Sunset and Sawdust Read online

  The great round saw in the mill screeched as it chewed trees, and there was the sound of the planing saw as it shaped lumber. The air was full of the sweet sap smell of fresh sawed East Texas pine. Out of a long chute connected to the mill houses came puffs of gnawed wood that floated down on top of a mound of sawdust made dark by time and weather.

  All about were broken limbs and trees twisted up by the storm. A log wagon was turned over and men were busy righting it. A dead ox lay nearby, half covered in fallen logs.

  “Wonder if they even stopped working when the tornado come,” Sunset said.

  “They did, wasn’t long,” Uncle Riley said. “Not here at Camp Rupture. Hell, someone will gut and skin that ox there and eat him by nightfall. A man fell down, they might skin and eat him.”

  “That’s Camp Rapture, Uncle Riley. Not Rupture.”

  “Not if you work here long it ain’t. And I worked long enough to know I didn’t want no more of it. I got a truss on to prove it.”

  “Sure wish I’d just shot Pete in the leg.”

  “Now that I ponder on it,” Uncle Riley said, “I’m starting to agree with you, Miss Sunset.”

  2

  As Sunset and Uncle Riley rode in, working men studied them, made note Sunset was wearing only a shirt. They put aside their work and began to move down the hill toward the wagon, like flies to molasses.

  “What you doing with that beat-up white woman?” a man said to Uncle Riley.

  “Just helping her,” Uncle Riley said. Then to Sunset: “See, they gonna cut me or hang me.”

  “Take me to my mother-in-law’s.”

  Uncle Riley looked at the men following the wagon.

  “Oh, heavens,” Uncle Riley said. “They look mean. It’s that kind of mean only a dead nigger can make happy.”

  “I still got the gun. Maybe I can get five of them.”

  “There’s more than five.”

  You could see screened-in sleeping porches on some of the houses, and on the porches were beds and the beds were there to take advantage of the night air and the screens were there to baffle the mosquitoes. The houses were painted industrial green and were jacked up on blocks or pilings. All around the houses chicken wire had been nailed and inside the wire, under the houses, chickens and geese pecked about. Most of the windows were black with soot from the power house and the grassless yards were sprinkled with sawdust from the mill.

  Sunset’s mother-in-law’s house was classier than the rest. Had wooden shingles, electricity and fresh paint. Stood on treated pilings and there were no chickens under the house. They were confined to a large pen and chicken house out back, and they were fed in troughs and their water was in a big tub and it was changed daily. By the chicken house was a fenced-in lot and a shed containing a hog and piglets. The windows were fresh scrubbed and the yard had been raked clean of sawdust and there were marks in the dirt as if a giant hen had been scratching for worms.

  The sleeping porch was large and not screened in, but framed by windows that could be cranked open. Sunset could see the potted plants her mother-in-law loved in big clay jars.

  Parked in the yard was a black company truck with mud-caked tires and weathered wooden slats all around the bed. The sides of the truck were scraped from hard work and it was lightly coated in sawdust. On the side of it, with a finger, someone had written in dust: I’M DIRTY AS SIN.

  As they neared the house, Uncle Riley turned the wagon so it came between the water pump and the house. He pulled alongside the front porch and the wide steps that led up to it. He yanked back on the wheel brake and loosely held the reins.

  “You’re gonna have to come around and help me down, Uncle Riley,” Sunset said. “I help myself, I’ll fall face first in the dirt and show my butt under this shirt.”

  “Oh, Miss Sunset, can’t you wait for one of them white men?”

  “All right.”

  Men, both white and black, gathered around the wagon. Sunset knew most of them, but she wasn’t sure with her face like this they’d know her. Then she remembered her hair. No one around had hair like hers. Not as long and flame-red and thick as hers. And unlike most women, she always wore it down.

  “What the hell’s going on here?” one of the men said. It was Sunset’s father-in-law. He was big and looked like his son, Pete, only thinner of hair and bigger of belly.

  His khaki shirt had wet swells beneath the arms and there were sweat frames around his collar and along his shirtfront. He cocked back his stained hat, said, “Goddamn, Sunset, is that you?”

