Pilgrims Upon the Earth Read online

  When he thought on it, in the afternoon and later again in the night, he felt small, that he led a petty life. But he wore it the next day past dark, and it made his forehead itch, and he scratched at it through the cloth, and when he pulled it off before he slept his hair stood up high one side and mashed on the other, and his forehead was streaked red scratch lines.

  Later he woke in the room dark, some pale light from the hall, and he needed water, his tongue bound at his teeth and the roof of his mouth, his eyes gunked at the corners. He went into the kitchen and ran the tap, drank two glassfuls, and then he turned the water hot and put some at his eyes and rubbed them. He passed the den, woodland triptych over the brown couch slightly cocked to one side, and stopped, backed and stood at the empty frame, the molding at his head wood colored and squared. His father lay at one side with his knees pulled close to his chest. His head nudged the brick on the floor. A nodded low flame lit one part of his face.

  The coals wept orange and the fire moved inside them, and the embers hissed, and popped, and one leapt a high arc and skidded at the wood floor, settled and kept bright hot in the dark, and then another coal spat but was dead before it struck the wood. He looked closer, blinked at the dark and the flame tilt shifting light in the room. He saw thimble holes burned at the floor in other spots. He bent down and put hands to them, and then he stooped behind his father. He sat down and prodded one hand on his wide back, and he shook him, and then he patted the top of his head, hair sprigged thin and white on top, his scalp pink, shined wet in the light put there by the fire. He kept his face to the coals. A few minutes Terry sat and watched him breathe, and blink, and smoke held at the flue and fell back a skein and high in the room. Terry’s eyes watered. He lit a cigarette and took a deep pull, and then he put it to his father’s lips, and he drug on it, and blew out. Terry stood up, finished the smoke in two pulls and thumped it to the coals. He nudged his father at the back with one foot and then he did it some more.

  You going to get up? he said.

  No. I’m not.

  He reached under the top rim of the fireplace brick and jostled the lever on the flue. He felt the air draft up the chimney. He sat again behind him.

  You should sometime, he said.

  I can’t.

  Alright.

  He left the house and tramped the yard toward the treeline, and the light sifted gray in the east. He stopped past the first of them and then he stood beneath an old tall oak and looked up on it, deep lined trunk, leaves bobbed animal. What he thought was, you can’t be. What he thought was, you won’t hold. A few minutes he turned the questions in his head and meant to sort them, but then his father stood beside, eyes red and smelling ash, his arms crossed high at the chest, wearing a blue robe and old knee high duck boots untied. He wore a tall, round boxed hat just onto his deep lined brow, brown fur, black flecked on the ends, animal pelt, soviet.

  Where did you get that hat? he said.

  I won it.

  For what?

  I can’t remember. It was a long time ago.

  What is it, like a beaver or something?

  It’s grizzly bear.

  Really?

  No. It’s antelope.

  Really?

  No.

  Well what is it?

  I’m not sure.

  Terry looked at him. What he thought was, what kind of man are you? He passed him the lit cigarette, and got another. He didn’t know a thing about him. They smoked, and did not speak, watched the tree and the coming light. His father reached a few feet up the trunk, held a bundle of gray moss one hand, worked it apart some with the other.

  NOVEMBER THEY ditched for a pool hall close to noon. He sat with Alice Washington in a booth at a back corner, and they watched old men and old women at the bar smoke cigarettes and lean over their drinks. Lightning caught up in far off clouds through the tall windows. The tables in the place were silent, chairs keyed at four sides, cues racked on the walls, and the air old chalk in the table lights.

  He said how he liked to watch a storm come up. He said he liked how all the trees got caught and leaned, and how the stiff neck pine shook tall in a storm, how it reached. He told her how he saw lightning take a bird in flight, the white line come up from the ground and the bird, not dropped, or split, just gone. He told her a bird was as much a part of the sky as a cloud. He said, the sky takes things back, just like the water, or the ground. He said, all of them want something lost.

  BENJAMIN WEBBER was home when Terry came in, shifts cut for half the month. He pointed at the ceiling in the front room. A hummingbird beat green and red at one corner and knocked at the plaster face first, stuttered back and lunged again on the same spot and did not stop.

  It’ll die, his father said.

  So what?

  Terry went and got a yarn dust broom from the closet. He came back and his father opened the front door. Terry held the broom at the ceiling and huddled the bird, and then he didn’t see it anymore. He lowered the broom some at the handle and then he saw the bird caught in the dust and the red yarn. He rushed at the door and shook it past. The bird shot a green spark over old leaves in the yard.

  He left the house and walked around in the woods. He sat in a rusted bathtub at a clearing and splayed his feet. He smoked, held his arms up, made like he worked soap on his chest, in his hair.

