Right-Hand Man

It’s one of those afternoons, cold and so damn dull you can only squat and shiver, and we’re all four of us hunkering in a square of sunlight in front of Ernton’s filling station, flicking our smoking butts out toward the pumps. No one cares how close they roll either. Ernton would care. Plenty. But Ernton ain’t here. He’s at the funeral of his wife’s aunt, holding the wife’s hand, moaning in the Methodist graveyard, laying on the Methodist smarm, says Eddie. Eddie can say that because he’s a Methodist, even though he swears he ain’t been in the church since before the Great War began. Much less ended.

We all wish he hadn’t said that last. That’s the whole trouble, see? We were all too young for the Great War and now it’s over and the soldiers come home with their uniforms and their canes and crutches, arms in slings, and the girls swoon into little honey puddles at their feet. Who’d want an eye-patched cripple when she could have a whole man? That’s what we want to know.

Duke quick wipes his nose with his oil rag and says, “So, how much you think Ernton’ll get from the aunt?”

“You mean the wife. It was the wife’s aunt croaked,” says Lew.

Duke gives Lew a look like he don’t have buckshot for brains (and poor Lew, he don’t) and Duke says slow and patient, so Lew can take it all in, “When-the-wife-gets-money-the-man-gets-money.” He rolls a fag and licks it. “Hell’s bells, Ernton don’t even need it. He’s got the only two filling stations in St. Elmo, and now that Stetler’s selling Fords downtown, don’t tell me Ernton ain’t raking in the straw. And plenty of it.”

“Too bad Ernton don’t love you like a son, Duke,” I say with a little snicker and the others laugh too because Ernton’s such a cluck he named his son Richard and his daughter Frances and so they got a Dick and a Fanny all in the same family. The same rich family. I flick the last of my butt and it rolls in smoking, real close to the first pump. Don’t no one go after it. Just then a gas buggy rumbles up and Duke hauls out his rag and jaws with the driver while he puts the stick down the gas tank, brings it out, reads it, same time he’s stepping neatly on my still-smoking fag. Clarence Hershey, he says hey boys to all of us, but who’s going to pass the time of day with a man who’s got grease stuck to his hands and overalls and his hair stuck out all over his head? But Duke, he’s got to listen to old Clarence’s old whiz-bang jokes and laugh. I guess that’s part of Duke’s job too, same as pumping gas. Finally Clarence’s flivver is out of there and Duke comes back, squats in the sunshine with us and says pretty soon everyone in this whole town is going to have a car.

“Everyone ‘cept us,” sulks Lew.

“It’s cold,” I say, buttoning up my coat. “We live in the damned desert and we’re cold.”

“It’s the wind!” says Lew, his big round face shining.

“Shut up, Lew,” says Eddie.

It is the wind though. January, that cold snaking wind winds up from the desert and down through Jesuit Pass, and way out here at Ernton’s filling station on the eastern road, well out of town, there’s nothing to stand ‘tween you and that wind. Though we oughta be glad it’s blowing from that direction or we’d get the smell from the city dump half a mile away. In summer that dump smell’s a killer. Duke always says he works in No Man’s Land and the trenches couldn’t have smelled no worse than the St. Elmo dump. Ernton’s other filling station, the one in town, his son Dick gets to work that one and Dick gets tips when he steps lively. All Duke gets is yahoos like the one that just come through. Well, you could say Duke was lucky to have the work and you’d be right. All the rest of us (‘cept for Lew who didn’t make it that far), we all went to St. Elmo High and I wanted to quit and join the Army soon as I knew America was in the fight against the Hun. But, oh no, my old lady says no, so I graduate and then she tells me she needs me to fix the roof before I join up because who knows if I’ll come back from Over There. She cries. I miss the war (because it’s over by the time I fix the roof), and I still can’t find no work fit for a white man and what work there is goes to demobbed soldiers. They get the girls and the work.

Duke gets up off his haunches and looks to where the sky is getting gray and faint in the east and he says, “The aunt’s funeral will be over pretty soon, and Ernton’ll be back out here to close up. He still don’t trust me to close the till, afraid I’ll nick him.”

“He’d deserve it,” says Eddie.

