Читать книгу Junior Ray - John Pritchard - Страница 10

Now I’ll say something about them “Note Books” we found in Shaw’s hidy-hole he had up there under the roof of Miss Helena’s silo. I’ll show you a little bit of what that crazy-ass muthafukka put in ’em, and I’ll show you some more as we go along. This’ll give you a better understanding of what I was up against*:

Call it day; it is the blinding and the time when one cannot navigate the farther [sic] of waters; it is the time when time as binder and as image cannot be seen shining in the night, for, as I recall, time is in the light, and I am called to find the point in all the scattered starburst where home is racing out of reach, where light cannot be caught except by theory and with sighs, to be held only and forever in the arms of infinite longing, which is where I, the lone and infinite longer, may have found my place.

About the myth, however, or the lack it,

it was in the flight and in the call of birds.

It lay in the shadows of the high grass,

and it thrummed at night

when the windows of the car were down.

It was in the silence of summer afternoons

and in the hands of Negroes who moved

like solitary dreams

above the rising heat.

I can see where it used to be,

though now, when I look,

it appears much like the exoskeleton

of a dead cicada.

And so the time and country that was pulled by beasts is gone, replaced by false weather, strange fields, and men with rubber skin.

All the mules, and horses too, are gone, burned in a fire at the edge of town, where constables stood on the road and shot at them and killed them with their Winchesters as they, both horse and mule, their manes, their flesh, their tails, all on fire, ran like living art, back and forth beneath the open shed and round and round, seeking haven in the safety of a burning barn.

I shall know my home by its indelible mark upon my longing, for it is the longing that is the plate on which the image is etched in distant light, where there are no angels, only the angelic.

There is no setting sun, only shadows for a time, and, then, it is that star again, whose light, itself, is shadow to all the rest, a screen to fool the eyes and hide the mystery, the distance, and the magnitude.

Surely in some land of pure form, the myth must still exist. I am not saying that it was good or that it was just or that it was right or that it was wrong. Myth has nothing to do with those things. Myth is, or was, and is what it is or was what it was. Unlike matter, It can be created, and destroyed.

The impossible is not attractive. Although, one can never know whether anything is impossible. And that is exactly what is attractive about Dostoyevsky’s mouse: it is the intolerable capacity to believe in infinite answers and unlimited options without, necessarily, making assumptions. Certainly, if I had been more the bullish “man of action” and less the mouse of thought, I would have been a better soldier. But soldier I am, and war this is. That I know. It is where that poses the problem. Where is all this effort, all this drama, going on? I think I am in Europe, the victim of a trick — the ambiguity here is acceptable because both Europe and I have fallen for the same deception. The question then becomes a matter of who is the trickster. However, all of that is too much a digression, and I must deal with the situation at hand, here and now, for it is I and not the larger framework — which has no blood and has no bones — that must live out my existence.

Still, just where is that? To be sure, there is nothing humdrum about escape. And I have found the game to be not one of escape and evasion so much as one of escape and search, partly because evading these Nazis does not appear very difficult, and that is why I am able to pursue my search, as all the while they, poor Teutons, bumble about the landscape in search of me, sweating — no doubt even on these clear, cold and brittle days that bathe the sleeping fields in noisy ice — inside their rubber skins.

That is when cotton undershirts become the enemy.

You can do whatever you want to with the rest of that goo-gah; I just don’t want nobody to run off with it.

And then there was that smart-ass black muthafukka, Bone Face. That dumb sumbich spelt it like one word, Boneface, but that’s because, bein’ black, he didn’t know no better. ’Course, he owned a lot of land and a whole buncha “cafes” all around the county and especially in the back alley behind the stores in St. Leo. And because of that, he pretty much controlled the rest of the niggas, and that’s why, when he died not too long ago, he had the biggest funeral there ever was in St. Leo, and half the people at it was white, the gotdamn sumbiches. If you didn’t know better, you’d think all them planters was a buncha Yankee-ass nigga lovers. But they are a strange crew—probably because so many of ’em goes up North to college. If it ain’t that, I don’t know what it is. All I know is they ain’t like good Christian folks like it is back in Clay City. Hell, a planter don’t think he’s alive unless he’s drivin forty miles to go eat’n or dancin’, and he sho don’t think it’s Sunday unless he’s got a house full of niggas and a pitcher of martinis set’n beside his ass.