  He walked to the sporting goods, brushed his fingers at tennis balls in skinny cans and wooden racquets on the first aisle, soccer balls and wood bats and baseballs and gloves at the next one. He stopped on the guns two rows over and put his hands on the case glass with the rifles and the shotguns and the scopes behind, the boxed shells and bullets shelved beside, and then the bird calls arranged past those, and then the doe rut, and then the decoys. The pellet guns and slingshots were stacked at the end of the aisle. He held one of the displays, rifle shaped, tied with plastic theft cord to the shelf. He aimed it on the ceiling, and then he put it back. He took one, heavy black plastic, held his arm straight and sighted a decoy on the shelf, a wood duck, eyes cat yellow and bright. He checked both ways and lifted the front of his shirt, put the gun to his belt, and then he looked at the air pellets, took a box of a hundred and dropped it to a pocket in his green army jacket, and then he left the store. The pellets rattled in the box.

  He got halfway, and then he turned back. The gun jostled some at his beltline. He pushed it back tight when he saw the sporting goods, waved at the store clerk inside and walked slow again at the gun aisle and tried to remember the space where the box of pellets fit and when he found it he took the box from his jacket and set it there.

  He came back in two hours, and Benjamin Webber sat at the table in the kitchen. He worked one bottom corner on a puzzle and rummaged loose pieces. He picked one up, and then he turned it over, put it to other pieces laid out. The box was on the floor. On the lid there was a sharp color picture, at the center of it a statue, steel colored, one man pointing, another slack armed next to him. The plaque beneath was labeled THE COMING OF THE WHITE MAN. Yellow leaves piled at the stone base and tall city buildings loomed behind, sky heavy gray and cold. He tried another piece and dropped it. He rubbed his eyes and blinked hard. He stood up, limped over to the blinds and pulled them, the table lit some in the daylight. He was barefoot. The duck boots lay on their sides under the table. He soaked his right heel, rust colored from part of a bottle cap lodged there, in a cereal bowl filled with bleach. He’d stepped on it in the yard five years back, taking trash out barefoot, at night. He pried most of it out with his fingernails, but part of the bottlecap was stubborn, stuck deep in his heel, and once he started working at it with his penknife, he understood it took more of him to get it out than to just leave it be.

  That’s a hard puzzle it looks like, Terry said.

  I’ve been at it a week.

  What kind of statue is that?

  I don’t know.

  He looked at the picture on the puzzle box.

  Those are explorers. His fat
her looked too.

  They had to eat candles because they ran out of food. I read that. I think it’s the same ones.

  His father studied the picture, face close. They look younger than me, he said.

  Terry went to his closet and took the gun from his belt and put it to the pocket of a plastic apple green raincoat. He fumbled the top rack for the red snow hat.

  He came back into the kitchen and dropped the hat in front of him on the table. His father picked it up with one hand and looked at it hard, turned it inside out and then back again.

  I haven’t seen snow for a long time, Benjamin Webber said.

  He pulled the bottom to the crown of his head, tin gray hair jutted from the sides.

  It’s red, Terry said. For thinking. I got a new one.

  Like this?

  Further down. Closer to your eyes. It has to be on good. You have to warm up your brain.

  He thought this was true, but he was not certain.

  It helps me usually, when I can’t figure something.

  He pulled the hat down closer to his eyebrows. He put his face back down at the puzzle, sorted a few pieces to a pile.

  I shouldn’t have gone at you so hard the other day, he said.

  Doesn’t matter.

  I get scared sometimes, he said.

  Down the hallway yellow light pushed the bottom slit of his bedroom door shut.

  I’m scared of things I’ve never seen.

  Yeah, Terry said. The Russians keep me up at night. Or just wars, I guess.

  This air raid siren used to ring all the time when I was young. It hurt my ears. The teachers made us run home from school. I was waiting for a plane, or a bomb falling. This one lined us up at the door, said, go fast, don’t look up.

  All night he sat at the table in the kitchen with his hands on the wood in front. He thumbed the puzzle pieces. He picked callus skin on his hands beneath the fingers and shifted the weight on his back and shoulders. He smoked cigarettes and dropped them at a soda can on the table, watched the black and white television on the counter. The picture struck light on his face and in the room. He cut at the table with a kitchen knife from the drawer, dusted the wood shaving. His head felt a jumbled mess, but he couldn’t figure why He went to the closet and got the gun from the raincoat.

  HE TURNED the engine near the guardhouse. Mostly dark still he watched the sun come big and torch red at the top of the black tupelo and the sumac crowned a short red dirt bluff. He watched the light steam hard frost on the grass where the shadow did not reach. The guard came up the gravel drive and parked the car. She shut the door and then got back inside and turned off the headlamps. She pushed the door shut again and went over to the small watch booth and turned the light on inside. She saw his car and came out of the booth and stood there past the door and squinted her eyes at him. He cracked the window a slit and stuck his hand out and waved. She came over beside. He rolled it the whole way down, took the cigarette from his mouth and leaned it to the ashtray He smiled.

  Early, she said.

  He nodded, and then he got the cigarette up and took a pull.

  I got a project, he said. A school report.

  On what?

  History. Battles and all what.

  This was true. One was due two weeks before.

  She put a hand at her brow for the glare and scanned the backseat.

  On the general, he said. That Pickens one.

  She looked him straight for a long moment and squinted her eyes. He tapped the white paper near the ash. She raised up all the way and stood there.

  He was an Indian killer, she said. Write that in your report.