“So I better crack on the delivery truck Mason Douglass brung in this morning. It’s his mother’s truck for the Pilgrim Restaurant and he lets me know she needs it in a jiffy and I’d better look smart about it. Lousy bastard.”

“Didn’t he just get back from--” asks Eddie.

“Didn’t he?” snarls Duke. “ ‘The mademoiselle from Armentiers, parly voo.’ ”

Duke peels a piece of tobacco from his tongue. “That fat Mason Douglass was full of the war all right and I had to listen to all of it. And then, if it ain’t bad enough hearing about the past, he starts telling me about the future, about how he’s blowing this burg soon as opportunity knocks.” Hands cupped against the wind, Duke lights his fag. “The thought of that truck don’t make me want to get up and sing ‘Oh say can you see.’ Maybe I’ll just leave it go till tomorrow.”

“Yeah, but Duke--” Lew’s jaw goes slack and worried-looking. “When Ernton comes back to close up, he’ll know you ain’t touched the Pilgrim truck and he’s gonna peel your dipstick right down to the bone.”

I’m ready to laugh because I know Duke’s going to say something about Lew’s dipstick, but when Duke don’t say nothing funny, I look up at him and his face has gone sort of greeny-white, and he’s looking out beyond the pumps. I look and I see too: Coming out of the dusk, wrapped in that chalky blue and milky pink, comes something staggering, stumbling--gray hair, gray face and blue-gray lips, right hand wrapped round the left wrist, holding out the left hand, or what’s left of the left hand because hanging down are bloody strings and bloody stumps. Staggering at us, arm out, beseeching. No one moves. Lew starts to cry.

“ Help ,” lurching toward us, dripping blood. “ Help .”

We all of us stand up together, slow, not scrambling to our feet, but slow and wishing we was Methodists or Mormons or mackerel snappers or even Chinks and praying this ain’t bloody death come for us at Ernton’s filling station. “It’s Mr. Forrest,” whispers Eddie.

“He’d be in town, running the newspaper. He wouldn’t be out here.”

“He would if he was dead,” I say, quiet like. “If he was dead, he could be anywhere he wanted. He could be here. He could look like that.” Good clothes, pressed shirt and pants, collar and tie in place, but the hands nearly red to the elbows, and flapping untied at the thigh, a mutilated holster.

“Help me, boys. Help me. Help me before I die of the pain.” So he wasn’t dead, but slumped now against a pump. Jake Forrest looked about a hundred years old, though he ain’t but 40 maybe. But out here in No Man’s Land he looks like Death Itself. He brings his blue eyes up to rest on us and says, “I’ve bitched it, boys. I’ve done it this time.”

I hotfoot in and get clean rags. (Duke had his oil rag out, but thought better of it.) We start to wrap the left hand while Mr. Forrest keeps pressure on the wrist, but it’s hard because the ends of the two middle fingers are still hanging by long bloody threads. Right then, one drops, the bloody thread spindles and the stump drops into Mr. Forrest’s lap and with another clean rag (and a quick breath) I pick it up, wrap it and put it in my coat pocket.

“Where’s your car, Mr. Forrest?” Duke shouts like he’s deaf.

Mr. Forrest sputters out somehow that the car wouldn’t start or crank over or something. He scratches up the words, but we get the meaning. He left the car. At the dump.

“The dump’s half a mile from here,” says Eddie.

“Longest half mile of my life. Get me to the doc, boys.” He grinds his teeth so hard we can hear them breaking down. “Any doc. I got to save my fingers. I’m a printer. I got to have my fingers.”

Well his fingers was long past saving, but didn’t none of us say so. Along with the blood you could see something white dangling and white bone sticking up jagged. The top knuckle of his ring finger was clean shot away and gone altogether, but his wedding ring clung there, twinkling wet and red.

“I’ll run to the dump and get his car,” says Eddie.

“No time,” I say. “He’ll bleed to death. We need to--”

“No telephone here,” says Duke.

“There’s the truck. The Pilgrim delivery truck.”

