The Orchard Keeper(8)

Some nights he made it to the Green Fly Inn and rocked away with those old boozers to the last man, this affluent son returned upon them bearing no olive branch but hard coin and greenbacks and ushering in an era of prosperity, a Utopia of paid drinks.

He was hard-pressed now on eighteen dollars a week, who had spent that in an evening. He turned twenty-one in August.

The following Friday he lost his job at the fertilizer plant. Aaron Conatser needled him into a fight, and he fought, not out of any particular dislike toward Conatser, or even in any great anger, but only to get the thing over with, settled. Conatser was the only man in the plant his size and had been looking to try him.

He was on one knee with his arms locked around Conatser’s neck when he heard Conatser’s hoarse breathing stop. There was no sound in the shipping room and when he raised his head he saw that the men standing around them were looking past him at something else and knew before he turned that Mr Petree had joined the circle. Not the dock foreman, or even the supervisor, either of whom would have said Break it up. He turned loose of Conatser and stood. Conatser came up too, stretching his neck like a mute rooster, and put his hands in his back pockets with elegant indifference.

He licked at the trickle of blood from his nose, tasting it salty and metallic, and turned to see what the old man would have to say. But Petree spun on his square leather heel and stalked briskly back down the aisle, the shipping-room floor echoing his hollow footfalls among the tiers of bags.

The three or four men who had gathered to watch the fray dispersed in silence, faded or slunk away in the dark malodorous aisles, less brazen than the rats that nested beneath the pallets. He and Conatser stood glaring at each other for a small minute, breathing laboriously. Then Conatser turned his head and spat, looked once obliquely across his shoulder at him and sauntered away toward the dock.

The dock foreman came down just before quitting time and told him. I tried to put in a word for you, he said, but he wadn’t hearing any.

Sylder doubted him but muttered a thanks anyway and started for the office. Where you goin? he asked. Get my pay.

Here, he said. Sylder turned. He was holding out the envelope toward him.

Sylder went to Monk’s and drank beer till six or seven o’clock, and finally went home. By eight o’clock he had packed some clothes into an old cardboard grip and was sitting grimly behind the wheel of the little coupe with the headlights clearing out the night ahead and a narrow strip of asphalt numbered 129 slipping away beneath him like tape from a spool. He stopped once at a grill outside of Chote, drank two warm beers from coffeecups and bought cigarettes. In the mountains the road was thin and gravel and he slewed down the curves on drifting wheels. Once a bobcat stood highlegged and lanterneyed in the road, bunched, floated away over the roadbank on invisible wires. For miles on miles the high country rolled lightless and uninhabited, the road ferruling through dark forests of owl trees, bat caverns, witch covens.

He smoked continuously, cranking in the windshield to light a fresh cigarette from the old stub and studying in the glare of their union   his shadowed muzzle in orange relief on the glass, watching the point of light fade when he exhaled and climb slowly up the dark mirror like a sun risen inexplicably by night as he turned the glass out again to let in the damp rush of air, the retired butt curving past the cowl to be swept away in a swift red arc. At Blairsville he filled up with gas and did not stop again after that. Out across the flats he could see the moon on the river curling under the black fall of the mountain, plating the riffles in chainwork, hordes of luminous snakes racing upriver over the sounding rocks. The air came cool and damp under the windscreen.

He reached Atlanta some time after midnight but did not go into town. He pulled in at a roadhouse just short of the city limits and sat in the car for a few minutes flexing his eyelids. There were three or four other cars parked in front, dimly lustrous in the neon ambience.

He passed through a fanfall of moths under the yellow doorlight and inside. Above the heads of the dancers he could see himself hollow-eyed and sinister in the bar mirror and it occurred to him that he was ungodly tired. He skirted along the high booths lining the walls and got to the bar where he ordered and drank straight four shots of whiskey. He began to feel better. He was sitting with the fifth drink before him when sounds of breaking glass issued from the dance floor and he turned to see two men circling warily with clenched bottles. A huge figure hulked up from the end of the bar and shuffling out through the gathering spectators seized the combatants one in each hand by the belts and turkey-walked them out the door, them stepping high, unprotesting, their bottles dangling idly.