Wolf Whistle (24 page)

Uncle pointed his finger straight in Solon Gregg's face.

He said, “Thar he.”

Thar he,
said the echo in Alice's heart.
Thar he. Thar she blows!

D
AYS LATER
, back at the Arrow Catcher schoolhouse, on a golden afternoon in late September, when the chalkboards were whistle-clean and every eraser was free of dust, and the oiled floors smelled like the perfume of fat jungle flowers after a tropical storm, and after all the witnesses had all testified down at the courthouse, and the trial was over, and Bobo's murderers had been set free, as most folks spec ted they would be, without apology or logic or shame, well then, Alice asked her schoolchildren to take out their big sheets of white butcher paper that Mr. Grady down at the meat market had so generously donated to their project, and their paint brushes, and Prang watercolors and Magic Markers, and to draw pictures, each of them, of the murder trial, what they remembered most of this horrible travesty of justice, this momentous injustice of setting child-murderers free, this racial and human insult to each of them—so Alice said, in her customary way of speaking her outrage, and so when the children had labored a long time at their desks and at the art table in the back of the schoolroom, and were sweaty and paint-covered with exertion and memory and primary colors of paint and horror and the juices of creation and loss, Alice picked up the
pages that they had bent over for so long and with such industry, and she sorted through them, one by one, and she discovered that each child had drawn a picture of a parrot.

T
HE DAYS
inched on through the autumn, with long, pink sunsets, and then, at night, bright stars, a cooler breeze. Local schools kept their steady schedules, big yellow schoolbuses, study halls, homework, bells to mark beginnings and endings, arrow-catching and football, the marching band.

Fortunata came home from Kosiesko and got her job back as a teacher's aide at the elementary school in Leflore, ten miles away, and so in this way she and Alice had small things to talk about.

Fortunata's younger children were clingy and sweet and tended to cry easily. They followed Fortunata around the house until she had to fuss at them. They pretended to be too sick to go to school so Fortunata would stay home with them.

Alice knew she'd be finding a new place to live soon. She was welcome to stay, Fortunata assured her, but Alice thought there was no reason to stay, now that the children didn't need her, and she wasn't sure she wanted to keep her job at Arrow Catcher Elementary next year, anyway, or even next semester.

Something had changed for Alice, it was hard to say just
what that was. She liked Mr. Archer and did not want to disappoint him, or let him down, but she didn't think she could stay.

She felt responsible, somehow, for failures that were vague to her. In her mind she carried the image in the raindrop and wondered whether there was not more she could have done.

There was something, too, that seemed still unfinished with Dr. Dust, and again she was not sure what. She was still in love with him, of course, and she couldn't live on that forever.

For a while, Runt kept his regular appointment at Red's Goodlookin Bar and Gro., mornings and evenings, too, but something was not the same for him, either. Runt looked for his friend Gilbert Mecklin, the crazy housepainter, but Gilbert was making himself scarce these days.

Even before the trial, Rufus McKay quit singing songs from Hollywood musicals, and stopped sleeping in the shoeshine chair. Then he stopped coming to work altogether. Nobody knew what happened to Rufus McKay.

Somebody said he went to Chicago to find work, he had a sister there. The blues singers stopped showing up at Red's, too, with their boxes and harpoons. All were friends of Rufus McKay's, maybe that had something to do with it. Runt had to admit, he missed them. Their music kept on playing in his head.

One day, down at the Goodlookin Bar and Gro., Runt asked Red to call him Cyrus from now on.

Red thought it was a joke. He thought they were playing a game.

He said, “Okay, Cyrus, and you call me Lance.”

Runt said, “No, really.”

And so then Red saw that Runt was serious and, after that, he worked hard at calling him Cyrus, but he often slipped and called him Runt, it was going to take him a good while to get the hang of it.

Runt wished he'd followed up on his hunch and found a way out to Runnymede that day, to Uncle's house, it might have changed things. He regretted he hadn't tried harder to find the boy's people.

Some other things happened, too, changes in routine that Runt didn't much care for. A lot of younger men, boys, really, started drinking down at Red's.