“No,” says Duke. “Ernton would flay me alive. He’d have my hide on a--”

Mr. Forrest starts shivering and his breath comes in long streaks, like the sound of something being ripped out of his chest. Duke looks once at me and we nod. What else can we do? We pick Mr. Forrest up and carry him out to the garage. Duke tells Lew to stay there and mind Ernton’s filling station, but Lew don’t hear or heed and he climbs in the back of the Pilgrim delivery van. Three of us lift Mr. Forrest up easily because he’s only a fair-sized man. He says he’s fine, but he falls over, head in Lew’s lap. Eddie jumps in the back too.

We got to ride like hell and we know it.

Duke gets in behind the wheel and tells me to give her a crank up and I do, but the truck don’t start. Again and again. Duke calls that truck a motherless, fatherless dog of a piece of flyspecked shit.

“Hurry,” Eddie cries from the back.

Duke gets out and I get in behind the wheel. Duke gives that truck a kick, I mean right where it hurts. Duke is big and he is smart and he can fix anything that don’t bite back, but I know (and so does he) that when Ernton comes to close up and finds the truck and Duke gone, it won’t matter if Duke ferried Adam and Eve back to the Garden. Ernton’ll fire him sure and that’ll be tough on Duke because his old man don’t work regular, though he drinks regular, and Duke’s got a mother and three younger brothers, and a mule tethered out in their front yard. In fact, Duke was just last week cursing Jake Forrest because the Enterprise-Gazette was having a paper rage about cleaning up St. Elmo and going after people who kept illegal livestock inside the city limits and picking on Duke’s family mule in particular, saying it (and they) was a disgrace. Duke was ragging all over Mr. Forrest, then. Here he is now, saving his life. That Duke is a good man.

Truck starts right then, she don’t purr, but knows to start. I move over and Duke jumps in and drives us west back into town which ain’t that far but feels far. We rattle and shake all over the roads since nothing is paved out here and the dust we make catches up with the smoke coming from the back of the truck and it’s so powerful up there in front, I wonder if they’re dying in the back. If they’re all three dying and not just Mr. Forrest.

We drive into the dusk which has got itself down to a hard, blue line in the west, like it does in the winter and there’s a single star hanging there. I kick myself and say inside, Dammit, Emmett, there’s a man bleeding to death in the back, but every time I look up to that fool goddamned star, comes rolling back through my head that verse that Helen McComb wrote me in Geography that day:

For Emmett Wells:

When evening drops her curtain down

And pins it with a star,

Remember that you have a friend

Though you may travel far.

And I seize up just like I did that day she sent the note back to me, got it passed under desks, right under the teacher’s nose as he stood there with his pointer going over the war in Europe. What did I care about the Western Front? I read Helen McComb’s poem and I got this queer, deep ache, right down there where you live and my face got hot. I stared over at Helen and saw only the back of her golden head till she turned around, all but rested her chin on her shoulder and give me a look. Not quite a smile. It was all in her blue eyes, that look, and suddenly I knew I was close to her--my body even--could smell the soap and talc on her arms and the lavender water at her throat, could touch the buttons down her blouse, ease them loose, free them, free her, free us both, even though my real body was stuck there in that pint-sized desk where my knees scraped. When she give me that look, her eyes were blue and level, open as the sea, and I knew she knew too, how it was my hand touched her golden hair, her shoulder, what it felt like, what it would feel like, what it will feel like, if I can only get a job and some money and marry her.

“There it is! The lights are on!” cries Duke. “Doctor’s in. Damn! Thank you, God! Thank you.” He pulls the Pilgrim delivery van in behind Dr. Tipton’s Ford. He turns it off and says, “Trouble’s in the pistons.” (Duke’s smart like that.)

We’re out of the cab and round the back and the doors fly open and there’s Lew and Eddie and Mr. Forrest. “I th-think he’s dead,” says Lew.

Maybe he is dead. His grip has slacked on the left wrist (Eddie’s holding it now) and there’s blood on the floor and blood on Lew and Eddie and they are looking pretty gray too. We tug Mr. Forrest’s legs and pull him out and he ain’t dead yet because he twitches and winces all over. We get him to the back door, which is already open, the light shining up behind Dr. Tipton, lighting his white, wiry hair as he fills the doorway, his gray eyes taking everything in. He says for us to follow.

