Cores’ Dream, A Novella

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CORES’ DREAM

A Novella by Lee Titus Elliott

"Making music is another way of making children."

                                      —Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power

I

All I'm singing sings true, so help me dogwood and puff adder, blood-clay and ulcer, panther and pine. Why'd any of you doubt it? I bring you food for your lives—and the lives of me and Louise, and Bramer Cole and the hollow dell (once his, now ours) and, if I could—bless their departed souls and ruint bodies—Don Shiver Lingo and his woman-friend Callie Smoot, who touched it all off a spring and summer ago.

My name is Herman Core. I'm fifty, medium height, medium build, and bald on the crown of my head. Until I heard the cry of that catamount, I'd lived five years a easy-going, hard-working, responsible life here in Midlight, a quiet cotton-mill-and-cattle-community off Old 15 ten miles south of The Hill.

(Midlight's the ex-act center of the state of North Carolina, according to the most recent U. S. Geological Survey. In '37 they said it was White Cross, up where I was borned, and then they come along in '47 and say they mistook, it ought to be Gulf, down where Louise was borned; since '65 they claim it's here in Midlight and always was, they just never before had the levelest instruments, and they planted a marker to prove it—a ce-ment cube down in the hollow-dell.)

Anyway, for five years here in Midlight, ever since the day me and Louise sold the King Size and moved to separate beds, I lived my easy-going, hard-working, responsible life: I'd rise at six and wake her, dress in the dark in January (in tomato sun in July), eat a big ole Louise-breakfast of pancakes or grits and sunnyside, stroll on out with her into the racket of crows and down that quarter mile of broomstraw and cedars to our store. There I'd cut meat, pump gas, wait on customers eight-nine hours—except Sundays, of course, and Wednesdays when we close at noon. Five years I'd lock up at five, stroll on back to my tight brick ranch on top of a knoll (Louise poking along after, just dead-weary from the day), eat a big ole Louise-supper, read the Durham Sun, watch pro-wrassling and a situation comedy on the TV, then shuffle off to bed. Some Sundays we'd drive to The Hill where we'd eat at the Inn and then tour the Mu-seum or watch a star show at the Planetarium.

So my life moved—if you can call it movement at all: easy-going, hard-working, responsible, and I'd feel contentful about it except for a time or two in morning dark, winter usually, when I'd shiver awake and could not slide back to sleep again and so stared at the pale ceiling and saw my life numb and dull and without no current, like the Haw River down yonder when she slows to sleep-seep in the drought season.

But then, o Lord, came that Monday dawn mid-April last when a cry shrieked up outside somewhere all quavery and wild, like the scream of a frightened woman. It jerked me off the pillow, so startling it was, and raised on elbows I stared out the open window beside me, saw a sky so blue it ached me, smelled warm breeze and honeysuckle and pine, and the cry came again—Louiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiise!—it seemed to sing, like a spout of sweet fire a-busting on up out of the ground somewhere.

I turned to Louise in her separate bed, by the wall in the dark, but she kept her deep even breaths, and I remembered she can sleep through thunderstorms. So I rolled out of bed and padded to her to tap her awake to come out and help me find this creature, for creature it surely was, no human in my recollection having ever sung such sweet fear.

But bending over bedside I noted the deep-sighing mound of her, that stout body hunched dark under the dust-ruffle, and I lost all will to wake her. So I gripped up work clothes from the arm chair and padded to the kitchen where I dressed and slipped out the back door.

Lord, what a dawn I emerged to! All crow-cawy and fresh with breeze that boomed the pines on the low ridge end of my yard, and the cry came again—Louiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiise!—cut crows off like a switch, and I strode fast to those pines, knowing cry came from beyond them, from the fescue hollow-dell that was part of Bramer Cole's cattle farm but that he'd never grazed as it wants a stream and the ground's blood-clay in patches, too stony for cows.

From ridgetop I stared down into morning shadow and saw right dead bottom of that dell a big pen with a panther in it: a fence of chainlink twice high as a man and twenty-foot square, and inside, circling slow, a catamount of buff coat, bullet head and hornbeam body on thick legs and thick feet, a long lean tail curving up behind it. Three times it slunk around, circling ce-ment marker what marks state-center, then stopped and poked nose through a link and blinked up at me, then slunk on around, big shoulders shuddering like a fish-pond when a breeze touches it. I looked for balls but saw not a one so knew it won't male, a she-panther sure. And I looked for some food, some slab of meat, but saw not a smidgen and wondered about it.

But I couldn't wonder long as I'd raised eyes beyond the pen and caught a wall-tent, OD, Army-issue, staked so taut the wind never wrinkled it. And I looked beyond the tent and saw come rising out of the hollow—Lordamercy!—a whole slope of dogwoods that only a week ago'd been grey as smoke floating but now were white—spine-aching white—against the bull-black bark of the pine trunks.

All a sudden a tent flap flew out, smacked canvas, and I quick-slipped behind a pine to watch a man emerge six-four and built like a pro-tackle. He looked about thirty, wore dark fatigue pants starched to creases and stuffed in black boots shiny as mirrors, wore a gun-metal parkah so tight on him I could see his chest-humps mound against the cloth. His hair flew out thick black wild-curly from under a red bandana tied tight around his head.

Heart-tight I watched him stride toward the pen and wrench back the bolt of a gate and enter, and when the gate clanged shut, the panther froze in her slink and whirled to face him, and the man spread arms thick as hornbeams and gave his own cry, but it won't no human nor creaturely cry—came a taut-wire uprising whine like a modified motorbike you hear nigger-driven summer nights down a blacktop in the pines and the engine yawls skyward till you think it'll burst but then the gears shift and the whine loops to a lower pitch and begins to yawl again.

Three times so the pro-tackle cried, took three long strides and lunged at the cat, who reared, pawed air, hissed thick as the Haw in flood, and the man gripped the bunched shoulders in huge fists and threw her aside in a clean thrust. I watched her moil a moment on some blood-clay and then flail to feet and again rear, and the pro-tackle lunged, gripped shoulders, threw her again.

Ten minutes, seemed like, I watched their rounds, the pro-tackle grunting deep on the hurl, the cat hissing thick as she reared and then mewling and snarling when she struck the clay.

All a sudden I felt a fullness under my fly, and I looked down at my work pants and saw a strange bulge not much bigger than a early carrot. It had a ache in it like well-water drunk fast on a hot day. I watched it arc up near to my belt-buckle and stop, and I stared at it and whispered, "Lord, Herman Core, I do believe that's your old puff adder done risen up like it ain't in five years nearly, since Louise and you stopped and sold the King Size and moved to separate beds. It ain't rock-hard, like it was at twenty, but it's stiffer 'n when you pee in the morning—stiff enough to ache you sweet like them dogwoods yonder and all the warm breeze and pine-trees a-roaring and blue sky arching over. And, there, Lord, it even throbs a mite, just a baby-pulse, true, but a pulse all the same—o Lord, there!"

I was turning up the volume, so I laid a finger on my mouth to shut it and then reached down to feel was my puff adder real. Squeezing fingers under belt, I groped down into the warm-wet, touched the taut head and the fish-mouth, felt the old sticky ooze, then tickled on down to adder-root and felt of the hair there and the big loose balls below. Lord, it was real all right—a achesome powersome rise I hadn't felt in five years nearly—and I jerked hand out quick so as not to bust it. I wanted to savor it awhile, this God-luscious pang.

But I couldn't savor long, as I knew it was seven from the sun on my back and so time to stride down and wake up Louise and open the store. So with fly still full I crept quiet out of the pines while the pro-tackle and catamount went on to wrassle. Once clear of the ridge I legged it back to the house, slipped off my work shoes in the kitchen, and padded to the bedroom where Louise was still sleeping.

From bedside I saw the dust-ruffle'd been thrown half-way to bed-foot, showing the pink nightgown and the fleshy white of her thighs where the gown had worked its way up. Her right hand lay white palm out on her forehead and her hair, still buff-colored at fifty, was untied from its five-year bun and sprawled girl-like over the pillow. I leaned closer, saw under the gown her lush basooms and rose-petal nipples, saw her belly spread out full and luscious, saw her bush just as buff and thick as I knew it at thirty.

Leaning over her with the old adder stiff and remembering the pro-tackle and catamount wrassling in the hollow-dell and the warm breeze and the pine roar and the dogwoods so white and the fescue and the bloodclay, I wanted her right then. For after all, she is a Ferrell and took after her momma and daddy who had such powerful appetites they hatched her twelve brothers and sisters—ten more than they'd planned on. They lived every day of their adult lives down in Gulf, in a big old Carolina T, and Gulf-folks say they could hear them all over town summer mornings, screaming out like bobcats.

"Yeah, Herman Core," I whispered, "that's one reason you married her, won't it? The second reason being there won't nobody else as fine in bed—not even Selma Bunn with her binder's twine and posture book and ginseng root direct imported from the Great Smoky Mountains. Lord, Louise didn't need no posture book—she could make up the most interesting and tangliest positions clean up out of her own head."

I stopped a moment and just stared on that dark deep-sighing mound of her and tried to remember the third reason I married her. But not a thing rose up in me—not a picture, not a word, not even a groan. So I squinted till she blurred and strained to picture what she was thinking—dreaming—hoping that might raise it—the true real right reason why I married her. But squint and strain as I might, I couldn't dig down to the bottom of her where the live stuff lay—what made her Louise Ferrell Core her own self. Nosir, I could only see the pink-gown-white-palm-buff-bush blur of her breathing deep and even there and dark under the dust-ruffle. She was like a fish-pond you ain't seen in a while and you come back to it a day in the summer, after a thundershower, and you know there's fish in it—big bass and silvery bream you caught years ago—but the bottom's so muddied now you can't even see a minnow.

So I went back to the second reason and whispered, "Lord, yeah, Herman Core, you and Louise had some juicy hoot-and-holler sessions in that old King Size long sold now."

I stood quiet a second and the words echoed in my mind, "Long sold now, long sold now, long sold now," like the slow sad refrain of some Tom T. Hall or other, and my puff adder drooped down to a mess of flesh quick as a balloon you'd let the air out of.

I padded back to my separate bed and sat on the end of it and gazed out the open window at the green pines swaying on the blue sky. They were booming even better now, like bass cheers, but the refrain in my mind soon drowned them, "Long sold now, long sold now, long sold now." And I whispered, "Herman Core, why'd you stop? Why'd we stop, you and Louise?"

I remembered the day clear as on a movie screen: February sixteen, 1974, around three o'clock, a Wednesday afternoon blue and sunny but so cold there were smoke plumes coming out of every chimney in Midlight, seemed like. Me and Louise were forty-five both and been married twenty years and still no children, though we'd both ached for them, Louise in particular—to hatch 'em, not adopt. We were wanting, I suppose, for dandelion puffs of ourselves to go on circulating amongst the pine trees and warm breeze and honeysuckle long after our earthly term. I'd even had a basement dug when the house was built so there'd be space for them—rooms we'd raise up partitions for one by one as they were borned. But hatch 'em we never could, though tests on the Hill showed us fertile as rabbits and we whooped and hoped daily in our King Size.

Oh, Louise did get pregnant. Yessir, once a year for eight straight, '54 to '61, she'd start to take sick in the morning and swell, but then in the third or fourth month, and always in the night, in the King Size, she'd pang sudden and start to bleed, and I'd have to drive her to The Hill. I'd stay at the Inn, she at Memorial, and after a day or two she'd tell me to get on home and back to the store, she could manage by herself. And so I'd leave her the car and hitch home and she'd stay on the ward three days more and then walk out and drive down to Gulf, stay three days at her momma's, then drive on home. As for me, the whole time she was gone, I'd go on with the store and work extra hard to keep from thinking about it.

After her eighth miscarrying (this was '61, April fifteen), we slept apart a year—she in the King Size, me on the couch in the living room—thinking a rest might help. On the night of April fifteen, '62, around ten o'clock, we dove on back in the King Size and started up that sweet rhythm the oldest there is known to man. We went on that way one month, two months, four months, but this time she wouldn't swell, wouldn't even take sick in the morning. We went on with it, though—whooped out month after month, year after year, sweet-green April to elm-bare March—Lord, I've lost track of the number of times she'd bloom big and howl out wild as a bobcat and I'd growl and gurgle to glory. We even bought that test-dropper out of La-Cock's on the Hill, but Lou never even turned it dark, much less red.

Then Lou was 43, and one morning around Christmas she complained of some hot flashes. That night before bed, I stood in the bathroom, alone before the mirror, and whispered, "Lord, Herman, seems like it's awful early for the flashes. Why, they didn't come on Mama till she was 54." Then I leaned so mirror-close I could see my breath misting on it, and I gave that breath hard words: I told it that our time to hatch 'em was absolute over, that we had failed utterly in our desire. They were bitter words to swallow, like bad milk, but swallow them I eventually did—by March one, to be exact—and so grew reconciled to our failure and gave up further hatching hope. I saw our King Size sessions as just juicing now, just slumming, and when the pulses'd come, I'd howl out loud as any teenager when he's done it the first time successful.

As for Louise herself, I was sure she'd gone reconciled, too, from the way on her slow rhythm up to glory, she'd whip her head side to side, buff hair a-flying, and when she came to bloom, howl loud and wild as she ever had before, "Lord, Herman Core, twist me that old puff adder, I'll shit or die!"

But then came that bone-shiver Wednesday in mid-February, 1974, around three o'clock. After we'd locked the store at our usual noon, Lou took the LTD and drove to The Hill on one of her shopping trips she claimed she'd been making every Wednesday afternoon since the turn of the year. She was headed—so she told me—for Durham Boulevard and that new mill outlet where dress cloth was going for 69 cents a yard.

Along about three o'clock I was sitting in the kitchen hunched over late lunch—a baloney sandwich and some potato chips on a plate—when I heard that LTD roar up the driveway and tire-squeal to a stop on the concrete pad outside the kitchen wall. "Now that ain't like Louise," I remember whispering. "She purrs up slow and stops gentle." Some jays'd been racketing outside awhile, but they cut off sharp when the car door slammed, a little too loud, and I glanced out the window panes just in time to catch a blur of her pink handbag and purple pants suit. The next thing I know, the door busts open, slams the wall so hard my plate jumps, and in she strides, face red as July, and without sitting down or other preparation just spits right out with it—words that stopped us. Yessir, jabbing her purse at me, she jags out in this rasp-voice I ain't never heard her use before—Lord, just like a chainsaw when it hits a knot.

"Herman Core," she says, "I can't have no chirren, can't now, can't never no more, 'cause I'm barren, what Doc Hartsell says. He says, 'Mizz Core, yore barren for the rest of yore nat'ral life,' so you sell that King Size tomorrow, Herman Core, and we'll stop all this foolishness and get us separate beds and go on about our bidness!"

Not quite sensing her at first, I yelled all phlegmy through my bread and mashed up chips and meat, "Why, Lou, I thought you was reconciled—ain't we just slummin' now, just juicin'?"

But she just jags out again in that chainsaw voice, "That's exackly our trouble, Herman Core. Been too much slummin', too much juicin', too much wallowin' around that bed like a couple of hogs don't know no better—Lord, just a-gruntin' and a-greasin' and a-groanin'. And it's been that way a year ago and five and ten year ago and even way back to when we was first married—just a-gruntin' and a-greasin' and a-groanin'—and I couldn't have 'em then—kep droppin' 'em out like little blood-rats, all eight of 'em—and then I couldn't even turn that water pink, and now I know I can't have 'em, no, not never no more, and there ain't nothin' neither Doc Hartsell nor nobody else can say or do about it so you phone up the Sears store, Herman Core, and order us separate beds and we'll stop all that 'cause there ain't no sense in foolin' ourselves no more!"

Before I could reply or even think what to say, she whipped around and strode out to the hallway and into the bedroom and slammed the door so hard the window panes rattled.

For the next two hours, as it came on toward dust-dark and the kitchen was turning chill, I sat hunched over my plate of bit-out baloney and bread and wondered on her words, her change, and at last came to three conclusions.

Number one, those shopping trips hadn't been for no dress cloth. Nosir, she'd been seeing Doc Jeremiah Hartsell, that Hill chiropractor who don't charge much and so all us Midlight folks go to when we get our backs throwed out. She was hoping he could spine-pop her into pregnancy where the women doctors'd failed with their pills and shots.

And number two, all those years I'd thought she was reconciled to our failure, she won't reconciled the least little bit. Nosir, even when she'd howl out her most pleasureful in the King Size, she still held that child-dream hung up high in her head, like a little puff of cumulus—those bright partitions in the basement, those rainbow-colored rooms full of burbling cries. And so when she heard Doc Hartsell's final hard words, she must've took it in mind to burst and say the heck with our King Size, she won't about to wallow one more night, it didn't work then, it don't work now, and it won't work nevermore in future. She, Lord, 'd had enough of puffs.

Just then I noted this ice in my feet. (I was wearing just socks and the floor was tile, the kitchen north-facing.) I studied that ice a moment, and then drew my final conclusion and whispered, "Herman Core, maybe Lou's absolute right about our wallowin'. Maybe we were too much juicin', too much slummin' in that King Size. Maybe we'd done gone on slummin' for so long a time we'd done lost our music. Yeah, Herman, it was like way back at 25 and 30 and even 35 we'd make real tunes in that King Size—tunes you could whistle and dance to—bop and jitterbug and do the hokey-pokey—but in recent years, we'd done begun to sloppy—to wallow them tunes around so, this way and that, we couldn't hardly recognize them no more, not the rhythm nor the melody, so they were tones only, and cries, and crazy-hollerin'. Or it was like we'd got to be a athalete turned fifty and growed to fat thighs and handles on his waist. There's muscle in him still, but it's just shapes, no more anatomy. Yeah, Herman, you and Louise been slummin' so long we done sloppy down to flab ever last tune and muscle of ourselves, so now there ain't no music more and never will be ever more in future."

So I wondered and concluded three o'clock to five o'clock that bone-shiver Wednesday afternoon, February sixteen, 1974. And I looked out the window panes and saw the green pines on the blue sky like they was painted on cardboard, and that foot-ice crawled up legs, hips, belly, chest—clear on up to the crown of my head, and I began to shiver, now full of the chill of the day.

But that won't the end of Lou's change. For over supper she told me, still in her chainsaw, to sleep on the couch in the living room and phone up Bramer Cole to help out in the store, she was "blood-tired and bone-weary" and needed her a "long long rest." And after washing the dishes and slamming the cabinets shut on them, she slipped on her pink nightgown and took to the bed for the rest of the season.

That whole time I suffered the Nasty Gnaw. My ulcer flared that I hadn't felt since '51 when I identified bodies in Korea. At first it was one or two little suckworms crawling along the belly wall, navel to solar plexus and back on down again. But inside a week, all the while I cared for her—bringing her meals on a tray, plumping her pillow, helping her to the toilet, pasting on a smile to cheer her (it never once cracked her), those suckworms did what me and Louise never could: they went forth and multiplied till my whole upper belly became a nest of pain, fiery and constant. Lord, it'd pang me so at times it'd snatch my breath away and I'd have to stop gas-pumping or meat-cutting—whatever I was doing—and bend over and wheeze till breath came back. After awhile it got so pangful I had to take pills to work proper.

But then, oh Lord, she changed again. Yessir, on March twenty-one, around noon o'clock, she rose up like nothing had ever happened and slipped on her work shift and walked on down to the store. I was alone there, slicing a chicken on the meat counter, when I heard the screen door squeak and looked up and saw Louise herself poking up between the Dry Goods and the Wash Powder. When she got within a yard of me, she stopped and sigh-whispered, "Herman, I'm back, tired of sick. You can come on back to the bedroom and tell Bramer go on about his bidness."

Bedtime that night she no sooner climbed in the King Size than she humped on her left side and wrenched the dust-ruffle to her neck and turned her face to the wall. I got in after, switched off the lamp, and right away reached over to cup my palm on her shoulder—to show her I wanted her, for I was mighty starved. But I'd barely brushed her gown before she flinched that shoulder away like my hand was just a insect a-fretting her. I flinched my own hand back like a poison snake'd bitten it and watched that dust-ruffle mound of her scrunch up toward the wall as far as it could. I sat up then and just stared on her, a dark lump of stout body breathing in the dark. Then I remembered that chainsaw voice of mid-February, that "No sense in foolin' ourselves no more!" and a suckworm panged me so sharp in my solar plexus I had to bend over and clamp a hand on my mouth to keep from yelling. I rubbed me till the pang cooled a mite, then stared back on her and drew a conclusion: I took her position to mean a cease-fire between us—or better, an exchange of prisoners—as if she were telling me (and here I rammed down words into her own head), "You don't touch me, Herman Core—you don't even lay a finger on me and make us wallow and so fool ourselves—and I won't no more take to the bed. I'll go on bein' your helpmeet—help run our store, sweep our house, cook our supper—just don't touch me, hear?"

So they were just words that stopped us—I see now—Hartsell's words and then Lou's words and then my words rammed down into her own head, and I accepted them all for absolute truth, especially the last. Yessir, I accepted Lou's conditions, raw as they were at first, as much as they went on to breeding ever fresh suckworms under my diaphragm. By November one, though, after we'd sold the King Size and bought us separate beds and put all that foolishness out of our minds, we'd begun to move to the steady satisfying rhythms of the clock—had become, in short, easy-going, hard-working, responsible citizens of Midlight, North Carolina, ten miles south of The Hill. And, Lord, next day the ulcers just curled up, shed their crawling suckers, and died. And I had no more pangs for five years nearly.

So it was then I must've left the Nasty Gnaw and entered the Rutless Rut. I was long in that Rut before I knowed it—all the way through rest of fall and all of winter and spring and well into summer. I only came to know on a day in August, 1975, not quite a year after we'd sold the King Size and moved to separate beds.

Lord, it was a hot hazy dog-day, around two o'clock, with big anvil clouds peaking up and turning gray and ragged around the edges, threatening storm. Me and Louise'd driven down to Lou's momma's Carolina T in Gulf. Mozelle'd died sudden in the Spring, alone, in her sleep. (Her Luke'd passed on ten years before.) After the funeral Lou and her twelve brothers and sisters decided rather than squabble over the furniture (which was mostly antiques and right valuable) they'd sell it direct from the house and divide up the proceeds. It was decided me and Louise would see to the business—drive down to Gulf and dust and polish and generally be available when interested parties would arrive.

So around two o'clock on that August dog-day in '75, I was alone in Mozelle's upstairs bedroom, wiping a dust-rag over her heart-pine dresser. There was a window fan in the window to my left, beside Mozelle's four-poster bed. It was an old belt-driven thing and was humming along just as smooth and easy-going as it had for twenty summers, not a squeak or rattle in it, when all a sudden it got dark, like dust-dark, and a big wind boomed up, wooshing the oak trees outside and popping every nail in the house. Then the wind died, just as sudden, and, Lord, fsssssssssssssssssssssst—pow!—there came a flash and a crack enough to stand your hair on end, and I stilled the dust-rag and jerked my eyes to the window and saw out of that fan shoot a long sharp flame, missing my fanny by a inch, I swear. But you know what? I didn't flinch a inch, didn't even feel a heart rollover. Nosir, as big barky thunder broke after and rolled on down and away, I just kept calm as you please and stared on that fan and whispered, "Herman Core, that's all she wrote for that old contraption. Ain't no way a-tall it'd survive a stroke like that. It's got to quit now—skip two-three times and then whine on down to nothing and die." But you know what? That fan didn't once falter or hesitate—didn't even squeak good and so show it might have felt something. Nosir, it just hummed on easy-going, hard-working, responsible, like it'd been humming twenty years despite Mozelle's abuse and neglect. (I doubt she'd ever oiled it one time.) And there spouted up a knowledge in me so sour and sudden, like gorge gouting up in you after you drink a Coke too fast, I had to whisper it.

"Herman Core," I says. "That lightning equals Louise and her chainsaw voice done struck you hard with that 'Don't touch me, Herman Core, don't even lay a finger on me' of more 'n a year ago. And that old fan, that's your own self struck and maybe even hurt down deep—'cause it had to be hurt, after such a stroke—but not showing the hurt one flicker's worth of squeak or whine but just humming on, easy-going, hard-working, responsible. And it'll keep on humming ten or twenty year more till the engine burns up or the grease gives out, and then, in '96 maybe, and maybe in the night, one August night, it'll whine up sharp in pain and then skip two-three times, then stop and moan and drone on down to nothing and die."

And with that sour gorge-gouting knowledge in me, the rain began to splatter down in big drops on the tin porch roof outside, and I felt all a sudden heavy-tired, like a rock was in my deep-gut, and I left my dustrag on the bureau-top and poked to Mozelle's bed where she died alone in the spring and sat down on the mattress and just slumped there a minute. Then the rain roared all down and drowned out the fan, and I swung my feet up and lay out flat su-pine, arms stiff at my sides, palms up. Some thunder broke, close and deep-barky, but I couldn't've flinched even if I'd wanted to, that rock was so heavy in me. The thunder peaked, then rolled on away, headed toward Midlight, seemed like, and then the rain dimmed to patters and I slid on down into sleep.

Lord, I had a strange dream. It was a shiver-chill morning with clouds low and lead-colored, like in February, and I was standing in wind-breaker and work clothes in the middle of Bramer Cole's west pasture, a flat four acres with thick woods around it. I was standing on the track that cuts through the middle of it and was just gazing off at this elm tree a hundred yards yonder. The elm was big-crown and bare and shape of a vase. All a sudden I saw this human form under it and I squinted and noted it was a woman and she was sitting on a big white rock, and right by her feet was a creek coiling and glittering, like a hogsnake in early spring when his skin's shed and you see him wind shiny over the bloodclay.

I squint harder at the woman and note she's stout body and buff hair and blue work shift. It's Louise, I know now, and she's got her hands laid in her lap, and she's staring up and away from me, at some spot in the clouds or other. I feel sudden yen to call her, why I don't know, and so, framing hands around my mouth I yell loud as I can, "Louiiiiiiiiiiiise! Louiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiise!" But you know what? My voice don't carry, don't even echo, just comes out smothered and hollow, like in a room full of drapes. I yell again—longer—"Louiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiise! Louiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiise!" But it still don't carry, don't even echo. My yen's still in me, though, so I drop hands and start walking to her, stepping careful over little white stones size of your fist and patches of blood-clay so soft it cakes to my work-shoes and bogs me. It's rough walking and mud-messy, so I have to look down and watch where I step. I walk five minutes, seems like, and then look up and see, Lord, she's not a foot nearer, just far blue-shift and buff-hair on a white rock under a bare elm shape of a vase, a snakey creek shining by her. I shift to a stride then and go like that awhile and then look up again and see, Lord, she's not only not no nearer but even further away, she and that elm and that rock and that creek, and getting further away the more I stride. At last I see it ain't no use in going on and I stop.

I stay absolute quiet then, but you know what? I can't hear a sound—not one. I feel a heart rollover and twist fingers in my ears, but that don't work, there still ain't a sound, and I whisper to myself, "Herman Core, there ought to be sound, even on a day so chill and bare—an air-puff maybe or a chip from a cardinal."

But there won't none nowhere, no wind and no birds either, and I whispered, "I call this death, Herman Core. No wind and no birds. And that vase-elm and Louise and snake-creek and white rock so far far yonder and not never coming near."

The next thing I knew I felt my shoulder clenched and shiver-shook, and I popped eyes open and saw Louise her full self all frown-faced and shoving at me and yelling, "Lord, what's got into you, Herman Core? All the work we got to do and here you sleepin'! You get on up out of that bed and finish that dustin'. There's a Durham couple come over to see about Momma's bureau!"

