He held the dollar in his hand, folded neatly twice. When he got outside he took it and folded it again, making a square of it, and thrust it down between the copper rivets into the watchpocket of his overall pants. He patted it flat and went down the walk past the grimy trees, the monuments, the poised and interminably peering statue, and out to the street.

A band was playing, wavering on the heat of the city strains of old hymns martial and distantly strident. Rows of cars were herded in shimmering somnolence beneath a vapor of exhaust fumes and at the intersection stood a policeman at parade rest.

He crossed the street and the music came suddenly louder as if a door had opened somewhere. When he got to the corner he could see them coming, eight and ten abreast, a solemn phalanx of worn maroon, the drill-cloth seedy and polished even at that distance, and their instruments glinting dully in the sun. In a little knot to the fore marched the leader, tall-hatted and batoned, and the four guidons bracing up their masts, the colors furling listlessly. A pair of tubas in the mass behind them bobbed and rode like balloons, leaped ludicrously above the marchers’ heads and belched their frog-notes in off-counterpoint to the gasping rattle of the other instruments. Behind the marchers came a slowly wending caravan of buses through the windows of which flocks of pennants waved and fluttered.

He watched, gathered up and pressed in the crowd, the people sweating in their thin summer clothes, a maze of shapes and colors similar only in the dark patches under their armpits, straining their necks, toe-standing, holding up children. The marchers passed them under the canopy of heat, sweaty and desperate-looking. He saw the near tuba player redfaced and wild as if perhaps he were obliged to puff at his instrument to keep it from deflating and drooping down over the heads of his fellows. They passed in an enormous shudder of sound and the buses came, laborious in low gear, churning out balls of hazy blue smoke, their windows alive with streamers, pennants, placards, small faces. Long paper banners ran the length of the buses proclaiming for Christ in tall red letters, and for sobriety, offering to vote against the devil when and wherever he ran for office. One by one they passed and again the multicolored flags in small children’s hands waving at the spectators who in turn mopped listlessly at their necks and faces with handkerchiefs. A blue and yellow card legended: Don’t Make My Daddy a Drunkard fell to the street like a stricken bird, leaving an empty hand clutching at the window. The next bus splintered and ground the flagstem and printed tiretreads over the sign.