Читать книгу Turbo's Very Life and Other Stories - Carroll Dale Short - Страница 9

Old Crazy walked the roads most all the time, his back bowed by the bulk of a clanking-full towsack, a shaggy cocoon that rode on him across the county’s blacktops, held to his neck by a skeleton-fingered grasp.

He put his secrets in there, people said, and juices of his craziness. And any day now, any year, the chrysalis of roadside trash that grew inside might burst, transformed under the honeyed sun one morning—rending the sack with a whoop of torn burlap, a dream-sized lunatic butterfly of all colors, jigging crazily through the air to terrorize the town, leaving the little man discarded in the road-edge weeds to dry brown in the sun like the husk of a sprouted seed.

People doubted his mind because he wouldn’t give a body the time of day and wouldn’t take a ride if it was offered. He traveled on his own feet or not at all, and he walked his own path, ignoring everyone who drove the roads. He kept his own hours, and spent them equally in all seasons.

His name began in years past as “That Crazy Man.” But when he became as familiar to people as an old tree, they called him “That Old Crazy Man,” though he wasn’t quite yet old. And finally, dropping “That” because there was none other, and dropping “Man” because it was plain to see that the roadworn whiskered shape was a man, he became forever “Old Crazy.”

He had been seen in the worst of summer, at midday, walking the throbbing pavement. From far off, the genie waves of sun dancing on old tar wizened his body to a funhouse spirit, a carnival-mirror man with ever-walking legs.

He had been seen in prime autumn, on the Gristmill Road near evening, where cool winds spit red and orange flakes of fire into his path from a gaggle of sourwood and wax-maple trees by the millpond.

He had been seen in bare winter, on Blacktown redrock trails, his feet leaving shallow dents that the straight-falling silver rain filled to brimming, to be the next day’s ice.

He had been seen in the days of first greenness, in the meadow by the river under Mankiller Bridge, when waterfog sat cold like cream on the grass, nigh to his waist, and sunrise showed the legless top stump of him gliding on the surface while his lost feet, below him, squeak-harped the young weeds.

And he had been seen . . .

“Son of a bitch, lookit ’im eat that chicken!” Milton Cardwell whispered to the other boy as they crouched behind thick hedges of honeysuckle, watching the cabin.

“Thought he just et folks,” Leon Butler whispered back, with a beatific grin to show he’d invented the horrible tale, just then.

The old man was sitting on a rusted oil drum, his feet propped on the rotten porch bannister. His eyes were closed ecstatically tight, and his tiny white teeth attacked a gold-fried chicken breast he held by its corners. Smoke from the wood stove inside was gasping through the makeshift chimney in the tarpaper roof—three tomato cans soldered in series to form a pipe—which pointed toward the region of the North Star. Dark was less than an hour away, and the sun brewed in the valley and threw rose-petal light onto the old man and the house.

“There’s his sack,” said Milton. And there it was, hanging empty on a blue steel nail big as a baby’s finger, beside a warped plank door that led to the cellar.

Leon Butler turned to Milton and furrowed his brow to show that the weight of a mystery was heavily upon him. “Hmmm,” he said, with great portent, the honeysuckle green and sun-pink kaleidoscopic in his half-inch-thick eyeglasses. A strand of yellow hair sprung from its well-oiled lodgings to rest on his nose. “So what’s a crazy man need with a cellar, huh? Tell me that.”

Milton snorted. “Whatcha reckon, ignoramus? To put junk in, o’course. Everybody’s got junk, but crazy folks got more than anybody.”

Leon’s eyes dropped to his own pockets, bulging with knives and wads of string and a broken carpenter’s rule and more. He started to shout, “Oh, yeah?” and slap at Milton’s bony shoulder to start a fight. But remembering they were in silent hiding, he let the remark go by.

At that moment a shout rang from the house, warbling in the heated air. Leon leaped up tense, his feet ready to run, but Milton grabbed an arm and yanked him down quietly as possible to the sweet-smelling safety of thick vines. “Hey, stupid,” Milton hissed. “He don’t even know we’re here!”

Leon flinched like a caged animal. “Bygod hollerin’ at us, he is, and you say he don’t . . .”