  “It’s me, Mr. Jones.”

  “What in hell happened to you? And what are you doing with this nigger in his undershirt? He do this? Is that Pete’s pistol?”

  The black men in the crowd faded back carefully, using practiced methods of sidestepping and eye misdirection. In a matter of moments they had managed themselves to the rear of the swarm, hands in pockets, watching cautiously, ready to “yas suh” or bolt.

  “I ain’t got nothing on underneath this shirt and I’m weak, so help me down, but be careful.”

  Jones helped her down. Sunset said, “Uncle Riley here found me after the storm and helped me. I didn’t have no clothes on, and he gave me his shirt.”

  “Well, I thank you for that, Uncle Riley,” Jones said.

  “You welcome, Mr. Jones. Just out gathering these here fishes, and along she come. I put my head down and gave her my shirt.”

  “That’s exactly what he did,” Sunset said, and leaned back against the wagon. “I can’t hardly stand. I’m gonna need help up on the porch there.”

  Two men eagerly stepped from the crowd to give her a hand. Sunset thought they were holding her just a little too warmly. Their eyes were playing to the front of her shirt where she had misbuttoned it and she knew they were peeking at her breasts. She was too weary to worry about it. Besides those peeks, more men were seeing her freckled legs this day than had seen them when she was a little girl in short pants.

  They helped her onto the porch as she used her hands to tug down the back of the shirt and not give a free show.

  Jones followed her up the steps, took a look down the front of her shirt himself, said, “What you doing like this? Get hurt in the storm?”

  “Something like that.” Sunset turned and called to Uncle Riley. “Thank you for being such a gentleman, Uncle Riley.”

  “You welcome, Miss Sunset.”

  “I’ll give you your shirt later. For reasons you can see, I got to hang on to it just now.”

  “Yes, ma’am. That’s quite all right. You keep it you got a mind to. Reckon I better run along, get these fishes home before they go bad.”

  Riley let loose the wheel brake, clucked to the mules, and the crowd parted.

  One of the men in the crowd, Don Walker, said to the man next to him, “You can bet that nigger enjoyed him a peek.”

  “Just hate it wasn’t me,” said the other, Bill Martin. “Even with her face all beat up like that, I’d take her.”

  “Hell, Bill, you’d take a hole in the dirt.”

  “Shit, I’d fuck a duck if it winked and bent over.”

  “I don’t think you’d care if it winked or not.”

  In the Jones house, Sunset sat down in a cane chair next to the radio and watched shadows run down the hill and over the house like spilled oil.

  Sunset said, “I shot him.” She held up the gun. “With this gun. His gun. He had me on the floor hitting me. He tried to rape me. He’d raped me before. I couldn’t have it no more.”

  When the truth of the matter sank in, Mrs. Jones, a tall, handsome woman with mounded hair skunk-striped with gray, let out a noise so shrill and pitiful, Sunset could feel it in her bones. It made her flex her right foot so hard her shoe came off.

  “You shot him?” Jones said. “You shot my boy?”

  “Right upside the head.”

  “My God,” he said.

  “Didn’t have no choice. He was raping me.”

  “Man can’
t rape his wife,” Jones said.

  “Sure seemed like rape to me,” Sunset said.

  Jones drew back his hand, and as he did, Sunset lifted the pistol. “I ain’t gonna have no man beat on me again, I can help it.”

  “You’re on a spree, that’s what you are,” Jones said. “You and that nigger. A spree.”

  “Uncle Riley don’t have nothing to do with it. And if we were on a spree, you think we’d have come here? I didn’t know no other place to go. I come for Karen.”

  “But why did you do it?” Jones said.

  “Pete come home drunk. Guess one of his girlfriends over in Holiday, probably that whore Jimmie Jo French, didn’t give him what he wanted. So he decided he wanted it from me. Even if I was second, or maybe third, choice. And he wanted it rough. He started beating on me, ripped off my clothes, and the storm come and blew the house away. Just took it out of there like it was made out of newspaper. I got hold of his gun and shot him. Walked off without no clothes on. Just these shoes and a curtain I found. Uncle Riley gave me his shirt.”

