Goes to the gettin pla …
Town, June broke in. Goes to town. Shorter this way. He thought she seemed to have edged closer to Sylder although she turned and was talking to him. He saw Sylder’s hand greenly phosphorescent under the dashlights pulling out the choke.
They reached the first bridge before it began to sputter enough for her to notice. Above here the road began to climb again and Sylder let it buck a time or two before he shifted to second. She didn’t move her leg. He was watching her out of the corner of his eye, her sitting forward on the seat and peering out intensely at the unfamiliar night. A moth whipped beneath the windscreen, brushed her cheek. He cranked the glass in a turn. When the car bucked again she flinched and asked what was wrong.
He started to tell her the generator was out of water but thought about the boy in the back seat. No word from him at all. The tall one in the back had leaned forward, breathing in Tipton’s collar and fixing the windshield with a look grim and harassed as if contemplating one desperate leap at the black passing night country.
Vapor lockin, he said finally. Overheats on these hills and you have to stop and let her cool off.
She looked at him and then looked away again, not saying anything. A phantom rabbit froze in the headlights, rolled one white eye, was gone. June was talking to her in a low voice, her still looking straight ahead, saying nothing. The one in the rear had sat back. No sound from her. In the mirror Sylder could see half a head dark and bushy in silhouette as a bear’s. He recognized the smell then. A tepid odor of urine, musty-sweet, circulated on the air now as they slowed.
They jerked around the last curve below the pine thicket and shuddered to a stop in front of the Olive Branch Negro Baptist Church. Sylder switched off the ignition. I guess that’s all she wrote, he said.
He opened the door and started to get out when he felt her hand on his leg. He stopped and turned.
Not him, she said. Not the other one.
No, he said. O.K. Come on.
He switched off the lights and then they were gone, negated in the sudden darkness. Marion, June whispered hoarsely. Hey, Marion?
From his porch Arthur Ownby had watched them pass and now he heard the slam of the car door up the road where they had stopped. It had begun to rain. A yellow haze in the woods flicked out. He could hear low voices, near-sounding on the warm night air. With one foot he tapped out the time of some old ballad against the corner post of the porch. From under the brim of the roof he studied the movements of stars. A night for meteors tonight. They cannonaded the towering hump of Red Mountain. Rain falling now from a faultless sky. A girl’s laugh on the road. He remembered her sitting high on the wagon seat Sunday morning that the mule broke wind in his ear while he unhooked the singletree and he stove two fingers in on a rib and it never even flinched. Late hours for an old man. Arthur Ownby had watched from his porch. He dozed.
When the boy came past on the road he looked up at the house on the sidehill, dark and abandoned-looking. He could not see the old man and the old man was asleep.
It was near daylight when they started back from Knoxville, a pale cold graying to the east.
Where’d you take her? Sylder asked.
June reached for the cigarettes riding in the visor. Goddamn she’s ugly, he said. You know what she told me?
What’s that, said Sylder, grinning. That I was the nicest boy ever needled her. Needled, for God’s sake. Where at? Huh?
Where’d you take her. You come down from the church but I never heard you come up. Where’d you go?
Ah. Up in the backhouse.
Backhouse?
Shithouse then.
Sylder was looking at him in amazed incredulity, acceptance and belief momentarily suspended, unable to picture it yet. He had one more question:
Standing up?
Naw, well … she sort of sat down and leant back and I … she … But that was beyond his powers of description, let alone Sylder’s imagination.
You mean to say you—Sylder paused for a moment trying to get the facts in summary—you screwed her in a nigger shithouse sittin on the …
Well Goddamnit at least I never took her in no Goddamn church, June broke in.
The coupe wobbled to a halt at the side of the road and Sylder collapsed against the door epileptic with laughter. After a while he stopped and said:
Was she the one that …
Yes, Goddamn you, she was the one.
Whooeee! Sylder screamed and rolled out the door where he lay in the wet morning grass shaking soundlessly.
The place was dimly lit and barnlike. A polished dance floor in which at the far end fell the reflection of the jukebox lights and those of the bar. Behind the bar a long mirror in which he was surprised to see himself, silhouetted in the doorframe, poised nimbly atop a stack of glasses. He came down and crossed the floor, limping slightly, and clambered up on the corner stool.