“All right,” the man in black grinned. “All right, let’s get down to it.”
He began to spit into Nort’s face, aiming carefully. The spittle gleamed on his forehead, pearled down the shaven beak of his nose.
Under the bar, her hands worked faster.
Sheb laughed, loonlike, and hunched over. He began to cough up phlegm, huge and sticky gobs of it, and let fly. The man in black roared approval and pounded him on the back. Sheb grinned, one gold tooth twinkling.
Some fled. Others gathered in a loose ring around Nort. His face and the dewlapped roosterwrinkles of his neck and upper chest gleamed with liquid — liquid so precious in this dry country. And suddenly it stopped, as if on signal. There was ragged, heavy breathing.
The man in black suddenly lunged across the body, jackknifing over it in a smooth arc. It was pretty, like a flash of water. He caught himself on his hands, sprang to his feet in a twist, grinning, and went over again.
One of the watchers forgot himself, began to applaud, and suddenly backed away, eyes cloudy with terror. He slobbered a hand across his mouth and made for the door.
Nort twitched the third time the man in black went across.
A sound went through the watchers — a grunt — and then they were silent. The man in black threw his head back and howled. His chest moved in a quick, shallow rhythm as he sucked air. He began to go back and forth at a faster clip, pouring over Nort’s body like water poured from one glass to another glass. The only sound in the room was the tearing rasp of his respiration and the rising pulse of the storm.
Nort drew a deep, dry breath. His hands rattled and pounded aimlessly on the table. Sheb screeched and exited. One of the women followed him.
The man in black went across once more, twice, thrice. The whole body was vibrating now, trembling and rapping and twitching. The smell of rot and excrement and decay billowed up in choking waves. His eyes opened.
Alice felt her feet propelling her backward. She struck the mirror, making it shiver, and blind panic took over.
She bolted like a steer.
“I’ve given into you,” the man in black called after her, panting. “Now you can sleep easy. Even that isn’t irreversible. Although it’s… so… goddamned…funny!” And he began to laugh again, The sound faded as she raced up the stairs, not stopping until the door to the three rooms above the bar was bolted.
She began to giggle then, rocking back and forth on her haunches by the door. The sound rose to a keening wail that mixed with the wind.
Downstairs, Nort wandered absently out into the storm to pull some weed. The man in black, now the only patron of the bar, watched him go, still grinning.
When she forced herself to go back down that evening, carrying a lamp in one hand and a heavy stick of stovewood in the other, the man in black was gone, rig and all. But Nort was there, sitting at the table by the
door as if he had never been away. The smell of the weed was on him, but not as heavily as she might have expected.
He looked up at her and smiled tentatively. “Hello, Allie.”
“Hello, Nort.” She put the stove wood down and began lighting the lamps, not turning her back to him.
“I been touched by God,” he said presently. “I ain’t going to die no more. He said so. It was a promise.”
“How nice for you, Nort.” The spill she was holding dropped through her trembling fingers and she picked it up.
“I’d like to stop chewing the grass,” he said. “I don’t enjoy it no more. It don’t seem right for a man touched by God to be chewing the weed.”
“Then why don’t you stop?”
Her exasperation startled her into looking at him as a man again, rather than an infernal miracle. What she saw was a rather sadlooking specimen only halfstoned, looking hangdog and ashamed. She could not be frightened by him anymore.
“I shake,” he said. “And I want it. I can’t stop. Allie, you was always so good to me — “he began to weep. “I can’t even stop peeing myself.”
She walked to the table and hesitated there, uncertain.
“He could have made me not want it,” he said through the tears. “He could have done that if he could have made me be alive. I ain’t complaining … I don’t want to complain… “He stared around hauntedly and whispered, “He might strike me dead if I did.”
“Maybe it’s a joke. He seemed to have quite a sense of humor.”
Nort took his poke from where it dangled inside his shirt and brought out a handful of grass. Unthinkingly she knocked it away and then drew her hand back, horrified.
“I can’t help it, Allie, I can’t — “and he made a crippled dive for the poke. She could have stopped him, but she made no effort. She went back to lighting the lamps, tired although the evening had barely begun. But nobody came in that night except old man Kennerly, who had missed everything. He did not seem particularly surprised to see Nort. He ordered beer, asked where Sheb was, and pawed her. The next day things were almost normal, although none of the children followed Nort. The day after that, the catcalls resumed. Life had gotten back on its own sweet keel. The uprooted corn was gathered together by the children, and a week after Nort’s resurrection, they burned it in the middle of the street. The fire was momentarily bright and most of the barflies stepped or staggered out to watch. They looked primitive. Their faces seemed to float between the flames and the icechip brilliance of the sky. Allie watched them and felt a pang of fleeting despair for the sad times of the world. Things had stretched apart There was no glue at the center of things anymore. She had
never seen the ocean, never would.
“If I had grits,” she murmured, “If I had guts, guts, guts…”
Nort raised his head at the sound of her voice and smiled emptily at her from hell. She had no guts. Only a bar and a scar.
The fire burned down rapidly and her customers came back in. She began to dose herself with the Star Whiskey, and by midnight she was blackly drunk.
VIII
She ceased her narrative, and when he made no immediate comment, she thought at first that the story had put him to sleep. She had begun to drowse herself when he asked: “That’s all?”
“Yes. That’s all. It’s very late.”
“Um.” He was rolling another cigarette.
“Don’t go getting your tobacco dandruff in my bed,” she told him, more sharply than she had intended.
“No.”
Silence again. The tip of his cigarette winked off and
on.
“You’ll be leaving in the morning,” she said dully.
“I should. I think he’s left a trap for me here.”
“Don’t go,” she said.
“We’ll see.”
He turned on his side away from her, but she was comforted. He would stay. She drowsed.
On the edge of sleep she thought again about the way Nort had addressed him, in that strange talk. She had not seen him express emotion before or since. Even his lovemaking had been a silent thing, and only at the last had his breathing roughened and then stopped for a minute. He was like something out of a fairytale or a myth, the last of his breed in a world that was writing the last page of its book. It didn’t matter. He would stay
for a while. Tomorrow was time enough to think, or the day after that. She slept.
IX
In the morning she cooked him grits which he ate without comment. He shoveled them into his mouth without thinking about her, hardly seeing her. He knew he should go. Every minute he sat here the man in black was further away — probably into the desert by now. His path had been undeviatingly south.
“Do you have a map?” he asked suddenly, looking up.
“Of the town?” she laughed. “There isn’t enough of it to need a map.”
“No. Of what’s south of here.”
Her smile faded. “The desert. Just the desert. I thought you’d stay for a little.”
“What’s south of the desert?”
“How would T know? Nobody crosses it. Nobody’s tried since I was here.” She wiped her hands on her apron, got potholders, and dumped the tub of water she had been heating into the sink, where it splashed and steamed.
He got up.
“Where are you going?” She heard the shrill fear in her voice and hated it.
“To the stable. If anyone knows, the hostler will.” He
put his hands on her shoulders. The hands were warm. “And to arrange for my mule. If I’m going to be here, he should be taken care of. For when I leave.”