  “He was your husband, girl,” Jones said.

  “Sometimes.”

  Mrs. Jones had begun to shriek and run about the house like a chicken being pursued by a fox. She came to one wall, hit it with her palms, turned, ran to the other side, repeated the process.

  “I didn’t want to kill him and I didn’t mean to. But I thought he might kill me.”

  “My own daughter-in-law. What have we done to you?”

  “It’s what your son done to me,” Sunset said. But thought: I still remember your hand patting my bottom more than once when no one was looking.

  “He was the constable,” Jones said.

  “Ain’t no more,” Sunset said. “Ain’t nothing no more.”

  Jones pulled up a chair and sat down. It was as if a great sack filled with potatoes had been tossed onto the chair. He seemed to droop over the sides and shift all over.

  Mrs. Jones had finally collapsed to the floor and was pulling her hair. “Pete. Pete. Pete,” she said, as if he might answer. “Goddamn you, Sunset,” Jones said. “A man’s got urges.”

  “Where’s Karen?” Sunset asked.

  Mrs. Jones wailed and Mr. Jones sat in his chair. Neither responded. Sunset got up, put on her shoe, sat back down.

  After a while, Mr. Jones said, “You know for sure he’s dead?”

  “He’s dead, all right.”

  “Might still be alive.”

  “Not unless he’s been resurrected.”

  Mrs. Jones let out another screech. This one shook the glass in the windows. She had begun to roll around on the floor.

  “Where is he?” Mr. Jones asked.

  “At what’s left of our house with his pants down and his ass in the air.”

  Jones sat for a while, trying to swallow a lump in his throat. When he managed, he said, “Reckon I got to go over there and get him. You, missy, you’re gonna pay for this. There’s the law, and they’re gonna make you pay.”

  “He was the law,” Sunset said, “and he made me pay every day, and I hadn’t even done nothing.”

  Jones got up and went out the door. Sunset sat and held the pistol in her lap. She looked at Mrs. Jones, who was lying on the floor heaving.

  Slowly her mother-in-law put her feet under her and got up and walked over to Sunset. Sunset knew what was coming, but unlike with Mr. Jones, she didn’t move. She figured she ought to take just a little for what she had done, and if she was going to take it, she’d take it from her mother-in-law, Marilyn Jones. The woman had always treated her good. She could take a slap.

  But just one.

  Mrs. Jones slapped Sunset with all her strength. So hard it knocked Sunset onto the floor and overturned the chair.

  Sunset thought: Maybe I could have skipped that one after all. The slap struck her where Pete had hit her, and it burned like hell.

  “You killed my boy,” Marilyn said.

  “I didn’t mean for it to happen,” Sunset said, then started to cry.

  Slowly, she got up and righted the chair, pushed the shirt down over herself best she could, sat down again. She still had the revolver in her hand. She held on to it like a drowning man to a straw.

  Marilyn stood over her and looked down, her hair loose now and hanging. She drew her hand back as if she might hit Sunset again.

  “No,” Sunset said.

  Marilyn’s face became less clouded. She studied Sunset for a long moment, opened her arms wide, said, “Come here, darling.”

  “Say what?” Sunset said.

  “Come here.”

  Sunset studied her mother-in-law for a time, stood cautiously.

  “It’s all right,” said Marilyn. “I ain’t crazy as I was.”

  “About half that crazy could be too much.”

  “It’s all right,” Marilyn said, and took a step toward Sunset. They embraced. Sunset continued to hold the gun, just in case. She was hoping she wouldn’t end up shooting the whole damn family. Maybe the chickens too.

  “I lost a son,” Marilyn said. “I ain’t gonna lose no daughter, too.”

  “I didn’t want to do it.”

  “I know.”

  “No. No, you don’t,” Sunset said.

  “You might be surprised what I know, girlie.”

  3

  The cyclone that tore up Sunset’s house swirled on through the trees, carrying away her roof and goods, headed east, and was still kicking by early nightfall, tossing fish, frogs, and debris. It even threw a calf against a house and killed it.

  The westbound train into Tyler caught the tail end of the storm, and the wind tossed fish against it and shook the boxcars and made them rattle like a toy train shaken by a mean child.