She whipped around and strode out of the room and down the hallway, work shoes pounding. I lay a minute longer on the four-poster, hearing the rain-dregs drip, drip, drip on down to nothing, and it came to me then, with a slow sad sink, I'd done long been grooved in the Rutless Rut and had just now dropped to bottom.

All this I was whirring in my mind like a picture show as I sat before the open window that mid-April morning not six months ago and looked out on the blue sky and the pine trees swaying on it. The whirring done, I was just about to rise and pad to Louise and tap her awake when the panther sang out from the hollow-dell— Louiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiise!—as before, but pang-angry now, like the pro-tackle may have gut-kicked her, and a pang shot so sudden in my plexus I had to bend double to keep from yelling. Right away I knew it for the old suckworms come to plague me again.

"Lord, Herman Core, what's that thing screechin' this time in the mornin'?" I heard Lou yell thick through her sleep-seeds.

I unbent, reached out, slammed shut the window, then bent over again.

"'Tain't nothin', Lou," I managed to groan. "Nothin' to get excited about. Just a screech owl thinkin' it's midnight."

II

The catamount sang out no more that morning, like maybe the pro-tackle done kicked her breath out awhile, and, Lord, I was glad of it, as my suckworms kept active all through breakfast and I had to knot every face-muscle I had to keep a smile pasted on me and force down the Lou-grits and sunnyside and so not let on my pang to her.

By nine o'clock, though, when Louise and me were deep in our store-ruts—she waiting on the customers, me cutting new meat and stocking the shelves—the ulcer dimmed a little. By noon I'd sunk so deep in my rut I'd nearly forgotten pro-tackle and panther (except for flickers of them now and then), and the ulcer burned me no more than a gas pocket would after eating a pear too fast.

It was Bramer Cole that reminded me, when along about one, while Louise ate lunch in the back pantry and I stood alone before the meat counter, slicing ham on the slicer (one's the loneliest store hour, most Midlight folks home to lunch or napping), up Bramer strides between the Dry Goods and Wash Powder and right at me, shaking his finger and red turkey wattles and shouting shrill as a jay bird when a cat's under its nest, "Ain't no way I'll tolerbate that somitch screaming me awake like a goddamn hog in goddamn heat! Uh-eeeeeeeeeeeee! Uh-eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee! Hell-fire, Herman, I ain't takin' it!"

Bramer Cole's nigh seventy and a widower. His wife Lucille caught fire, burned up, and died November thirty, '75. Story was Bramer was down at the barn that morning and Lucille up at the house. She was trying to light the pilot of a propane heater and switched on the valve too soon and then the gas whooshed and before she could think a flame shot up and caught her dress. Terrified, she ran out of the house, flame all around her like a coat, and so burned up and died. After she was buried, Bramer wouldn't marry and just lost spark. He hired help to do the cattle work and just sat all day on his front porch—good weather and bad—and stared on his lawn, face puckered like a wrinkled apple. The only time he'd even flicker was to drag up his bones and poke inside when his hired cook called him to meals. I knew all this that mid-April afternoon, so when he strides in face red as July and shaking his finger, I was right surprised and thought to myself, "Lord, Herman, we got us a brand-new Bramer."

When he gets breath-close, I switch off the slicer and say, "Hold it, Bramer, what somitch?" (I knew, of course, but wanted to hear him out anyway, as I knew he's the sort of folks once you spark 'em to talking they'll tell you everything they know and more besides.)

And sure enough he goes on to shrilling, "And that trailer—here I help him haul a humpin' single-wide into that ditch and set it on blocks and have him a light-pole erected and a septic tank dug—spend the en-tire mornin' of my valable time, and half asleep, too—uh-eeeeeeeeeeeeeee! uh-eeeeeeeeeeeeee! Hell-fire, Herman!"

"Now wait, Bramer Cole," I says. "Trailers don't yell."

"No, damn it—a catty-mount, he owns one of them—"

"Who, Bramer? Who owns it?" Lord, those words just burst out of me like they was separate creatures with their own will, and my puff adder welled up whole against the counter rim. I buckled knees so Bramer wouldn't see it.

"Don Shiver Lingo, that's who, and his woman friend Callie Smoot. Now I don't mind folks co-habitin'—we're in different times now—but he didn't tell me nothin' about no catty-mount when he bought the place."

"Bought it?" I says. My mouth felt dry as cotton, and that old puff adder wiggled, like it knew something I didn't.

"Lord, Herman, you gone stupid recent? You know I been yennin' to sell that ditch since '75—"

"About the time Lucille passed on," I says.

"Yeah, about that time. You ain't as stupid as I thought, Herman. Yeah, seemed like when Lucille was gone there won't no more point in keepin' it. We'd camp and picnic down in there Saturday nights in the summer, you know, but then she turned on that gas too quick and the fire come and killed her and I had no more use for that ditch. Anyway, just yesterday morning, around eleb'n o'clock, just as I was fixin' to get up out of my porch seat and go in and urinate, up my circle drive roars this big black-headed fellah on a modified motorbike—one of them choppers—and he roars on around real fast, leaning sideways nearabout to the ground, so I jump up, my heart a-racin', and I think, 'Lord, Bramer, he'll tip right over and skin hisself to death!' But he don't, thank the Lord, 'cause by the time I'm on the porch edge he's stopped a yard from my steps and shouts loud above the motor was my dell for sale still, he'd been wantin' a couple acres but would settle for less. And you know what, Herman? I never felt so charged up since the days Lucille and me'd camp in that ditch. So I step down off the porch and says, 'Sure thing, brother,' suspectin' despite his looks he's one of them Hill hippies or art people or crazy perfessers or such sucker enough to fall for the marker what says state-center and all them dogwoods on the slope-side, you know, and just now bustin' open. And so I walked him down there and showed it to him—dogwoods and center-marker and all—and he sweeps his eyes over slope-side and then aims 'em on the marker and they go wide as fish ponds, so sure enough he's hippy or artist or crazy perfesser, just as I suspected, and takes it for my asking price, two thousand dollars. Wrote me a check on the spot. But damn it, if I'd known he'd be bringin' a catty-mount—u-heeeeeeeeeeeeee! u-heeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!"

Bramer ripped on about ten more minutes, and I didn't interrupt as I was powerful curious—least my puff adder was, Lord, yeah—stiff-up, throb-yenning to know! So I let him jay-squawk as long as he wanted.

He told me Lingo said he was a perfesser in dramatics and the thee-yater and had taught awhile on The Hill till he quit or they fired him, one—Lingo didn't let on. He'd sold his "greater lendings"—meaning his house and furniture, Bramer suspected, and bought him a single wide over Durham and then a catamount from down somewhere in Florida. He'd come to Midlight for some "private study"—that's all he let on. Bramer reckoned it was something to do with the catamount, but exactly what he couldn't guess.

"But I don't give a bird-crap about his bidness with it," Bramer shrilled out. "I just won't tolerbate a wild animal screamin' not fifty yards from my home—Lord, screechin' like a hog in rut! And what if it climbs out? Won't that be some cake to read in the Sun some Sunday morning: 'Painter Ex-capes from Near Bramer Cole's Place.'"

I almost said it looked like Lingo had it pretty well contained, seemed like to me, but then I remembered I won't supposed to have seen it, and so I said, "Hell, Bramer looks like you done sold it now, so it ain't no more yours to fuss over. And there ain't no law in the county says a man can't keep a wild animal on his premises. So there ain't much nothin' you can do about it now, is there?"

"I reckon not," he mutters fretful, and I says, the words spouting up in me like they was creatures with their own will (and my old adder ache-wiggling right along with them), "I reckon he'll need a man to level up the somitch—the trailer, I mean."

And sure enough, I'm right on my speculation, as Bramer says, "Lord, that's just what I come here for, and here I gone on and got so wrapped up in another thing I done almost forgot. Yessir, Herman, me and Lingo were sitting on a rock down there in that ditch, resting from our labors, and he asked me if I would do that very thing, and I told him I'd like to but when my wife passed on I sold off my mobile home stuff, level included, but I'd get him another fellah, who was the best and most experienced mobile home man in the county, and I said he lived right here in Midlight and his name was Herman Core and him and his wife owned the store and her name was Louise, a Ferrell. Yessir, I told him you were about the smartest fellah in this section—spent two-three years up on The Hill learning math and bi-ology, leveled trailers over White Cross to support yourself, just as your daddy did—all them White Cross Cores in the mobile home business—so ole Herman, I says to Lingo, he knows his numbers and that piece of maple wood and bubble inside and out, and would of got his degree if Korea hadn't come along and drafted him and then Louise chased after him with her charms. Yessir, Herman, that drama perfesser'll be seein' you to-reckly." Then he cackled out, like he'd told a joke, and kept on cackling till I thought he'd never stop.

But I cut him off: "Hell, Bramer, I don't mind heppin' a man, even if he do have strange bidness. Bring him on."

I won't at all prepared for Bramer's reply: "Oh, I know you don't mind heppin' a man. It's Louise I'm thinkin' of. You and her's in separate beds and been so awhile now, and she's not a hundred yards from that ditch and the perfesser, and you'll see to-reckly he ain't exackly ugly, and she's a Ferrell, ain't she?"

"Hell, Bramer," I says, feeling sudden cotton in my throat. "You know jealousy don't worry me none. Me and Louise done give up all that foolishness long ago. We don't do nothin' with nobody now—nor no thing either." And I laughed quiet at that, hoping Bramer'd leave off as I was right itchy-fretful with all his cackling and insinuation.

But Bramer goes on with it—says, "Yeah,"—but softer now, like a mourning dove, the jay-bird gone out of him— "that was August twenny-one, won't it?"

"Twenny-one September," I says, feeling soft, too, a-sudden, dreamy and rememberful. "Was a Wednesday, around one o'clock."

"Yeah," Bramer goes on. "I recollect it exackly now, 'cause me and Lucille were eatin' lunch when we heard that Sears truck groanin' and tickin' up your driveway like—"

"Like it was dire sick, the engine needin' a new rod or tune-up, one," I finished it out. "'Cause me and Lou heard, too, eatin' beef stew in the kitchen. I remember when I heard it my whole heart tightened like a clamp'd come on it."

"And me and Lucille"—Bramer carried it on—"we set down our spoons and hasted out to the porch and looked down toward your brick ranch and saw that big ole truck green as a cabbage flash in the sun half-way up your drive, and we looked down to Old 15 and saw all crowded up before the privet hedge, Lord, fifty-sixty folks, seemed like—all of 'em Midlight folks—and I recognized Clyde Jones and Tom Tripp and Jack Wheeler and old man Morphus and a whole bunch of others—mostly mill men done retired and their wives and the wives of the men still working, not a child in sight, though, like the parents and the grandparents knew this won't for them but adults only, like a x-rated picture show."

"And me and Louise"—I carried it on—"we'd got up, too, but didn't haste 'cause we knew what it was. No, we just poked along to our picture window and saw all them folks down along the road, some with their hands over their eyebrows, some of 'em with binoculars, all of 'em peering up over the privet hedge."

"And they all moaned at once," Bramer crooned on, "when that Sears truck brake-squealed to a stop and out snaked a couple a veiny-armed niggers in tight jeans and tee-shirts and black as road tar, and they walked to the truck rear in this finger-snapping sashay, like a dance, and then wrenched up the door bars and jerked the doors open and then leapt inside like cats and then, part by part, section by section, each boxed up in a cardboard crate, they brung out them ugly twins—"

"Princess Specials," I reminded him. "Reduced to one sixty-nine a piece."

"Princess Specials, then," Bramer goes on—and here I let him have full tale, I'd lost all heart to help him—"and one nigger in the truck rear, he'd swing a crate down to the other who was standing on the grass, and he'd grip it in his fists and lay it down, and when they got all the parts and sections unloaded, they wrenched them out of their boxes and laid them on the lawn. Lord, I remember the frames so thin and frail and color of sick cream, and the mattresses, Lord, brown as a bath-tub stain, and the box springs same brown and not much bigger 'n my cow troughs. And last out of the crates were them dwarfy headboards the color of sick hay. And soon as they'd got them parts and sections laid out on the lawn, the niggers sashayed on in your house, snapping fingers like in a dance, and five minutes later they brung out the King Size, not the whole bed but broke down into its own parts and sections—the heart-oak frame-boards seven foot long, the big black headboard with the scarlet hearts and snakes painted on it, the big black box spring scarlet-snaked, too, and last, that scarlet mattress so spacious you could plant a garden in it and have enough fruits and vegetables to last you the whole summer and wintertime, too, if you canned 'em or froze 'em. Yessir, Herman, they brung out that mattress last and laid it upside the maple tree and then danced back in the truck and roared the engine and clashed the gears and ticked and groaned on down your drive and back onto Old 15. And when the truck-groan died away, all was still but a mourning dove up in a pine crown yonder and there won't no word from nobody, not from me or Lucille or nobody down along the hedge, 'cause all we had eyes for and mind for was that big old wallowy King Size all broke apart and dead and now no more use to anybody, not in Midlight nor nowhere else."

"Yeah, Bramer," I says, "me and Louise were watching it from the window and won't saying no word either, just breathing to ourselves."

I felt sudden drear-weary and heavy-headed and sad and so shook my head to clear it and said, back to my easy-going self of five years nearly, "Anyway, Bramer, it's done been ended a long time now, so jealousy don't worry me none and won't never will more. Me and Louise done give up all that foolishness for good, don't do nothin' with nobody now—nor no thing either. Fact is, we—"

And I stopped—had to—because of the ulcer flaring so fierce in my solar plexus I could almost hear it—shrill as that catamount's cry. So I says, "Bramer, 'scuse me a minute," and leaving him there with his jaws hung open, whipped around, reached over and grabbed some nabs off a rack, and then blundered into the bathroom behind me and shut and bolted the door.

Dropping pants I sat on the commode and tried to fart some but couldn't. So I just bent over and noted my puff adder shrunk down to a mess of flesh. But I couldn't pay it much mind for the pang in my belly that still came fierce as the cry—the second cry, the hurt-angry. So I just studied the pang and wondered on it. I knew it hadn't come from no jealousy or even any suspicion of it, but just what it come from I couldn't then fathom. It had something to do with the catamount, that was for sure, and maybe the pro-tackle, too, and his hard gut-kick of her down in the hollow-dell, but exactly what I couldn't then dredge out of my mind. So I just sat there on that cold commode till I heard Bramer clomp out. Then I stripped open the pack of nabs and munched a couple and the pang eased to where I could sit straight. Then I began to fart in soft puffs that seemed to smell of sweet spring onions and my ulcer cooled to nearabout nothing. Then I rose up and came back in the store and went on back to slicing.

About four-thirty, near closing time, I come to meet Don Shiver Lingo for the first time, breath-to-breath. The store was crammed full of folks, school being out and first shift over. Some tow-headed Wheeler children were playing chase by the Dry Goods, squealing and slapping each other when they'd tag. Three old farts were hack-laughing on the benches beside the stove. Before the register stood a crowd of women, all chattering at full volume and laying their packages on the counter. While Louise stood stout beside me, singing at them, "That all for you now, Mizz So-and-So?" I was bent quiet over the cash drawer, rolling a stack of quarters.

All a sudden the store turned night-still. I heard a early wasp pop against a window pane. Then, straightening up, I saw Don Shiver Lingo coming toward me, his full self walking slow through the women who'd made a path for him right down the middle. He looked same as I'd seen him from the ridge: about thirty, six-four, a pro-tackle, hair flying out thick black wild-curly, and he wore the same clothes he'd wrestled the panther in—black mirror boots, fatigue pants starched to creases, gun-metal parkah fit snug on his muscle, wide taut-tied headband red as blood and now darked with sweat along the edges. He walked to me half-striding, half-gliding, his big arms swinging rhythmic, like in a dance.

He came to me breath-close and then stopped and just stared at me while the wasp popped against the pane. He had a round, dark face, smooth-skinned near as I could tell, and a wide mouth with full lips the color of salmon. Had a lean-cut chin with black fuzz on it, a five-day beard, looked like. It was the eyes that shivered me, though: deep-set and deep-blue, like the hearts of pilot lights in propane heaters. Take it all around, it was as handsome a face as I'd ever seen, yet somehow rough and cruel and hard-looking, like the faces of those motorbike people sit out all day front of the Broken Spoke Club on the 54 highway going from the Hill to White Cross. Or it was like—and this just flashed in me—Lord, yeah, like that Greek face on the black-and-orange vase me and Louise saw number of times up at the Mu-seum. And, Lord, knowing that, my puff adder rose quick to stiffness behind the register like a garden hose'll do when the water's turned on. As for what stiffed it, the cruel or the handsome, I suspect it was both twined together, strange to say, like a garter snake and a copperhead a-coupling.

He stared at me a full minute with them deep-set eyes blue as pilot lights, and when he spoke finally, his voice came deep as a well, and seamless, without no accent, like an announcer on the radio:

"Mr. Core, my trailer, it needs leveling. Would you level it? Mr. Cole said you did that. Before you were married. Before the war. I'll pay you well. And I'll help you as well. My woman is coming tonight. We'll be there tonight. I'll have floodlights tonight. Can you come tonight? Seven o'clock?"

Oh, let me tell you, that old puff adder near broke to white and sticky glory, but I managed by sheer will-force to hold it and kept my face neutral-smiley as I could and sang at him like any good ole boy in Midlight, "Sure, Son, be down there 'fore dust-dark. And don't you fret none about money. We're neighbors and—"

But before I could finish, he whipped around and began to stride out, not a thank you kindly or nothing, like I'd give him just the one item he'd come here for and won't no more words required.

I should have thought him a mite discourteous, I reckon, but I won't fixed on no morality that dogwood blooming day in April. No sir, the old adder stayed full as I watched him walk out slow and rhythmic in those mirror boots, his big back bunching under the gunmetal. I watched him all the way to exit, and then the screen-door squeaked and slapped, and the women crowded back together.

"Well! That fellah needs him some trainin'!" Louise sang fretful, breaking the quiet that'd become right itchy, and, as if on signal, the woman started up to chattering again, the Wheeler children to chasing and squealing and slapping each other, the three old farts to hack-laughing, and Louise to singing, "That all for you now, Mizz So-and-So?" and soon the store was back to its old self—easy-going, hard-working, responsible.

As for me, my adder'd pretty well shrunk to just mess by closing time, but my head kept rapt over the leveling to come. It kept so rapt, in fact, I barely tasted supper back at the house—just wolfed it down in ten minutes, a thing unusual for me.

As for Louise, I noted she ate with a relish unusual for her these last five years, humming now and then over a particularly tasty morsel. I started to ponder on this peculiarity but then gave it up as I'd just cleaned my plate and was itching to get down to the hollow-dell.

I'd just begun to rise when she glanced up sudden, fork in air, and sang out all sweet-mellow, in a voice I hadn't heard in five years nearly, "Herman, honey, who's that good-lookin' fellah come in the store today?"

And, Lord, it came to me sudden that she, too, was rapted—she, too, had been struck in the store that afternoon, and by the self-same protackle. And knowing this, my old suckworm gave a suck so fierce at my solar I nearly yelled out right there at table. But I rubbed stomach and sipped some water and so managed to cool me, keep smile pasted on me. Then I lied, "Lord, Lou, it done slipped my mind."

You see, Lingo and his catamount and even his woman friend—what was her name? Yeah, Callie Smoot, who was coming tonight—they were all my secret—from Louise anyways—and I yenned to keep them that way as long as I could. As for howcome and whyfor, I didn't know then no more than I knew why the suckworms'd crawled back to plague me again.

I was hoping she'd let it drop then, but she rasped out, chainsaw back in her, "Well, it seems like to me you and him was old war buddies the way y'all were carryin' on."

And the ulcer gave a second suck, even fiercer if that was possible, and brought back in my mind the bitch voice of half-decade ago, that "no sense in foolin' ourselves no more!" and that "don't you touch me, Herman, don't even lay a finger on me!" and I clattered my chair back, near tipping it to the floor, and lurched up and blundered over to the tool drawer, wrenched it open, and clattered around inside through all the screwdrivers and spare fuses and hammers and odd nails until I felt the cool calming smoothness of my level, the hard simple wood of a maple tree. Lou'd lurched up, too, by then and all the time was chainsawing fretful, "Herman Core, what's got into you? I just asked you his name!"

I gripped it finally and just yanked it out, exploding nails all over the floor, and then I whipped around and blundered out the back door and up the lawn toward the pine ridge. I stopped a second and turned around and called, "Don't wait up, Lou!" and then strode on, all the while hearing her yell, "Herman! I didn't mean nothin'! Her-man! Her-man!"—drawing out the Her like she wanted to own me all—not just my Herman Core self age fifty, medium height, medium build, and bald on the crown of his head, but all that was deep down in him besides—every precious secret—till he'd have, Lord, left in him not nothing of his own. So I thought at the time.

"Her-man!" she bitch-sang on, her chainsaw rasping at me, jagging at me, hooking at me. "Her-man! Come eat your apple cobbler! What in the world did I say? I didn't mean—Her-man! I just asked you his name! Her-man!"

III

When I reached ridgetop, she stopped sudden, like she was switched off, and I could hear just crickets and way off a early bobwhite and a mourning dove. I shut eyes a moment to collect myself and then opened them and looked first at the dogwoods now all rosy-colored in the sunset, and then down into the hollow-dell, now in deep shadow.

There was the chainlink still and the panther inside and still no meat, not even a smidgen, but she slept now, furled on the bloodclay by the ce-ment cube what marks state-center. The tent had been struck, and in its place sat a brand new single wide on cinderblocks. And, Lord, it won't your regular white with black trim like you'd see in Daddy's and then mine and then Bramer's old court up at White Cross. Nosir, it was black—all black, like road tar just been poured—and it had the thinnest front door and the biggest picture window to the left of it I'd ever seen on a single wide. And that won't all peculiar about it, because down from the door sill fell this five-foot drop to the bloodclay, not a cinderblock step in sight. And parked in front was a black motorcycle with a long front-fork and a red seat and red grips on the handlebars—one of them choppers—and next to it, a black Volkswagen, a '60 model, looked like, with mud-smears on the fenders and all scratched and dented—Callie Smoot's, I reckoned. Off to my left I noted the double track with the hump of wire grass down the middle snaking up out of the hollow towards Bramer's place.

Rubbing my level, I stepped down off the ridge and caught a rabbit path and followed it down in snaky switchbacks to dell bottom. I walked toward the pen, stepping over the white stones and clay-patches and clumps of fescue, going quiet like the dell was a nursery and babies were sleeping there. When I got a yard from the chainlink, the panther all a sudden unfurled herself and rose and stretched, arching her back like a housecat, and then padded to me and poked her nose through a link and began to purr, "Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmn, Hermmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmnnnnnn, Hermmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmannnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnn—or so it seemed to me in my rapturement—the letters of my own name molten to a fine deep-rumbling hum, a breathy wonder-drone, no jags or hooks or chainsaws in it, no raspy-voice, "Her-man, who's that good-lookin' fellah come in the store this afternoon?" My puff adder arced up to so acheful a stiff I lost all caution and bent over and squeezed fingers through her link and rubbed her cool nose and warm whiskered muzzle, and she closed her eyes and seemed to smile and I felt that Herman-hum catch my arm nerves and run clean down to my posterior, and it seemed like I was sitting on a car hood when the engine's in well-tuned idle. Then I drew out my fingers and rose and the cat padded back to pen-center and, furling herself, lay down by the ce-ment cube and in a minute was breathing deep and even.

Adder acheful still, I followed the chainlink around till I came in front of the trailer, between the chopperbike and the Volkswagen, and stopped and stared at it.

"Lord, Herman, any minute now," I whispered, playing it out before my eyes like a picture show in slow motion, "and that black door'll fly out and slap metal and Lingo'll stand huge in the doorway, dressed in the mirror boots and the starched fatigues and the headband and the parkah—no, not parkah now but tanktop—yeah, a tanktop clung tight to his chest and black as road tar. And he'll be cradling something in his arms, a thing black and shiny, and for a second, Lord, I'll think it's a nigger baby, Callie Smoot's sure and just now borned! But then I'll squint and see it's a coupler jack coated with grease.

"He'll stand quiet a full minute, giving me time to gaze on him, and then he'll call out, "Mr. Core!" shivering me down to spine-bottom with his deep seamless. Then he'll buckle knees and with that heavy jack in his arms, Lord, he'll just leeeeeeeeeeap straight down from doorsill and mirror-boot that bloodclay whomp, crouching a little to ease the shock. He'll walk slow to me then, come breathclose, then stare at me with them eyes blue as pilot lights, and then he'll bow deep, like in a little ceremony, and bend over and lay the coupler jack at my feet. Then he'll rise and go—striding long-legged now—to the Volkswagen and jerk the door open and reach his muscle-arm into the backseat and grip out a second jack identical to the first, and he'll cradle it back to me, big shoulders quivering, and bow deep again and bend over and lay it aside the other.

"And what then, Herman?" I whispered on, and I noted the sun had winked out behind me and so everything—single wide, motorbike, Volkswagen, dogwoods—was dimming on down toward dust-dark. And then I somehow knew "what then"—don't ask me how, I just did—and I whispered, "Yeah, Herman, he'll rise then and give off heat like a kerosene stove in wintertime and then, oh Lord, he'll lay a hand on my shoulder and grip it and then roll out in his voice so deep-seamless I'll think it's pine roar and warm breeze in one, 'Herman—can I call you Herman?' And, Lord, I'll just nod, unable to speak for the stiffness under my fly. And then, "Let's attack it!" he'll roll so deep-seamless, and I'll lay down my level on a patch of bloodclay and grip one side of a coupler jack while he grips the other and together we'll lift it with a grunt—him a thigh-grunt, me a plexus-grunt—and crab walk it to the trailer-end right of the pen and bend over and shove it snug between the frame-bottom and the bloodclay. Then we'll grip up the other jack and grunt it to the door and shove it snug beneath the sill. Then we'll rough-level: raise one jack, lower the other, pump it up up up, then twist the release screw, then stand back and eye it and if it's slanted still, lower one, raise the other. And then we'll cradle up shims in our arms—but wherefrom, Herman? Yeah, from a pile by the septic tank (Bramer's brought 'em)—and we'll grunt 'em to jacks and with big mallets Lingo gripped out of the Volkswagen we'll pound pound pound 'em between cinderblocks and frame and so wedge 'em tight. And as we work, shoulder to shoulder, my knobby bones to his thick meat, Lord, I'll smell the sweat on him that'll ooze out especial strong when he pumps a jack-lever and his arm-muscles go knots and snake-slithers and the veins all coil and twist.

"And what then, Herman?" I whispered, so adder-acheful, and I noted the dark was nigh full, the dust gone out of it. And somehow I knew "what then"—don't ask me how, I just did—and whispered, "Yeah, Herman, there's the fine-levelin' yet to do—the inside stuff," and with that the old adder near burst to white and sticky glory. I managed to hold it, though, by sheer will-force, and went on to whispering, playing out that picture show to the climax, "Yeah, Herman, when we'll've rough-leveled—done drove in the last shim and our eyes'll've judged it's even as a pool table, I'll remember a-sudden he has a woman-friend and her name's Callie Smoot and, Lord, so must be nigh big as he is, and she's come for the leveling and she's inside now, for sure, on a shag-rug maybe and spread out all luscious, and remembering my maple wood, I'll grip it from the bloodclay and, forgetting Lingo for a moment, stride to the doorsill and grip it and push me up and in and work-shoe pound to room-center and see, Lord, laying center of a blush-pink shag carpet Callie Smoot herself spread out all luscious and whipping head side to side, and before I can lay the level on her and more—to fine-level, you see—I'll hear them mirror-boots pound in behind me and I'll wait for his big heat and sweat to stand beside me and then, oh Lord, like dance partners or deep-sea divers, one, we'll both breathe deep and hold it, spread arms wide, and plunge on down and in!"