Duke and me, together we make a sling of ourselves and we carry Mr. Forrest into Doctor’s surgery where Doctor flips on the electric light and then he’s washing his hands in the sink and--whew!--the smell of some powerful antiseptic near knocks me over. But Doctor don’t seem to notice. He just goes on asking us what happened.

We don’t have any damned idea whatever and we say so. Doctor don’t look like he believes us, but he takes Mr. Forrest’s left wrist from Eddie and binds it fast with something and we all start to shuffle out the door, but right then, Mr. Forrest reaches out with his right hand and he grabs hold my wrist, clutches like he is trying to keep me from bleeding to death. His lips curl back from his clenched-tight teeth, his eyeballs roll into his head and Mr. Forrest says to me: “Don’t let him cut my fingers off.”

I look over at Dr. Tipton and I say, “Tell him yourself, Mr. Forrest. Tell him. Doctor’s right here.”

“It’s me, Jake,” says Doctor.

But Mr. Forrest clutches me all the tighter and says again, fierce, “Don’t let him cut off my fingers. I need my fingers. I have to have--”

“Jake,” says Doctor. “I’ll do what I can, but I got to tell you now, Jake, it looks bad. It looks real bad.”

Then I remember the wrapped-up fingertip in my coat pocket. With my other hand, I find it. The rag is all bloodied up and soaked through. Doctor takes it. I try to get my wrist from Mr. Forrest’s grip, but he don’t let go. Won’t. My fingers tingle.

Doctor tells the others to go into the study and in the bottom desk drawer they’ll find a bottle of Burning Bush and they all look like they could use a drink. They close the door. Doctor’s eyes come up and meet mine. “It looks like you been drafted for this one, Emmett. You ready?”

“I’m ready, sir.”

But I wasn’t. I done what he told me to do, everything he said and I didn’t vomit or pass out, and it wasn’t even the blood. It was the screams. Guards at the gates of hell could not have stood to hear such screams. The snort of chloroform was merciful for Mr. Forrest, but it did not do me a damn bit of good.

When it was over, I had to go outside and have the dry heaves, fight off the shakes and chills, walking around out back, smoking, kicking clods, flapping my arms at my sides and hooting a few times. Dr. Tipton saved Mr. Forrest’s fingers, or saved what was left of them. What I mean is, he sewed the one still hanging down and he even sewed up the one I had pulled from my pocket. The top of the ring finger was gone for good and the mended ones would never look or work right. They were whole, but broken-looking. It was some job and even Dr. Tipton said it woulda been so much easier just to cut them off and be done with it.

Finally I come back inside, stop at the kitchen pump, put my face under the water. I can hear their voices from the study as I dry off and go in there. Doctor’s behind the desk and Mr. Forrest, I am surprised to see, is propped up on the couch, white bandages glowing in the electric light, his left hand splinted and his arm in a sling. The sleeves of his coat and shirt have been cut away and you can see he has a small tattoo. A pale rose and anchor. The pain must be a killer, but you got to admire Mr. Forrest, he’s keeping it all in his clenched jaw. Lew looks worse than he does. In fact, they all look pretty grim, except for Blanche, Doctor’s skeleton, hanging there behind his chair, grinning like she just heard the one about the traveling salesman.

Dr. Tipton has a glass all ready for me, pours me some Burning Bush (and don’t have to ask!) and then he says to Mr. Forrest that he hates to have to ask again, but he must. “I didn’t say--were you alone, Jake. I asked what happened.”

Jake Forrest takes a little sip of Burning Bush like he don’t really need it. His right hand trembles and he slowly lowers it back on the arm of the couch. He says well he was out at the city dump shooting rats. Target practice on the rats. And funniest damn thing, he forgot to tie his holster to his leg (and he points to the holster still buckled around his hips and shot to hell). “And I quick drew and the gun went off still stuck in the holster and since it wasn’t tied, it twisted and I had my hand out and--” He raises his right hand again, sips slow on the Burning Bush.

“Careless, Jake,” says Doctor. “You were careless.”

“That’s the worst of it. I did it carelessly.”

“You’re an experienced man with a gun. How could you forget something like that?”

“I didn’t know how important it was.” The pain must be eating Mr. Forrest alive by now. “I bitched it bad all right. Careless.”

