Chapter 11 #3
He didn’t know why she sounded so shocked; they hadn’t always been careful.
But he felt such a weight lifting off him that he laughed aloud, and then he bent to set his lips on hers and his hand slid lower on her neckline, down inside it, where it didn’t seem she was wearing a brassiere although she surely could have used one.
He squeezed, and she drew a sharp breath, and he pressed her back toward the corner of the barn and laid her down on the hay, not once taking his lips away.
He kicked his boots off, somehow. He got free of his overalls and his BVDs all in one move.
Linnie was struggling out of her drawers, and just as he reached to help her he heard …
not words but a sort of bellow, like the sound a bull makes, and then, “Great God Almighty!”
He rolled over and scrambled to his feet. A skinny little stick of a man was lunging toward him with both hands outstretched, but Junior stepped aside. The man landed against the plow and hastily righted himself. “Clifford!” he roared. “Brandon!”
Junior had the confused impression that the man was trying out different names on him, but then from the direction of the house he heard another voice call, “Daddy?”
“Get out here! Bring a gun!”
“Daddy, wait, you don’t understand,” Linnie said.
But he was too busy trying to clamp his hands around Junior’s throat.
Junior thought he should be given a moment to get his overalls back on; it put him at a disadvantage.
He pried Mr. Inman’s fingers loose without much difficulty, but when he spun toward where his clothes lay the man grabbed hold of him again.
Then, “Freeze!” somebody shouted, and he turned his head to find two boys standing in the doorway training Winchesters on him.
He froze.
“Hand me that,” Mr. Inman ordered, and the younger boy stepped forward and passed him his rifle.
Mr. Inman backed up just far enough to put the length of the rifle between himself and Junior, and then he cocked the lever and told Junior, “Turn around.”
Junior turned so he was facing the two boys, who seemed more interested than angry. They had their eyes fixed on his crotch. Junior felt the cold, perfect circle of the rifle muzzle in the dead center of the back of his neck. It prodded him. “Forward,” Mr. Inman said.
“Well, if I could just—”
“Forward!”
“Sir, could I just get my clothes?”
“No, you cannot get your clothes. Could he get his clothes! Just go. Get out of my barn and get off of my land and get out of this state, you hear? Because if you’re not two states over by morning I will set the law on you, I swear to God.
I’ve half a mind to do it anyhow, except I don’t want the shame on my family. ”
“But, Daddy, he’s half nekkid,” Linnie said.
“You shut up,” Mr. Inman told her.
He jabbed the rifle harder into the back of Junior’s neck and Junior lurched forward, sending a last desperate glance toward the crumple of his clothes in the hay. The toe of one boot was poking out from underneath them.
It was dark in the yard, but the bulb above the back door of the house lit him clearly, he could tell, because the people crowding out on the stoop all gasped and murmured—women and a couple of men and a whole bunch of children, all ages, their eyes as round as moons, the little boys nudging one another.
It was a blessing to leave the circle of light and step into the deep, velvety blackness just beyond. With one last jab of the rifle muzzle, Mr. Inman came to a halt and let Junior stumble on by himself.
He hadn’t walked barefoot since he was in grade school. Every stob and pebble made him wince.
Next to the Inmans’ yard it was woods, the scrubby kind thick with briers to snatch at his bare skin, but that was better than the open road, where headlights could pick him out at any moment.
He found himself a middling-size tree that he could stand behind, close enough that he could still see pieces of the Inmans’ lighted windows through the undergrowth.
He was hoping for Linnie Mae to come out eventually with his clothes.
Gnats whined in his ears and tree frogs piped. He shifted from foot to foot and swatted away something feathery, a moth. His heartbeat got back to normal.
Linnie didn’t come. He supposed they had locked her up.
After some time he took his shirt off and tied the sleeves around his waist with the body of the shirt hanging down in front like an apron.
Then he stepped out from behind the tree and made his way to the road.
The ground alongside it was stony, so he walked on the asphalt, which was smooth and still faintly warm from a day’s worth of sun.
With every step, he listened for the sound of a car.
If it was the Moffats’ car, he would need to flag it down.
He could already picture how the twins would snicker at the sight of him.
One time he heard a faint hum up ahead and he saw a kind of radiance on the horizon. He ducked back into the bushes just in case and kept a watch, but the road stayed empty and the radiance faded. Whoever it was must have cut off someplace. He returned to the pavement.
If the Moffats did come, would he recognize their car in time? Would he mistake another car for theirs and get caught by strangers without his pants on?
This was the kind of fix that the men he worked with told jokes about, but when he tried to imagine talking about it ever, to anybody, he couldn’t. To begin with, the girl was thirteen. Right there that put a different light on things.
Sawyer Road took so long to show up, he started worrying he had passed it.
He could have sworn it was closer. He crossed to the other side of the pavement so he’d be sure not to miss it, although the other side was low-growth fields and he would be easier to spot there.
He heard a fluttering overhead and then the hoot of an owl, which for some reason struck him as comforting.
Much, much later than he had expected, he came across the narrow pale band of Sawyer Road and he turned onto it.
The gravel was vicious, but he had stopped bothering to mince as he walked.
He trudged heavily, obstinately, taking a peculiar pleasure in the thought that the soles of his feet must be cut to ribbons.
He hoped Linnie had found a way out of the house by now and was standing in the yard calling “Junior? Junior?” and wringing her hands.