They were good customers, and there were a lot of them, as many as ten sometimes, and so Red couldn't very well run them off, business being business and all.

But they were foul-mouthed and unruly and unpredictable and wild, and maybe dangerous. Runt thought so, anyway. Runt didn't much like being around them. These boys didn't seem to have been affected at all by the murder or the trial. It was unsettling to be around people who lived where this thing had happened and for them to seem not to
have noticed. There was a little too much of Solon Gregg in every one of these new boys, young men, for Runt's taste.

One time one of these new boys brought a new ax handle with him to Red's Goodlookin Bar and Gro. and dragged a straight-back chair out in the cinder parking lot and stood up on it with the ax handle and said, “Anybody who wants to get hit over the head with an ax handle, line up out here.”

Well, hell, who in his right mind would want to get hit over the head with an ax handle, is all Runt wanted to know.

So Runt was pretty astonished when seven or eight of these boys went outside and got in line. This is the way they lived their lives, Runt guessed. Seemed like to Runt you couldn't live this way in a town where this thing had happened.

So they lined up, these new boys. Each one took his turn. The boy on the chair hauled off and cracked each one over the head with the new ax handle, first one, and then the next.

It hurt, too. They seen stars. It like to knocked a couple of the smaller boys out, it hurt so bad. One boy went down on his knees, he couldn't help it. Another one, Crack!—like to paralyzed him. He walked back around and got in line a second time. You figure it out.

Nobody might as well of died at all, no murderers might as well have got let off, as far as these boys were concerned.
That's the way Runt looked at the whole situation. That's why he didn't like these boys. He didn't trust a man who was not changed by local horror.

Gilbert Mecklin, the housepainter, slacked off in his attendance at Red's Goodlookin Bar and Gro.

This drew some attention.

After a while, he stopped showing up altogether.

Somebody said, “We gone have to mark old Gilbert absent, ain't we?”

Somebody said, “Look like he don't remember his old friends.”

Somebody said maybe it was because his boy Sugar found that swole-up body in the spillway, maybe Gilbert couldn't face his friends after that, maybe he was too ashamed and broke-up.

Somebody else said, Well, hail, that didn't make no sense, what kind of sense did that make, it wont logical.

Somebody else said it wont Sugar that found the body no-how, it was Sweet Austin, Gilbert's illegitimate boy with Rosemary Austin, down to the Legion Hut.

Somebody else said that boy wont Gilbert's, Sweet Austin belonged to Morris Austin just sure as I'm standing here, look just like old Morris, and anyway, Gilbert's a family man.

Somebody else said Morris Austin was impotent, that's
why Morris couldn't be Sweet's real daddy, that's what they heard. They said they heard Morris Austin ain't never had a hard-on in his life.

Somebody else said that wont nothing, they said they heard that Miss Alberta, down at the grade school, was born without a vagina.

Some people said, Well, I'll be dog. Is that a fact? Miss Alberta ain't got one? Well, shoot, Miss Alberta and Morris Austin, they ought to get together, go out to a pitcher show.

Somebody else said they heard Gilbert Mecklin had done stopped drinking. Completely quit.

Huh?

What'd you say?

Now wait a minute, let me get this straight. Gilbert Mecklin has done stopped drinking?

That's what they said they heard.

Whoa. Hole up just one durn minute here.

Yep, that's it. Gilbert Mecklin done quit.

The boy with the ax handle mought as well have cracked everybody over the head at once.

Gilbert Mecklin?—are you sho about this? You mean he died, don't you? Seem like that would be a more likely explanation.

Red said, “Gilbert ain't quit drinking. That's all there is to it.”

Somebody said, “That ain't what I heard.”

Red said, “It ain't. Gilbert's too good a friend. Gilbert wouldn't do that to me.”

Somebody said, “Well, I wouldn't take it too durn personal, Red.”

Red wagged his head. He wouldn't look anybody in the eye.

He jerked out his handkerchief from his back pocket, a big red bandanna, and blew his nose angrily into it.

The place fell quiet for a time.

Now here was the problem with the new boys.

One of them said, “He goes to them Don't Drink meetings, what I heard.”