Let me just clarifiy one other thing—them black muthafukkas weren’t no minority. Not in that little Delta county, no-fukkin-sir. When I was deputy, back then, they was twenty thousand people in the town and county combined, but less than two thousand was white. And that’s the way it was in most of them Delta counties. That was back in the time when the Fourth of July was still considered a day of mournin’. One nem planters explained that to me one time. He said it was the Fall of Vicksburg. I could see it. Although, if you want to know the truth, that war didn’t have nothin’ to do with the likes of me and my kind. I know I wouldna fought for them rich, slave-ownin’ muthafukkas. Plus, I sure as hell wouldna wanted no slaves. Fuk that. The real slaves was the assholes who owned ’em, if you want my opinion.

Anyway, I guess because of my background it was hard for me to ever really fit in down here in the Delta. But then, them other white sumbiches wouldna fit in back where my people come from in Clay City, over in the hills. And, actually, that has a lot to do with what happened, once you know how to look at it.

It really could turn out that Voyd was the only one of ’em who truly saw my side of the thing. But, he’s such a dumb sumbich, that don’t say a lot for me. And I needed somebody to say somethin’ for me, gotdamn it, even if I was on the wrong side. Here’s what happened.

One day, about ten in the morning, Leland Shaw come into the office at the lumber company and told Miss Willy that he was goin’ home. She said he didn’t wait for no answer; he just turned around and walked out the door. Then, for several days nobody seen nothin’ of him. But finally the neighbors realized he was inside his mama’s house, and they got worried that he wasn’t able to take care of hissef, whatever in the fuk that means, so they called Miss Helena Ferry, who was getting on up in years even then, and she called Dr. Austin, who was her cousin from Rosedale but who had set up practice in St. Leo back in the twenties, and he said leave it to him. So, the first thing he done was to call up Lawyer Montgomery, and him and Lawyer Montgomery went down to the bank and talked to the president, Mr. Humes. And since they was all three—or four, including Miss Helena—pretty much the same thing as family, they whipped up an idea that took care of the problem. For a moment.

They got Sheriff Holston and me to come over to the house and help ’em take Leland to the “Rest Wing” of the new hospital where they more or less fixed him up his own little apartment, which had a big pitcha-window lookin’ east out across Highway 61 and an iron wreckin’ bar across the door that opened into the main hall. For the time being, they said, they didn’t want to send him up to Meffis to the Army hospital, nor did they want to ship him off to the insane asylum down at Whitfield. Lord, they said, that woulda been the end of him. Personally, I wished it hadda been. They said they believed Leland would be fine if he could just stay among people who knew him and that he would be happy, they believed, and comfortable there in the “Rest Wing” of the Mhoon County Hospital, right there in St. Leo, on the side of Highway 61. Truth is, they was all afraid he was gonna start runnin’ around nekkid.

Well, boy, did those assholes have another thing comin’. They failed to realize that Leland Shaw didn’t know who the fuk they was or give a shit about who cared about him or that he was suppose–ably in St. Leo “among people who knew him.” As far as that crazy sumbich was concerned, he wuddn nowheres near St. Leo, and, in his warped-ass mind, all them kin and connections out there was probably the enemy. And, in my opinion, he wuddn about to be happy about nothin’ until he could get back home—wherever in the fuk he may have thought that was.

Another thing I forgot to mention: he was real goosey. If you’d point your finger at him, he’d th’ow hissef on the floor and scramble around to get up under something. See, I figure that’s because he believed them German soldiers was about to nail him. Same thing if anybody shined a light at him, he’d dive up under something. He was the craziest sumbich I ever saw. And how anybody could’ve wasted any time lookin’ after him, I will never understand. I’da throwed his ass in the river a long time ago. People thought I was hard, but I say you had to be there. I know: they was there, too, but fukkum.

One night, the nurse shined a flashlight on him just to make sure he was in his bed asleep, and he leapt up like some kinda gotdamn animal and zipped off into a corner where she couldn’t see him no more, but she knew he was in there and couldn’t get out so she went on back down the hall and didn’t say nothin’ about it. But he musta been going through one of them real intense spells of believin’ them German soldiers was comin’ up on him, because the next day, which was the day after Christmas, 1958, he jumped through that pitcha-window at the cracker-dawn and run like a muthafukka. The nurse said she heard a crash, but had thought it was something out on the highway. The truth is she was asleep and didn’t want that to come out.