Good luck to her, because she was never going to lay eyes on him again as long as she lived.
If only she hadn’t noticed that he’d been caught without his overalls on, he might have been able to forgive her, but “Daddy, he’s half nekkid!
” she’d said, and now whatever little feeling he might have had for her was dead and gone forever.
He didn’t know what time it was when he finally hit Seven Mile Road. He walked in the very center, where the asphalt was smoothest, but his feet were so shredded by then that even that was torture.
When he reached home the sky was lightening, or maybe he’d just turned into some kind of night-visioned animal.
He nudged a sleeping dog aside with his foot, opened the screen door and stepped into the close, musty dark and the sound of snoring.
In the bedroom, he shucked off the shirt tied around his waist and felt his way to the chifforobe and dug out a pair of BVDs.
Stepping into them was the sweetest feeling in the world.
He sank onto the rumpled sheets next to Jimmy and closed his eyes.
But not to sleep. Oh, no. His whole walk home he had been longing for sleep, but now he was thoroughly, electrically awake, watching vivid pictures flash past. The party guests gawking on the stoop. His skinny white legs with no pants on. Linnie’s witless face and her dropped jaw.
He’s half nekkid!
He hated her.
During his first months in Baltimore, those pictures could make him wince and snap his head violently to one side, trying to shake them out of his brain.
Gradually, though, they grew fainter. He had other things to think about.
Just making his way in the world, for instance.
Figuring out how it all worked. Adjusting to the unsettling look of the horizon in these parts—the jumble of low, close buildings wherever he turned, the lack of those broad-shouldered purple mountains rising in the distance to give him a sense of protection.
At some point, it occurred to him that it was highly unlikely Mr. Inman would have set the law on him.
As the man had said himself, he didn’t want to shame his family.
All Junior would have needed to do was keep out of the way for a while, and maybe partake in a fistfight or two if he chanced to be in the wrong place.
But this realization did not cause him to pack up and go home.
For one thing, he found it surprisingly easy to put his family behind him.
His mother was the one he had cared about, and she had died when he was twelve.
His father had turned mean after that, and Junior had never been close to his brothers or his sister, who were all considerably older.
(Had he, in fact, just been looking for any excuse to get away from them all?) But what was even more important: by then he had discovered work.
Prideful work, the kind that makes you eager to get out of bed every morning.
When he’d asked after Trouble’s whereabouts in the lumberyard that day, it had been in the back of his mind that maybe he’d get a job with him.
Trouble had always struck him as interesting.
He took his wood so seriously. In fact, his nickname was no accident: the mere appearance of his truck in the lumberyard would bring good-natured groans from the men, because they knew he would want to study each and every board as if he were looking to marry it.
It shouldn’t have any knotholes, any chewed-off ends or unsightly grain.
(That was the word he used: “unsightly.”) He built fine furniture, was why.
He used to work at a factory in High Point but he quit in disgust and set up in Parryville, where his wife’s people were from.
And he’d more than once told the men in the lumberyard that he’d a good mind to strike out from Parryville, too, and go up north where there was more of a market for his kind of product.
So when Junior walked over to his brother-in-law’s house the morning he left home (wearing his lace-up church shoes that made his battered feet hurt even worse), he asked if they could stop by the lumberyard on their way out of town.
All he got at the lumberyard was a mention of Baltimore, but that would have to suffice.
He climbed back into the truck and they drove to the gas station on Highway 80.
“Tell the family I’ll send them a postcard once I know where I’m at,” he said when he got out.
Raymond lifted one hand from the steering wheel and then pulled back onto the road, and Junior went into the station to look for somebody heading north.
He had a paper sack with two sets of clothes inside and a razor and a comb, and twenty-eight dollars in his pocket.
But he should have realized Trouble wouldn’t want to hire him.
Trouble liked to work alone. (And probably lacked the money for a helper, anyhow.) After Junior had spent two days tracking his shop down, the man didn’t offer him so much as a drink of water, although he was civil enough.
“Work? You mean lumberyard work?” he asked, all the while keeping his eyes on the drawer-front he was beveling.
Junior said, “I had in mind something that takes some skill. I’m good at making things. I’d like to make something that I could be proud of afterwards.”
Trouble did pause in his beveling, then.
He looked up at Junior and said, “Well, there’s a house builder in these parts who seems to me real particular.
Clyde Ward, his name is; I sometimes make cabinets for him.
I might could tell you where you would find him.
” He also suggested Mrs. Davies’s boardinghouse as a dwelling place, which Junior was glad to hear about because he’d been staying at a sailors’ hotel down near the harbor where they expected him to sing hymns every evening.
After that, he never saw Trouble again. But he rented a room at Mrs. Davies’s, in her three-story house in Hampden that must once have belonged to a mill owner or at least a manager, and he went to work for Clyde Ward, the most exacting builder he had ever come across.
It was from Mr. Ward that he learned the great pleasure of doing things right.
He did send his family a postcard, eventually, but they never wrote him back and he didn’t send another.
That was okay; he didn’t even think about them.
He didn’t think about Linnie Mae, either.
She was a tiny, dim person buried in the back of his mind alongside that other person, his past self—that completely unrelated self who went out carousing every weekend and spent his money on cigarettes and fast girls and bootleg whiskey.
The new Junior had a plan. He was going to be his own boss someday.
His life was a straight, shining road now with a clear destination, and he supposed he ought to thank Linnie for setting his feet upon it.