Lord, yes, that's how not mind but puff adder played it—yenned for it—that mid-April dust-dark not six months ago.

But, of course, don't none of that stuff ever happen in real life—don't ever and didn't then as I stood front of Lingo's black single-wide and waited for him to come out and bid me welcome, brother, welcome, and say I could level and he'd help.

I stood there as it came on to full dark, and then it was eight o'clock and still no door'd swung out, slapped metal. So I strode to the single-wide and reached up and rapped three sharp raps on the door-foot, then stepped back and waited. I heard boots pounding inside and then the door busted wide open, slapped metal, and there stood Lingo himself in parkah and the rest, no tanktop black as road tar. He rubbed his eyes, shook his wild hair, then yelled out, not deep-seamless but like there were rocks in his voice, or loose teeth, one, "Who in the goddamn fuck—?" But then he must've noted it was me standing there as he pasted on a smile of teeth and set arms akimbo and cleared his throat and slid back down to his seamless, "Ah! Mr. Core. It is you, and you have come for the leveling. A pity, however, and a bit of a waste, as I no longer have need of you. It seems Mr. Cole and I, when we set it on blocks, made it level enough. There's a bit of a slant, yes, but nothing to alarm. Goodnight now, Mr. Core."

That's all he said, no apology or nothing, just that stiff "Good night now," and he whipped around and went in and shut the door with a soft whomp! and I was alone but for sleepful catamount, pants loose as wet burlap.

I raised my eyes and saw the moon, near full, risen up above the dogwoods, and right then I wanted to tighten them again.

"But how, Herman Core?" I whispered.

"Louise." The word bloomed before me like a flower.

But then I remembered the rasp-voice, "Don't you touch me, Herman Core, don't even lay a finger on me!" of five years earlier, and, more recent, that chainsawed, "Who's that good-lookin' fellah come in the store this afternoon?" and the worm-mouth gave a suck so fierce at my solar I lost breath and had to bend over and wheeze awhile.

Breath caught soon and ulcer dimmed a little, I recognized, Lord, no, I couldn't go to her now, couldn't bear that chainsaw voice filling the whole tight house. I had to stay down in the hollow-dell, but do what here I did not know.

But I did not have long to worry it, because all a sudden, just as a early owl went "Who cooks for me? Who cooks for you?" way off beyond the dogwoods somewhere, Lord, a light flickered up in the picture window—a white light with a shiver in it.

Shivering a little myself, I set the level on a clay patch and padded to the trailer and knelt and groped under it and drug out three stray cinderblocks, one at a time, and piled them aside the window. I stood on the top block and with my palm cupped over my eyebrows leaned my hip against the siding and peered through the pane, legs tensed to jerk me down if Lingo or Callie Smoot should spy me.

The window gave on a long narrow room with a ceiling red as scarlet and ten fluorescent light tubes running the length of it. Over walls and floor animal skins had been tacked up or thrown about anyhow, in no particular pattern. They were deer, bear, bobcat, skunk, and, of course, catamount—all American stuff, nothing exotic. Straight across from me was a hunting rifle painted black and racked on brackets bolted through the skin of a polar bear. It was a like a .410, only larger, and looked blacker than black against that white polar bear—I shiver today just thinking about it.

But that won't all to shiver over because hung above it was this blowed up black-white photograph showing waist-up some string-muscley Jap-looking fellah. He was neckid down to his drawers and in both fists he gripped a long Jap sword and held it straight out in front of him. It must have been awful heavy because his teeth were gritted pangful and sweat had balled up on his skin. Along the top edge of the picture was the word PATRIOTISM in big red-glitter letters cut out of what looked like tin foil someone'd rubbed lipstick over. Hung up on a bracket either side of the picture was one of those, Lord, hary-kary knives just as sharp-thin and curved as a sliver moon when Venus glows above her along about dust-dark.

Down below all this was the only furniture in the room, a couple of four-legged stools about a yard high and a yard apart from each other. They were maple-finish, what you can buy at Max Way. A couple of yards in front of them and a little to my left stood this kerosene heater, the dwarf model out of Western Auto. It was all black and flat-top, and heat wavers were rising off it. Behind the stools, leaning up against the skins between the floor and the rifle, was this long Max-Way mirror turned on its side. It gave back nigh the en-tire room—skins, stools, kerosene heater, picture window, and, Lord, even my own white face if I squinted.

All a sudden it came to me this room and stuff won't much different from a thee-yater stage set up for a play and me the audience way back down in the full-dark peering up white-faced and gazy. I didn't have time to wonder over it, though, because all a sudden, it was like a curtain done raised on that play as this pale girl—Lord, no, a woman, a big full-growed woman with big bones and big basooms, though she looked just like a teenage girl way she was so pale and dressed in raspberry jeans and white turtle-neck sweater and green flip-flops and gold locket around her neck—this woman, Callie Smoot, I reckoned, came fast from my right and padded in quick steps over the animal skins to the first stool and sat down on it and stared straight at my window. I quick ducked down, heart in my throat, but then remembered white lights'd throw back a glare and so pretty much hide me from her. When I peered back in, she had her hands folded in her lap—big hands but pale as flour—and her face was same pale and had pale lips pressed tight together and a tiny nose so fine it looked like sculpted. Her eyes were deep-set, like Lingo's, but green as pine trees in the wintertime. Her hair, in that white light buff as molasses been setting on the shelf a year, was combed back tight into a pony tail with a red ribbon tied around it.

All a sudden she reacted—jerked her head to the right—like Lingo'd just entered. His voice rolled deep-seamless through the siding, but it broke hawky now and then like there were rocks in it big as your fist.

"So you won't do me that little favor, you fucking bitch—no, that's not in the script—cruel bitch! cruel bitch! cruel bitch!"

She pressed her lips till they whited and then shook her head quick as a little bird, that ribbon and pony tail just a-whipping back and forth, and his voice changed again: he began to swoop and croon like a kid whine-pleading at his girl, "But we're in private, Natasha. We're alone! You've no need to treat me thus!"

She sudden raised her hand and shot him a mid-finger and wrenched that flour face into the meanest scowl I've ever seen on a woman, Louise included.

Lord, I was expecting something brutal then, but Lingo kept where he was, out of my sight still, and went on to kid-crooning, like before but now edged with hoarseness, "Come to me, my little mouse, my little musculum, my muscle-fiber of my thigh, sweet lost frail little muscle, you! Come to Daddy Shiver now!"

She kept her lips set and once more shook her head and he kid-crooned on, "My little rabbit, my cunnilingus, my underground burrow-sweet, come to Daddy now, come to Daddy Shiver, my little mouse, my musculum, sweet ripe fiber of my third-eye thigh!"

At that she quickbent around to the mirror and smiled and winked at herself and then faced front again and shot the mid-finger just as Lingo rushed at her, still in the parkah and headband and fatigues, his mirror-boots vibrating the siding. When he reached her, he stopped, glanced in the mirror and smiled and winked at himself, then scowled and threw a sharp kick at the empty stool and sent it flying toward the heater. It glanced it but not hard enough to topple it, just made it wobble some and then hit the skins and rolled off to the left and out of my sight. Then he leaned in her face and blurted all spit-sprayey and hawky, "I'll make you, bitch!" and grabbed her arm and jerked her to her feet and wrenched her around till she di-rect faced him.

Lord, she was nigh as tall as he was, six-two at the least, and so I expected her to haul off and slap him a time or two, but she stood quiet and pale there and even spread her arms to help him as he snatched her sweater and wrenched it up and off her and threw it aside, then clutched at her jeans button and snapped it off and jerked her jeans down to her ankles.

"Step out of them, bitch!" he hawked, and she did as she was told and faced him tall and handsome there, breasts nigh big as flour sacks and just as white, the pink nipples sprouting up a little.

Then he wrenched off his parkah and threw it aside and undid his fatigues and wrenched them down and stepped out of them, and they stood a moment there, facing each other—her all big-boned and tall and shapely like a statue made out of flour, him all veiny-muscle chest and arms and the thickest thighs I ever seen on a man, Brute Bernard included. And, Lord, I noted on his left thigh, the side facing me, close up to his hip, this green tattoo of a big old staring eye. I knew I'd seen it before someplace and scratched my head and then remembered, yeah, it was that same eye top of the pyramid—you know, the eye on the dollar bill, other side of George Washington's picture.

They stood still there a full minute. Then he laid a thick hand on her shoulder and gripped it till his knuckles whitened and she made a mew like a cat.

"Cut it, bitch!" he hawked. "That's not in the script!" He released his grip and swung back his hand and slapped her so whap! across the cheek she whipped around to face me and I noted her lips turned up at the corners—not much, but enough to let me know she smiled.

Then he gripped her shoulder again and tightened on it till his knuckles whitened and this time she didn't mew, just made an O with her mouth. Then he sloooooowly pressed her down till she was laid out flat su-pine on a moose skin. He knelt then and crouching over spread himself on top of her. And you know what? Lord, he don't enter her at all, just goes to rubbing back and forth and side to side on her belly, moaning a little. And all the time she just lays quiet, only moving to turn her face to the mirror now and then and smile and wink at herself. In a minute he groans to white bloom all on her belly, raising up to wink and smile at himself.

At that moment the floor looked a mite slanted, and I whispered, "Lord, Herman, you done misleveled the somitch." But then it came to me I hadn't leveled, just dreamied it, and I whispered, "Lord, Herman, Lingo told you an absolute lie. Them folks did actually need your maple wood."

But I didn't have time to ponder on it because Lingo surprised me again: still on top of her, he started sudden to kissing her cheeks in soft pecks and smoothing her breast-skin with his hands, not once looking in the mirror, and the floor looked level again—flat as a pool table. Then he gently rolled off her and cradled her in his arms and stood up with her—all six-foot body and basooms of her—and walked her round and round the shudder-lit room, all the while shouting in that kid-croon voice, "O, my sweet Natasha! I am so sorry! My Kitty! My Gruschenka! My sweet good Laura! My dearest Lo! I am mad to have treated thee in such brutal fashion, with such careless coarseness. Yet I needed thee at once! And we were alone and in private, so I took the advantage, and now I am so sorry, so needled with guilt. I am worthless, a wretch, a rapist in disguise. And yet I love thee more than the rain, more than the sun, more than the sky, more than the flowering trees! I love thee more than my work, more than life itself!"

But then the floor seemed to slant again as Lingo faced the mirror with Callie Smoot in his arms and yelled hawky at it, his mouth the meanest wrench I ever saw on a man, those Broken Spoke people included, "Wet yourself, you tight ugly bitch!" And he stood her on her feet and played the first scene over: gripped shoulder till she mewed, slapped her face whap! (I saw that little smile again when it whipped back in my direction), gripped her again till she made O with her mouth, then slow-pressed her down till she was flat su-pine, then knelt and spread on her and rubbed till the bloom-groan came and he raised his head to smile in the mirror and wink at himself.

This time I aimed eyes on Callie Smoot and, except for winking and smiling at the mirror now and then, she laid under him all still and tight-mouthed, just taking it—a-suffering him without no protest. And Lord, I couldn't help hating that bitch—a cruel bitch, like Lingo'd said (but just whyfor and howcome cruel I didn't then know)—and that suckworm flared under my solar and chewed me fierce. Strange to say, though, the adder didn't droop on down to a mess of flesh—nosir, he stayed up tight and thick—but hurt-pangful now, and he was panging me more as I thought about her, hated her.

But I didn't get to hate her long because, Lord, she surprised me: yessir, just as Lingo started to peck at her again and smooth her breast-skin, I saw her right thigh flex and then her knee, same knee, thrust sharp in his groin—smack on the jewelry, you might say—and now it was his turn to make an O with his mouth, and he did, too, and more—Lord, such a groan I'd never heard come out of a man in all my life and never expect to hear so again. And while he's curled up on a skunk skin a-cupping himself, she's quick-strode to the mirror and reaches up and grips a hary-kary knife off its bracket and strides back to him still groaning there and knocks him on the head with the handle so he lays out su-pine, arms spread like a Samson or worse but not knocked out, just stunned, and Lord, I pop with sweat in the chill full-dark, hoping he snatches them hands back where they belong—cupping himself.

But, Lord, he surprises me again—just keeps arms spread like some victim and breaks out in this wild shuddery laugh while Callie Smoot slams cross-wise top of him like a pro-wrassler—Brute Bernard couldn't do no better—and brings that knife to his adder that's arcing up quick all the while, and soon as it's straight-stiff she lines up knife-edge to the base of it, down in the groin hair, and I'm expecting any second now and that blade'll stroke clean on through and then blood'll whooooooooooooooooosh on up like flames off of white gas.

But it don't happen that way at all—not in real life and not then. Nosir, she keeps that hary-kary steady on his root, not quite nicking him, and all he does is laugh out all creepy and snake-shuddery again, and then hawks, "You go right on ahead, bitch, and cut it, slice it, eat it! And while you're at it, cut me open and slither your hands in my insides and squeeze them up and slop them in your mouth and swallow them down—just like your cruel fucking kind who'd just as soon swallow a man as look at him! Go ahead, bitch, and lop it, cut it, slice it, eat it! And taste it, bitch, yes, taste it—if you can! Ha! Ha! Ha!"

She wiggled on up his body till she faced him and then wrenched her mouth and spat in his face, but he only laughed louder, creepier, and she hurled the hary-kary aside—Lord, just missing that kerosene heater by a inch—then turned back to the mirror and winked and smiled at herself, then plunged her face in his groin, right by the dollar eye, and slurped on his adder like it was tube sausage coated with honey. And, Lord, strange to admit it, I was liking her now, even wanting her, and my own puff adder nigh burst to white glory against the trailer siding.

But, Lord, she then changed back to hateful, because right after he came to bloom and she swallowed her fill, he quick-reached over and grabbed her pony tail and stood and wrenched her up beside him, and she acted that victim stuff again—mewed out, took face-whap! with that smile that won't much but just enough to be called a smile, made mouth O, sunk down to su-pine under his fist-clench, suffered still and quiet his rubbing on her and his coming to bloom, and I hated her again for it—why, I didn't know—and those twin-pangs, adder-pang and ulcer-pang, did flare their hottest yet.

Then Lingo changed back to tender: pecked soft at her cheeks and smoothed her breasts and cradled her up again and began walking her around the room, shout-crooning all them names.

I didn't stay to watch but stagger-stepped off the stack of cinderblocks, my whole body black-buzzing crazy, like a hive done lost its queen, and with adder pangful and ulcer angry, I strode past the pen (the panther slept still, its breaths deep and even, woman-sighs) and caught the rabbit track and stone-stumbled and root-clawed my snaky way up the slope, reached ridgetop, then legged it down the lawn, ulcer cooling now but adder stiff and panging still, like a pistol been cocked hours and hours with the safety off.

By the time I reached the back door, my black buzzing had wore itself out and turned to gnat-like irritation. I was itch-sweaty from my walk and wanted a shower bad, but then I remembered a shower won't possible as Louise was asleep and might wake with the shower rush (I'd forgot she could sleep through thunderstorms) and I didn't want her to see me just then—why, I didn't know.

But then I thought of the basement, what I'd had dug for the children. I remembered I'd had a shower installed, a white tin closet in a corner by the water heater. I remembered it had a plastic curtain I'd hung from a rod twenty five years before. It was now so stiff with mildew, I reckoned, I'd have to beat it supple with my fists before I could enter. And knowing this, the worm mouth gave a suck at my belly wall and I cussed aloud and pounded into the kitchen and then into the hallway and wrenched open the basement door and entered. I pulled cord for the low-watt bulb and pounded down the dim-lit stairs, face breaking cobwebs and smelling the cool dank.

When I reached the ce-ment, I strode to the corner, tore clothes off and threw them in a heap, then gripped that shower curtain, ready to rip it to pieces if it'd give me any sass. But it didn't—just rattled aside smooth and easy on the hooks and then I was in the chill stall, twisting the stiff cocks and hearing them squeak in rusty spurts. The spray came cold first, then hot, then warm and hard, driving on me pleasantly, and I turned round and round, hearing the tin floor rumble under my feet. Feeling the steady drumming warmth, I remembered the catamount when she purred "Hermmmmmmmmmannnnn" under my hand, remembered her wild sweet-fire cry not twenty hours earlier, remembered her and Lingo wrassling so muscle-close on the bloodclay, remembered my dust-dark dreamy of me and Lingo leveling like dance partners been dancing a long time and then Callie Smoot spread out all luscious on the shag carpet and me and Lingo plunging on in, and then, out of the dreamy, I remembered Lingo in the white shudder-light kissing soft at her cheeks and smoothing her breast skin, and remembering all this under the warm spray, I noted the worm mouth had cooled to nigh no flare at all, and the adder, though stiff still, had gone less pangful. (In that warm spray, I damped the other stuff: the mirror and the hary-kary knives and the black rifle and the rest; damped Lingo's hard slap and "Wet yourself, bitch!" and Callie Smoot's mew and O with her mouth and faint smile when her face, slapped whap!, whipped to face me; damped the hary-kary knife she held with blade to adder-root; damped Lingo's creepy laugh when she looked about to cut him.) And I whispered, whirling under the spray, "Lord, Herman, they'll never have chirren, don't need 'em, don't even need to think about 'em. Chirren'd just spoil 'em."

All a sudden I stopped still under the spray and looked down at that old pink adder risen stiff, and I bent over and began to pump it like a lever. I pumped five full minutes maybe, and then the pulses started and I whispered, "His sweat, his deep seamless, his snake-muscles—it's all this! And his wrasslin' especially, with the catamount, and, yes, with Callie Smoot, 'cause that's wrasslin', too—not the Brute Bernard kind you see on the TV but a new kind that's never been witnessed or muscle-felt before—simple, dominatin', without no back-talk—penned up, you might say, like in a chainlink without no food, not even a smidgen—controlled, Lingo-ed! Yes, Lord, exackly this! Hew-mongus! Right on the jewelry!" And I burst thicky white into my cupped hand.

A second later I was dead-hollow but refreshed, the tenseness drained out of me. I twisted off the rusty cocks, heard stray drops bounce off the tin, then silence rushing in like insects.

All a sudden, straight over me, the toilet flushed in a roar. That set something off—brought back the ulcer-flare and the adder-pang and the black-buzzing crazy—because all during the loud toilet-roar I yelled out, without knowing whycome or howfor, "The cruel fucking bitch! The tight ugly stubborn bitch!"

The flushing stopped then, died down to a gurgle, and I heard her steps pap over me, going into the bedroom, and then the bedsprings of her Princess Special squeaking and twitching like gnats nipping at you on a summer night. And I pictured her—Louise the bitch now, the cruel fucking bitch!—in a way I never had before: saw her in what I then took to be her real self—saw her grim taut face the color of masking tape, her thin grim lips curved in hard scowl with that lipstick too red for her, her sharp chin raised up like a blade, and all the time she was rasping at me, jagging at me, hooking at me in that mean chainsaw voice, "Her-man, who's that good-lookin' fellah come in the store this afternoon?" and "Don't you touch me, Herman, don't even lay a finger on me!" and "I can't have 'em and won't never, so you sell that King Size, Herman Core, as it ain't no sense in foolin' ourselves no more!"

That picture of her in my mind, I stood trembling-quiet a moment in the dim dank, and then, without wanting to, like there was something in me making me do it, some black fist clenching in my brain, I burst out in hard spit-spraying whispers—had to whisper because of the bitch upstairs not quite asleep yet—wishing I could shout it loud as my Homelite in winter woods, "No, bitch, Doc Hartsell didn't say that! You were gully-dirt lyin' to me! You just didn't want to do it with me any more! You'd gotten all the use you could get out of me, and when you thought I'd turned flat on you—and why you thought so, bitch, I'll never know—you decided you'd just stop and tell that gully-dirt lie just to punish me! You cruel bitch, I should have forced you that February day, around three o'clock—I should've wrassle-slapped some sense into you like Lingo does Callie Smoot when she sasses him!"

Five full minutes I spat and sprayed and the more I cursed her the madder I got. I recognized I'd been hating her all those five years of drought since that February day and would never admit it to myself until now. "Lord, Herman Core," I whispered to myself, "you've been livin' a rotten dead rut of a life and all on account of that cruel fuckin' bitch!"

With all this whirring in my mind (but way deep down I could feel, even then, a little tight ball of hurt, a baby-loss, a hollowness), I wrenched the stiff curtain aside and blundered out of the stall and legged it adder-stiff and ulcer-flaring up the steps and out of the basement and through the hallway and into the bedroom, slamming the door so hard against the wall the window-panes rattled.

Her bed lamp was already flared, hand snatching away from it. I stopped at bedfoot and glared at her, teeth snarling. She was raised up July-pink in her gown and rubbed at her eyes and squinted.

"Lord, Herman!" she yelled out thick through her sleep-seeds. "You near about gave me a hard attack!"

Then she looked again and her eyes bugged out and her mouth fell open. "To scream," I thought, "'cause she sees me now, my full self—sees I ain't to put up with her meanness no damn more!"

But she surprised me more than anyone else that day:

"Oh, Herman! Oh, Herman! Oh, Herman!" she sang, her voice so warm and full of longing and regret and relief and thankfulness all at the same time. "Lord, he's come back to me now, my Herman's done come home again after all them tired awful years!"

And before I could even think what to say, she threw back her dust-ruffle, exposing her buff-bush where the gown'd worked its way up, and then sat up and reached out her plump white arms and sang, "Come to me, Herman! Come to Louise! She ain't seen you like this in years! She ain't seen that old puff adder in years! She ain't said nothin', she kept quite all that time—didn't want to fret him, just knowin' he'd come out of his dive sooner or later, and now he has—Lord, yes—he's done come back and risen up again all on his own, and Louise, she's just so frightful happy!"

Seeing her like this, a side of her I'd near forgotten ever was, I nearly plunged in the bed right then, no matter if it was a flimsy twin and would surely break with our humping. But then I remembered my shower words down in the basement and that bitch-picture I'd painted of her and her chainsaw voice of that February day, around three o'clock, and the ulcer flared and the adder arced on down to a mess of flesh quick as a balloon you'd let the air out of, and so I blurted, "Naw, Louise, you go on back to bed now. A notion took me, is all. Been workin' awful hard in the store. Just forget I come up this way, hear? Get on back to bed now." And I shooed hands at her and started backing out of the room.

But she rolled out of that Princess Special and shuffled at me, legs wobbly with sleep, white arms spread and pleading at me, her voice like a chainsaw now, rasping at me, jagging at me, hooking at me, "Oh, Her-man! Her-man! Don't leave me again! Come to me! Her-man! You been away too long! Come back to Louise! Please! Her-man!"

I went on to backing away, shooing out my hands. When my hip banged the doorknob, I whirled and blundered into the hallway and then into the basement, slamming and bolting the door behind me, and that voice was stopped at last, like it was switched off, and all I could hear was silence again like rushing insects, and I was easeful and relieved.

IV

Now it was my turn to take to the bed—not my separate bed of five years nearly, but my old Korea cot I drug out from behind the water heater and squeaked out flat and set in the middle of the basement floor. Yessir, the morning after Louise came at me so sudden and suprising—so forward, don't you know—I told her over breakfast to phone up Bramer to come help out in the store, I was "blood-tired and bone-weary" and needed me a "long long rest."

Over her grits she mumbled, hurt, "Whatever you want, Herman," and I clattered my chair back, fetched toothbrush, towels, and pajamas, and with just the work-clothes on my back pounded down into the basement. I ended up staying there the rest of the season, leaving only to shit, piss, wash clothes, nibble lone meals in the kitchen (Lou'd nibble first, then leave me a dish—we'd arranged it so), and take lone walks and drives, mainly at night.

I'd sleep like a dead man daytime, so all night I'd lie awake on the cot and just stare dull at the floor-beams and hear Louise pap to the bathroom and then back to her separate bed and then the springs twitch and squeak. I'd doze off now and again, and when I did I'd dream of Louise, but only in flickers—Louise in her bed, sweet-smiling and reaching arms out so plump and white, or Louise sitting at a picnic table under Bramer's vase elm, singing a strange song I couldn't make out the words to—a song not country and not popular and not opera either—no human song at all, but a song some creature might sing I never yet had occasion to witness or hear spoke of.

When I'd awake from my dozes, I'd find the old adder about half staff and I'd be yenning for her and would even swing legs off the cot to rise and go to her. But then I'd think of my shower words and that bitch-picture I'd painted of her and her chainsaw voice of years before—that "Don't even lay a finger on me, Herman Core!" and that "No sense in foolin' ourselves no more!" and my ulcer'd flare so fierce I'd have to bring knees to my plexus and keep them there until it'd cool again.

So I never went up to Lou, even in my adder-ache and longing, just stayed in basement dank dim under the low-watt bulb, and, except for chores and walks and drives, slept dead daytimes and nighttimes fitful and dreamt those flickers of Lou.

I did that way till night of June thirteen, around ten o'clock. I was lying on my cot staring dull-eyed at the floor-beams and their trenches of dark. Lou'd been in bed an hour (I'd heard her springs twitch and squeak as she settled in), and all was now quiet down in my dim dank but for the water heater ticking up to temperature every so often. About ten o'clock I heard her springs squeak-spurt sudden and then her footsteps going pap pap pap away from me, then turning around and going pap pap pap back in my direction. They stopped a second, then papped away again and then turned around and papped back. Her papping went on an hour or so and then stopped sudden and the bedsprings squeaked again, in a little flurry, then died to stillness, then squeaked once more, again a flurry, and the steps started again, this time shoe-pounding whap whap whap straight out the door and down the hallway, fading when they reached the kitchen.

"Herman Core," I whispered. "She's leaving the house, headed for the hollow-dell. Bramer's done mouthed off all about him, and you been away from her and folks two full moons and so she's going to him now, to Lingo, like Bramer predicted—Lord, yes, Herman—" and I stopped—had to—as the old suckworm flared, bit solar plexus, took breath away. I wheezed a full minute and snatched it back, but didn't curl up on the cot. No sir, this suck, I rose up, wrenched on work clothes and strode up the steps and through the hallway and out the kitchen door after her. I was part in my angry again—my black-buzzing angry—and yet I was part clear-headed, too, like a man done thought a long long time and decides at last to commit that murder in the first degree.

It was a June-warm night and no wind and tree frogs peeping from everywhere, seemed like. The moon was halfway up the sky and absolute full, throwing this sheen on the lawn sloping up and on the pine crowns top of the ridge. I strode to ridgetop and looked down into the hollow-dell and saw it full of moonlight but for the black single-wide and chopper bike and Volkswagen. I saw the chain link a-glittering and the panther all moon-sheened in her sleeping curl by ce-ment cube what marks state-center. I aimed eyes on single-wide and saw what looked like Louise herself standing on a pile of cinderblocks and leaning up stout and pale against the black siding. She had a hand cupped above her eyebrows and was peering into the big window lit up with the white shuddery.