“Ain’t hollerin’ at us,” the stern-faced boy broke in. “Look at ’im . . .”

For the first time since the shout, Leon looked at the cabin. The old man was standing on the south end of his porch facing the river, not looking toward Milton Cardwell and Leon Butler at all. When the river echo died down, he stalked to the north side like the rotten boards were a proscenium and, facing a grove of trees, he said it again:

“Anybody here? Come ’round . . .”

The call echoed faintly in the moss-gummed thicket.

Then he strode to the front of the porch, his olive drab pants billowing in the still air. He shouted to the west and the sun and the two unseen boys hidden in the honeysuckle:

“Anybody here? Come ’round . . .”

He fastened his eyes straight on the offending clump of vines, it seemed. Milton and Leon scrambled crab-like through tangles of brush and briars until they found a clearing big enough to stand up and run in. As they ran down the mouth of the valley they looked over their shoulders with nearly every step. When they could no longer see the thread of woodsmoke wafting north, they stopped to catch their breath.

A day passed, and . . .

“But what if he uses this here path we come up?” Leon’s voice asked, from the same vines. “What if he knows the same shortcut we do, and walks right up behind us while we’re settin’ here waitin’ for him to come home?”

He spit, and the wad hung glistening on a briar bush in the late sun. “Tell me that, huh?”

But Milton’s eyes belonged to the steam in the air, and his ears to the cricket voice behind them pulsing like one faint fiddle note, waiting for night. Milton turned to Leon: “Say what?”

Leon took a rare opportunity to be disgusted himself for a change. He sighed deep and drummed his fingertips on his corduroy knees to show impatience. “I said, how t’hell we know he ain’t gonna sneak up behind us?” He pointed downhill, the direction they had come.

Milton frowned and pulled his pantsleg up to show a galaxy of red welts on his calf. “That’s how we know,” he said. “A-body ain’t gone walk through muck and briars and ’skeeters to get to their own house. They gone to go the road.”

“Yeah, but this is a crazy man, if you ain’t forgot . . .”

First the cricket note stopped, and they they heard feet scuffing the dirt path that split off from the town road. Milton eased his silencing vise-grip off the other boy’s arm and bent close to whisper: “What’d I tell you?”

The little man shuffled into view in the cabin yard, hazed gold by the sun. Puffs of dirt rose and fell at his feet. His legs turned by habit and carried him down two dug-out dirt steps to the cellar door. Sack and all, he disappeared inside.

Leon voiced another doubt: “I still say he musta seen us or heard us or something, yesterday, ’cause he was talkin’ straight at us.”

Milton kept his eyes on the warped door. “Naw,” he said. “He was just hollerin’ in ever direction and hopin’ somebody’d be in one of ’em.”

“Why’d he do that?”

“Lonesome, I guess. Maybe just crazy. I don’t know.”

The last three words surprised Leon, and he was ready to comment about it being the first thing ever Milton didn’t know, when Milton’s hand snaked out lightning-quick. “Shhh . . .”

The cellar door was opening.

The man walked out and flung his bristling towsack, empty now, onto the nail beside the door. He walked around the house, into the sunlight that was growing a redder dusty gold, and climbed the steps, all with the methodical plodding of an all-day road wanderer.

Standing on the porch, his hands on the bannisters, the old man leaned forward glint-eyed and breathed deep of the sourness blown up from the slime-hot river slough.

Milton Cardwell and Leon Butler didn’t breathe at all.

Then Old Crazy began his routine again, striding south first to shout at the stale backwater:

“Anybody here? Come ’round . . .”

He walked to the north end, invited the oaks, and then stalked again to the west side. His eyes were bright enough from the sun’s red fire to pierce a living heart, much less the frail tendrils of vine it might try to hide behind:

“Anybody here? Come ’round . . .”

The silence from the bush clump was so total it must have caught his eye, must have rung in his ears, because he sat down on the porch’s edge to watch it, his ruby hawkeyes full of the west sky. He looked as if he planned to sit forever.

“Godamighty . . .”

The soft whimper broke from Leon’s throat, coming on an intake of breath, not a shout, for there was no air left in him by now. Only Milton heard it, though they imagined that the sound pealed around all the curves in the river, to frighten nesting birds. The boys sat frozen.