  For a moment, it seemed as if the train might be sucked off the track, but shaking was the worst of it. The locomotive and its little boxes chugged on and so did the storm, which finally played out near the Louisiana border. The last of it was just a cool, damp wind for some hot people night-fishing on the banks of the Sabine River.

  In one of the boxcars, Hillbilly sat with his guitar and his little tote bag and eyed the two fellas squatting across from him. They had climbed on when the train slowed in Tyler, and now as it clunked through the countryside and the storm was over, they began to eye him.

  They pretended to ignore him at first, but he caught them sneaking glances. He hadn’t liked them from the start. He had greeted them as they climbed into the car, and they hadn’t said so much as eat shit or howdy.

  They kicked a couple of sun perch out of the open doorway, shook the rain off themselves dog style, hunkered down like gargoyles opposite the open sliding door, and said nothing, just sneaked peeks.

  Although Hillbilly looked younger than his thirty years, he had lived a full thirty. He had been around and seen much. He had played his guitar and sung in every dive in East Texas, Oklahoma and Louisiana. He had ridden trains all over the place, supped in hobo camps, boxed and wrestled for money at county fairs, where his wiry thinness and soft good looks had fooled many a local tough into thinking he was a pushover.

  From experience, Hillbilly knew these fellas were studying him a little too intently. Like hungry dogs looking at a pork chop. One of them was short and stout and wore a wool cap. The other was taller, leaner, and hatless, with a thick growth of beard.

  “You got the makings?” Hillbilly asked, even though he didn’t smoke as a matter of course. But sometimes, you broke the ice, it could save you trouble. A cigarette could do that, break the ice.

  The man with the cap shook his head, said, “You’re a young’n, ain’t you?”

  “Not that young,” Hillbilly said.

  “You look young.”

  “Have any food?” Hillbilly asked.

  “Just them fish in the doorway,” said the bearded man. “You want that, have at it.”

  “I don’t think so,” Hillbilly said. “Ever seen that kind of thing before? Raining fish? I read about it. It was that cyclo
ne. It sucked out a pond somewhere, throwed them fish all along here.”

  The men had no interest in the cyclone or the fish. The bearded man grinned at Hillbilly. Hillbilly had seen friendlier grins on alligators.

  “You been on the road a while?” said the bearded man.

  “A while.”

  “Gets lonely, don’t it?” said the man with the cap.

  “I’m not that lonely, really.”

  “We get lonely,” said the bearded man. “Me and him just being together. We get all kinds of lonely. Man don’t need to be lonely. Don’t have to be.”

  “I’m not lonely at all,” Hillbilly said.

  The man with the cap said, “We can show you that you been lonely and didn’t even know it.”

  “I’m fine. Really.”

  The man with the cap laughed. “It ain’t really you we’re worried about. It’s us that are lonely.”

  “You got each other,” Hillbilly said.

  “Having each other all the time gets old,” the bearded man said. “We want someone else to not be lonely with.”

  “God don’t like that kind of talk. You boys ever hear about Sodom and Gomorrah?”

  The bearded man hooted. “Who gives a damn about some Bible story? We get you bent over, you’ll be happier than you think.”

  “Fellas, leave me alone.”

  That’s when the one with the cap came up from his squatting position and sprang.

  Hillbilly brought his guitar around hard, breaking it soundly over the capped man’s head, knocking him back. Then the bearded one was on him. Hillbilly pushed him back with the palm of his hand, stuck the other hand in his pocket, pulled out his knife, flicked it open.

  The one with the cap came in again, and Hillbilly stuck him under the short ribs. The knife went in as easy as poking a hole through a sheet of wet paper. The man dropped immediately. Went to his knees, tumbled on his side.

  “Goddamn,” said the bearded one, whacking Hillbilly in the eye. “You hurt Winston.”

  The bearded man grabbed Hillbilly in a bear hug and squeezed Hillbilly’s hands to his sides. Hillbilly butted him in the nose and he let go. Hillbilly stabbed him in the groin and he stumbled back. Hillbilly’s knife flashed again, high and wide.