She looked a long long time—"just lapping it up, slurping it up," I whispered, and I hated her for it. First of all, Lingo and Callie Smoot were my secret and she had no right to be spying on them like that. Second, she was more than likely noting same as I'd noted two full moons ago—that hateful Callie Smoot lying so limp and tight-lipped under Lingo and just taking it, just suffering it. And third, Louise was a Ferrell, won't she? and so was so hot down deep by now—Lord, it'd been a half-decade since she'd got satisfaction—she'd lower herself to get neckid and fist-pressed down and take every inch of him, face-slaps included, and even smiling all the while. And as I hated her—Louise now, I'm speaking of—my ulcer flared so fierce it knocked breath out and I had to wheeze a full minute to snatch it back.

I rubbed plexus to cool it some and then stood quiet while she turned and stepped off the cinderblocks (having got her fill, I reckoned) and started striding across the fescue and bloodclay. I watched her pass the pen, then whip around and look back at the catamount, as if she'd just this second noticed her. Then she put a hand to her mouth and gave this little peep, like a cardinal in winter, and the catamount unfurled herself, showing the ce-ment cube what marks state-center, and padded to the fence and poked her nose through a link, and Louise strode to the fence and did the same as I did that mid-April night two full moons ago: lost caution, squeezed fingers through a link, rubbed cool nose and muzzle warm as toast. Then, having got her fill there, too, she turned and left the fence and snaked on up the rabbit track.

I hid myself behind a pine trunk until her dark stout self reached ridgetop and came within a pace from me. Then I just stepped out in front of her, and she laid a hand on her breast, gave insuck of breath, and rushed out, "Lord! Herman Core, you scared me to—" but I didn't give her chance to finish, rasped in a voice so sharp it'd cut you just looking at it, "Louise, you keep away from that single-wide and don't ever go down in that dell again. That stuff's Perfesser Lingo's private bidness and I'm sure he don't 'preciate no gawkers."

She let her hand drop and just stared at me a moment, primming her lips, and then rasped out in that chainsaw voice, "You go to hell, Herman Core. You just get on back to your little dim hell and stay there and mind your own bidness and let me do mine. Now let me pass."

I flurry-stepped aside, as if by instinct, and she passed, and I turned around to watch her as she strode on down the lawn, her stout mean self dark against the moon-sheen, and my ulcer flared again, knocking breath out, and I had to wheeze awhile before I could stride back to the house.

Back in the basement it was five till eleven and I was so wore out I fell dead asleep soon as I hit the cot.

Next day I just lay on the cot and stared dull and drifted in and out of sleep. That night I heard Lou step outside again, and I rose again and strode out after her; saw her lean and peer again, disobeying my express orders; warned her again; got bitch-sassed again; felt ulcer flare again, knocking breath out; strode back to basement again and fell dead asleep soon as I hit the cot.

Six nights more she did me that way and then it was dawn of June nineteen and all a sudden the now! now! now! of a chainsaw revving up in hard mean spurts outside somewhere. It gouted up close to the house, as even down through the thick clay and cinderblocks I could hear the now! now! now! like it was right aside my ear, and I startled up, full awake, heard again the now! now! now!, felt ulcer flare fierce, and I whispered, "That's my Homelite and that bitch's got it and she's 'bout to ruin it!"

Lord, was I smoking! I shot out of that Korea cot, wrenched on work clothes, and was out in the cloudy morning in the time it takes a single wide to burn to black shell.

I saw her half way up the lawn in her pink nightgown, and sure enough, she had my Homelite in the grip of both her hands and was revving it in those hard mean nows! three mean spurts at a time, and all the while she was slashing the air with it like she was looking for some logs to kill or other, and she was yelling "Hi-yah!" and "Kee-yuh!" and all sorts of strange expressions I never heard her use before.

But it won't her words my mind was on. Nosir, all I could think of was her fat fists gripping my Homelite and waving it around like a sword and revving now! now! now!, wearing engine out and wasting precious fuel.

About the time I busted out the kitchen door, she had her back to me and so I saw my advantage and took it: bent bald head forward and ran at her backbone like a battering ram, figuring I'd stun breath out with the blow and she'd loosen grip and I could grab the Homelite before it'd fall and break.

But just as I come within a yard, the saw guttered down to idle so she must've heard me, and she whipped around and raised that shiny red Homelite high over her head and yelled, "Herman Core, you come one inch closer and I'll saw your head off, I swear! I'll cut it clean off and right now, and then I'll saw my own head off so I won't go to jail account of your sorry flesh, so you stay clear of me, Herman Core, and let me do my bidness!" And she ran a few steps at me and revved a mean now or two.

Of course, I won't in no position to butt and grip her then. I had to back off, much as my suckworm went on to gnawing me. So I shooed hands at her and said, "Fine, Lou, you go right ahead. Just set it back in the toolshed time you get done, hear?"

I strode back to basement then, ulcer gnawing, chainsaw nowing, and hit the Korea cot and just stared dull rest of the daytime, rising only to eat or piss or shit.

The nows stopped around seven and I heard Lou pap to the bedroom, then pap to the kitchen and pap-flurry around to fix breakfast and eat it, then set a plate slap on the table for me, then pap outside to open the store.

The nows were stopped, but my mind kept on them. Yessir, the whole time I laid dull-eyed on the Korea cot, I pictured that bitch in her pink nightgown gripping my Homelite like she owned it and revving it so mean and slashing it around like a sword.

After supper, I laid on the cot till night came on and ten o'clock and her bedsprings twitched with her stoutness as she settled in. An hour passed and no springs twitched, no steps papped, and so I knew she won't going down to hollow-dell again. Yessir, she'd found a new way to fret me, gripping my Homelite, and come dawn she'd go back to shed and grip it and rev it again.

Knowing this I decided to take action. Yessir, I rose and wrenched work clothes on and strode outside to the toolshed left end of the house and unbolted the door and gripped up the Homelite and started back to the basement with it.

I reached as far as the bedroom door when, Lord, out of absolute instinct, I creaked it open, stepped in the bedroom, and shut the door quiet behind me. In the pale light of the moon coming in through the window, I saw my old Princess Special just dark bare mattress now, like the bed of somebody died recent and so don't nobody want to sleep in it a while. Then I swung my eyes to Lou's twin and padded to bedfoot and stared down on that mound of her so stout and dark under the dust-ruffle, a-breathing so deep and even, face so wrenched from me and into her pillow.

I looked up and stared on the dark wall above her head and showed me a little picture show. I saw me lay down the Homelite quiet on the carpet, turn around and open the door and pad out of the room and through the hallway and the kitchen and out into the night and down that quarter mile of broomstraw and cedars to the store. I saw me let myself in the front door, pull the light cord, pad to the back pantry, pinch me a couple kitchen matches out of their pack—yeah, Herman, all the matches I'd need—, grip me up a five-gallon gas can out of the corner, lug it to the gas pumps out front and pump it lipping full of Hi-Test, then stride back with it and enter the bedroom again and quick and quiet as a fox when he grips him a chicken slosh that Hi-Test over the carpet and walls in little mean spurts. I'd slosh-spurt till the can was empty and then set it down echo-hollow on the carpet and grip up the Homelite and fire it alive, and right then she'd wake, the cruel bitch, and flick her hand to the lamp and flare it and see my own self and that Homelite alive and lunging at her, and she'd open her fat mouth to squall but couldn't no way because the Homelite-teeth'd be ripping that bitch-throat like it won't no more than a log of rotten poplar. When I'd have got her sectioned into a sufficient number of blood-chunks, I'd pinch up the matches out of my shirt-pocket and strike one, then the other, then stride to the doorsill and flick them back to carpet and then whooooooooooooooooooooooooooosh! I'd see flames roar to the ceiling. Then I'd leg it outside, and in five minutes flat her separate bed, her dust-ruffle, and her stout mean self, not to mention her kitchen and the whole damn tight brick ranch—it'd all be flaming high as the pine crowns on the ridgetop.

So flickered my private picture show on the dark wall above her head that June twenty, 1979, around one in the morning. Time I was done, the suckworm was flaring, my heart was pounding like a piston, and my hand was shaking so hard the Homelite-teeth went to rattling in their groove.

I shut eyes a moment to cool the ulcer and still me, then opened them again on Lou's dark mound a-breathing so deep and even, and I whispered, "Naw, Herman Core, you don't want to do all that. What you want to do is—" And I stopped and just stared wallward again, straining at it, as if it might tell me.

Then, Lord, all a sudden, it came to me what I had to do—came to me like a meteor showering sparks down in black- night August:

"You got to go down, Herman Core. Got to go down to the hollow-dell and just wait and watch and hear awhile. Watch and wait for them strange folks Don Shiver and Callie Smoot and talk with them awhile and hear what they have to say to you."

So I gripped up my Homelite and padded down to the basement and set it on the ce-ment and hit the Korea cot and laid sleepless there till my wristwatch said six o'clock and I knew it was dawn.

Five minutes later I was out in June morning so clear and still I heard the Haw roar a mile down yonder. I strode to the ridgetop and from there looked across at the dogwoods that'd long lost their spine-ache white and now glowed the full green of summer. I aimed my eyes down in the dell, noted the black chopper and the black Volkswagen parked same as mid-April, noted the black single-wide same too but for three cinderblock steps leading down now from doorsill to bloodclay. I noted the chainlink as well and the catamount inside, but, Lord, she won't no more circling slow-slinky her daytime self. Nosir, a yard long inch-rope stretched from a thick collar on her neck to the bottom of an iron stake that stood up a yard out of the bloodclay couple yards left of pencenter. They must've drove it yard-deep or more as it stood up noon-stiff, even though the catamount stretched the rope tight as it could go. Yessir, she was straining on that rope, muscles ridged taut, and she aimed her muzzle at a slab of brown fly-specked meat that was just out of her reach and leaning upside the ce-ment cube what marks state-center. Lord, yes, she was straaaaaaaaaaaaining hard as she could, and mewling and snarling—Lord, I never heard such in all my life—just yenning for that meat. And I remembered I'd not seen meat in there before, least not daytimes. It was absolute plain Lingo fed her some, nighttime maybe, but not near enough for her size. I watched her strain five minutes, buff coat rippling like a fish pond under breeze.

All a sudden the trailer door shot out, slapped metal, and filling up the doorway stood Lingo buck-ass neckid, that thigh-eye tattoo green as the dollar bill it came off of. And cradled in his arms was not no shiny coupler jack I'd mistake for a nigger baby just out of Callie Smoot but big-bone big-basoom Callie Smoot herself, and she was buck-ass neckid, too, and absolute limp like dead, red ribbon and pony-tail dangling down.

Lingo held his pose a moment, then stepped down the cinderblocks slow and formal, like a procession, then stopped on the bloodclay and spoke, "Dead. Dead. Dead. My Natasha. My Gruschenka. My dearest Lo. Dead. Dead. Dead." I'll never forget those words as long as I live on this earth. They dropped down dull as clods of clay plopped on asphalt, one by one.

Then he walked her slow and formal to the gate—Lord, it was swung wide open, I just now noted—and entered the pen and bent down and laid her out su-pine on the bloodclay, her right-waist touching the ce-ment cube and the meat slab that the catamount was straaaaaaaaaining so mewly and snarly after.

He rose then, spread hornbeam arms, then dropped those clay-clod words again, "Dead. Dead. Dead. My Callie is Smoot and dead. Dead. Dead. Dead." Then he turns and walks slow-formal out of the pen and back up the cinderblock steps and into the trailer, leaving the door swung wide. I squint after him but it's too dark inside and his white self fades.

Then I'm aiming eyes on the catamount straaaaaaaaining at the meat-slab and at Callie Smoot, too, who's absolute limp and ain't flickered once, and for a moment I think she is actual dead—poisoned, I'm sure—why sure, I don't know—and Lingo done it.

But then I note a shudder on her like waves in a pond you drop a stone to, and it starts at her hips, rolls slow up her big body till her head goes to whipping side to side, pony tail a-flying. It stops sudden then and her arms swing up to the sky, clasp hands like praying, then quick-plunge down in her bush-cleft, oh Lord! And she goes to rubbing in her groove, back and forth, slow and rhythmic, like some kind of friction, friction for a fire, like I remember'd Lou'd do in the King Size nights those two-three weeks I had me that infection back in '66. I watch her rub and rub, back and forth, going faster and faster and breath getting faster and then high little moans spilling out and head whipping side to side, that pony tail a-flying, and all the time that half-starved catamount not half-foot away and just straaaaaaaaaaaaaining for the meat-slab and for Callie Smoot, too, and Callie Smoot knowing it and so all the faster rubbing and all the shallower breathing and all the louder moaning and her head so whipping side to side I can hear her pony tail slap packed bloodclay like hard steps.

She does that way five minutes and then all a sudden stops absolute still—so quiet I can hear a bobwhite clear as two sweet drops of water yonder. Then a moan starts low, way down deep in her privates, seems like, and then slow uprises through belly and chest and throat to pierce out at last in this wild quavery scream like a frightened woman, or better, like—well, yeah, like a catamount when it's mid-April dawn and she's yenning to breed. The scream peaks, then cuts off sharp like switched off, and then she's lying limp wore out, eyes shut, breaths slowing, and in five minutes she's breathing more or less normal again.

By this time my old puff adder's nigh high as my belt buckle, so without even thinking about it, I'm snaking down the rabbit track, going as quiet and fast as the root snags and white stones will allow. In a minute I'm on the bloodclay and I sneak to the chainlink and stare down on that catamount still straaaaaaaaaining for the meat-slab and for Callie Smoot, too. I aim my eyes on Smoot next and note, Lord, she don't look like she's breathing, and I think, "Lord, Herman, she's done had a hard attack, all that gyratin' ain't easeful for the human heart." So then I stride in the gate and bend over her, recollecting my CPR over Durham Tech ten years back.

But before I can lay my palm on her, I feel, oh Lord, a blunt metal object gouge me back-center. Then comes Lingo's deep-seamless, "Raise high your Gemini, whoever you are, friend or hostile."

I reckoned he meant arms, so I stretched them so high they hurt, shuddering all the time.

"Now, when I remove the device, turn yourself about and face him who is armed, keeping own arms high."

I did as I was told and noted, Lord, Lingo his full self aiming that black rifle at my solar plexus, right where suckworm just then sucked me. He was neckid still but for the red bandana and the black mirror boots and, Lord, some strange red underdrawers looked like old rags tied under and over and every which way. The tattoo eye was on him, left of left thigh and green as the dollar bill it came off of. Looking at him waist on up, I knew I'd seen him somewhere before besides the Mu-seum up on The Hill—but where? I pondered, I strained, and at last it came to me, yeah, he looked from waist up like that Jap fellah in the blowed up photograph above the racked rifle—not an ex-ack copy but you slant his eyes and iron out his hair and slim his muscle to Jap-sinewy and he'd be absolute twin.

I only had a second to whir all this because the next thing I knew he stretched this creepy sneer-smile across his face like you see sometimes in South Wing over Memorial (I know because I had to carry Mama there when she fell out in '57) and then he says, rolling his seamless, "Mr. Core! Ah, yes, you have come for your level. You had forgotten it—when? Yes, April, and we have been, my woman and I, shall we say, rather too occupied in our private study to return it you sooner. Come inside now, and we shall recover it together. We may must forage and ferret, but we shall root it out at last. Come."

And he shoulders the black rifle like a DI and sweeps his free hand behind him—meaning me to go ahead—and I look back at Callie Smoot and note she's still absolute limp, like dead, and that catamount still straaaaaaaaaining at that meat and her big self, too, and Lingo rolls in his seamless, "Let the cruel bitch die, Mr. Core, and come inside now. Your level awaits you. And while we're ferreting, I shall show you world of which you never before dreamed was possible to exist on this abortion of a planet."

I shuddered deep at his words and nigh bid him "'Mornin'" and strode on back to the basement. But then I recollected the gas can in the back pantry, waiting on me, and recollected whyfor I'd come down to the hollow-dell and Smoot and Lingo—my need and yen to hear from them—and so I turned around and strode up the cinderblock steps and into the trailer, Lingo pounding behind in the mirror boots.

He flicked a wall switch behind me and the tubes flickered to white shuddery and I saw the inside was pretty much the same as I'd seen it that night mid-April: the American skins over floors and walls, the Maxway mirror leaned on its side, and, above the mirror, the empty rack for black rifle, the two hary-kary knives, the Jap picture with that PATRIOTISM glittering over it in those lipstick letters cut out of tinfoil. The kerosene heater stood in the exact same spot, near as I could recolleck, and was deadcold now like I'd expect June twenty. The only thing missing was them Maxway stools, stored away, I reckoned, in the back somewhere.

Lingo strode past me, racked the rifle on the rack, then pointed to a moose skin under it and rolled, "Squat, Mr. Core. I shall return with your level."

I did as I was told: squatted on the mooseskin courthouse-style (as I reckoned that was what he meant) and he boot-pounded through a doorway to my left. While he was back in there, I aimed my eyes through the open front door to the chainlink and that catamount still straaaaaaaaining for that meat-slab and Callie Smoot, too, who was still su-pine and limp buck-neckid on the bloodclay. I was worrying on her now, as the stake'd begun to bend a little, inch-rope as taut as it could go. Any minute now, I thought, and that panther'd have her some double meat—the regular slab and Callie Smoot, too.

But I couldn't worry long because Lingo pounded back in the room, wearing the same clothes he'd wrassled the panther in back mid-April: starched fatigues, gunmetal parkah, headband, mirror-boots. He had my maple wood and bubble gripped in his fist and he strode to the heater and set it slap on flat top of it, each level-end sticking out three full inches over the rim. I noted this—even took me a mind-photo—why, I don't know—then watched Lingo boot-pound to the front doorway and furling himself sit down cross-legged on some skunk-skins and face me. He blocked nigh all June light outside and every bit of chainlink and Callie Smoot limp and catamount straaaaaaaaaaaining for meat-slab and her big self, too.

For a minute he just cross-legged it there absolute quiet and stared at me. Then he said, abrupt in the sweat-itchy quiet (I was wearing workshirt and workpants and the trailer hadn't no a.c.), "Co-lor-less, od-or-less, pain-less, poi-son-ous, in-com-plete"—his words dropping down like those clay-clods on asphalt.

Then he was quiet a second, then said, back in his deep seamless, "Did you see that rifle behind you, Mr. Core? The one I racked not five minutes ago?"

I nodded, mouth gone dry and cottony a sudden, like it does when there's a ice storm and I'm in the LTD driving not too fast actually and just as I round a curve it sudden, Lord, goes to sliding right or left.

"Do you know what I am to do with that rifle?"

I shook my head and shuddered, unable to speak for the mouth dryness.

"Come, I'll show you."

He unfurled himself and rose and pounded to the doorway he'd just come out of. And I rose all mouth-dry and shuddery and followed him into a little dust-dim room with a couple of tiny square windows facing out back and yellowed over by old shades. The room smelled of sweaty clothes and something ache-sweet, like Clorox. He flicked on the overhead tubes, and Lord, except for where the windows were, every wall had mirrors floor-to-ceiling and the room was cram-cluttered with weight benches and barbells and dumbells and muscle-pulleys and other kinds of gym-contraptions I didn't know the names to—and all of them were black as road tar and some full of cogs and gears and wires. The room was what I always thought them Korea communist torture places must've looked like. On a narrow two-foot shelf under a window were clustered some little brown drugstore bottles full of pills.

Lingo had come aside me now and stood so close I could feel the heat come off him like a stove and smell his thick sweat.

"I see you are no little amazed, Mr. Core," he rolled in his seamless. "But be not so. My woman abides in a room precisely like this one: devices the same, mirrors the same, even the little shelf and pills the same, all the very same. You can journey anywhere on our abortion of a planet and find no more same than our two rooms. She abides to my south." He pointed out the door and into the living room, toward the opposite end of the trailer, and then rolled on, "We abide apart, Mr. Core, for beings such as we require separate lives in our private study."

All a sudden he thrust a white fist toward a black weightbench all by itself floorcenter, a black barbell with weights racked above it. "These black friends, Mr. Core, do you know what I use them for?"

"Well, sir, I expeck you—" I couldn't finish because he'd long-legged it over some other benches and weights crammed together and strode to the two-foot shelf under the window and gripped up one of the bottles full of pills and rolled, "And these little brown friends? Do you know, Mr. Core, their potent uses?"

I squinted for a label but saw not a one and scratched my bald head and wondered about it.

But I couldn't wonder long as he'd long-legged it back and come to me breathclose and broke out all teethsnarly and guttural, like he hated what he was saying, "I pack on this, Mr. Core!" And he jerked up his parkah hem clear to his throat and flexed up his chest muscle till it was nigh like a shelf you could set a glass of water on, and then he grabbed my hand and clamped it palm down on the mounded muscle, about heart-center. I felt his skin flushwarm and taut, like tent canvas been stretched out in the sun all day.

"Try to dent, Mr. Core," he rasped out again. "Press hard, claw if you like."

I pressed, I clawed even, but could not dent a smidgen. It was like trying to knead bread dough made out of asphalt.

"Now if you feel for pulse, Mr. Core, you'll find no beat beats, correct, Mr. Core? There's pulse down there, somewhere, but my mass occludes it, correct, Mr. Core?"

I felt a full minute, hearing his slow smooth breaths, but caught no heart-pulse, no, not a one, and I nodded my answer, mouth too shudder-dry to speak proper.

"And do you know why, Mr. Core?"

I shook head nosir.

"All this, Mr. Core!" And he made his free hand a fist and punched it at the things in the room, one at a time, speaking on each and every in that same clay-clod-on-asphalt voice he'd used calling Callie Smoot dead, dead, dead: "Dum-bell. Bar-bell. Bench-press. Prea-cher curl. Dead-lift. Squat. And all this for mass, all this for peaks, all this for veins, for deep deep splits, Mr. Core. And last, most deep-splitting of all, my little brown bottle-friends there!" He punched at the window shelf, then rolled on, back in his seamless, "Yes, Mr. Core, my Dianabol, Anavar, Anadrol; my Danocrine, Winstrol, Teslac; my Oreton, Methosarb, Delastryl; and last my, ah, so lovely Android-T, that truest because bluest hottest most deadly fire of them all, not unlike that refiner's fire which burns, ah, so steadily blue in my, ah, so private little heater. They heap up mass, of course, in fierce growth so fast, so immense, but there are costs, Mr. Core, yes, costs! They bald, for instance, oh, yes, they bald quite completely—" and here he reached up with his free hand and, Lord, gripped his hair and headband both and pulled them clean up off his head and held them high like a scalp he might've just torn off some dead Indian or other. Yessir, it was a wig was all, a little too curly and a little too black, and he was bald as a baby's fanny everywhere but on the fringe and even that was thinning, too.

He gave me a full minute to stare at him and then plopped his wig and head band back on his head and adjusted it and then rolled on in his seamless, "And pimple, Mr. Core—yes, they pimple, too, burn you back to your heaped-up time—" and here he reached around and snatched a white handkerchief out of his back pocket and wiped it across his left cheek and then reached out and showed it to me and, Lord, smeared all over it was this makeup-looking stuff color of OD or thereabouts. He let me stare on it awhile, then stuffed the handkerchief back in his pocket and turned his cheek to me where he'd wiped it and I noted about a dozen whiteheads and three-four red pimples in a cluster, and Lord, I just happened to note some wrinkles, too—fine wiggly lines criss-crossing that cheek like I first saw on my own cheek in the bathroom mirror one early morning about ten years ago.

He held that cheek-pose to me awhile, and I thought, "Herman Core, is he fifteen or thirty or forty-five or what?" And looking on those wrinkles—and, Lord, noting, too, some crows feet in his eye corners and a little loose flesh under his jawbone—it came to me sudden with a heart rollover that he won't no thirty but forty-five, maybe older. Lord, here he done fooled not only me and Louise and Bramer but everydamnbody in Midlight.

But before I could wonder longer on this peculiarity—this mystery, if you want to call it that—, he'd faced front again and begun to roll on, still in his seamless, "So there are drawbacks, Mr. Core, to my fast hot little friends—side effects, as the physicians say—but their advantages far outglory—have brought me at last, together with my steel, to that peak and hard of muscle mass toward which I have striven for so long a time and from out of which no heart beats audible to human hand or ear. One feels and hears only the quiet hard flesh quivering with my too too stolid flex."

All a sudden he flicked my hand off his chest and lunged to room-center and in both white fists gripped up the big black barbell racked on the weight bench and with a grunt raised it high over his head, held it still a moment, big shoulders quivering, then slammed it thunder-clatter down on the crammed-up other benches, and the whole trailer shuddered like a bomb'd been dropped in the yard somewhere. Then he sucked a deep breath and threw a boot-kick at the weight bench, clattering it over two-three times till it knocked against another bench and righted itself. Then he looked back at me so bug-eyed and teeth-snarly and red in the face I thought, "Lord, Herman, he's about to have him a stroke!"

But he swallowed sudden and shut his eyes—to calm himself, I reckoned—and then spoke, back in his seamless, "So do you know, Mr. Core, what I am to do with that rifle?"

"No sir," I said, speaking despite my dry mouth and tongue-shudder.

And he rolled out in his deep seamless, but with a break in it now and then, like a wild thing was caught in his throat—a chimney swallow maybe you might hear whippering in a stove pipe summer evenings. He said, "I'm thirty-three, Mr. Core—and have remained thirty-three for eight years and five—thirteen years altogether—and I have come to know I can remain thirty-three no longer. And so I've resolved to murder this!" He slapped his chest a whap! flat sound like a book dropped on concrete in a empty warehouse. "Yes, Mr. Core, destroy this, a splendid specimen I've been building these eight years and five—these thirteen years, all the years I've remained thirty-three—and just for the pleasure of murdering it. Yes, Mr. Core, the pleasure, the gut-coiling, spine-aching pleasure.

"But 'twas not always thus, Mr. Core, no indeed. For when I began a dozen and one years ago, I had no brown bottle friends—no, I pumped the black iron only—pumped to attain pure body-relish—the body complete at peak of prime, which all men know is not 18, not 25, not 32, but 33, two years from the great high-noon. But then, oh—but a big "but then"—oh, then, I met my Callie Smoot, named different then, comrade pumpess in sweat-redolent spa. It was there she spoke so sweetly with her luring alluring tongue—promised body prime forever—ah, yes! memory caresses it well!—but, alas, her tongue did turn to teeth, and she taught me with those teeth, not mouth-teeth but jaws of death, those savage and hateful underteeth so loathesome to any man in prime body—you have seen them, have you not, Mr. Core?"

All a sudden I recollected Louise in her leg-rear-back posture of '64—the one she'd used all that spring—and, Lord, I knew then exactly what he meant, and my mouth went so cottony I could only nod and did, and he rolled on, "Yes, Mr. Core, the woman-underteeth that, at the time of male-life-noon, gleam so shark-like before us, reminding that all is only flesh, and clay, and dust, and so doomed to wither and die. It was such dark and grievous knowledge she gave me one night in spa-closet—withdrew sweet tongue and bared bitter teeth and so showed me body's hateful end no matter how hard, how long, how often I'd pump. Ah, the body, Mr. Core. It's the women who know the body and all its deadly ills, and Callie, now Smoot, when she withheld sweet tongue, she tried to hurl me down to despair, showed only bitter underteeth gleaming so shark. But she did fail—yea verily—for I did outsmart her, performed the necessary—shall we say—operation?—and without anesthetic, my sweet revenge, and, oh, she was a brave lass, Lo was. And then we left spa and bought own benches and bells, both dumb and bar, and, yes, the little brown friends, and lived in lonely cabin edge of Hill and pumped bells both dumb and bar and popped brown friends, the truest fires of all. And then, when we'd both grown big—this took but a summer with our fast hot friends—we sold our greater lendings and many smaller, too, and bought chainlink and singlewide, skins and panther—never mind when or where—and came down here, fast in our pact to murder our hunks before time, cruel bitch, could infuse her own black poison.