Now, there it was, colder than the I-R-S, and that dicklicker skips off in nothin’ but a pair of cotton khakis, some wool socks, brogan shoes, a flannel shirt from the Golden Rule, an olivedrab GI sweater, the kind that has buttons runnin’ from the breastbone to the neck, one nem knit caps from the army surplus, and his daddy’s old wine-colored heavy wool bathrobe, which was damn near too big for him but, I grant you, woulda provided him with a good deal of warmth. Oh, yeah, and a pair of blue mittens that had “Joy to the World” wrote all over ’em, which somebody from the Episcopal church had made and sent over to him for a Christmas present. And except for them mittens, that’s what he wore every year when the weather turned cool. I guess it was his uniform.

The ground was so frozen he didn’t leave no tracks, although somebody found a couple of PayDay candy–bar wrappers behind the Boll and Bloom Cafe out on the highway across from the lot that had all them scaly-bark trees, where the old Boy Sprout hut used to be.

Naturally, at first, the talk was that he hitched a ride to Meffis. But I said then, and I say now, no fool in his right mind woulda given a lift to a crazy lookin’ sumbich like Leland Shaw was, dressed up in that big-ass bathrobe. So I never did believe he left the area. It turned out I was right, too, but all that come out little by little as time went by.

Well, I never saw such a gotdamn commotion in all my life. The Boll and Bloom became the headquarters for the volunteers who wanted to help search for that crazy muthafukka. It was a good place to have a headquarters because that’s where most of them volunteers was ever’day anyhow, even when they wuddn searchin’ for nothin’.

I enjoyed the whole thing. Shoot, the highway patrol got in on it, and a group or two from out of town came up to help—well, after a while they was reports of a wild-ass lookin’ sumbich showin’ up here and there in about four or five counties around the Delta. That, in itself, didn’t mean a whole lot because, if you ast me, the Delta had more wild-actin’, weird-looking coksukkas than it could keep track of anyhow. Most of the reports turned out to be something else or nothin’ at all, but one or two had some truth in ’em. Like the one from out there in the eastern part of the county around Dooley Spur, and another from over ’cross the levee in the bar’ pits south of Mhoon’s Landing. There were others that Voyd and I and sometimes some of the volunteers investigated, but we couldn’t turn up nothin’. And the strange thing about it was that he was right up under our nose the whole fukkin time.

As I say, at first I wanted to save him and make ever’body happy; then, later, I wanted to kill him—and also make ever’body happy . . . but, as the thing drug on, I ceased to give a fuk about ever’body, and I just wanted to shoot his ass.

By that time it wouldn’t have mattered who it was, but, you might say, he had become the most convenient target of what you also might say was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. And I sure as sheepshit wuddn gonna turn it down.

I am a soldier of misfortune,

though, even so, not an unhappy one. Indeed,

I speed by night on feet of light

to all the corners of this alien land,

where I am blocked and cannot proceed

for lack of stars

and high water.

I fly on foot with flashing talaria,

my body wrapped in the wool of a supplicant,

but my aim is armed in archetypes;

and, moving fast through the clear,

cold moonless night,

I am a particle of all the cosmic dust

within that bright galactic swipe above me, that, frankly,

warms my heart with its myriad, radiant islands

of atomic fire.

Pinpoints find me, fuel my velocity — I do not tire — I have no schedule, and, as prey, I have but three concerns: escape, evasion, and return.

But I cannot return

unless I know where I’ve gone,

and that is the relentless difficulty

which neither preachers

nor geographers can remedy.

A planter down near Tutwiler said he saw a strange-actin, funny-dressed feller runnin’ around his equipment shed. Two teenagers said they looked out of their car up on the levee and seen a maniac with a hook for a hand. I’d like to know who told that one for the first time. How many hook-handed maniacs you reckon there could be? And why is it always teenagers who sees ’em?

Anyhow, the point is that finally they was sightings of “the maniac” up and down Highway 61 as far south as Shelby and as far north as Dead Nigga Slough, up between Lake Cormorant and Walls. And it was when he began to be referred to as a maniac that started me to thinking about being able to blow him away and not having to explain it.