“Well, Jake, you probably wrote more words about this town in the Enterprise-Gazette than any living mortal, so I don’t need to tell you what the law is. When there’s firearms involved--accident or not--the doctor’s got to tell the Sheriff. I’m sure he won’t take it no further than that, but he’s got to be told.”

“Well, sure I know that, Lucius. Everyone knows that,” says Jake like Doctor has asked after the tune of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” “Why every man in St. Elmo--” he looks at each of us--”knows that.” He holds up his mummified left hand and I can almost see the pain throbbing in front of my eyes, beating through his hand, but it don’t show on his face. Mr. Forrest grins. I never seen anything braver. He grins and he says, “Gentlemen, you see before you, walking testimony to the kind of accident you do not want to have. Careless. That’s the kind of man Jake Forrest is.” He laughs. Lew laughs. Only Lew sounds like the mule in Duke’s front yard. HaWHaWHaW.

Doctor don’t laugh. He pours himself another shot of Burning Bush and digs around the desk till he finds a cigar and a safety match. He don’t light the cigar. He’s thinking on lighting it. He’s thinking. He shakes his head. “Jake, I can’t--”

“Listen,” Jake says fast, “no one else was involved. It was an accident. A damned, stupid accident. I forgot to tie the damned holster down, that’s all. It was a target-practice accident.” He takes another drink and you can see him fighting pain back into a corner, dueling with it. “Can’t we just forget it?” The blood is starting to beat back into his face and his blue eyes are focusing hard.

Dr. Tipton, he fumbles around with the cigar and the unlit match. He finally strikes that match and then another and another, but he don’t ever light the cigar, though he keeps his eyes there. He don’t look at us.

But Jake Forrest does. He looks at us, each one. And I think, Yes, of course. And it’s like my mind can see the banner run at the top of every issue of the Enterprise-Gazette: A NEWSPAPER CAN HAVE NO SECRETS FROM THE READERS IT SERVES.

In fact, it was that line he used when he gave one of the speeches at my graduation. He said, in print as in life, that was his motto. It made your blood quicken, his talking about growing up and keeping yourself clean and proud so you could serve your family, your native St. Elmo, the great state of California and this great nation America too. That’s the kind of man Jake Forrest is. He lives the most public life in the country, though he don’t hold public office and never has. There’s no one who don’t know--or know of--him. Seems he has time for everyone. He can talk with working men who wear boots and braces, with growers in overalls and he knows the citrus and alfalfa crop, understands railroads and irrigation. He charms the old ladies who get their health asked after and dazzles the young matrons who get listened to (like they never do at home--you can bet). Schoolchildren who graduate at the top of their classes, they get their names in a special column in the newspaper and a silver dollar if they come by the Enterprise-Gazette which believes in education and right there at the front counter you can see why: Mr. Forrest’s framed degree from Central Methodist College is hanging up.

Jake Forrest is the only man who can walk from the railyard roundhouse, down where old St. Elmo once washed away, all the way up to New Town and know everyone in between, walk too into the Pilgrim Restaurant, sit down and have the manners to eat with the best of them. He ain’t rich, but everyone courts him up anyway and anyone who hates him is afraid to say so. (Usually. Duke’s old man said so after the mule business, all right, but he didn’t do nothing.) There’s been a few though, try to get after Mr. Forrest, but no one can say the Enterprise-Gazette plays favorites because it don’t. It’s always throttling on about making St. Elmo safe for democracy, about water rights and community service, sanctity of the public trust and the civil rights of Chinks. Mr. Forrest is in the Methodist pew every Sunday alongside his wife and daughters and you need only ask Jake Forrest for a favor to find that he is ever-obliging. People always say, That’s the kind of man Jake Forrest is .

You got to admire a man who’s good as his word and no hypocrite. Mr. Forrest don’t try to hide it that he’s also the kind of man plays poker with the Big Boys two or three nights a week at the Alexandria. (And maybe that’s why the Alexandria’s the only saloon not been attacked by the Women’s Christian Temperance Union.) Jake Forrest’s been known to drop a hundred dollars there on a pair of black queens. (Imagine, that kind of money running on a simple pair.) When he loses, he folds up his hand and leaves without a word. But when he wins, why everyone from the dealer right down to Lew’s old man (who cleans spittoons at the Alexandria), Jake Forrest strews money on them like they all done him a personal favor just by drawing breath. Everyone likes to see him win.