"You see, Mr. Core—" And you know what he did next? He did a thing I never thought he could possibly do: he actually changed to human being—or leastways near as you could get to human, considering a man in his position. Yessir, he knelt down before me and clasped his hands like praying and looked up at me and that sneer on his face broke to serious and he moaned like a boy of twenty, "Mr. Core, my grandfather once said, 'Don, don't ever grow old,' but being nine I never understood what he meant, and now I do, and I don't want to grow old and wither. Age, it terrifies me so!"

And I was just about to cry myself and reach out and hug him and try to comfort him, as he'd stirred some dark pangful snake down in my deep gut. But before I could even step to him, he changed sudden—his sneer come wrenching back across his face and he yelled out "Fucking bitch!" all teeth-snarly and raspy, then jumped up and strode to the black bench and righted it and slid it back to roomcenter, then gripped up the black barbell and racked it over the bench. Then he lay down su-pine on the bench and reached up his hornbeam arms and gripped the barbell in white fists and raised it up off the rack and lowered it to his chest. Then, whooshing breath out, he raised it slow till elbows locked, then lowered it to chest, sucking breath in.

He went on that way awhile, pumping slow, then started grunting out these numbers—"Two one-ah; two one-ah; two one-ah"—just like that, slow and rhythmic, "two" on the breath-whoosh raise, "one-ah" on the breath-suck lower.

He grunted on like that awhile, then quit the numbering and pumped quiet for a time. Then I heard come spurting out of his mouth the strangest sound—sounded like "rub-dub-ah, rub-dub-ah, rub-dub-ah," near as I can recollect—and I thought, "Herman, you done heard that sound before somewhere, but where?" And it come to me with a heart rollover, "Lord, Herman, it's the human heart! Yessir, it's the exack same sound a human heart makes when it's pumpin' fine and healthful—pumpin' just as regular as Lingo himself a-pumpin' them weights."

But I didn't have time to wonder on it as he stopped his pumps sudden, barbell raised to elbow-lock and chest mounded and ridged up with veins twisting every which way, and he broke out in this laugh so shudder-creepy I shiver even now just thinking about it.

That laugh was absolute enough for me, so I whipped around and started out of the room. The laugh stopped mid-creep, like it was switched off, and Lingo rolled in his seamless, "Shut the door behind you, Mr. Core. I need dearly the air-less, the od-or-less, the pain-less, the poi-son-ous, Lord Death's—or, shall I say, Lady Death's?—clean and, oh, so pale blue flame."

If I'd known what he meant—as I do know now, not six months after—I might could have saved their lives—his and Callie Smoot's both, but I did not so know, not even a smidgen, and so padded out of the room and shut the door as I was told and found myself among the skins again.

The front door was still wide open and so I strode to it and gazed out, looking for Callie Smoot su-pine on the bloodclay and that catamount straaaaaaaaining for her and that meat-slab, too, but, Lord, she was clean gone! And the catamount won't no more straaaaaaaining but lying limp on her side, cheek flush on the bloodclay and nose away from me. I thought a moment she was dead but then as I stared on her I noted buff coat rising and falling, breathing deep and even, and then knew she won't dead, just sleeping, and I whooshed out in relief.

I turned around then and strode to the kerosene heater to grip up my level and head back to the basement. I reached down to pinch it by an end stuck out beyond the stove-top, and I touched it and, Lord, it was so hot I snatched fingers back and sucked on them. Then I noted how hot the room was, like a closed-up attic in August, and I noted heat wavers rising up above the stove top like sliver-snakes made of air, and I whispered, "Lord, Herman Core, that heater was deadcold when you strode in here not a hour-two ago, and now it's on absolute high. Someone done turned it up and on purpose, too, but who? Callie Smoot, that's who, but why?"

I left that question hanging a moment and raised my right work shoe and kicked the level off and watched it drop on a skunk skin and lay there and smoke a little. I knelt down and just a-bleeeeeeew di-rectly on it and shoe-rolled it over a couple times and patted the skunk skin to make sure no fire. When I had the level cooled to where I could touch it, I pinched it up and started back for the basement. I got all the way to the cinderblock steps when that question came back to me like a light, "Callie Smoot, that's who, but why?" And I whispered, "You can't go back to the basement yet, Herman Core. You got to know the answer to 'Callie Smoot, but why?' and besides that, you done heard from Lingo, heard plenty from his tongue and seamless, but you ain't yet heard at all from her—what her tongue has to tell you—and since she ain't in the chainlink, she's in her room for sure, waitin' on you, though she don't know it yet."

So I laid my level on the top step and strode back in the trailer. Lord, it was absolute oven now, but my mind kept too much on that "Callie Smoot, but why?" to fret over it. I strode to a door left of the Maxway mirror and twisted the knob and creaked the door open and saw a room just as tiny and dim and sweaty-clothes smelling as Lingo's, even the same twin windows yellowed over with old shades.

I stepped on in, heard metal clank on metal in a little flurry about three foot front of me, and looked down and saw this big pale shape of what seemed like a woman lying on a weight bench in the dust-dimness and, the woman was raising up and lowering down a barbell with a cluster of weights on each end of it. It was Callie Smoot—I knew from her bigness—and I listened close and caught her breath-whoosh on the upraise, then her breath-suck on the downlower, just like Lingo in his pumping.

She didn't seem to note me standing there, just kept on with that raise-then-lower, pumping regular and rhythmic. So I groped on the wall aside me and found me a light switch and flicked it up and the flourescent tubes shuddered on, and I could see her full self su-pine on the weight bench and legs astraddle it. Her knees were jutting out at me, and she was absolute neckid, her molasses bush hiding those underteeth, her ponytail and red ribbon dangling down over the bench-end opposite. I watched her white arms pumping so regular, her basooms heaving and falling as she sucked breath in, whooshed it out.

I expected she'd note me now, in that white shudder-light, but, Lord, she don't stop that rhythm one bit, don't even look up at me, though I knew she knew I was nigh di-rect over her—had to know, lessen she was blind, and I knew she won't blind. Then I think, "Lord, Herman, maybe she's deef," and I quick-clap my hands and she stops sudden on the upraise. She stays still a second, then lowers the barbell onto the rack, shimmy-slides herself out from under it, and sits up on the bench-end and just lays hands in her lap and stares at me, her face pale and press-lipped like I saw through the picture window back mid-April.

Then, Lord, I note her arms and shoulders all muscle-ridged like a man's, and just then she reaches up a white hand and palm-wipes it over her left cheek and then holds her palm out for me to see, and on that palm's a smear of some sort of makeup absolute white—a tree-toad, fish-belly white—and she lays hand back in her lap and turns that cheek in my direction and thrusts it forward and I bend down and see, Lord, not no whiteheads or pimples but this dark skin kind of cross between leather and OD, and these fine wiggly lines—wrinkles—and then she tucks her chin down nigh to her throat and I note her hair molasses color but roots white as onion-hearts, and I know then she ain't no gal or even young woman but fifty if a day, and she raises her head and faces me again, eyes slitted now and mouth no longer press-lipped but kind of smirky. Then all a sudden she does a double-take at me, down about belt-level, and bugs eyes down there and then rears head back and opens her mouth and laughs this creepy laugh, exactly like Lingo's but woman-high and shrill, and I shudder clean on down my spine. She goes on with that laugh a full minute, seems like, me getting more and more itch-sweaty in the process, and then I know something's wrong on me, something funny down about belt-level, so I bend over and look down there and see, Lord, it's my puff adder bulging my work pants and raised up high as a early carrot. And she goes on to laughing, so shrill and so creepy, and then all a sudden she stops, like she's switched off.

But she keeps her mouth as wide open as it can go and gaping up at me, like she's inviting me to go dental and look in, and I take her in-vite and go dental and bend eyes down to a inch from her lips and arc my hand over my eyebrows and peer down inside. I see mud-red gums and some silver fillings and a gold crown or two and teeth brown-stained, a few of them missing, and for a moment I wonder, "Herman, what you supposed to look for, as her mouth's not a whole lot different from Lou's I used to note when she'd wake up by me face to face in the old King Size and yawn especial deep."

But rather than whisper, "Heck, Herman, she ain't got a thing to tell you, not a blessed word," and then go on back to the basement, I go on to peering—exactly why, I don't know—like maybe I peer long enough I might note a thing or two I done never noted before about the human mouth—and besides that, if I stayed and went on to peering long enough, Lord, she might eventually quit this pantomime and creepy laugh stuff and talk words to me—tell me about Lou and me and my Homelite and why I'd took to the cot in basement and why Lou took to the King Size five years before, and why just a hour ago I wanted to chainsaw her and then burn her and the whole tight house with her, and why we stopped in the first place and sold the King Size and moved to separate beds.

I peered in that wide-open mouth five full minutes, seemed like, and it came to me sudden with a shudder so deep and cold her mouth seemed to quiver before me, "Herman Core, that gal-young-woman-old woman, whatever she may be—that woman-friend of Lingo's he calls Callie Smoot—why, Herman Core, she ain't got no tongue! Nosir, not a tongue in her head, not even a flap of it!" And I recollected Lingo's "without no anesthetic" rolled so deep and seamless, and I bugged eyes and shuddered and my deep-gut coiled like a snake was down in there someone'd just touched a ice-pick to.

And Callie Smoot must've seen me bug and shudder, as she broke out in that creepy laugh again, shriller and louder then before.

"That's, Lord, enough for you, Herman Core," I whispered. "That's slap all you need to hear from them folks." And I whipped around and work-shoe pounded it out of the room and slammed the door behind me and strode through that hot room lit up with the white shuddery and out into the ah! fresh June air and down the cinderblock steps and stopped on the bloodclay to catch breath a minute and still and cool myself.

Breath caught and body cooled as much as I could expect in work clothes on a sweaty June twenty around five p. m., I glanced back at the black trailer and seeing the door swung wide turned around and started back, aiming to shut it, but then I remembered the heater was on high and so knew they'd need air and so turned back around and aimed eyes into the chainlink.

The stake stood six inches off the vertical, and the inch-rope snaked over the bloodclay to the neck of the catamount who still laid sidewise, face away from me and limp like dead—wore out, I reckoned, from all her long straining.

Something looked missing, though, and so I looked longer and noted, Lord, the meat slab was gone—all et up but for some brown scraps aside the ce-ment cube what marks state-center. Just then came a loud whap! behind me and I glanced back and noted the trailer door was absolute shut and I remembered the windows were shut, too—"and that stove on absolute high," I whispered"—and all a sudden, just as sudden as that door's sharp whap!, my belly coiled absolute cold and my heart did a rollover and I turned back to the catamount lying limp on the bloodclay and aimed eyes on her ribs.

Some cow-flies were clustered on them and had been so awhile, but that buff coat don't twitch, not even a flicker, and so I stride to the chainlink and stare on her longer and note, yeah, the ribs rise and fall all right but not a smidgen regular, maybe two-three times one minute and six-seven times the next.

The next thing I know I'm losing all caution: I sing gate open (Lord, she don't flicker even then) and stride into the pen and crouch over her so we're nigh face to face. The cowflies are still on her, so I reach out and shoo them away, brushing her buff coat. Her ears flick and she sloooooow upturns her face to me—can't lift it, just upturns it—and she looks at me not with bright eyes mostly yellow like you'd expect at five o'clock on a bright June twenty, but eyes glassy-gazy and full of black pupil.

She blinks at me—once. And then—Lord, what happened next I'll never disremember so long as I live on this earth: this great shudder drops on down like right out of the sky and grabs a-hold of her and shakes her and wracks her every inch—from the crown of her head to the tip of her tail—and then her mouth gapes wide as it can go and out of it flies this high-pitch wild-shivery sceeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeam such as I have never heard before in all my life and don't ever expect to hear so again. Near as I can describe it, it was like you grip up her first Louiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiise! a-spouting up so sweet-fire fine that mid-April dawn, and you throw it in a cook-pot and fork in a dash of Lingo's motorbike cry when he spread arms to wrassle her, then spoon in a little of Callie Smoot's and Lingo's creepy laughs, and, Lord, yes, even a little of the scream Lucille Cole must've sung out when that heater fire clung on her and wouldn't let go and she ran out in her yard yelling for Bramer to put her out, and, Lord, double yes, add heaping tablespoons of Lou's chainsaw voice rasping out that "No sense in foolin' ourselves no more!" and that "Don't you touch me, Herman Core, don't even lay a finger on me!" and that "Her-man, who's that good-lookin' fellah come in the store this afternoon?"—you throw in all these cries and screams and rasps and mix them up together and you'll hear the screeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeam of that catamount when the shudder came on her and kept on a-coming three-four-five-six times and wracked her every inch.

She shuddered and screamed just a half-minute but it seemed like a hour so wild and pangful it was, and then it stopped sudden, scream and shudder both, like they were switched off, and quick as a clod of asphalt her face dropped down cheek first onto the bloodclay and stayed there, tongue flopping out all twisted from between her teeth and turning slowly pink to purple. Crouched, I kept my downstare on her, noted her ribs neither rose nor fell, noted her buff coat lay absolute still, like a fishpond on a dead August dogday when even the dragonflies and skitterbugs are sleeping.

I couldn't say nor think a word awhile, just kept my downstare on her still coat, on her tongue slow-turning purple. Then I swung my eyes to the ce-ment cube what marks state-center and noted the meat-slab scraps now clustered with flies, and then swung them back to the buff coat and the tongue twisting out. When the tongue turned about as purple as it could get, some words finally crept into my mind, and I whispered them slow, like counting them, like tasting them, and they were bitter as bad milk on my tongue: "Poisoned. Shiver Lingo. Meat slab. Callie Smoot. Tongue. Dead. Dead. Dead."

Grasshoppers and such'd been chirring June twenty at it the whole time since I left the single-wide. But just as I whispered my last "dead," they sudden quieted and the hollow was absolute still, like all down here was a-mourning and a-grieving her. The stillness went on a minute maybe, and then a bobwhite piped its sweet two drops and the hoppers and such started up again, chirring loud as before.

I didn't get much chance to listen to them, though, because just as I raised eyes from my long downstare and aimed them on the green dogwoods where I reckoned the bobwhite'd piped from, those trees—Lord, I swear it!—turned sudden to the spine-ache white of April and begun to blur and spin, and before I could call out "Louise! Hep me!" my eyes lost all their light and I tipped back, felt crown strike clay.

In that deep faint I dreamed it was a day in late winter all sunny and cold and I was high in the air in my work clothes strapped in the harness of a bloodred parachute waterdarked along the rim and floating down oh so soft and easy toward some place on this earth I couldn't yet recognize I was still so high. When I got within five hundred foot of the ground, I made out clusters of pine crowns below and a long rolling pasture now brown fescue, and right in the middle of it, under a cluster of oaks so bare they looked like smoke floating, Lord yes, that old clapboard Carolina T that bootlegger lived in back in the '30s—the one killed his wife with a hatchet—and I knew then I was headed down to Bramer Cole's back forty slap center of it.

As I floated down closer, I noted the house had a tin roof shining in the sun like a sheet of ice, noted the vertical of the T pointed di-rect to Bramer's fishpond about a quarter mile away through the pasture, noted that fishpond was so dry there were mudcracks from shore down to deepcenter.

In ten minutes maybe I struck the brown fescue and rolled head over heels awhile and then stood and unbuckled the harness and stepped out of it and let the chute drift off. Then I gazed on that Carolina T and noted it won't at all that weathered black I remember but absolute white—spine-aching white—like dogwoods in mid-April when they've just burst out of smoke-color. And I looked for windows and saw not a one, just the white clapboards and the tin roof shining so icy. I began to stride to it, but after a minute I saw the T no closer and wondered whyfor and looked down and noted I was walking in bloodclay absolute wet, my work-shoes squish-squashing along and barely able to lift themselves.

I walk what seems like hours and at last I reach the steps of the shed porch and look up and see, Lord, Lingo's and Callie Smoot's catamount sitting alive on her haunches there and staring yellow-eyed at me, black pupils pinpricks. She looks at me not threatening and not peaceful either, just curious, like "Well, what in the world?" I look for a door behind her but, Lord, there ain't one—just that solid white of clapboards.

But I don't get to wonder over it because the next thing I know the catamount just o-pens her mouth, Lord, wide as she can go! And out of that mouth, the biggest wide open mouth I have ever seen in my life and don't ever expect to see so again—ever—out of that mouth, I say, comes actual words! And the words go, "Come, Mr. Core. Let me show you," in the voice of Lingo—his deep seamless, not his snarly. And she keeps her mouth open, like inviting me to go dental and peer in. I hesitate, though, like anybody naturally would in this situation, and my heart does a rollover. Then the panther says, "Be not afraid, Mr. Core. Peer in. Peer deep. Peer your full fill, Mr. Core." Again it's Lingo's seamless, and she yawns wider than before—if that's possible—and I step up the steps and bend me down and bring my eyes to a inch from her whiskers, and she says, "Closer, Mr. Core. Closer," in Lingo's seamless, and so I bring my bald crown all the way to between her lips and peer down inside and see cat teeth, of course, and mud-red gums and mouth-roof, but, Lord, I don't see a tongue in sight, not even a flap! But before I can wonder over it I note some bright red sore way back on her throat, about the size of a gnat—a ulcer, seems like, as it's caved in at the top and looks drooly. All a sudden, this red sore starts, Lord, a-grooooooooowing, and it grows on up to about cowfly size and stops. Then, out of the center of it, that caved-in top so drooly, a little old snake sticks his head—a puff adder dwarf, I could tell from the brown of it, like pinestraw in winter—and he has his own mouth, too, and he yawns it wider than I ever seen any snake yawn in my whole life—I never expected a puff adder could yawn so wide, and a dwarfy at that—and, Lord, out of his mouth, too, comes a human voice, again Lingo's, his seamless, not snarly, and it goes, "Rub-dub-ah, Rub-dub-ah, Rub-dub-ah." It goes on like that ten-eleven times and then stops sudden, as if switched off, then rolls actual words, "Dianabol, Anavar, Anadrol. Denocrine, Winstrol, Teslac. Oreton, Methosarb, Delastryl"—just like that. Then he stops, draws his head back down into the sore and the sore shrinks to gnat size and then it's clean gone and all I can see is the bare cat-throat red as bloodclay and no tongue and the sharp white teeth at my eye corners.

There's quiet a moment except for her deep even breaths and then comes out of her another voice and human, too, but this time, Lord, it's this woman's voice I ain't never heard before—a voice part educated, like Hill folks talk, and part twangy country, like out of Benson or Lillington where they speak like rusty hinges—and the voice up and says, "Follow the T, Herman Core. Which end. Where end. When end. Don't know. Follow. Feel. Follow. South end? South wing? Follow wing. Follow end. Begin end. Begin to end. End end. End to end. End this Smoot and Lingo."

And, Lord, it came to me right then in my dream this was Callie Smoot speaking before she was Smoot and named somebody else or other—Moore maybe, not Smoot—when she was, Lord, oh, young and fine-lookin' and just starting out, not yet hitched to any man, much less Lingo.

All a sudden, I heard a wild scream off to the right of the shed porch, up by a cedar copse about fifty yards yonder, and I whipped to my right and noted this woman on fire running out of that copse and down the fescue away from me. I squinted at her and saw, Lord, she was Louise her full self—how I knew I don't know, I just knew—and she was all afire, like I said, and not no yellow or orange fire but blue fire like a pilot light in a propane heater, and the flames clung on her head-to-foot and she was screaming like a siren and running wild to a late-model car parked under a big elm tree bare now and shape of a vase, the ex-act twin of Bramer's in his west pasture. I squinted tighter and saw the car was maroon with a cream-color roof—Lord, it was me and Lou's LTD, '77 model, and Louise was on full fire and legging for it.

I watched her yank open the driver's door and slide inside and wrench the door slam shut and roll down the window and, Lord, those flames flew out, just a-licking. And then she must've started it as I heard it revving hard, but, Lord, not like no regular LTD but a now! now! now! like my Homelite rasping out in winter woods. And then she back-roared the car to the elm trunk and aimed the hood di-rect at me, where I was standing on the shed porch of the Carolina T. Three times she flashed the headlights, revved again that now! now! now!—all the while her window open and flames shooting out. Then she lunged it, roared it straight on at me, black smoke a-jetting out behind her, and I whipped around and saw, Lord, the panther'd clean gone! But a door was on the clapboards now, a thin door and absolute black, and just then it swung wide open, like on its own volition. I took advantage of it, as a body would naturally do in my situation, and quick strode through it and slammed it behind me and shot the dead bolt and crouched down in the dust-dimness and aimed my eye through the keyhole. I saw that LTD loom up closer and closer, blue flames flying out, and just before it hit, I flinched my eye away, and then it hit whap!—somewhere left of shed-porch, sounded like—and the whole house shook so hard I was expecting it to collapse on down around me. But it stayed upright, somehow, and I looked out through the keyhole and saw the LTD had wrenched itself around and was tearing back toward that vase elm, fire flying out both windows now, driver and passenger. I saw it strike the elm-trunk head on, and right in their places—vase-elm and LTD—gouted up about the biggest mushroom ball of fire I ever seen this side of the atom bomb. Strange to say, though, it was a fire absolute quiet, not a sound anywheres during or after, and when the flames settled down and I could see the elm's black skeleton and the black shell of the LTD, there come a sharp crack behind me, and I turned and in the dust-dimness of that Carolina T noted a door-joist drop sudden and whap! the wood floor in a burst of dust. Then some plaster pieces dropped two-three whaps on the floor. Then the whole house seemed to crack apart and start collapsing on down around me, and in the loud roar-rush, like a stream done broke out of its banks, I opened my mouth to yell, "Louise! Hep me!" but found, Lord, no word would come, not even the L, and I worked my mouth a minute and recognized with a cold belly coil, Lord, my own tongue, it was clean cut out, won't even a flap!

V

I woke in absolute night, crown right pangful where it had struck blood-clay. I shut eyes and held still till the pang dimmed on down to tolerable. When I opened them, I saw black night arching over and chock full of stars, a million of them, seemed like. Out of the left corner of my left eye I caught a half moon about tree-top level, so I knew it was midnight or a little ways after. When the crown pang dimmed on down to where I could raise, I did just that—sat halfway up and leaned back on my elbows. I looked down along my work shirt and work pants and work shoes—all the way to the catamount lying limp dark dead at the heels of them. And, Lord, it sudden came to me in the night that her body made the beam of a Christian cross of which I was the upright, the trunk.

I raised my eyes a little, saw the black singlewide and chopperbike and Volkswagen, saw that picture window still lit up with the white shuddery. Then I remembered flickers of my dream, whirred through the cat's strange words in Lingo's seamless and in that woman's half-educated, half rusty-hinge voice I was sure was Callie's when she won't named Smoot but Moore. Then I remembered the catamount and the huge shudder that came down on it like a fist out of the sky and its wild scream come after, and my belly coiled so cold I shuddered myself and had a heart rollover and my mouth turned dry as cotton and sweat broke out and I whispered, "Lord, Herman Core, them folks is— Lord, it was five o'clock when I strode out of the singlewide and then the door slapped whap! and then the catamount died so sudden, meat-slab poisoned, and then I looked up at the green dogwoods and they begun a-spinnin' white and then I rolled backwards and fainted on the bloodclay and had that dream. Why, Herman, it's been seven-eight hours since and that kerosene heater and shut door and windows shut, too, I'm sure of it, and, Lord, they don't know no better 'n to keep a unvented stove—why, Herman Core, them folks by now is—"

I sat all the way up then and scrambled to my feet and strode out of the pen and up the cinderblock steps and wrenched at the black door but it was absolute locked! So I whipped around and in a minute or less I'd drug out some stray cinderblocks from under the singlewide and made a pile of them aside the picture window and stood on them and leaned against the siding and with my hand cupped over my eyebrows peered through the pane and into the white shuddery, and, Lord, that hand was a-trembling so hard I had to grip it still with the other one.

What I saw next I won't never forget as long as I live on this earth.

I saw Lingo and Callie Smoot lying limp su-pine neckid on the animal skins—the all American stuff, nothing exotic. They laid feet to feet, soles a foot apart, arms stiff at their sides, palms up and cupped—that corpse-posture Louise showed me once when she was doing yoga and stuff back in '69. Except for Lingo's thigh-eye green as the dollar bill it came off of, their skin was fish-belly tree-toad white against the blacks and browns and buffs of the rest, and their nails were purple as Ripple, and their ribs never rose one single time, so I knew they were as dead as they could be. Which didn't surprise me at all, seeing as how the trailer'd been closed tight as a drum for quite a while and that Western Auto hadn't no vents and the heat wavers'd been rising off it. So didn't nothing I saw surprise me at all, like I said.

And you know what? A thing gory and brutal—what you'd see on a Hitchcock re-run on the TV—that wouldn't've surprised me either: say, Callie Smoot squatting over su-pine Lingo and he's alive and adder up stiff and she's holding a blood-drippy hary-kary knife in one hand and with the other hand she's reaching down into the jag she's just finished cutting in him, about belt high, and then with the same hand she squeezes up all his insides—all the 'testines and liver and spleen and such and all greasy and smoking and pink—and then rubs them on her face and licks at them and when she gets her fill she lays down the hary-kary and reaches for his adder and pumps it like a lever and then Lingo reaches a hand in her cleft and rubs in it slow and rhythmic and then gropes on the skins beside him and grips the black rifle and raises it and points the barrel-end at her throat and just at the peak and shudder of bloom—his bloom and her bloom both—his deep grunt and her yelling all whippery, like me and Louise when we come—squeezing the trigger and pow!—blowing blood sprays and throat-shreds and vocal cords and buff hair and great big gobbets of brains all over the American skins till they look like a watercolor of somebody over South Wing or other. Nosir, wouldn't none of that stuff or worse have surprised me in the least, considering what all I done heard and saw that June twenty, dawn o'clock to five.

But, like I said before about my mid-April dreamy of me and Lingo a-leveling together, don't none of that stuff ever happen in real life, and didn't then either that little after midnight, tweny-one June, 1979, and so what I actually saw in that white shuddery I'll never forget so long as I live on this earth. I still have dreams about it.

What I saw, simply, was first this peculiar smile on Callie Smoot—a smile I'd seen before somewhere but where? And it came to me sudden, and I whispered, "Lord, yes, Herman, that Greek face or other on one of them vases up in the Mu-seum top of The Hill." And I looked at Lingo's dead face and saw similar smile, only his was crooked in places—dented, you might say—because two-three little cricks of blood were coiling out from between his shut lips and down his chin and over his throat till they drip-dropped down into that long deep cleft center of his chest. The cleft was right at bank-full then, and as I went on to staring on it, the blood brimmed over onto his chest muscle and trickled down his ribs in three-four little cricks and dripped on some skunk-skins beside him, making splotches the size of vanilla wafers or thereabouts.

Lord, I didn't want to do it, but I gripped up my sheer will-force and just made me look back on his smile—on his lips and the way they were broken-like, dented-like, like before he died he must've suffered pangs worse than any he'd ever suffered before—pangs all the worse for a thing he'd expected to happen to some folks, like Callie, but not never expected would happen to him.