Now, if that sumbich had been the kinda good ol’ boy I have some repect for, I’da had a whole different attitude about the entire episode. But he wuddn. He wuddn the kinda guy that a person growed up with and went out with after the ballgame on Fridays and screwed sheep with just for the hell of it. Screwin’ sheep was supposed to be against the law, but what was they gon’ do—put one nem little wooly muthafukkas on the witness stand? It’d a been my word against hers anyhow.

They used to say that down at State College they was a half-human, half-sheep thing in a jar. It sounded pretty awful, mainly because of what it meant might happen to you if you wuddn careful. Think about it. It would be the unde-fukkin-niable proof that you’d been out screwin’ sheep. I mean, don’t you know back then they was a lotta good ol’ boys down there at Cow College that hated to look at that thing in the jar on account of they was afraid they was gonna see their spit’n image.

Some people, especially women, find it hard to believe all that went on, but it did, and for as far back as I can remember, too, till finally they wuddn no more livestock due to the way the farmin’ situation changed and all. But, hell, by then it didn’t make no difference no way, ’cause I was already long growed up and didn’t care about that kinda thing no more. But I’ll tell you what, every time I’m somewheres of a Sunday, which ain’t much, and they’re servin’ lamb and mint jelly, I always feel a little bit uneasy. It’s things like that, later on, that make you think about what you’re going to do before you do it instead of just shoot’n from the hip, if you know what I mean. I guess if I could say one thing about screwin’ sheep, it really made me appreciate family values.

But it was a lotta fun. We had us a time back in nem days. They was this one ewe that belonged to old man Peyton, and we used to go out and catch her in his pasture out near the levee. One night that old ewe looked back over her shoulder at me and said, “Junior Ray, you’re a baaaaaad boy.”

That’s a joke.

Why is it men are the only ones that do shit like that? I mean, can’t you just see a whole carload of cheerleaders flingin’ empty pints of Jim Beam out the windows, tearin’ out along a gravel road to fuk sheep? Or, better yet, after the big game, one of the high school heroes says to his girlfriend, “Want to go to the dance?” and she says, “Hell, no, muthafukka, I wanta go screw sheep.” That could be that sumbich’s greatest nightmare, and it’s no wonder them planters was in such a sweat to get mechanized and stick to row crops.

But there were mules,

and mules were food

and numerous enough

to fatten the vultures who,

at that very moment, may, in fact, have been consuming the time and place, devouring it hunk by hunk until, finally, only the bones remain and those so scattered only mice can find them.

Anyhow, get’n back to what I was tellin you, one day in the middle of all that commotion over the disappearance of that asshole Leland Shaw, I was set’n in the Sheriff’s office with my feet up on my desk, eat’n one nem pimento cheese sammidges the Methodist ladies sent over, and drinkin’ a Coke, and I looked over at Voyd who was read’n last month’s Field and Stream, and I said, “Voyd,” and he didn’t say nothin’, and I said, “Voyd, I’mo find that gotdamn maniac.” And Voyd, still readin’ Field and Stream—or more likely just lookin’ at the pitchers—says, “Junior Ray, that sumbich ain’t no maniac.”

And I said, “Well, he’s sure as shit gon’ be one when I get through with his ass—I’mo find that sumbich—I’mo find ’im!”

“You not gon’ do doodly squat, Junior Ray,” he says to me. “You couldn’t find your dick with a hard on, much less some crazy fool runnin’ around the county scarin’ one half of ever’body to death and worryin’ the shit out of the other half about whether he’s gon’ catch cold or not.”

“Well, Voyd,” I said, “You’re right about one thing—I ain’t gonna find him—we are gonna find him, and we are gon’ get started right now, so get your ass up and come on!”

We went out the side door of the courthouse, got in my patrol car, which was parked under the big white oak, and scratched off outa the parking lot. I turned on the blue lights and the sireen, and took off out the Beat Line Road toward Savage and the Yellow Dog.