And me--right now--I’d like to see him win. I know that it ain’t the dump, or the gun, or the untied holster, or what’s left of his left hand. He bitched something else. He has a secret from the readers he serves and it’s like I can see the words before he says them. Smell the words and greenbacks. Say it, Mr. Forrest. Say: I’ll make it worth your while.

Then I look over at Lucius Tipton and I know Jake Forrest would be a damned fool to say those words to Dr. Tipton. There couldn’t be two more different men. Lucius Tipton lives a real private life. Real private. He’s kept secrets for folks who live on Silk Stocking Row, just like he’s kept them for Chinks who smoke opium in the cribs out back of their laundries. But you couldn’t buy his silence. If it wasn’t a gift, it wouldn’t be at all. But I am not Lucius Tipton. I am Emmett Wells and I think: Say it, you can buy my silence if you’ll only just say it. I look to the others (‘cept for Lew, who don’t know what’s happening) and I know they’re thinking too: Make it worth my while .

So I can see the words and smell them, but I don’t hear nothing except the tick of the clock and the snap of Doctor’s match when he (finally) lights that damn cigar and the squeal of his chair and the clatter of Blanche’s bones when he accidentally bumps into her. “Jake, it can’t work this way. Even if I want it to. Even if you want it to. Every soul in this town--including the Sheriff--is going to come up to you and say what did you do to your hand? Everyone’s going to ask after that left hand, Jake, and wonder how it was these men brought you into town from way out there at Ernton’s and--”

“Then we’ll have to think of some other story.”

“Why don’t we tell the Sheriff enough so he don’t feel obliged to ask for more? We could--”

“No. It can’t be that way. It can’t. It would--” Jake finishes off his Burning Bush, studies the empty glass in his right hand. “There is a woman involved. A lady who--” He swallows hard, so hard we hear it. “I was at the dump. Alone. Shooting. It was not target practice. I didn’t care what I hit or hurt. I just wanted something else destroyed. Something besides me. It was the old destruction.” Jake looks at Lucius Tipton alone. “You know what I mean. It was the old destruction incumbent on love.” His face grows gray and pale again. He tries to shrug, but the pain won’t allow it. He rests his eyes on Blanche for a minute and I think he’s going to cry, but instead, he lifts his empty glass and in doing that, he seems to pull another trigger. BANG! In front of my eyes, Jake Forrest puts on cheer and charm like they was hat, coat and collar stud, all snapping into place. He laughs. “Well boys, you can’t change the past, can you?”

Dr. Tipton says: “You get one chance at the past. And that’s when it’s still the present. That’s the only chance you ever get to change it.”

Eddie rolls a fag and rolls me one too. Mr. Forrest don’t smoke, but Duke and Lew are smoking and with Doctor’s cigar, we don’t have to see one another till finally, Doctor waves his smoke away, cuts a big swath through it and says, “Well men, killing rats in the St. Elmo city dump, that’s a public service by my standard. I can’t go calling the Sheriff every time a citizen renders a public service. Why that would mean--” He puzzles over what it would mean.

“You’d have to call the Sheriff when someone fell out of a tree chasing a cat,” says Lew, his round empty face glowing.

“Good work, Lew.”

“Or a dog or maybe a baby bird. Or a chicken. Chickens can get into trees. I seen one once.”

Well, then Eddie has to jump into it, how the four of us just mighta happened on Mr. Forrest there with his hand hurt and needing a ride into town. Then Duke says he hates like hell to bring this up and he’s glad Mr. Forrest done us all a public service, but there’s still the matter of the truck. “Ernton’s already closed up by now. He’s found me gone and the truck gone. He’ll have my hide and he won’t buy no cock-and-bull story.”

“That’s the Pilgrim’s delivery van, isn’t it?” asks Doctor and Duke nods and Doctor adds, “Then don’t worry about that. I can right that easy with Mrs. Douglass and she’ll right it with Ernton.”