Lord, those lips and that smile! I wish even now I hadn't gone to studying them so. The reason being it was them and them only made me raise eyes then, raise them slooooowly up—see Maxway mirror on its side reflecting everything, see black rifle racked above it in brackets bolted through the skin of a polar bear, see the two hary-kary knives racked on either side of it, see that blowed up photograph of that half-neckid, slim-muscley, Jap-looking fellah all balled up in sweat and teeth gritted white as toothpaste as he two-fisted out his big Jap-sword in front of him, see the letters PATRIOTISM cut out of that tin foil someone'd rubbed lipstick over, and, last, see—Lord, yes, I'm coming to it now, wish I'd never seen it—waaaaaaaaay up above the PATRIOTISM, near up to the ceiling, all by itself, this stubby pink meat-like thing. I couldn't bring myself to look at it yet, so I glanced back down toward the floor and noted one of the Maxway stools pushed up against the mirror, and di-rect under the rifle—Lord, I didn't know why I hadn't seen it before—and I noted a big black hammer on the seat of it, and I looked down to the stool-legs and noted on either side a few blood-drops on the same moose-skin I'd sat on not eighteen hours ago when I looked out at the catamount straining for that slab of meat and Callie Smoot, too. I looked back up toward the ceiling again—not wanting to at all but having to—needing to—why I did not know then and do not wholly know to this day. Yessir, I aimed eyes back up and squinted hard as I could and saw hanging straight down from a twenty-penny nail pierced through the skin of the polar bear this slim pink meat-looking thing color of salmon, only darker, and maybe three-four inches in length. It was a couple inches wide at the top and ragged and bloody along the edge there and it tapered down to a little tip at the bottom, and all down the surface of it were these little smears of what looked like dark blood or bloodclay, I couldn't tell which, my eyes'd become so shuddery.

I managed to keep stare on it one more minute and noted this single blood-drop (claydrop?) go rolling slow down a straight little seam in the center, hang a second on the little tip, and then drip on down to the mooseskin below and make a red splotch size of a vanilla wafer or thereabouts.

My belly coiled me cold and queasy then—so queasy I quickspun around on my cinderblock and bent over and put hands on my knees and as the sweat popped out all over me wretched up onto the bloodclay the two-three ounces of what was left of the Lou-supper I'd eaten over twenty-four hours ago.

When I'd wretched my fill, I stood quiet till the sweat dried on me and belly-pang dimmed on down to tolerable. Then I whispered, "Heck, Herman, you get on back to the basement and leave them folks be. Somebody or other—maybe Bramer—'ll come along and find 'em and call an ambulance to take 'em on back up to The Hill where they come from." And I aimed eyes on my level that laid on the top stair-step to my left, caught that bubble winking in the half-moon's light, and reached down to grip it—the calming and easeful maple-wood. But half way to it, I recollected that all what I had to go back to was the dust-dim dank and the old cold Korea cot and the endless days of ceiling-stare and nights of Lou-pap and bed-spring twitch and squeak and the three-time-a-day strides to the kitchen to eat absolute alone the Lou-stuff she'd slapped on the table for me, and last, and dim-dank-deadest of all, that Homelite waiting on me down on the ce-ment by the Korea cot and that gas can and pack of kitchen matches in the store's back pantry, and I whispered, "Not yet, Herman. You can't go back yet a while. You need you to look back inside that white shuddery and squint on Callie Smoot and see she don't talk to you—her smile leastways. You can forget Lingo's bent and broken one—not to mention his deep seamless (and his snarly, too) as it's done been Callie-cut out of him and hung up on a nail for good, a-drippin'."

And I so raised up and peered back in the white shuddery and aimed my eyes on the smile of Smoot and noted it won't just contentful, won't just pleasureful—but was absolute peaceful, and sweet, Lord, so sweet you'd bust out crying just looking at it—like she mayhap've suffered through pangs I hadn't never dreamed a person, man or woman, was capable of suffering through, and at last she come through them and survived and done even come to some kind of wisdom from them all and they didn't no more a-fret her and so made her sweet. Yessir, I stared on that smile, her thin lips like a moon-sliver at sunset when a little pink cloud just brushes it.

And as I gazed on it, I whirred my mind through the dream again—came to the cat mouth opening and her words in the half-educated half-rusty-hinged voice out of Benson or Lillington that I was sure was Callie's when she was Moore, not Smoot—"and is so now," I whispered, "in her smile so sweet-peaceful it's nigh absolute joy and something else, too, but what I don't yet know but will"—I whirred to her words, her "Follow the T," and it came to me so shudder-sudden I near toppled off the cinderblock, "Why, Herman, she means—yeah, that Carolina T so spine-ache white, and she said to follow it, but where did it point?" And then I saw and knew—the smile gave it to me right then, how I don't know—and I whispered, "A T, yeah, and it was absolute white, and a T's a, why, yeah, nigh a Christian cross, so it's white cross, yeah! I need me to go on up to White Cross and go up now, this early dark, but how?"

I thought of the LTD sitting now maroon and dark and cream color roof on the parking pad by the kitchen, but then I remembered how in my dream it'd Lou-revved now! now! now! and roared and raced, flames flying out, and struck that vase-elm whap! and the mushroom of flame that burst up after and then the Carolina T breaking apart and collapsing down in plaster-bursts around me, and I knew there won't no way I'd set foot in no LTD.

"But what car I drive then, Herman Core?" I whispered. "And if not car, what other manner of transportation?"

I stared on the smile again.

"Aim eyes behind you, Herman Core," it said, lips still still—I swear it. "And the first thang they light on you get your ass on and drive."

I did as the smile so told me—turned around and let eyes light where they would—and the first thing I noted was Lingo's black motorbike with those long skinny forks slanting down into wheels hardly bigger than thread-spools—his chopper of the kind you hear nigger-driven down a lone black-top in the dead still nights of August.

"Lord, Smile, I ain't never before drove one of them things," I whispered, and I peered back into the white shuddery and stared again on that smile of Callie Smoot, once Moore and now Moore again as far as I was concerned, and the lips seemed to shine like a crescent moon in blackest night and once more spoke actual words, lips still still—I swear it, "Fret not, Herman Core. Just keep me close. Keep me not only in the picture show of your mind, but deep down, oh, deep, down where ulcer once flared and gnawed and may so flare and gnaw again but now cold coils—keep me down there, too, as you follow the T, and you shall know how to drive Don Shiver's black chopper. Just keep me, is all—keep me joy-smile and grief-smile—yes, grief-smile, too. You'll know very soon how much grief, too. Keep me, Herman Core. And do one thing more: love me."

Hearing her words—and, oh, she seemed right then to lose every bit of that half-educated, half rusty-hinge—seemed to sing now like honeysuckle on a warm-breeze day in May—yeah, the smile was "she" now, not Callie and not no actual person you could name, just "she" in singing warm-breeze-and-honeysuckle voice of May—and hearing her words, I say, I felt well up in me not any just joy-burst like you'd might expect, but this sudden strange burst of hurt, a hurt I couldn't name but which I knew'd been buried long time deep—spine-end deep—and tears sprang sudden in my eyes. It mayhap have been just the sweet-peacefulness of that smile nigh unbearable, and the honeysuckle voice she sang in and maybe something else, too, all mixed up with them—something out of the pine crowns when they boom so lonely in the gusts of wind on a late-March day when the air's so strangely warm—this thing a sadness, maybe, that covers some weep-heaving grief I couldn't then put name to or find reason for, just knew it was there, deep down.

In a minute I managed to wipe my cheeks dry and still myself and turn and step down to the bloodclay. I strode to the chopper, straddled the saddle, and sat quiet a while, wondering how to work this thing. I pictured Callie-smile for help and she did so shine and sing, wordless now, just pure honeysuckle, and then I knew: I right away found the ignition key and twisted it, and as the starter whirred, I shoved my right foot down on the gas pedal. The engine caught with a deep loose roar, and after twisting the red grips to rev it, I found the clutch (Smile singing me where, without words where) and I slid the chopper into gear and eased it forward and gripping the grips steered it slow up the snakey double-track and out of the hollow-dell.

In a minute I was out on Old 15 in warm night, looping deft as a Broken Spoker through the gears and roaring north toward White Cross, Callie-smile helping me all the while, so shining and singing in my mind.

I was doing thirty-five, wind warm in my face, when all a sudden Smile said, "Too slow, Herman Core. Hunch down. Wring your bars for speed."

I did as I was told and bike lurched to sixty and more, and Smile said, "Grit teeth now and strain your muscles—strain till you can strain no more. Strain to the peak of contraction."

I did as I was told and felt a sudden wave of hate and anger and fear all mixed up together, and Smile said, "Now, Herman Core, you know your Lingo and how he ever was since he was thirty—no, earlier, a little boy of eight or nine—forever hating that his body was doomed to grow old and die—not just fearing it, like most of us, but hating it, and hating every body in the world because of it, his own body included."

And I opened my mouth to curse, to roar Lingo's hate—my hate, too, it sudden came to me, because it was nigh like my hate of Lou—the real hate, the true hate, the body-woman-hate in those basement nights mid-April to twenty June—don't ask me how I knew, I knew—and so I opened my mouth to roar this hate but sweet Smile hushed me, finger to her lips, and sang, "Yes, Herman Core, so hating that body-fate, that cruelest injustice of all, that he swore to hurt all he could in the way of the woman—to hurt her not merely with his white-knuckled fists, but with his slippery tongue as well—slim tongue, salmon tongue, rolling deep-seamless tongue—and you saw, Herman Core, what happened to that. So don't say out your curse, Herman Core. Keep it down deep. And love it. And get on to White Cross, now. Go quiet in your soul."

I shut my mouth then and stilled myself and drove my sixty, reached the White Cross sign in quarter of an hour. I drove to Core Road and swung into it, headed for my own Carolina T where I was borned and grew up at. But a quarter mile down, Smile said, "Stop, Herman Core," and I stopped by a stand of cedars, and Smile said, "It's burned down, Herman Core, and has so been burned ten years," and I whisper, "Lord, yes, I done forgot. A lightning bolt struck it one July thunderstorm, '69, and Daddy and Mama were two years dead and no one renting it and so no one to phone the fire department in time and so it burnt clean to the ground—I saw the black hulk the afternoon after—so I can't go there but where?"

"The court," Smile sang.

"Lord, yeah, Herman," I whispered. "She means my old mobile home court I got from Daddy day I turned 24 and which I managed '53 to '55 and then sold to Bramer who sold it himself in '75, after Lucille'd caught fire, burnt up, and died."

"But why there?" I asked Smile. "True, there's a ce-ment cube aside one of the trailers, though it don't no more mark state-center. Did in '37, about the time I was eight or nine, but not no more, as they mistook and admitted it so and then said it was Gulf, Lou's T exackly, and mistook again and said it was Midlight, down in the hollow-dell, and has been so since. And besides that, that old court ain't no more in the family, not in mine and not in Bramer's either. Some fat juicy nigger couple owns it now, out of Eli Whitney, and rents it integrated and ever one gettin' along, not no racial strife or burnin' and stuff, just everyone as fine and easy-going and responsible as they can be."

And Smile up and said, "The holy place."

That was all—just that: "The holy place."

And I scratched my bald head and wondered over it and Smile says, "Mr. Cooper, age 54. When you were eight and nine."

Lord, it sudden came to me what she meant: that old '30s singlewide looked nigh like a tank. It was off in the pine grove at the dead-end's end, south edge of the court, and was still there now, I reckoned—grown over in kudzu more than likely, the ce-ment cube just a yard from the door. "Yeah, Herman," I whispered, "the singlewide wouldn't nobody else ever rent again after that June day, '33 (I was just four then, so had to have it from Daddy in '36 or '37)—that hot June day when Mr. Harmon Cooper, age 54, came home wore out from the cottonmill and found the Mrs., age 29, in the sack with his foreman, age 33, and going at it, and he gripped up his axe—they didn't have no Homelites back then—and all by hisself (he was six-four and they were teeny in comparsion, about five-eight), he chased them around the trailer, chopping at 'em—a finger flying off here, a hand flying there—and cut 'em down to just trunks after awhile—Lord, it was a mess!—and then he snatched a jack-knife out of his work-pants pocket and slit his own self ear to ear and died. It took Daddy a month and a half of steel wool and lye soap to get them walls back even half white. And he tried renting it again and he'd even get some interested parties—a single young fellah, maybe, or a woman with chirren and the husband run off, or even a pair of college kids from over on The Hill, once or twice a couple, but wouldn't nobody ever rent it, and what was peculiar was not one of 'em knew the story or had even ever heard of Mr. Harmon Cooper, age 54, the Mrs., age 29, the Foreman, age 33. It was like they'd walk in that single-wide and sniff at the air and smell something peculiar and would just know. I know they would know 'cause I was ever by Daddy when he'd show it, and I'd see the interested parties—the couple and the college students and the rest—walk around them three rooms—the long middle room and the two crampies on either side—and go so careful, nigh on tiptoes, and not touching wall nor furniture, not even a windowsill, and not saying a word the whole time, and Daddy and me'd go quiet, too, like in a church or graveyard—some holy place."

"And you showed it, too," Smile said, and it came to me there in the night how, yeah, I showed it at eight and nine and ten. "Yeah, Herman," I whispered, "I would've just made friends with a new boy in the court, and in the summer, on a June day (it'd always be June), I'd ask him, 'Want to see where Mr. Cooper, age 54, killed the Mrs., age 29, and the Foreman, age 33?" And the boy'd nod eager and I'd lead him to the pine grove and past the marker what said state-center and up the steps and into the trailer (Daddy wouldn't lock it—why, I never knew—) and there in the long middle room, I'd tell him the whole story just as I'd had it from Daddy, and when I'd got done, we'd walk room to room awhile, not touching a thing, not saying a word, and then we'd go out, me back to the rent-office, the boy to his single-wide, and without a word of good-bye. Yessir, it was just that way when I was eight and nine and ten: next to White Cross Cemetery and maybe the Varsity Thee-yater over on The Hill Saturday mornings, that single-wide was the holiest place in the world for me."

I stopped then and straddled the saddle again and wrenched the chopper around and roared back to the main road and then down it a mile and into that dirt-road pale in the night—still dirt—and then up it a mile till the first single-wide loomed up white on my right. I stopped there and unstraddled and leaned the bike against a pine and strode quiet down the pale road till I reached the end of it. I faced right and squinted into the pine-dark and caught pale slivers of that singlewide where the siding showed. I crossed a ditch and tramped toward it through the weeds and the briars and the kudzu, passed the old ce-ment marker that stuck up stub-white in the pine-dark, and came to the cinderblock steps, heart thumping thuddy now like it would when I was eight and nine and showing it to my buddy and, yeah, deep down yenning for it to tell me that strange secret, that dark and shuddery mystery deep down not only in Mr. Harmon Cooper, age 54, but in the Mrs., age 29, and in the Foreman, age 33—that dark deep-down slippery thing, like a eel, that'd slap dab make them go and do the way they went on to do and not being able to stop themselves. And I reckon I was just as curious now—years later, on that twenty-one June, 1979—yeah, was deep down yenning for it to lay bare a similar secret, the dark deep-down thing—that eel-slippery thing—that made Lingo and Callie Smoot do what they did like there won't no choice but that.

I reached the top step and creaked the door open (the Eli Whitney couple—they didn't lock it either) and eased inside the long middle room and saw the pale walls in the dark. I walked from bare room to bare room and all around inside them and heard my footsteps echo and smelled the sour must, like houses closed up a long old time, and you know what? I felt no deep shiver at all—no deep spine-shiver mystery like I did at eight and nine. I only felt sick at my stomach—and not even sad-sick or angry-sick or fearful-sick, just sick-sick, disgusted-sick, and I whispered, "'A holy place,' Herman Core? Heck, it ain't hardly even deserving of 'place,' much less 'holy.' And to think as a boy of eight and nine I'd thought it so! Lord, either I've done grown bitter as bad butter at fifty or this trailer's done changed for me since 40 years ago. I'd like to think the latter."

And Smile said, "Yes, Herman Core. It is no more holy to you now. And Lingo, he, too, and all he echoes—Mr. Harmon Cooper, age 54, the Mrs., age 29, the Foreman, age 33—is no more holy to you now. You can leave this place—and him and male-hate—and leave it now for good."

And I feel a sudden lightness in me, like a balloon just pumped, and say, "Where to now, Smile?"

And Smile says, "Follow the T, Herman Core. That's all you need to know, for now."

And all a sudden my dream flickered back to me—whirred to the vertical of the Carolina T pointing off down toward Bramer's fish pond which from high up where I floated was all dried up and showed mud-cracks from shore down to deepcenter, and now I thought about it it looked about as hollow as the hollow-dell and just as bloodclay, and Smile says, to give me hint, "One more hollow, third hollow, think, Herman Core," and I do so think and, Lord, out of my mouth pops "Gulf" like a flower. And I whisper, "Not Bramer's dried up gulf, and not that dead catamount gulf of dead Lingo and Callie Smoot, but Lou's Gulf down where she was borned and grew to woman and, yes, Lord, where she drove on down eight separate times, '54 to '61, after each miscarrying, and stayed three days in a room there—which room?—and then drove home."

And so knowing now where to, I strode out of that sick-must trailer no more holy and back to the chopper and straddled the saddle and roared back to the main road and out of White Cross—roared south to do what Smile so told me.

Or start to. For just as I roared into Midlight, the gas gauge glared E in the night, and I geared down and swung into Bramer's drive and rumbled up to the ridgetop and snaked back down to the hollow-dell and parked and unstraddled and stood and just stared up at the trailer-window lit up with the white shuddery and fretful asked, "Well, Smile, do you expect me to walk? And I ain't about to drive no LTD."

And Smile said, "Volkswagen, Herman Core. The key's in the ignition. You should have no trial here as you've driven clutch before—Korea jeep, '51, remember?"

She was absolute right, as always, and so I strode to the Volkswagen black against the bloodclay and wrenched the door open and slid into the driver's seat and started it and revved it two-three times and drove its loose and chattery Volkswagen self past the chainlink and the dark mound of the catamount dead inside and up the snake-track and out of the hollow and then down to Old 15 and direct south down it, in the direction of Gulf.

I came to the stop sign that marks the intersection with the new highway what state calls Jefferson Davis and stopped there awhile and out of curiosity switched on the overhead and aimed my eyes around the Volkswagen's insides.

I've ever thought you could tell a body's self by the insides and contents of that body's car: a handkerchief with a Ripple stain on it, a squushed pack of Old Gold cigarettes, a piece of purple jew-ry out of Max Way—all such is clues to a body's self somehow. And so I thought then, that June twenty-one, around two in the morning. I even whispered, "Herman Core, you make a survey and know this car and you'll know that Callie Smoot, once Moore, more," and I did so survey—spent a full quarter hour at it—but, Lord, I found no clue, not a one. The glove compartment was absolute empty and the car's insides absolute black—black dash, black seats, black floor mats—all black. The only possible clue was some bloodclay smears on the floormats, but they won't that individual, considering the bloodclay hollow it'd been parked in and the big May rains we'd had. I even got out and checked in the trunk and saw just the usual spare tire bolted loose to the bottom and bald as a nigger baby's be-hind, like in any fellah's junker he don't care much about maintenance just so it gets him where he's gettin'.

So won't nothing the car had, interior or exterior, to give me a clue to Callie Smoot, once Moore. I pictured Smile then, so shining and sweet-peaceful it nigh brought tears to my eyes, and I said, "Smile, tell me about yourself when you won't Smoot but Moore—before you went with Don Shiver."

And Smile says, "My joy-half must leave you now, Herman Core—my half that speaks and sings. It is dead. You have killed it with your question—oh, why did you ask? But you did ask and so now I am only dark-moon half, the grief-face now, and there are no words to sing it. So it is you alone must find your way, find Gulf-way and T-way alone, and once in Gulf and T, listen closely there, and feel—not hear—my grief, my unspeakable, and, feeling, love it—if you can."

And I say, like a country tune on the radio, "Lord, Smile, don't leave me now, say more, once Smoot, now Moore." But she don't say one thing more, just keeps that mysterious shine and peace and sweet so sharp you want to cry for joy. But then, Lord, in my mind picture of her I note for the first time a little tremblor in her, real faint, but just enough to let me know she's turned sadful and so's about to leave me.

So sad myself sudden—and fearful shuddery, too—why, I didn't know—I clashed the Volkswagen into gear and eased on out into the Jefferson Davis and chattered on down toward Gulf.

About halfway there I was driving through dark tall pines done been planted close together and allowed to stay that way, when it sudden came to me—wherefrom, I don't rightly know—maybe the high pines and their dark closeness, "Herman Core, Louise drove this very same way in the LTD eight straight times '54 to '61. Yeah, she must've come along here about three or four in the afternoon—she'd always leave Memorial around two—and it was always April—mid-April, yeah—and sometimes May—early or mid-, never late—because it was nigh always Christmas or New Years time when we'd lock the store noon Wednesday and stride home to the King Size and strip to our baby-suits and plunge on in and try again. So she'd of been driving along here about three or four p. m., April or May, and maybe look out at them close pines whipping by—just saplings then—and see a cluster of dogwoods in amongst them spine-aching white against the bull-black bark and she'd see a number of poplars and a maple or two all shining in new green. And seeing all this fresh new life around her and seeing, too, that black asphalt running on straight before her, and knowing where she'd just come from and whyfor and where she'd be going and whyfor, she must've have felt way deep down in her insides—"

And I stopped—had to—because of that Korea ulcer flaring up so sudden and pangful like it hadn't since dust-dark of June twenty and all those basement nights before, going back to the dawn of mid-April when the pro-tackle gut-kicked the catamount. It was so suckworm-fierce and raspy it snatched my breath away, and I had to brake and pull over to the road-shoulder and lurch out into the night and wheeze awhile before I could breathe proper.

Breath caught at last, I whirred back to my last thought, "She must've felt—"and I could not further think because I did not know in words. All I could do was feel that suck of suckworm under my solar, and then a picture-show flickered into my mind: Louise in pink nightgown halfway up our back lawn, gripping Homelite in both her fists and revving it now! now! now! like someone done burst out so black-buzzing-crazy they belong no place else but South Wing. And at the same time she was lunging at the air with it, like yenning for log of oak or pine or poplar to rip-slash clean in two. I studied that picture a moment—her revving the Homelite and slashing at that phantom piece of wood—and then tried to blank it out of my mind, as it was just too black-buzzing, too angry-pangful. But I could not so blank it. Nosir, every time I strained to blank it right there on the roadside, in the night, it'd flicker back even more pink and raspy, and I grew fretful, then black-buzzing angry, and wanted to kick at something, but what?

I whipped around there on the shoulder of the road in the night and swung back my work shoe and aimed it at the Volkswagen and kicked the front fender hard as I could without panging me—put a mean dent in it big as a plate from Lou-supper.

"Volkswagen bitch!" I yelled, without knowing why, and then realizing the rasp-Lou picture was there in my mind to stay, at least for awhile—and the word was there to stay, too—Volkswagen, Volkswagen, Volkswagen—I decided I'd just study on them like a man has a toothache and can't pull it out and so just lets it hurt and tastes it. Yessir, I studied on them both—the Lou-rasp picture and the Volkswagen-word, as if somehow—I did not then know how—they were twins and went together, and I slid back in the Volkswagen and kept my mind on them both, first one, then other, the ten miles remaining to Gulf.

Ten minutes later, I chattered past the Gulf sign, crossed the Southern tracks, passed on both sides of the road the big clay pits of Gulf Brick what Gulf is named after, turned left onto Ferrell Road, dirt still after forty years and stretching straight and pale through dark pines. I slow-chattered down it a half-mile maybe, and then saw way off in the distance and small and white under a dark crown of oaks the Carolina T where Louise Ferrell was borned in '29, grew up to woman '29 to '52, and eight straight times, '54 to '61, April sometimes and sometimes May, drove down to after each miscarrying and spent three days.

"But where?" I whispered as I chattered slow toward the house looming up fresh-white-painted in the night (we'd kept it up, Lou and me, though we hadn't yet rented it). "Which room, Herman?"

I pulled up to the shed porch and stopped and got out of the car and having no key strode around to the right chimney where I knew a window was, unlatched and low to the ground. I lifted it open and heaved me into a dim room, the dining room, now white walls and bare of furniture and hollowy when I stepped.

I stood a minute there and then whispered, "It won't her girl-room she stayed in, how I know I don't know, I just know, but where, then, Herman, where?"

For help I looked on a pale wall and tried to picture the smile there, like projected, but I could not so picture her. Nosir, all I could picture was Louise in her pink nightgown, rasping that Homelite and slashing at some phantom pine or poplar or other. So there won't no smile now to guide me to the room she stayed in, just that Lou-picture and that won't giving me a whole lot of clue.

"Then you'll have to give the rest of them trial," I whispered, "and leave out not a one," and so I groped through the dining room and into the hall and pulled the light cord there, and in the dim light of a twenty-watter found the stairwell and poked up it and groped to Mozelle's bedroom and swung open the door. In the light of the halfmoon—now top-sky-high outside—I saw her four-poster bed, headboard pushed up against the wall opposite, a window on either side, and in the left window I saw that old fan, blades still now, which that lightning done struck flame out of that August thunderstorm four years before nearly. And I remembered those items—posterbed and window-fan—were the only ones not a body would buy at our auction that day.

"Lord, Herman," I whispered, "They might've glanced at 'em once or twice, but always they'd turn away and aim eyes on something else, as if they knew somehow these items were—" And I stopped and thought and then whispered, "Holy. Yeah, Herman Core, holy as the graveyard behind Gulf First Babtist." And I said it again—"holy"—and again—"holy"—and the third time I didn't finish and my mouth kept open on the o as I poked to the bed and stretched out on it su-pine and stared at the pale ceiling. Yessir, that o I kept shaped in mind and mouth like a smoke ring—kept it five full minutes at least, first not knowing what it so yenned to tell me, then sudden knowing—and groaning "Oh!" at the knowledge—Lord, it yenned to tell me what I was so yenning to know myself: the ex-act room where Louise spent those three days after each miscarrying, '54 to '61.

All a sudden, I saw that pink-nightgown-Homelite picture of her again, revving it and waving it around like to slash at some phantom wood or other, and my ulcer sucked me fierce and, Lord, this time for the first time in its en-tire life it began to crawl some distance! I felt it start at my plexus and crawl slow down toward my 'testines—"toward south," I whispered, "toward Gulf."

It crawled down far as my bladder seemed like and stopped there and just sucked me fierce a number of times—not to where I couldn't stand it but enough to fret me. It sucked me ten-eleven times maybe, about a half-minute a suck, and then it sucked faster, about a suck every ten seconds, then sped on up to a suck a second—"like labor pangs," I whispered. And then it stopped, like switched off, and I sudden knew—groaned, first, deep well-moan o, and then, surprised up-swooping o, and finally, the long down-swooping o, like you ever do when a lightbulb brightens in your brain—a 200, not a 20—and I said it aloud, my knowledge, "She stayed downstairs, Herman Core. In Mozelle's pout and fret room Mozelle'd sulk in after Luke and her'd quarrell. Louise told me about it once, even showed it to me: a stuffy room not a whole lot larger than a oversize closet. It had then—maybe has now—a little maple day bed and a pine deal table with a drawer and a ladderback chair made out of poplar wood and, yeah, there's a mirror over the desk—a mirror in a frame of heart-pine belonged to Mozelle's great grandmother. Yeah, Herman, the room's down by the kitchen and has its own bathroom and outside door, and down underneath the floor—yeah, Louise showed me this, too, back in '53, day of our reception—is this old ce-ment cube what marks what used to be state-center but ain't no more as they said they'd mistook and remeasured and found it was Midlight and the hollow-dell." In a sudden picture show in my mind, I saw its stubby cube self down under the floor, in the deep shadow, stuck up white out of the bloodclay, Lou's white finger a-pointing at it.