Just about all the roads was still gravel then, except for Highway 61; so, dry as it was, I raised a lotta dust blastin’ outta town on the Beat Line Road, goin’ east. Then I cut off the blue lights and the sireen when we got past the city dump. We was gonna go check out a so-called sighting by some niggas out between Savage and Prichard. One of ’em said he heard a painter, and the other two said it was a man howlin’ out in the woods over on the other side of the Yellow Dog, between the railroad tracks and the Coldwater River.

I didn’t believe it was no painters left around there, but Voyd claimed Leroy Whalum swore they was one right out where we was goin’ and said Leroy said he’d heard it and seen its footprints in a rice field as far up as Lost Lake.

Anyhow, when me and Voyd was clippin’ along out the Beat Line road, just fo we got to the Dog, Voyd says, “looky yonder at that old silo.” And I says, “Uhn-huhn,” not thinkin’ much about it. And Voyd says, “That sumbich is full of cotton seeds.” Now that got my attention, for a moment anyway, and I said, “That’s a gotdamnn helluva thing to have in a silo. Who put cotton seeds in it?” And Voyd said he didn’t know but that, one afternoon, him and Sunflow’r was parked out there the other side of it, and he got out of the car to take a leak and decided to look up in the chute. And that’s when he found out the thing was jam-ass-packed to the top with old cotton seeds, and they wasn’t no tellin’ how long they’d been there.

Now, the silo itsef, which was a big, tall muthafukka, had been put there in about 1914, and I knew that because, at the Rotary Club one day when I was the guest of Sheriff Holston, Judge Lowe had made a talk on the history of the county, and he pointed out that that silo had been built way back then by a buncha Yankees from up in Wisconsin who rented the land from old Miss Helena Ferry’s father and wanted to raise milk cows on the property, but that didn’t last long, with the mosquitos and the heat and the damp-ass weather—but them Yankees always was a silly-ass lot . . . anyway, finally, the Wisconsin outfit gave it up, and Miss Helena rented it out for row crops. I don’t know who farmed it, but, at some point, somebody filled that thing full of cotton seeds and just left them there.

I look now across the clear, cold light

of this winter plain

and see the marsh hawk gliding low,

just above the sedge,

along the ditch.

No doubt rabbits are trembling

beneath the swift shadow of this early harrier,

hungry, borne up not by air

but by beauty.

In the distance the patrol approaches at port arms, in a line of skirmishers, Teutonic, in search of Celts. Their eyes burn with murder. Their pace is deliberate and unceasing. Yet, it is I who have found them and not the reverse, and they are the sign that I am not at home. I do not share their fondness for kartoffels.

*[Interviewer’s Note to the Reader: Here Junior Ray rose from his chair and walked into the hallway where he went to a door behind and beneath the staircase, the usual location of the steps leading to a basement, but there are almost no basements in Delta dwellings, for, indeed, they are already in one. He opened the door to a deep if not large closet; then, standing on the threshold, he bent over, rummaged about briefly but noisily and hauled forth an enormous light-tan canvas hunting coat, of which not only the game pockets but the coat itself—buttoned up and bound into a bundle with lengths of cotton rope—bulged and strained at every stitch and seam with the weight of what appeared to be angular objects. He lifted the grotesque and bloated garment from the floor of the closet with both hands and carried it with him back to his chair in the living room where he dropped the swollen coat upon the floor between our two chairs. This odd package contained Shaw’ notebooks.

From a sitting position, Junior Ray, as though thrusting his bold hand into the jaws and uncertain darkness of a sleeping catfish, reached and grabbed and tossed, one by one, each of the notebooks at my feet until the heap stood at the height of my knees.

The notebooks themselves were not actually notebooks: they were ledgers, a plentiful supply of which had been available to Shaw in the almost empty and long-unused plantation commissary that still stands even today in slow decay on land once owned by Shaw’s great-grandfather on his mother’s side, Captain Pemberton Whitworth Ferry, a native of North Carolina, who had obtained land in the Delta in the 1840s and had moved, at first, his family to Carrollton just up in the Hills, then, later, after the Civil War, had moved them, finally, down into the Delta’s fertile alluvial jungle.

I picked up one of the ledgers, thought briefly of Thomas Wolfe, and opened it to the first page. I quickly examined the contents of that page and that of several more. A rapid survey of the pile confirmed my impression that every page of each book was completely filled, back and front—in pencil. Shaw’s handwriting was atrocious but quite readable. And that was a great relief.]