Well, everyone stands up now like we’re just out of Sunday School. Mr. Forrest weaves a little. “I’d be obliged for a ride home, men. I hope my wife has kept my supper warm.” We kind of crowd him to the door so he don’t have to be exactly helped like some damn cripple. We go out to the delivery van (she starts first crank), Lew and Eddie get in the back, me and Duke with Mr. Forrest between us in the cab. Mr. Forrest holds out his right hand for me to shake and his old, rich voice rolls out, just like it did on graduation day. “Thank you, Emmett. Thank you for letting me hold onto you. It was a real service.”

“It’s nothing,” I say. “I guess I am your right-hand man.”

It’s full dark now and that single evening star that made me think of Helen McComb is lost in a hundred thousand stars all looking like each other, spilled across the cold black sky. Duke drives without even asking where Mr. Forrest lives because everyone knows where he lives. Hell, in St. Elmo you know which dogs are summer homes to which fleas. But I would give my right arm to know who was the woman, once the present, now the past, the reason that a man like Jake Forrest is out at the city dump trying to destroy something besides his own self.

Just then we pull slowly behind a man in uniform walking with his arm around a girl and Duke snorts out, “Another goddamn returning hero.”

“Yes, the war is over,” says Mr. Forrest, like we might not know this.

I don’t know the soldier, but my heart comes up and beats in my throat because I know that golden hair, those hips and shoulders. I know or would have known them and I push the window down quick and look out into the cold to see when evening drops her curtain down who Helen McComb is with and pins it with a star . “Can you beat that?” My breath hard and hurtful in my chest. “Mason Douglass. Mason Damn Douglass.”

“Hope he didn’t notice his mother’s truck,” Duke mutters, speeding up.

“He won’t.” He won’t notice anything but what Helen McComb must feel like, close up, near his body, so close he can smell the soap and talc and lavender water on her.

Engine still thumping, we stop in front of Mr. Forrest’s house, the windows spilling yellow light on the porch and the porch swing, which they had not yet took down, even if it was January, rocking in the cold, a steady squeal like the ghosts of summer lovers. You could hear one of his daughters playing piano. Trying to. I jump out and I ask Mr. Forrest if he wants some help up the porch steps.

He says he is fine as he is. And, he seems to be--the old Jake Forrest back in place, his smile promising you Principles and Interest in whatever you was about to say. He even gives us a kind of salute. “Goodnight, men.” Then he walks slowly up the stairs. He don’t look back.

It turned out Dr. Tipton couldn’t right it about the delivery truck, even though Mrs. Douglass did just as he asked. She wrote a note to Mr. Ernton to say how very pleased she was that Duke had driven her truck into town to try to find out what was wrong with it and how Duke was a fine, responsible, clever young man and Mr. Ernton was lucky to have him working and wasn’t it even more lucky Duke happened to be driving past the Enterprise-Gazette when Mr. Forrest had his accident and that Mr. Ernton should not give a thought to the blood on the floor as she would have it painted over.

Ernton still sacked Duke. He turned round and hired one of Our Boys Come Back From Over There.

Dog vomit. That’s what Duke called Ernton. But he stayed home after that, sulking, stuck with his drunk father and the mule tethered in the front yard.

For me, I might go out afternoons with Lew and Eddie, or maybe look for work, but mornings I hang around waiting for the mail. (Even though my mother gives me this sneer she’s been practicing for 19 years that I know of.) I hang around the mailbox hoping Mr. Forrest will make it worth my while, reward me for having been his right-hand man, buy my silence. But after a few weeks, it looks like I have given my silence for free because everyone else buys the story how he smashed his hand up in the press, an awful accident right there in the pressroom of the Enterprise-Gazette. Oh, I think Lew mighta said something else, but no one pays him any mind because Lew means well, but he don’t have biscuits for brains.

Then--February--Duke turns up behind the counter at the Enterprise-Gazette. He says Mr. Forrest really needs someone who has experience setting type because his hand is so busted up now and won’t ever be the same, but he hires Duke anyway. Duke’s fast and mechanical. Days, Duke’s on the counter, nights he’s learning the presses. And then, why look here, Lew’s delivering papers along with boys half his age. He’s working, ain’t he? And if you give Lew a set task and tell him how, he’s a good man for it. And well, next thing you know, Eddie’s up at dawn too, working a full day, hauling, loading, driving, supervising Lew and the others. Eddie’s doing real good. He’s still living with his mother, but he is busy days and I am not.