Everybody looked at the new boy.

Why don't you just shit right in the middle of your dinner plate, while you're at it, son?

Red laid the bandanna down on the counter.

He took a deep breath.

He reached up under the counter and took the enormous pistol from where it lay beside the Kotex.

He raised the pistol, level out in front of him, and held it on the boy.

The boy took a step backwards and froze.

Real slow, Red said, “Get your goddamn ass, out'n my goddamn store, or I'll blow your goddamn head off.”

The boy started walking backwards, slow, till he reached
the door, and then he pushed open the two screened doors with his back, without taking his eyes off Red, and then turned quickly and took off running, and disappeared, down the steps, through the cinder lot, and he was gone.

Red dropped the pistol onto the floor, and it clattered like pots and pans. He put his head down on the counter and wept.

He said, “It's all over, boys, the world is coming to an end.”

Somebody said, “No, it ain't, Red, come on now, boy, it truly ain't.”

Red said, “It ain't no use, there ain't no comfort in the land.”

Runt said, “I got to be going, Red. You take care of yourself, you hear?”

Somebody said, “Get a grip, Red, you can do it, that's all right, you get a grip.”

Runt slipped on out of the store.

He thought, Gilbert Mecklin has done quit drinking?—goes to Don't Drink meetings? Now ain't that the limit?

He thought, And Red!—Law, have mercy, did you ever see such a durn sight in your life?—that boy was a mess in this world, now wont he, that Red.

Coach Wily Heard, the one-legged arrow-catching coach, had been having a taste with the boys that autumn day. He followed Runt out of the store.

Coach Heard hadn't been able to get Runt's boy out of his mind, Roy Dale. It wasn't like Roy Dale to shoot a classmate in the head. If it had been anybody but Smoky Viner, the situation could have been dangerous.

When Coach Heard had a few drinks in him, he took an interest in his students.

He called out, “Hey, Runt, hole up.”

Runt stopped at the bottom of the porch steps and looked back.

Coach said, “Can I talk to you a minute, Runt?”

Runt said, “Call me Cyrus.”

Coach said, “Oh, yeah, right. Sure thing, Cyrus.”

Coach said, “How's your boy, Cyrus, how's Roy Dale getting along these days?”

Runt said, “Well, you know.”

Coach said, “Yeah, I know.”

They kept on walking across the cinder lot.

Coach said, “How about I give you a ride home, Runt. I got my pickup parked right out yonder by the hellhound shed.”

Runt said, “Well, sure, Coach, that'd be nice, thank you. Call me Cyrus.”

Coach said, “Cyrus, right.”

They walked over and climbed up in the pickup. Runt slammed his door shut, and then Coach Heard pumped the
accelerator a couple of times with his fiberglass foot and started up the engine.

Runt said, “You're not wearing your peg leg today, I see.”

Coach said, “I got it slung back in the bed of the truck if I need it. My wife prefers for me to wear the one with afoot.”

Runt said, “It's a little dressier.”

Coach said, “I suppose.”

Runt said, “Your shoes wear out more or less even, too, I'd guess.”

Coach said, “I guess.”

Coach drove on past the gin, out towards the edge of Balance Due.

Coach said, “Runt, I been concerned about your boy.”

Runt said, “Call me Cyrus.”

Coach said, “Cyrus, right.”

Runt said, “He's mad at the world, ain't no doubt about that.”

Coach said, “I'm fond of that boy, Runt, I'm not going to lie to you.”

Runt said, “Call me Cyrus.”

Coach said, “So you're saying you want me to call you Cyrus, is that it? Do I understand you correctly?”

Runt said, “I'd appreciate it.”

Coach said, “Cyrus it is, then. You got it. No problem.”

They pulled up in front of Runt's house. The truck came banging to a halt. The leg in the bed came sliding from the tailgate up to the cab.

Coach Heard opened up the glove compartment and took out a nipper, actually an army canteen, dented metal with a stained canvas cover. The cover was army green and had the initials us stamped beneath the snaps.

Coach said, “You want a little taste before you go in the house, Runt?”