A minute later I was out of Mozelle's bed and downstairs before the pout room door. I pushed it open, groped my way in, smelled the closed up must, like the smell of sadness. Why it was sadness, I couldn't tell, just knew.

From the light of the half-moon outside I could make out the day bed against the wall to my left, the ladderback chair and deal table to my right, and to the right of the table the bathroom door, swung halfway open. The outside door stood straight ahead of me, its four glass panes lit up with moon sheen.

"Now that I think about it," I said aloud, "them folks didn't buy these items either, day of our auction—didn't hardly look at 'em, antiques as they were."

I stopped sudden, feeling ashamed I'd even spoke in this place, and then stood quiet and promised I'd say no more word the time I was there, this holy place—the only place I can now claim is truly holy in my en-tire song I'm singing you now, every word of which is true, I swear it.

I slipped off my work shoes and paired them by the doorsill and padded soft to the ladderback chair and lifting it so it wouldn't scrape drew it back from the table and sat down on it and looked in the mirror and saw my dust-dim face without no features, saw neck to waist my dust-dim form shaped like a pear. I squinted into that mirror and sprouted long thick hair on my head, added stoutness to my chest and ribs, and, Lord, I seemed to see nigh Louise her full self sitting there and staring back at me, but whether smiling or sad I couldn't tell which, as the face—my face, her face—was so dust-dim in the dark. All I could make out for sure was her hands—my hands—were resting in her lap—my lap. Then, Lord, I—she—reached out a pale hand and pulled open the little drawer of the table. I—she—heard it creak slow open and she—I—reached in and lifted out a pad of paper—a Big Chief tablet: I—she—could distinguish, even in the dark, that dark old Indian reining in a horse. It was the kind of tablet with the big spaces between the lines that I'd do my sums on when I was eight, nine, ten.

I—she—lifted the cover and turned it back, and I squinted and saw—no longer she, just I now, just me—squinted and saw not any writing in her neat careful hand, as I'd expected, but just a page blank but for the faint straight lines one inch apart. And yet I kept on squinting, as if by squinting long enough and hard enough, the blank page might show me some picture—of Louise down here in the dust-dark on each one of those three successive nights, sometimes April and sometimes May, '54 to '61, sitting alone before the mirror and looking at her dim face awhile and then sliding the drawer open and taking out the Big Chief tablet and the long pencil still sharp (and here I groped in the drawer and found and pinched out the pencil, long and still sharp, sure enough) and then setting them down, Big Chief and pencil, on the table top and then rising and pulling the light cord (and here I did so my own self rise and pull the cord straight over me) and sitting back down again (and here I did so sit) and in the dim light of a fifty watter holding pencil point poised over the top line of the first blank page of the Big Chief—holding it there five, ten, fifteen minutes, a half-hour, a hour—and never once touching it to paper (and I did so my own self hold it poised nigh the same length of time and never once touched it to paper), as if after every miscarrying, by the time her Memorial days were up, her pang'd done got so deep-down ingrained in her—worm-clawed and worm-sucked in her, so to say—no just words could describe it.

And I thought, "Yeah, Herman, her pang—not her anger, not her raspy, but her pang, what must've, soon as she sat in this chair, started coiling from deep-down near her spine-bottom and then, all through the dark three days, slow-crawled up through her bladder and belly and stopped at her left breast—her heart, deadcenter of it—and then just stayed there awhile and more and sharper panged. Yessir, all that pang up-crawling to heart-center was too ingrained for just words." And I felt my ulcer flare again, but not hot and raspy like before, not angry and hateful as in the basement days I laid on Korea cot. Nosir, it was just this full round ache, like a big hard knot tied with inch-rope.

And as I went on to staring on the blank lined page of that Big Chief tablet lit up with the fifty watter, that big knot began to crawl up slow in my very own self—crawl up slow through belly and plexus and stop at my own heart deadcenter and ache me round and full, like a big mournful bullfrog swelling up slow on a summer night.

Then it was that I raised my eyes from the tablet and looked in the mirror and actually saw—not no seemed to see—her own self, Louise, in her blue workshift, holding the very same pad and pencil. I saw her gaze at me droopy-eyed awhile and then bend over a little and slip the pad and the pencil back into the drawer and slow-scrape it shut and then lift her face to me: the big Spaniel face, the pine-green eyes now dull and staring, the mouth drooped down, showing deep wrinkles. I watched her watch me a long time, just staring, and then all at once, without no preparation, one big teardrop globed out her right eye-corner, like a pearl in the dim light, then rolled slow down her cheek, leaving a twisty track behind. She stared on till the track dried to bare skin, and then she heaved a done-with-it sigh, rose to full height, and, staring down on me, pinched her shift-waist with her hands and tugged at it sharp. Then she twisted around and reached up a white arm and pulled the cord and so put out the light.

I sat a moment longer before the mirror and was seeing my dim-dark face and pear-shaped form again (I'd pulled my own cord, too), and I remembered a-sudden an afternoon in '54. Louise and me'd just moved to the tight brick-ranch and were lying side by side and buck-ass neckid in the King Size, brand-new then, out of Sears and Roebucks. It was a Sunday afternoon in late March and unusual warm—I know because we had the window open wide as it could go—and the breeze puffed in pine smells and clay smells and wet-wood bark from the frogstranglers recent. Me and Louise were young then—twenty-five a-piece. My hair was red-brown and medium curly and covered my head; hers was buff-color and spread out in long hanks over her pillow; our faces were as clear as a baby's fanny, our eyes wide on every blessed thing on this earth.

So we were resting there, young then and absolute easeful and content, like a pair of cats in the warm grass, when all a sudden, Louise takes a hold of my left hand and clasps it in both of hers and whips it to her breast and clamps it there, palm downward, and sings, "Feel it, Herman?" And I says, a little edgy and itchy as I was young then and without much experience in matters of a sexual nature (Daddy and Mama didn't talk about such much), "Aw, Louise! Let's wait till after supper anyways." And Louise says, joky-fretful, "Lord, I don't mean that, Herman. I mean my heart—you feel it?"

I felt her warm dry hand on top of mine, felt the soft warm breast under my palm, and we held still a moment—so quiet we heard only the warm wind outside booming in the pine crowns. Then, very gradual, I began to feel her heart, faint at first, but then stronger, more evident—a-thump-ah, a-thump-ah, a-thump-ah. "Not none of that rub-dub-ah, rub-dub-ah, rub-dub-ah mess what Lingo moaned in his deep seamless," I thought, down in Mozelle's pout and fret room on June twenty-one around four o'clock in the morning.

So it was a-thump-ah under my palm in the King Size that afternoon in '54—I went on to remembering—and when I'd felt it five minutes maybe it come to me sudden, with a welling up of wonder and a tingling all the way down my spine, that I had done absolute right in marrying Louise Ferrell and that she was mine and I was hers and there won't no other. And it come to me, just as sudden, down in the pout room twenty-five years later, the third reason—the real right true reason I'd married her, the reason I'd done got so hung up on trying to name that mid-April dawn as I stood over her stout self twenty-five years older and dark under the dust-ruffle, that reason being one no words could name (and therefore why I'd forgot, I reckon, my mind so full of nothing but words those five years since we'd sold the King Size and moved to separate beds)—that reason not to be word-named, then, but felt—felt left-breast level on that afternoon in '54 and having to do with a-thump-ah getting stronger and more evident as I kept hand there those five minutes and felt it.

And I turned to Louise on the King Size—I went on to remember—and grinned at her (and grinned in the pout room twenty-five years later) and so Louise knew I'd felt it and she sang, "I wonder what it feels like when it beats way down yonder." She winked at me and nodded her chin at her belly and I knew where she meant.

Then she sudden turned her face aside and said, her voice darker, the play gone out of it, "And I wonder what it's like when it don't no more beat at all. When it's just breast then."

"Aw, Louise, quit that," I said, fretful (and a little fearful, too), and to damp that fear and fret I slipped my hand out of hers and went to play-slapping on her shoulders, and she went to slapping back and I slapped and she slapped and we went on like that awhile till we grew wore out and quit and just flopped back on our pillows with a whew! and drifted off and didn't wake up till dark.

Yessir, I remembered all that clear as on a movie screen that four o'clock in the morning, June twenty-one, 1979, in the pout room of the Ferrell's Carolina T in Gulf.

Just then, for no real reason I could name, I pressed palm on my own chest and felt my own heart there—a-thump-ah, a-thump-ah, a-thump-ah—just as steady and rhythmic as always, and I thought of that day in '54 when I felt Lou's heart, and the twenty-five years that had passed since then, and the twenty-four nights, '54 to '61, she'd spent down here, feeling her own heart, a-thump-ah, a-thump-ah, a-thump-ah, and then knowing at last, mid-April or early May, '61, it wouldn't never beat down yonder, in her belly and would someday stop for good and all and no new hearts ever to take its place. I thought of all her wondering and pondering on that as she sat before the mirror and stared on herself and when she felt too tired to sit longer laying down in the daybed to stare at the ceiling, and thinking of her so I felt that ache-knot burst and then such a welling up of grief I opened my mouth right there in the pout room and broke my promise and in a loud voice cried. I brought hands to my face and wept and heaved a long time.

When I died down to sniffles and then was quiet and breathing even again, I kept my hand on my heart and heard it now Her-man-ah, Her-man-ah, Her-man-ah—not the bitch-rasping, bitch-jagging, bitch-hooking Her-man of that dust-dark mid-April two months before, but new-rhythm, deep-rhythm, right-rhythm now, the way hearts ought to beat and do beat when they're working whole and forceful and out of your own deep self and no other. "Yeah, Herman," I whispered, sudden light-headed. "Like a slow and deep-lovely dance."

I felt it beat so a full minute and then let my hand drop in my lap and strained to see in my mind's picture show where I had to go, what I had to do, but all I could see was white screen, like the film done broke somehow. So I just rose and groped my way out of the room and down the dark hallway and into the dining room. I heaved me out of the window, whapped it shut, strode to the Volkswagen and slid in and revved it alive and chattered it around and then down the white Ferrell Road and out to the black asphalt and back north towards Midlight, hoping to see sign to guide me by the time I next stopped and parked.

VI

But the whole dark way back, no sign did reveal itself—no star fell in spark-burst, no possum-eyes gleamed in the headlights, no blade-cloud hid the half moon now tree-top level.

Around five o'clock, just as the sky begun to gray a little, I arrived down in the hollow-dell and parked and slid out of the Volkswagen and stood quiet and stared at the black single-wide and the picture window lit up with the white shuddery, as if they might be the sign somehow. Smile had left me and I knew no other to look upon.

I stared for ten minutes maybe and then the sign I sought revealed itself in a way I had not expected. For all a sudden this voice called out from behind me, "Herman, give me some help, hear?"

It was Lou's own voice—I could recognize it anywhere—and I turned around and looked into the chainlink and saw her dark stout shape kneeling and crouching over the dead catamount, and her white arms were slid under it, like about to lift it. I squinted and in the gray light of dust-dawn saw she wore her blue work-shift, and she turned up her white face at me and said, a little fretful, "Hep me, Herman. This cat's too dern heavy for just one."

I strode in the gate and over to the cat and her and bent over and peered in her face and said, right puzzled, "Lou?"

"Well, it ain't Bramer, that's for sure," she says. "Come on and give me a hand now. We're carrying this here cat into that there single-wide."

"But Lou," I says. "What—"

"Nemmine what for. I'll tell you later."

I knelt across from her and slipped my arms under the catamount and we strained up and grunted together but, Lord, we couldn't raise her more than an inch off the bloodclay. We grunted and groaned and strained again but still couldn't raise her. Finally Lou said, "I don't like it a bit, but looks like we'll have to drag her."

And we did exactly that: picked the front door lock with one of the Volkswagen keys and swung open the door, then went back to the cat and gripping her by the back legs—me one leg and Lou the other—dragged her in short little spurts over the bloodclay and fescue patches and out of the pen and up the cinderblock steps where we stopped for a breather at the top one and Lou spotted my level and gripped it up and laid it inside the doorsill and said, "We'll have need of that later, Herman Core."

"Heck, Lou, leveling's the last thing on their minds right now."

"We ain't levelin'," she says. "So hush now and hep me with this painter-cat. You'll find out later what I'm aimin' to do and whyfor."

I did as I was told, and with just one grunt more we had that cat inside the single-wide—Lord, it must've been a hundred degrees in there—and then su-pine on the American skins and straight alongside Lingo and Callie Smoot, who were still laid out su-pine themselves, foot-to-foot, arms at their sides, palms up in that corpse posture. They were like I saw them a few hours ago except they were purple as scuppernongs on their lips, and their smiles—Callie's sweet-peaceful, Lingo's dented and bloody—were stiff and set and grim, like the smiles I'd paste on me that time Lou took to the bed and stayed there a season.

After we got the cat laid out like we wanted it, Louise strode to the doorsill and gripped up my level and laid it on the flat black top of the kerosene heater and said, "Now we'll leave this place, Herman Core, and then your level and that heater—thank the good sweet Lord for 'em—they'll do the rest and we won't have to worry about these folks no more, thanks to goodness—about watching 'em so secretive and then acting just like 'em—and we can get on away from our five-year mess and back to our old bidness and new bidness both."

All a sudden I remembered Lou'd seen Lingo and Callie and their strange bidness—had seen them do plenty strangeness through the picture window all those nights in the spring, and I recognized they must've turned her gut and privates, too—not like mine but in her own woman-way—and knowing this, I saw, Lord, exactly what she meant for us to do and whyfor.

The "what" was simple: we had to get absolute rid of these folks—them, their poisoned cat who'd done lived (and died) so chainlinked and tortured and pangful, their single-wide so black and tight, even their Volkswagen and chopper bike—all of it had to go out absolute ruint, and only flames would do the job right and without much mess afterward.

As for whyfor, that was more complicated: first of all, Lingo and Callie would've wanted it this way—had perhaps even planned it so but that heater couldn't quite reach combustion temperature to touch off the skins. (They didn't know it was just a dwarfy, God bless 'em, out of Western Auto.) The second whyfor was because it was all a real mess, what with the two of them dead so shudder-strange and Callie the way she was in her mouth and that tongue of Lingo's nailed up on the wall—not to mention all the other possible repercussions like folks outside Midlight find out about this mess (as they surely would, the Durham Sun being the nosiest paper this side of the News and Observer), Midlight'd never see the end of it. We'd be on the Sun's front page for a full year afterward and then every so often after that, for years and years and years, a little reminder down on page four or five, next to the obituaries. The third whyfor—what I see now is most important—was it was Lou's own way of saying to me (as she won't never much good in the words department, which, I see now, ain't much a department no way—at least not just words only)—her way, I say, of saying to me what I mayhap discovered when I first straddled Lingo's chopper, first slid in Callie Smoot's Volkswagen, but had not yet recognized I'd discovered it: that Lingo was another face of me, a dark dim-blur face I might see in a mirror in dust-dark without no lights on, and that Callie Smoot was another face of Lou—not the Moore-face, the joy-side of it, the Lou as she was when she clamped my hand on her breast that March day and said, "Feel it, Herman?" and not, years later, the grief-side either when she stayed down in Mozelle's pout room in the Carolina T in Gulf—nosir, Smoot (the Lingo-ed Callie and therefore Smoot) won't Lou's actual face but the face I Lingo-laid on her like a dark dust-ruffle, or better, more accurate, that I Lingo-rammed down in her throat like a blade-sharp wad of cloth and so made her mute to me that night in March, '74, when she flinched shoulder from me, my hand about to touch her—the sharp cloth-wad my angry words thrust into her own head, "Don't you touch me, Herman Core, don't even lay a finger on me!" And from that night forward—I went on to recognize, shudders seizing me everywhere, even in the hot singlewide—it was as if, by my going on to keep myself easy-going, hard-working, responsible—and separate—the next five years nearly, I'd took hold of Lou's tongue and put a cancer on it and that cancer slowly ate her tongue away till by June nineteen, just forty-eight hours ago, the only thing she had left to speak with was my Homelite revving now! now! now! in dust-dawn. And, Lord, yes—I went on to recognize—it was like that same cancer ate at my own tongue, too, and went on to eating at it and eating at it and eating at it, so by that same dust-dawn when I raged at her, bald crown aimed at her backbone, I'd lost all tongue, too, and had become just as bloody-lipped and grim-silent as Lingo that early morning of June twenty-one in the single-wide, a little past midnight.

All this—the what and the whyfors—came on me so fast that when I finished whirring them through, I had to turn away and look out into the slow-brightening day and gaze on the chainlink as if to grab hold of it and still myself. I stayed quiet and staring five full minutes at least, but Lou behind me (I could hear her breathing)—she didn't say a word, like she knew all what I'd just recognized and what wonderment and shudderpangs both I'd been going through.

I was five minutes into my stare-quiet when a mocker starting going at it sweet and silly on a tree up the slope somewhere behind the singlewide, and I turned back around to Lou and, out of instinct, gave her a sly grin, and she nodded and winked and grinned back, about as sly, and just then, as if, Lord, our own sly grins had caused it, a little smoke began to cone up from underneath an end of my level, right where it laid on the heater top. It twisted up in a thin grey wisp at first, but then turned thicker, blacker, and inside a minute as we grinned down on it, Louise having come and stood aside me, a teeny crack of red glow about a half-inch in length opened on the side of the level facing us. Then another red crack opened on the other side, and the two of them ate slowly inward toward the middle, like a pair of little mouths. In a minute, they met and the level-end dropped quick as a snake striking and struck a skunk-skin whap!

A little flame sprouted up from beneath the level-end like a flower. It caught the skunk-skin and crawled fast—stretched long as a snake when it glides out of a hole and keeps on gliding and you don't think it'll ever stop—and when it hit the other skins it split into two-three smaller snakes that began to crawl their separate ways, splitting and spreading further.

Louise, now, she did the sensible thing and strode on out—I heard her work-shoes pap down the cinderblocks. But I stayed where I was awhile, gazing down on the splitting and spreading flames like I was hypnotized. It won't thirty seconds before they reached the catamount herself and caught on her buff coat and then sudden, like she was gasoline, shot up whooooooooooooooosh! and licked the red ceiling and flourescent tubes. It was only then I was brought back to my senses and whipped around and strode out the door and down the cinderblocks as fast as I could, heading after Lou's blue work shift that was snaking up the slope toward the ridgetop.

I got as far as the other side of the chainlink before whooooooooooooom! and I looked back behind me and saw a fountain of flame shoot up from that singlewide high as the pine crowns on the opposite slope. It won't orange or yellow like a usual fire but absolute white, and shuddery. You take dogwoods just turned spine-ache white and you throw in some fluorescent shuddery and add a dash of actual flame (to make it fork and lick), and you'll get a picture of that firelight as it looked to me that dust-dawn of June twenty-one, 1979. The only thing I ever seen like it was another trailer caught fire one wintertime night in Daddy's White Cross court back in '47. Flames sent up a whoooooooooom! just as fast and pine-crown high as this one. Some of the court folks driving home on the 54 highway said they could see the flame-light five miles off, shimmering on the night sky and pine crowns both.

I went on to watching while the black siding began to melt and drip on the bloodclay in little smoky pools, and then came, Lord, another whooooooooooooooom! and the whole trailer exploded in on itself and threw out spark-showers that fell on the seat and grips of the chopper bike and swirled on in the insides of the Volkswagen (I hadn't rolled the windows up) and bloomed flames on them that split and spread and licked till they clung on them every inch and then must've ate to the gas tanks because, Lord, whooooooooooooooom! and then, right after, whooooooooooooooooom!—the both of them exploded in big mushroom bursts all black-smokey and orange-flamey like a tire fire in a junkyard.

After I was satisfied all that mess was absolute ruint and out of the lives of me and Louise and Bramer and all the rest of Midlight, too, I quit watching and whipped around and legged it to the rabbit track and back up the slope to ridgetop and then down the lawn toward the house, leaf-dew graying my pants cuffs.

When I reached the back door, I heard a couple of pick-up trucks groaning hard up Bramer's driveway and then some truck doors slamming and men yelling and then a siren, first wailing far off faint from down on Old 15 and then getting louder as it came closer and went on up Bramer's driveway, finally groaning down and stopping when it came to the bottom of the hollow-dell. And then there was just the men yelling and the flicker of that white shudder-fire all around on the pine crowns.

I didn't stay to listen, as I knew then what I had to do. I strode into the kitchen and through the hallway and into the bedroom. It was dust-dawn in there, with a little of the white shudder-light shimmering on the walls. The window was open, letting in the dew-grass smell and the men yelling from down in the hollow. I aimed my eyes to Lou's bed and noted what looked like Lou herself in there, the stout mound of her body dark under the dust-ruffle.

"Lord, Herman," I whispered, "she sure done gone to sleep in a hurry. But then she's always been one quick to doze off time she hits the sack—got it from her momma."

And then, recollecting what I had to do, I went to my own Princess Special and bent down to bedfoot and gripping the frame lifted it a little and swung it to Lou's till the mattresses touched. Then I did same thing to bed-head. In half a minute, I had the beds pushed together so they looked near like a double as they could. Then I slipped off every stitch and stretched out su-pine on my bare mattress and slow-eased toward the dust-dark mound of Lou, aiming to tap her awake and we'd start up the old sweet rhythm I hadn't tasted in so long a time I'd near forgot what it was like. I got to the crack between the beds, my puff adder arcing up nicely, and reached out my hand and clapped it on where I thought her shoulder was—whop!

"Now, Herman," I whispered, "that don't sound like flesh to me. Flesh goes whap!"

I raised my hand and clapped again whop! and whispered, "Herman, that ain't no flesh, it's wood, heart pine or red oak, one." And at that moment my puff adder drooped to half staff and my heart did a rollover, and as quick as I was able to I gripped the hem of that dust-ruffle and flung it down toward bedfoot, and, Lord, I swear it, staring up at me was the big green eyes of this loooooooooooooooong old snake red as scarlet and thick and muscley as a hornbeam trunk and painted on his face was a smile wide as a Cheshire's. His body was two-three hornbeam logs stuck together somehow—nailed? glued? I won't sure—and snaking on down to bed-foot and then out over the end of it. He had a head made out of an old basketball painted deeper scarlet than the body, and his eyes were green tennis balls, and the Cheshire smile was made out of sticks of writing-chalk laid close together. And, Lord, it had wings, too—three pairs made out of eight-inch squares of plyboard painted black and angled up straight from where they were nailed to the body.

When I got my heart back in proper rhythm again, I looked on that big scarlet snake and wondered on its mystery—what mere human could have made it, seeing as how those hornbeam logs'd been so neat-sawed and fit so precise. No human hand alone could do such as this. It'd need a device—

All a sudden I felt a wonder in me—a sort of twin snake just as thick but made out of flesh—stir down in my deep gut, about bladder-level, and then slow uncoil and start to rise through 'testines and belly and chest, come to heart-level and stay a second and warm me there so fine I nearly cried, then rise on up through throat and put honey on my tongue, then rise through brown mole between my eyebrows, tickling there like a feather, come finally to my bald crown and coil round on top of it and warm it like a heating pad, or like Ripple always did when I was on it in '54, about the time of the first miscarrying.

At that warm-Ripple sweet-fire moment, a word bloomed out of me like a flower, a honeysuckle rose herself, "Homelite." And it came to me now not only where I'd find Louise but what I'd find with her when I got there.

I rose from the bed and neckid still padded into the hallway, opened the basement door, looked inside, saw it lit dim down there, saw at the bottom of the long stairs another wood-animal sitting on the ce-ment, bright red eyes staring up at me. I squinted and saw a pink long-ear creature with Draino caps for eyes and nose—Lord, a rabbit, yeah.

I stepped down the steps, going slow and quiet, and when I came to the bottom, I looked to my right and saw spread all over the ce-ment—from Korea cot to shower stall—a sight I shall never forget so long as I live on this earth.

I saw Louise lying buckass neckid on the Korea cot, ankles crossed, one white arm bent back under her head, hand supporting it like a pillow, her eyes staring up at the floor-beams.

"Yeah, Herman," she said, in a voice absolute new to me, slow and long-drawed-out and dark, like from down in a well, "I been down here most of the time you been gone, since dawn June twenty. Been only a little more 'n a day but seems like a year and a half. You can see for yourself what I been doin'."

She laid her free hand on the Homelite that lay on the ce-ment beside her and said, still in that slow and down-well voice, "This new king sure come in handy. And these here, too." She stretched back a white arm to a row of five-six paint cans lined up along the head of the cot, paint-stiff brushes lying on their tops. "And this here, too." She flung same arm to a tray of nails and a couple of hammers and a bunch of other tools scattered on the ce-ment above the paint cans. "And these here, too—these the main things next to the Homelite." She slipped the other arm from behind her neck and, still laying su-pine, held up both her hands, and I saw the chipped and broken nails and the scratches and the bumps and the blisters—they were hands just like mine when I ran the trailer court awhile up at White Cross and did the household repairs and such.

"Yeah, they're different," she said, "but look what all they done since you been gone to hollow-dell and even a few days before that, you too down-here and down-there to notice or even suspect. Lord, I bet you didn't even hear me raspin'."

And she swung her left arm to the left of the cot and I looked over the ce-ment and saw scattered all the way to the shower-stall all these animals made out of long boughs and short sticks and medium branches and thick logs done been chainsawed up into sections that were then nailed or glued together and then painted on and drawn on and a whole lot else. I looked around more, a-squinting, and saw, Lord, the basement was chock-cram full of them: they were stacked up in the shower stall and on the water heater, heaped in every dark corner, tangled and cluttered over every square foot of that ce-ment space we'd planned in '54 to raise up partitions on and so make rooms for our chirren, one by one, as they were borned.

They were creatures not like any animal I'd ever seen but often close to it—animals you'd might see in dreams. They had bodies of oak logs and big poplar stumps, legs of dogwood boughs and pine branches and thick boards, heads of old split maple limbs and hornbeam roots. I saw green dogs with red eyes staring out, pink deer with long stick-twisty antlers, saw rodent-like creatures with bodies painted purple and tails black as night. There was a giraffe even, with a long two-by-four for the neck and a green scarf—Lord, Lou's Hill scarf, I noted—tied up near to the head. And I saw four-headed dogs and six-headed dogs and green-and-white-striped alligators and strange cats—housecats orange as flame and ears long as a rabbit's and no tail, not even a stump. And I squinted at the eyes of these creatures and saw besides Draino caps old Co'-Cola caps, saw plastic red roses that, Lord, had set in that vase in the living room since '56 March, saw old tennis balls like the fifty or so I'd see down in the woods yonder after the Haw'd recede from her floods.

I looked a long time and then turned to Lou a-lying back quiet on the Korea cot and asked, "Lord, Lou, howfor all this? How'd you make it and all?"