  He nodded. She put her eyes away from him then and to the main road and shook her head. She jostled the brass and silver keys at the circle ring laced on a beltloop and went over to the gate and undid the padlock holding the heavy chain. She went back inside the guardhouse. He drove slow on the early wet road and put the window down, waved at her gone past.

  The woods cut to a field past the gate, and he stayed at the dirt road and followed a half circle, and it turned to woods on both sides then ended at another field. He parked the car and got out, stood at a thick wooden sign like a pulpit, the name of the general cut on top, and the name of the fight below that, shot buried pinholes on the face. He thought about those tablets in church that the old man came off a mountain with. They seemed good rules. No killing or stealing, something like that. He put cigarettes out on the sign and dropped the ends to a front pocket. He kicked burst shells, twenty or more.

  The grass was high, white brown in the new cold, and rocked in the stiff wind. He walked a straight line through the middle, and the grass shook thick and bent under his boots, and he put his hands at the tops and ran them over.

  He heard the fight in the trees, chatter left in the grass, the dust of felled houses and the quickly dead, first names, a hope for child.

  He sat down, wind in his ears and eyes watered on the dry air.

  The bright cold stayed in the afternoon and he drove and kept the window down and smoked the rest of the joint. He slowed at the exit to his highway and then turned on. Three police cars sat each shoulder gone to the crest, their sirens spun blue and red. There were german shepherds yelling. Officers held them at chains. He rolled the window halfway and then he was between them.

  One asked why he took that particular exit. Another stood beside him pressing buttons on a hand held radio. He said certain numbers into one end.

  It’s my exit, Terry said.

  The one with the radio asked for his address. Terry told him.

  It’s not your exit.

  It is, he said.

  It was his. He used it a few times already. The officer told him to get out of the car.

  Where’s your adult? he said.

  Sixteen was the age for unaccompanied driving.

  He put his hands on the back of his hips and spit because sometimes he liked to spit.

  The policeman put Terry’s face against the roof of the hatchback and mashed his lips down until spit ran.

  This is bullshit, he said. I know that.

  They pulled his arms behind. The one at his head pumped his face down on each word.

  Shut the fuck up, right now, he said.

  Inside his car a dog whined.

  Okay, okay, goddammit, okay, I understand.

  He didn’t understand, not even a little.

  He spit blood in the kitchen sink. His bottom lip was fat and felt stiff when he poked it. He pulled his father’s whiskey from the cabinet, held it up in front and in light over the sink, sloshed the brown whiskey in the bottle. He drank a mouthful and washed it around. His eyes watered. He heard car engines running full out and hot, smelled burnt tire, felt gasoline at his nose, and in his cheeks. He stomped his feet. He spit again and yelled something, head lost on how much it burned. He punched the pantry door and left knuckle marks.

  IN THE gas station he stood at the pay counter beside a stand of menthol cigarettes and kept his busted hand to a pocket. His lip welled. He felt his heartbeat in it and then at his neck. The old man cashier kept at his newspaper and drank coffee from a short white paper cup. Terry heard a bell. The old man hunched forward and pressed a yellow button to start a pump.

  He got a bottle of aspirin and two green and white packets of headache powder near the end of one aisle, soda from the cooler in the back, and he put them in his jacket. He saw a rich man named Nola Walker up front, standing, leaned elbows at the front counter and talking to the old man. He owned the junked car field and the dirt bike track, the textile mill where his father worked. He was the one that sold him the blue hatchback. Terry conjured the Bengal tiger pouncing and then eating Nola Walker. He conjured the howler monkey dancing on Nola Walker’s chest and banging a small tambourine.

  Terry went back to the front of the store. He fingered a felt bag of polished rocks at a display shelf. Some of them came from mines, some were sifted from river dirt. He untied the string on t
op of the sack and held the rocks out and studied them. Some were green, some pink, some white and swirled. He moved them around in his palm, closed his fingers over.

  Nola Walker pushed the door and went outside. The newspaper creaked a fold, again the gas bell. He checked at the cashier, stuffed two bags to his jacket with his good hand, and then he opened the door and hopped the curb.

  His breath fogged. Nola Walker was near the pumps, leaned beside a tire. Terry walked fast, rocks clicking, jostled in his pockets on the aspirin and the soda. He put hands to quiet them, turned again on the rich man. Nola Walker raised up from the tire and glared hard at Terry, pinched his eyes a slit. Terry put his face down at the lot and went faster. He stopped and turned at him when Nola Walker yelled.

  What? he said.

  Nola Walker kicked the rubber hard, made steps at him and bore his eyes. Terry felt the air a high cold in his ears and at his head. Nola Walker looked at the holes worn white string at Terry’s knees.

  Your momma can’t buy you any good pants? he said.

  My mom hasn’t bought me pants in a long damn time.

  You took something in there, he said.

  Terry shook his head and didn’t say anything. He took hands from his pockets and held them up.

  See? he said. I got nothing.

  You think I’m dumb?

  No.

  He felt the bags in his jacket against his ribs.

  Take it back, Nola Walker said.

  I didn’t take anything.

  You did.

  You don’t even know me.

  I know what you look like boy.

  Not your boy