The old man threw his head back and cocked it to one side, like a sparrow, so his eyes could see the whole hemisphere when he spoke again:

“Ain’t you never wondered?”

Leon Butler gasped quickly, while the man’s echo still rang to cover the sound: “Godamighty, Godamighty . . .”

The man’s small red eyes stayed fixed on the honeysuckle prison.

“Ain’t you never wondered what I’ve seen?” he said with a pleading, a tremble of passion in his throat, but then he clamped his mouth firm in a lip-thin smile to match the set of his eyes.

“Toad frogs matin’ to have young’uns . . . devil horses racin’ at midnight, when it’s lightnin’, runnin’ to a spot in deep woods where the sun nor moon don’t fall. The place where the spirits lives . . .” He held his finger in the air, a thumb cocked against it to show the length of a devil horse.

“I’ve seen the hole in the river where the sun goes down. Ain’t you never heard it hissin’, way off? Ain’t you smelled fish boilin’ when it goes? I’ve knowed the very spot. I been there. Ain’t you never wondered?”

Leon leaned close to Milton’s ear, and his lips spoke his words straight into the boy’s head, calm and measured: “Let’s go . . . while they’s still enough light . . . to run.”

But Milton didn’t answer. He was looking down at his own two hands, baby-smooth without any creases. He imagined how they would look if he could take hold of dark secrets and carry them around like jewels.

He heard a fish jump into the air, a mile or more away, and roil the water with its tail, trying to flee the holocaust of sun that was setting. But the fish never fell, the tail-slap never came, and Milton decided that giant birds probably wait near the sunhole every evening to snare frantic food out of the air and then swoop down to safety under dark trees while the sun boils away to night.

Milton Cardwell was the first to stand up. His smooth white jaw jutted; his eyes were believing. Leon’s arm showed itself, grabbing at the convert’s bony wrist, but Milton slung it away like a swimmer in thick seaweed. He stood firm.

“Godamighty!” came a whisper from the vines. “He’s a crazy man . . .”

“But he knows stuff,” Milton said over his shoulder. “About everything.” He walked forward into the forbidden yard as he talked, and Leon Butler heard every word because he followed.

They stopped in the center of the grassless patch around the porch; Leon, a head taller, peered over Milton’s firm-arched back.

The old man wasn’t startled. He lowered his head from its bird-tilt slowly and spoke as casually as if they’d been there all afternoon.

“You want to see it, first, while the sun’s right, I guess. Yes, uh . . .” He shaded his eyes with mummy-veined hands.

“Yessir,” said Milton, in deep contrition, not knowing what else to say. The old man got up and they followed his bent, slow-paced steps to the cellar door. He opened it back and stood aside, stretching out his arm to point the way.

Milton and Leon looked into each other’s eyes, one second. They felt the coldness of the dug-away dirt through their shoe soles, one second. A guinea-fowl far past Mulberry Fork cried out death along the water, one second.

They went inside.

The cobwebbed window that sat above ground in the far mud wall let in blood mixed with honey, a blinding orange shaft of sun that shattered at the square pane and flooded the cellar with a sleetstorm of light, bouncing off ten million glass-hard forms to dazzle the eye and the mind.

A piece of light would fall, here, and spark to strawberry red, then burst up again like a fountain to fall in turn, there, on shards of junebug green and penny brown and snake-eye tints of smoky blue—amber and azure, emerald and gold, all of them god-lucent, all of them a haze of bright shimmerings in the dank cellar air.

“Bottles . . .” The lips of Leon Butler shaped to say the word, but never did. There was no need, for they were there to see, and splendidly so. They were arrayed on shelves of hand-cleaved pine attached to a scaffolding of wood that stretched from the bare dirt to the planked ceiling of the room, crisscrossed with V’s and Z’s of narrower lumber, strips in endless profusion, spaces to hold more.

Bottles.

The burst of sunlight began to fade. The old man’s head stuck through the door behind them, smiling.

“I guess you’ll be wantin’ to know the secrets, now,” he said. Milton and Leon nodded to him, and to each other, and through a sheen of cricket calls they walked with him up the two dirt stairs and around the house, where darkness was already too thick for the rising wind to blow it away.