Junior Ray. John Pritchard

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СКАЧАТЬ she knew he was in there and couldn’t get out so she went on back down the hall and didn’t say nothin’ about it. But he musta been going through one of them real intense spells of believin’ them German soldiers was comin’ up on him, because the next day, which was the day after Christmas, 1958, he jumped through that pitcha-window at the cracker-dawn and run like a muthafukka. The nurse said she heard a crash, but had thought it was something out on the highway. The truth is she was asleep and didn’t want that to come out.

      Now, there it was, colder than the I-R-S, and that dicklicker skips off in nothin’ but a pair of cotton khakis, some wool socks, brogan shoes, a flannel shirt from the Golden Rule, an olivedrab GI sweater, the kind that has buttons runnin’ from the breastbone to the neck, one nem knit caps from the army surplus, and his daddy’s old wine-colored heavy wool bathrobe, which was damn near too big for him but, I grant you, woulda provided him with a good deal of warmth. Oh, yeah, and a pair of blue mittens that had “Joy to the World” wrote all over ’em, which somebody from the Episcopal church had made and sent over to him for a Christmas present. And except for them mittens, that’s what he wore every year when the weather turned cool. I guess it was his uniform.

      The ground was so frozen he didn’t leave no tracks, although somebody found a couple of PayDay candy–bar wrappers behind the Boll and Bloom Cafe out on the highway across from the lot that had all them scaly-bark trees, where the old Boy Sprout hut used to be.

      Naturally, at first, the talk was that he hitched a ride to Meffis. But I said then, and I say now, no fool in his right mind woulda given a lift to a crazy lookin’ sumbich like Leland Shaw was, dressed up in that big-ass bathrobe. So I never did believe he left the area. It turned out I was right, too, but all that come out little by little as time went by.

      Well, I never saw such a gotdamn commotion in all my life. The Boll and Bloom became the headquarters for the volunteers who wanted to help search for that crazy muthafukka. It was a good place to have a headquarters because that’s where most of them volunteers was ever’day anyhow, even when they wuddn searchin’ for nothin’.

      I enjoyed the whole thing. Shoot, the highway patrol got in on it, and a group or two from out of town came up to help—well, after a while they was reports of a wild-ass lookin’ sumbich showin’ up here and there in about four or five counties around the Delta. That, in itself, didn’t mean a whole lot because, if you ast me, the Delta had more wild-actin’, weird-looking coksukkas than it could keep track of anyhow. Most of the reports turned out to be something else or nothin’ at all, but one or two had some truth in ’em. Like the one from out there in the eastern part of the county around Dooley Spur, and another from over ’cross the levee in the bar’ pits south of Mhoon’s Landing. There were others that Voyd and I and sometimes some of the volunteers investigated, but we couldn’t turn up nothin’. And the strange thing about it was that he was right up under our nose the whole fukkin time.

      As I say, at first I wanted to save him and make ever’body happy; then, later, I wanted to kill him—and also make ever’body happy . . . but, as the thing drug on, I ceased to give a fuk about ever’body, and I just wanted to shoot his ass.

      By that time it wouldn’t have mattered who it was, but, you might say, he had become the most convenient target of what you also might say was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. And I sure as sheepshit wuddn gonna turn it down.

      I am a soldier of misfortune,

      though, even so, not an unhappy one. Indeed,

      I speed by night on feet of light

      to all the corners of this alien land,

      where I am blocked and cannot proceed

      for lack of stars

      and high water.

      I fly on foot with flashing talaria,

      my body wrapped in the wool of a supplicant,

      but my aim is armed in archetypes;

      and, moving fast through the clear,

      cold moonless night,

      I am a particle of all the cosmic dust

      within that bright galactic swipe above me, that, frankly,

      warms my heart with its myriad, radiant islands

      of atomic fire.

      Pinpoints find me, fuel my velocity — I do not tire — I have no schedule, and, as prey, I have but three concerns: escape, evasion, and return.

      But I cannot return

      unless I know where I’ve gone,

      and that is the relentless difficulty

      which neither preachers

      nor geographers can remedy.

      A planter down near Tutwiler said he saw a strange-actin, funny-dressed feller runnin’ around his equipment shed. Two teenagers said they looked out of their car up on the levee and seen a maniac with a hook for a hand. I’d like to know who told that one for the first time. How many hook-handed maniacs you reckon there could be? And why is it always teenagers who sees ’em?

      Anyhow, the point is that finally they was sightings of “the maniac” up and down Highway 61 as far south as Shelby and as far north as Dead Nigga Slough, up between Lake Cormorant and Walls. And it was when he began to be referred to as a maniac that started me to thinking about being able to blow him away and not having to explain it.

      Now, if that sumbich had been the kinda good ol’ boy I have some repect for, I’da had a whole different attitude about the entire episode. But he wuddn. He wuddn the kinda guy that a person growed up with and went out with after the ballgame on Fridays and screwed sheep with just for the hell of it. Screwin’ sheep was supposed to be against the law, but what was they gon’ do—put one nem little wooly muthafukkas on the witness stand? It’d a been my word against hers anyhow.

      They used to say that down at State College they was a half-human, half-sheep thing in a jar. It sounded pretty awful, mainly because of what it meant might happen to you if you wuddn careful. Think about it. It would be the unde-fukkin-niable proof that you’d been out screwin’ sheep. I mean, don’t you know back then they was a lotta good ol’ boys down there at Cow College that hated to look at that thing in the jar on account of they was afraid they was gonna see their spit’n image.

      Some people, especially women, find it hard to believe all that went on, but it did, and for as far back as I can remember, too, till finally they wuddn no more livestock due to the way the farmin’ situation changed and all. But, hell, by then it didn’t make no difference no way, ’cause I was already long growed up and didn’t care about that kinda thing no more. But I’ll tell you what, every time I’m somewheres of a Sunday, which ain’t much, and they’re servin’ lamb and mint jelly, I always feel a little bit uneasy. It’s things like that, later on, that make you think about what you’re going to do before you do it instead of just shoot’n from the hip, if you know what I mean. I guess if I could say one thing about screwin’ sheep, it really made me appreciate family values.

      But it was a lotta fun. We had us a time back in nem days. They was this one ewe that belonged to old man Peyton, and we used to go out and catch her in his pasture out near the levee. One night that old ewe looked back over her shoulder at me and СКАЧАТЬ