"Won't easy, won't pleasureful," she says, still in the deep-well voice. "Just know I made them one place and then another, a half hour here, a couple hours there, after I got your Homelite out of the shed, that dawn June twelve. Did a heap down here since dawn June twenty. Yeah, after you were gone down to the dell with your new bidness—I just knew you won't coming back for awhile—I phoned up Bramer to say I was sick and come on over and run the store. And he did as I requested and then I gripped up all them tools and equipment and the animals I'd already made from all the places I'd hid 'em in and carried 'em down here—Lord, it nearabout wore me out. Thanks to goodness your Homelite was already here—which didn't surprise me as I knew you were sensitive about it and figured you might try and keep it from me, steal it out of the shed. So about noon o'clock I started on my new ones—went straight on through to two a.m., chainsawin' and hammerin' and paintin' and gluin', then went down to hollow-dell and looked for you and as you won't there just stayed there and waited on you as I knew you was comin' back from wherever you'd been gone and was comin' back down to dell, I knew. And to pass the time I went in the chainlink and over to that cat and touched it and felt it was dead and stayed aside it, waiting on you, and you came back dust-dawn and I called you come over and hep me and you did so hep and we burned that singlewide and you reckoned right about whyfor and howcome and now you're down here and seen 'em all everyone and what I done and my hands and such. And as for howcome all this—all these creatures—I think you know, Herman. I can tell by the way you stare on the ce-ment—so gazy-eyed, so ponderful."

And she stopped and I realized I did know, knew as absolute sure as I knew why she and me burnt the singlewide; why she drove down to Gulf those eight times, '54 to '61, sometimes April, sometimes May, and stayed three days in the pout-room and felt her heart and stared at the ceiling; why that March twenty-one of '74 I essentially Lingo-ed her—thrust words of my own head into hers and had her rasp them back to me in the dust-dark picture show of my mind.

But before I can think on this further and so name in actual words the whyfor all this animal-makin', she sits up all the way on the Korea cot and grips the side bars with her fists till her knuckles whiten and says, her voice edgy now, like a file on ce-ment, "And I know somethin' else, Herman—don't ask me how, I just know—I know what you did a hour ago when you got back to the bedroom and saw that dust-ruffle lump you thought was me. You pushed your bed to mine and laid down by the lump and eased up by it, aimin' to tap it awake—what you thought was me—and ask it to start up the old sweet rhythm, now ain't that right? Ain't that what you did and what you next were aimin' at?"

"Yeah, Lou, you're right," I said, and she was.

"Just like you'd do and aim when we were twenty-five and just married and you'd got up your confidence, ain't that right?"

"Yeah, Lou, you're absolute right," I said, and again, of course, she was.

"And just like you'd do and aim nigh ever time we laid down in the King Size after that—especially the night after I'd come back from them three days in Gulf, now ain't that right?"

And I remembered it was so, but could now only nod, my mouth too dry to speak.

"And just like you'd do and aim nigh ever King Size time after '61, when there won't no more miscarryin' because there won't no more chirren to miscarry, ain't that right?"

Again, I could only nod, she was dust-dark right, and I felt my ulcer pang me a little.

"And then came my Hartsell trips and he said I was done with it and done even with hopin' it, barren for good and all, and then I came back that Wednesday, around three o'clock, and told you so, and we never started up that old sweet rhythm no more and have not done so five years nearly, ain't that right?"

I nodded again, sudden sad-heavy, like a rock was down in me, weighing me.

"And so you thought just a half hour ago, easing up aside that dust-ruffle lump you thought was me—you thought that now that singlewide and mess was burnt up and ruint we could just ease on back to where we started and do it just like we started out to doin'—back at twenny-five when we were, Lord, young, and wantin' 'em so and all our bornin' before us—you easin' up beside me on the King Size we'd just bought out of Sears and Roebucks and then tapping me awake and me wakin' and yawnin' and turnin' to you and clappin' your hand on my heart and you feelin' it thump and then, when you'd got up your confidence and I knew you'd got it, me lickin' on your chest and belly and throat and face and that sweet thing down below and then you lickin' back on my belly and breasts and face and throat and that sweet thing down below and before we know it us pantin' and wallowin' and tanglin' up arms and legs ever which way and then startin' up the old sweet rhythm, knowing all the sweet time and world before us, for bornin' and store and supper and lunch and breakfast and tendin' to 'em and kissin' 'em and puttin' 'em to bed, readin' 'em stories or singing 'em stories we'd make up out of our own head—you thought half-hour ago we could just go back to all that sweet young wallowin' like them twenty-five years of fret and pang and misery ain't never happened?"

I won't sure how to answer her, so just nodded kind of half-way, my heart not in it.

"You're lyin' to me, Herman Core," she says, voice taut-shrill. "And you know why you're lyin' to me? It's 'cause you ain't rememberin' all them awful years—the nigh last five I'm talking about now—them years you were off in that separate bed, face wrenched away from me, and them years at breakfast and lunch and supper and you shovelin' down all I cooked for you and raisin' your head ever once in a while to say, "Fine, Lou, this is real fine," in that paste-smile voice and never once petting me or kissing me afterward—Lord, not even a handshake—just that paste-smile voice, and then all them years at the store you goin' about your bidness so smiley and cheerful—cuttin' meat and stockin' shelves and pumpin' gas and never a word to me other 'n bidness and money, and then all them years them Sundays you drivin' me to The Hill and on the way back all your smiley-sweet talk about the Mu-seum and the Star Show and such and never even a pat on the shoulder like you'd give a dog or a cat, and then all them years come night the whole hateful thing starting over again—brush teeth, slip on them sick-green pajamas, climb in your separate bed, wrench face away from me and you're snoring in a minute, and me, Louise Core, your wife twenty years all them years a-yennin' for you so much and even yennin' to tell you a time or two but then seein' that paste-smile so easy-going hard-working responsible and then feelin' such a shudder in me I'd nigh throw up and think, 'Forget it, Lou, he's way off in his own self, too far yonder for you to mess with.' And then that night mid-April last you bustin' on in the bedroom all neckid and adder stiff up, Lord-fine, and me thinkin', Lord, you'd come back at last, but then you shooin' me away like I was some gnat nippin' at you on a summer night, and then you just a-scurryin' down here like a rat to lie on this stinkin' cot and forget me like twenty-five years done never happened and I won't no more to you than a toad-frog—ain't that right, Herman Core? Ain't that the way you did me them five tired awful years? You answer me the truth now."

She was dead dust-dark right and I knew it sure as my ulcer sucked me about the fiercest it ever had in its whole life. But I didn't get no chance to answer her—first because of the ulcer snatching breath away, and second, because all a sudden she gave this sharp insuck of breath and brought her hands to her face and covered it and her whole body began to shake and heave and out of her mouth came these high wails long and deep-breathed and rhythmic like they come when you been holding in the sadness and grief so long and showing just anger and rasp to everyone or a calm deep-well chill or paste-smile cheer, and the anger or the chill or the cheer go on and on and on, day after day, month after month, year after year, till finally that anger-rasp can't stretch no more tauter without snapping clean in two, that well-chill can't drop no more colder without freezing to solid, that paste-smile can't stretch no more tighter without making you absolute mask and sculpture, and so then the sadness and the grief just busts on out and wails loud and long and deep and goes on that way, heaving and shaking, till you think it won't never stop.

So Lou wailed and heaved and shook and I just let her wail and heave and shake and soon felt tears in my own eye-corners and then went over and knelt on the ce-ment and bent down and put my arms around her and hugged her tight and felt her warm shaking body on mine and soon I was as heaving and shaking and deepbreath-wailing as she was.

So we grieved in that deep basement dank for all what we'd wanted to sprout and raise there and yet lost in the fourth-fifth month and so never got to bear, grieved for all the prime time we'd had and now was not never more, grieved for all those five years we'd kept ourselves hateful and separate, out of our pride or shame or Lord knows what.

In a half-hour we'd about cried ourselves out, and I rose and faced down on her, and she wiped her eyes with the back of her hand and said, in this still small voice, "I'm glad you can see that, Herman Core—us not evermore able to go back like we were and whyfor."

And then she swung a white arm around the basement and pointed out this cluster and that cluster of animals all around and says, her voice brightening a little, but a little sadful still, like she had a ways to go to believe what she was about to say, "But we got these here to make up for it now—you and me. Here—"

She rose up from the cot and padded to a long pink alligator with Co'-Cola caps for eyes and bent over and laid a white hand on its tail and said, in a little-girl whoop, "Tell me about him, Herman! Sing me a song! Tell me all about him, tell ever-thing you know!"

Jaws hung open I just stared on that stout neckid woman name of Louise Core, a Ferrell, and watched her keep her hand on that alligator's tail and start to caressing it.

"Don't snag on me, Herman," she whooped after a full itchy minute. "Tell me about him! Sing me a song, like Tom T. Hall or such!"

All a sudden it came to me what she meant and I said, "Well, he—"

"Maybe he's her," she sings out.

"Her, then. Maybe she—" I grope and strain but, Lord, can't hear that alligator's song noway.

And Lou sings, "Lord, Herman, you need you some hep, some gettin'-goin', and then some practice. It ain't too easy when you ain't had practice. But first, the gettin'-goin'."

And she rises from the alligator and comes to me and takes me gentle by the arm, caressing it, and with jaws hung open, I just follow her and do what she directs, and she leads me to cot-side and then faces me breath-close and rests both plump arms on my shoulders, and I stare on her there all stout and fleshy and basooms and buff hair roped down her neckid shoulders and her smiling at me so sweet-peaceful—that Callie-smile but with human teeth in it, Lord yes, and with heart so brim-full to top it's nearabout to bust—not just smile by itself, you know what I mean?

And seeing her there before me that way, I feel my puff adder fill and swing up slow in a graceful arc, rise to full staff and stop and quiver a little.

Then Lou's hands grip my shoulders and her arms go rigid and start pressing me down—oh so sloooooooowly down—and I give way to her force and in half a minute we're on the Korea cot and all over each other, the old cot rattling and squeaking like an old pickup on a gravel road. We're kissing and licking and Lord knows what else awhile and then I'm deep in her cleft and spading in and then me and her start up that old sweet rhythm the oldest and wisest there is known to man, and pretty soon she's going yip yip yip yip and whipping her head side to side, buff hair a-flying, and at peak of her bloom she cries out all yodel-y and wild, "Lord, Herman, twist me that puff adder, I'll shit or die!"

And I pulse up slow right after, hearing me sing, "That alligator, alligator, alligator, she's she, not him, and not no other alligator, and born down in Gulf, September seven, '29, and went to school at the schoolhouse there and growed up and all the time so shy, Lord, she was shy, why shy, I don't know, and then she was twenty-four and on a drive down the 54 highway one day in '53 she stopped by Core's Store by White Cross Trailer Court, and I was inside bent over the counter and cutting a chicken and age 24 and in she comes and up I look and see her and know right then she's not no, not no, not no alligator, no, oh Lord, she's her own self Loiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiise!"

And then I come—not in my usual quick spurt but, oh Lord, so large, so round, like a big bullfrog swelling slow on a summer night.

VII

Just then, dad fetch it, came this bam! bam! bam! on a door upstairs somewhere—kitchen door, sounded like it.

"Keep quite," Lou whispered, breath slowing now. "Keep still and they'll get."

We stayed still but the bam bam bam went on and I reckoned I'd better go up and answer before whoever it was broke the damn door down. So, cross as I was about it, I eased off Louise and padded to the stairs and legged it up, stopped in the bathroom to throw a towel around myself, then padded to the kitchen and wrenched the door open.

It was Bramer Cole all red-faced and excited, the day eye-squinting bright behind him—June noon, for sure—and he had a tin bucket in his hand.

"About time you woke up," he rasped right fretful. "Don't you know it's been all afire down in that ditch? Humpin' single-wide burnt up, motorbike burnt up, Volkswagen burnt up, and the power pole and septic tank and them co-habitin' folks inside and that cattymount, too, u-heeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!—Lord, how she got in there, I don't know—all been burnt up, Herman, all been ruint, and Sheriff Herndon, he—"

"He knows who set it, Bramer?" I busted in. "Tell me what he said."

"Sheriff says didn't no one set it, that heater set it, it just—"

"Get, Bramer," I said, "I'm showerin'."

And he looked slack-jawed at me and I started to close the door on him, yenning to get back to the Korea cot and Lou. But then my mind whirred fast through Lou and cot and wood-animals and hollow-dell and all what happened since sixteen April and all Lou said and done, and whirring all this through, it sudden came to me Bramer'd come to our door at just the right time and could not have come at a time no better, and I had a thing to tell him—a proposition. I said, "Bramer, you got that check still?"

"Which check? Lord, Herman, you need to get yourself to South Wing, you gone absolute—"

"That dell check, one Lingo wrote you out on the spot, two thousand dollars."

"Why—Lord, yeah—" (and here he slapped his forehead) "Hellfire, Herman, I done forgot to bank the somitch! It's down in my hole!"

"I know, Bramer."

(And I did: Bramer never got him no checking account nowhere till he was sixty and Lucille finally made him—for his growed-up chirren and the will and such. Before then him and Lucille stuffed wads of bills in little holes all over the house—I saw one green bunch sticking out a rat hole when I was over there for lunch in '63, twenty-nine June or thereabouts. And he did the same with his checks for cattle and rent and such: he'd stash them in the ratholes like they was green money.)

So he had Lingo's check more than three full months and hadn't cashed or banked it, and I knowed he hadn't yet asked about it to jog his memory and I did so jog and he said he hadn't cashed it and then I said, "Tear it up, Bramer, and that dell is yours again, and I want you to hear me now, so come up closer."

And he was hesitant at first, just looked at me slack-jawed, but then got up his courage and came up closer and said, "I'm listenin'," and I said, going slow and careful, trying to sound reasonable, "Bramer, I know you're wore out with that dell trying to sell it all these years since '75, and you been right much over to the store lately, helping out and even running it yourself a time or two, and when you're in there—we all of us note it—me, Louise, and about ever-body in Midlight—you brighten up out of your four-year dark since Lucille caught fire, burnt up, and died. So considering all this, I'd like to make you a proposition. Let's us make an ex-change: you take my store and all the stock and equipment and ever-thing, and take this tight brick ranch and all the furniture and stuff, and in ex-change you deed me and Lou your hollow-dell and twenty thousand cash money—enough to buy us a single wide and some furniture and to live on awhile, now don't that sound reasonable?"

Old Bramer, he nigh turned tree-toad white and fainted. Then he just lurched around and staggered up the lawn, shaking his head and muttering South Wing and such to himself.

Two-three days later, he come around to see me and accepted my proposition, and me and Louise, we handed him the store-deed and the brick-ranch-deed and he gave us the deed to the dell and the cash money and me and Lou went down to the dell and with our own strength tore down that chainlink and had it trucked off and then cleaned up the other mess and had it trucked off—the black shell of the singlewide and the burnt up Volkswagen and the burnt up chopper bike and all what else those Hill folks left behind when their bodies begun to match their souls and then got ruint and they died. Inside a month, end of July, we had us a brand-new singlewide down in there—white with black trim and all leveled up and new septic tank and power pole and the other necessities.

We kept our furnishings simple, a few Max Way rugs on the carpet—polyester-cotton mix, not animal—and some wood-grain straight chairs and tables, again out of Max Way, and two Korea cots I found in a GI surplus place over Durham—heavy canvas, legs and frame of reinforced steel, color OD, just like my old one. We pushed the cots together and made us a new King Size—more like a Queen Size actually, but big enough for all our play.

As for our yard, we planted fescue to cover the bloodclay patches so they wouldn't muddy so in the rain. And I built a picnic table out of pine boards and set it over the ce-ment cube what marks state-center. I needed me a place where I could write out the stories about Lou's animals and then memorize them so I could sing them to folks like I'm singing you now.

We keep the rest of the yard for the animals themselves—Lou's "chainsaw chirren," as she calls them—and they're scattered all over in their crazy colors and funny postures so twisting-up and looking aside. From my picnic table where I'm writing this now, about to come on home to the end of it, I can squeeze eyes to a squint and rotate my head and the whole dell looks like a flower garden you might dream about sometime in the dead night and then wake from and want to slide back down to it's so sweet-aching lovely.

About two months ago, August one, some Hill folks happened to be wandering around Midlight and spotted one of Lou's creatures front of our old store. They went back to the Hill and spread the word and one day a week later a whole heap of Hill folks come down with their fancy cameras and tripods and shot pictures. A week after that Lou was wrote up about in the Sun, and then some museum people over Raleigh invited her to "give a show." Despite the publicity and the crowds of folks coming and gawking, Lou most times just gives her chirren away—to chirren mostly—selling just enough to restaurants and such to pay bills and keep us in eating money and gas for the LTD.

As for my new music—rather, my share in it, as it's our music both, Lou's and mine—it ain't come easy, just as Lou warned me. But I done practiced—stared for hours mainly—so it's done got to where I can sit down and stare at this three-headed dog or that poplar-neck giraffe and in less than a minute tell you his story from the time he was born till the time he died and Lou revved now! and hammered and nailed and painted—set him forever in her wood and colors and Co'-Cola caps for eyes. When I get good at borning my own creatures—breath-creatures, these, out of my own solar-plexus where the old ulcer might flicker me a time or two but not near so hot as before—when I get good at my borning, I say, me and Lou aim to start us a show in the dell, Lou making her creatures, me my songs about them, the audience all men and women and chirren from Midlight, from the county, from the Hill—and from everywhere else where folks need food for their lives—and all of them sitting there on benched slope-side, watching on us, staring on us, pleasureful.

It's September twenty-one, around four o'clock in the afternoon, and been a fine warm blue-sky day, just a tinge of fall chill in the air, and I'm out here in the hollow-dell, sitting at the picnic table and writing this, just about to come to the end of it. There's just these things left to say and they're my dream of three nights ago, September eighteen, and then what happened the morning after to drive me to come to the picnic table and spend three days, eight to five, to sing you this on paper, what all is true so help me dogwood and puff adder, blood-clay and ulcer, panther and pine.

First, the dream: Louise and me were sitting at a pine-board picnic table by Bramer's fish-pond on a warm day absolute blue—a May one, seemed like, from the way birds were going at it and all was new green. We were buckass neckid and sitting side-by-side sipping grape juice out of Dixie cups and eating green grapes off paper plates. They were Thompson Seedless, I reckon, as we won't spitting seeds. And while we ate, we watched the fish-pond as a breeze would spring up now and then and ripple the water, like a she-panther's coat when she slinks.

All a sudden, we heard this whoooooooooooosh of birds behind us—grackles, seemed like—and we shifted around in our seats and saw the cloud of them soaring away and then, way on up a long upsloping pasture, Bramer Cole walking slow in our direction, and he was buck-ass neckid and not seventy but thirty and black hair and clear face and that dimple on his chin, and Lucille walked beside him, arm in arm, and her thirty and also neckid, and slim and sparrow breasts and redbrown hair tied back in a ponytail with a ribbon red as scarlet. "My, they sure have changed," Louise said, and I looked at her and nodded. And behind them, about fifty yards maybe, and walking toward us too and going just as slow, were three other folks, and Lou says, "Who them people? I ain't seen nary one in Midlight." And I squinted and recognized Mr. Harmon Cooper, age 54, in his cottonmill work clothes—dirty work shoes, dark-green pants and shirt, brown cotton fluff stuck on his collar,—and beside him, the Mrs., age 29, and she was barefoot and wrapped neck to ankles in a blanket black as night—sort of looked like a dust-ruffle—and I told Lou this and she nodded and winked at me and sang, "Yeah, it's mighty like a dust-ruffle." About three yards to the right of the Mrs. and slightly behind, I recognized the Foreman, age 33, and he was absolute neckid and smeared all over with what looked like red blood at first but then darked down to purple and shone in the sun as he came closer, and I told Lou this and she nodded and said, "Yeah, Herman, like this grape juice we been sippin' ever day since June twenty-one."

When they got within fifty yards (Bramer and Lucille within twenty), something brightened a good ways behind them, like a mirror winking in sunlight, and I squinted and saw, high on a ridge topped with tall pines, this man and woman riding some creature or other, and they were all white-shining. And Louise, she seen, too, and flings her hand out and sings, "Look what they're riding, Herman!" and I squint again and see, Lord, it's Don Shiver and Callie and they're buckass neckid and riding a panther, Callie up front and holding some reins, Don Shiver behind with his arms round her waist. All a sudden Callie yells high and quavery, like a creature, and the panther breaks into a gallop kind of cross between race-horse and deer, and they come up behind the other folks—Bramer and Lucille and Mr. Cooper and the Mrs. and the Foreman—and the folks all turn around and peer back, hands cupped over eyebrows, and, Lord, that catamount just leeeeeeeeeeeeeaps right up over them—soars up high as the pine crowns around us, flies easeful awhile, then soft, so soft, floats down and lands on the fescue not ten yards before us.

Don Shiver and Callie unstraddle the panther and leave her sitting on her haunches by a pine tree and come arm in arm to our picnic table, striding slow and easeful, like in a dance, their bodies glowing white, and me and Louise, we just let our eyes follow them as they move around the table so easeful and graceful and sit across from us, their backs to the pond. Facing them now, we watch them pluck grapes off paper plates and eat them one at a time, chewing slow and content, and they're Thompsons like ours as they ain't spitting seeds, and then they raise Dixies like ours and sip grape juice out of them.

Soon the others arrive and join us: Bramer sits by Shiver, Lucille by Callie, Mr. Harmon Cooper by me, the Mrs. by Louise. The Foreman sits to my left, on this ladderback chair at the head of the table. And they all go to eating Thompson grapes off paper plates and sipping grape juice out of Dixies. And nobody says a word, just smiles and eats and drinks, content and easeful. Just every once in a while, one or other of them stops and looks up and stares at me, like they're waiting on me, for maybe some word or other. But I don't pay them much mind I'm so easful in my Thompsons, sipping my juice.

When Shiver and Callie have cleaned their plates, drained dry their Dixies, they rise and dance to the panther that's the whole time been sitting on her haunches by the pine tree (and the whole time been yellow-eyed staring on us), and as they dance I notice their rhythm—da-dum da-dum (pause) da-dum da-dum (pause) da-dum da-dum (pause)—just like that, and then they're astraddle the panther and ride back up the pasture, turning around, first one and then the other, to yell now and then, Dianobol! Anavar! Danocrine!" and such like that. When they've crested the ridgetop and gone on, I look at Mr. Harmon Cooper, age 54, beside me and say, "Well, ain't you waving at 'em?" And he says, in a voice so deep-gravelly and hard it makes me shudder in my dream, "Hell, they don't mean me, they mean you," and then, turning first to the Foreman and then to the Mrs., he gravels, "Let's git on back to the trailer 'fore we git anavar-ed so much we can't see straight." And they all three of them rise and leave and go up the pasture after the panther couple, not slow now but legging it, Harmon and the Mrs. arm in arm, the Foreman slightly behind, his grape juice losing shine and turning back to bloody.

This leaves Lucille and Bramer sitting across from us, their backs to the pond. They stare at me five minutes maybe, like waiting for a word, and since I don't speak it (since I don't know it yet), they rise and turn around to the pond, hold still a moment, then arm in arm walk into it, slow and easeful and danceful, in that same rhythm as Shiver and Callie—da-dum da-dum (pause) da-dum da-dum (pause) da-dum da-dum. Once in the water they keep the same rhythm, looks like, and the water soon lips over their heads and covers them. When they're just bubbles and ripples and then just smooth pond-surface, me and Louise bend over our bunch of grapes and go on to eating, easeful and content, like nothing ever happened.

Then Lou does a strange thing, even for a dream: she turns to me and takes my chin with her hand and turns my face to hers and then opens her mouth and sings in the sweetest breath I've ever smelled on this earth, "Dianobol, Anavar, Danocrine," and such like that. And when she's done she lays my same hand down in her lap, and I says, "Why you sing such, Louise?" And she says, "All that time they was sittin' at table, them folks—Lucille and Bramer, Mr. Don and his Mrs., Mr. Harmon Cooper and his Mrs., and that Foreman fellah so grapey-color—they were waitin' on you, Herman, and they waited and waited and kept on waitin', and I couldn't tell 'em—Lord, it won't me could sing it to 'em—all I can do is make the chainsaw-chirren—and yet you just sat there and ate your grapes and smiled and looked content, and so pretty soon them folks got tired of waiting and left—Bramer and Lucille back to their fish-pond, that Mr. 54, Mrs. 29, Mr. 33 back to their singlewide up at White Cross wouldn't nobody else rent but them as it's so holy, and that panther couple back up to The Hill and the Mu-seum and their vases and sculptures and heads where they come from, and that panther herself back down to where she rightly belongs—down here." And with that Louise the Ferrell gently takes my hand and wedges it gently in her cleft, and I feel the thick bush and the warm sticky moist, and she sings, "But your hand don't do no lasting good down here lessen you tell 'em about her, Herman—sing 'em her song and so give 'em food for their lives, not to mention the lives of me and you and all else on this earth so ho—" And she stops on the o and keeps her mouth shaped o and out of that o blooms slow and one at a time these wildflowers such as I have never seen before and never expect to see again as long as I live on this earth—flowers all pink as pink nightgowns and smelling like warm breeze in April and pine trees after a frogstrangler and honeysuckle just now dream-burst to whiteness along the pasture fences.

And I woke up, su-pine on the Korea cot, and it was September eighteen and dawn so flamey through the bedroom window, and I reached over and tapped Louise, and she woke and turned to me and through her sleep-seeds said, "What?" and I said I'd had this dream and I wanted her to hear it, and she said to tell it and I told it and she listened, every word, and then she said, "All that's mighty interestin'—and what I could of tole you myself, you just asked. But you ain't seen nothin' yet. Get up and put on your britches and come on out to the yard."

And she rose and slipped on her workshift and shoes and strode outside, and I wrenched on my workclothes and shoes and followed out after her, and she went to the picnic table by the ce-ment cube what marks state-center and said, pointing to the items around her, "Over there's some wood blocks, and over there's some stumps and boughs and branches, and over yonder's some nails and hammers and cans of paint, and there's your Homelite—we got all we need to make the one creature we ain't done yet, the one I ain't carved and you ain't sung—the one what screamed out mid-April last and caught your breath and tongue so long and now will give it full back."

And I saw the items she listed heaped and scattered over the fescue and it came to me sudden what creature she meant and that together we now would born.

We began: taking turns on the Homelite, we sawed the wood-blocks and boughs and logs of hornbeam into sections, then nailed them together, glued on tennis balls for eyes, glued to the rear a yard-long inch rope, painted eyes yellow with a point of black in the middle, painted all else buff. By five o'clock we saw it whole and done: the buff coat, the bullet head, the hornbeam body on the thick legs and thick feet—panther pure and simple, you couldn't hardly tell it from Shiver's and Callie's. The only difference was it was still as a fish-pond on an August dead-day and so it would last, live way on beyond us.

And Louise sang, gazing on it whole and done by the picnic table there, "We give the other ones away—to chirren and Mu-seums and fancy restaurants and such—and sell a few to live on—but we don't sell or give this 'un to anybody, Herman Core, she stays right here, state-center, and when the Hill folks come down to visit and take their pictures or see our show next summer, you'll point her out especial and sing her story, and when your song is done, you'll give her a name, and that name'll be a name you could give to anything alive, creature or plant or human, and the name'll be her name for all her life and all her time and food for everyone—and what, Herman? What shall it be? Her name, Herman—give her her name, and now, don't waste more time about it, it's fall already and nigh dust-dark."

And with Louise aside me, breathing even, I gaze on the panther an hour while the sun winks out and the dust-dark starts to chill all round us. I gaze on her and gaze on her, and just as the dark goes full and the full moon brightens behind me, throws a sheen over the panther till she seems like another moon herself, I turn to Louise beside me and see her face a-glow and open my mouth and sing, "Say All, Louise. Call this panther All and give for the last name Beast, and say she's him as well—call her Mr. and Mrs. Beast—and let them sing out their name for all time and everywhere. Yeah, Louise, and all you people and plants and creatures hearing me now, sing her All and Beast in one."