So, one of them un-busy days, I’m looking for work or something like it and I find I’m way the hell out by Ernton’s and pass by the filling station where the new man is jawing a yahoo. I keep walking on up the road that leads to the city dump. The smell--whew! How many kitten corpses are rotting out here? I walk round the edges of the dump, paper blowing past me, kicking a few cans and bottles, piles of dirty rags, keeping my eyes peeled for rats because Mr. Forrest couldn’t have killed them all. And looking too for his pistol, which must still be here somewheres, but not on the edges, more likely somewheres in the middle, the muddle of the dump, where I stumble over buggy wheels and wagon tongues and singletrees because everyone’s got cars now, and kick candlesticks and headless lanterns because the whole town’s electrified. Don’t no one need this junk. Sun squints off broken glass and toasts up rusted cans and broken scales, a toothless rake, a busted bucket. A stove upended looks to be a fat lady kicking her feet, iron skirt over her head. The sun shines off a broken bedstead and dries up even the killer-death stench. The flies wink at me and rub their legs and chuckle over all these things that have been thrown out of people’s lives. Like me.

I’m ankle-, sometimes knee-deep in this trash while I wonder about Mr. Forrest’s ring finger. Lost the finger. Saved the ring. That’s the kind of man Jake Forrest is. Everyone likes to see him win, but for a man whose life is open and shut, public as a clothespin, you long to know who was the woman before that present became past and what it was he bitched so bad. His left hand will always be crooked and broken and cut off, and whatever he bitched, now he’ll never forget.

Me, my hands are fine and I’ll never forget Remember that you have a friend . Hell, my hands are big and strong and my fingers aren’t wrecked. My fingers could have laced through Helen McComb’s golden hair and cupped her chin and brought her lips to mine. My hands are strong enough to hold Helen McComb’s bare shoulders, that’s how strong my hands are, strong enough to pull her up against me tight and hold her there forever. My hands are so goddamned strong I can fling this goddamned topless food mill so it strikes an old bureau, hits, splinters the bureau and the bottles and they break and splinter too--shatter, splatter, sing through the air, burst, empty cans ricochet. The old destruction comes on me Though you may travel far because I’m not going anywhere, am I?

With my strong hands I heft a busted-up sewing machine, cabinet and all, high over my head, throw, heave it and it bounces twice, wood cracks open on a broken soapstone drainboard and the ash sifter I hurl, it hits a rusted washtub full of paper and rags and when I kick that over, the paper and rags all fly before I trip on a skillet with a hole in it, curse it, throw that and a bottomless kettle and all the crockery I can get my hands on, throw them too, throw whatever was warped, whatever was worthless, like this dirty goddamn clock lying on its wooden side, its hands sprung off, but its gizzards don’t splinter when I kick it. All right. All right and kick again. My boot goes through this time, but its dirty face is still grinning at me and I pick it up and throw, not aiming or caring what I hit or hurt, just wanting it destroyed, but it bounces off an unstuffed mattress, goddamnit and don’t break. Paper flying from my feet, my boot catches that clock’s handless face and splits it off and it goes sailing, high, falls, lands in a goddamned baby carriage. Damned if it don’t! I laugh out loud. Laugh. Because that’s what Mr. Forrest did, isn’t it? You don’t catch Jake Forrest crying. He shot his fingers off and screamed all right, but he didn’t cry. And when it was over, he laughed. I heard him. I was there.

By mid-May I’m working the front desk at the Enterprise-Gazette. Duke’s took over the pressroom, so I am on the counter days. Nights, Duke’s teaching me to set type. I’m not smart or quick as Duke, but I am doing all right. I am working anyway. It’s been worth my while. And, though no one ever mentions it, I notice how Mr. Forrest’s learned to keep his left hand half-hid and how he never again says he bitched anything. So, maybe even with the busted-up fingers, he forgot after all. I didn’t. You only get one chance at the past and that’s when it’s still the present. Helen McComb married someone else.