Junior Ray. John Pritchard

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СКАЧАТЬ is it men are the only ones that do shit like that? I mean, can’t you just see a whole carload of cheerleaders flingin’ empty pints of Jim Beam out the windows, tearin’ out along a gravel road to fuk sheep? Or, better yet, after the big game, one of the high school heroes says to his girlfriend, “Want to go to the dance?” and she says, “Hell, no, muthafukka, I wanta go screw sheep.” That could be that sumbich’s greatest nightmare, and it’s no wonder them planters was in such a sweat to get mechanized and stick to row crops.

      But there were mules,

      and mules were food

      and numerous enough

      to fatten the vultures who,

      at that very moment, may, in fact, have been consuming the time and place, devouring it hunk by hunk until, finally, only the bones remain and those so scattered only mice can find them.

      Anyhow, get’n back to what I was tellin you, one day in the middle of all that commotion over the disappearance of that asshole Leland Shaw, I was set’n in the Sheriff’s office with my feet up on my desk, eat’n one nem pimento cheese sammidges the Methodist ladies sent over, and drinkin’ a Coke, and I looked over at Voyd who was read’n last month’s Field and Stream, and I said, “Voyd,” and he didn’t say nothin’, and I said, “Voyd, I’mo find that gotdamn maniac.” And Voyd, still readin’ Field and Stream—or more likely just lookin’ at the pitchers—says, “Junior Ray, that sumbich ain’t no maniac.”

      And I said, “Well, he’s sure as shit gon’ be one when I get through with his ass—I’mo find that sumbich—I’mo find ’im!”

      “You not gon’ do doodly squat, Junior Ray,” he says to me. “You couldn’t find your dick with a hard on, much less some crazy fool runnin’ around the county scarin’ one half of ever’body to death and worryin’ the shit out of the other half about whether he’s gon’ catch cold or not.”

      “Well, Voyd,” I said, “You’re right about one thing—I ain’t gonna find him—we are gonna find him, and we are gon’ get started right now, so get your ass up and come on!”

      We went out the side door of the courthouse, got in my patrol car, which was parked under the big white oak, and scratched off outa the parking lot. I turned on the blue lights and the sireen, and took off out the Beat Line Road toward Savage and the Yellow Dog.

      Just about all the roads was still gravel then, except for Highway 61; so, dry as it was, I raised a lotta dust blastin’ outta town on the Beat Line Road, goin’ east. Then I cut off the blue lights and the sireen when we got past the city dump. We was gonna go check out a so-called sighting by some niggas out between Savage and Prichard. One of ’em said he heard a painter, and the other two said it was a man howlin’ out in the woods over on the other side of the Yellow Dog, between the railroad tracks and the Coldwater River.

      I didn’t believe it was no painters left around there, but Voyd claimed Leroy Whalum swore they was one right out where we was goin’ and said Leroy said he’d heard it and seen its footprints in a rice field as far up as Lost Lake.

      Anyhow, when me and Voyd was clippin’ along out the Beat Line road, just fo we got to the Dog, Voyd says, “looky yonder at that old silo.” And I says, “Uhn-huhn,” not thinkin’ much about it. And Voyd says, “That sumbich is full of cotton seeds.” Now that got my attention, for a moment anyway, and I said, “That’s a gotdamnn helluva thing to have in a silo. Who put cotton seeds in it?” And Voyd said he didn’t know but that, one afternoon, him and Sunflow’r was parked out there the other side of it, and he got out of the car to take a leak and decided to look up in the chute. And that’s when he found out the thing was jam-ass-packed to the top with old cotton seeds, and they wasn’t no tellin’ how long they’d been there.

      Now, the silo itsef, which was a big, tall muthafukka, had been put there in about 1914, and I knew that because, at the Rotary Club one day when I was the guest of Sheriff Holston, Judge Lowe had made a talk on the history of the county, and he pointed out that that silo had been built way back then by a buncha Yankees from up in Wisconsin who rented the land from old Miss Helena Ferry’s father and wanted to raise milk cows on the property, but that didn’t last long, with the mosquitos and the heat and the damp-ass weather—but them Yankees always was a silly-ass lot . . . anyway, finally, the Wisconsin outfit gave it up, and Miss Helena rented it out for row crops. I don’t know who farmed it, but, at some point, somebody filled that thing full of cotton seeds and just left them there.

      I look now across the clear, cold light

      of this winter plain

      and see the marsh hawk gliding low,

      just above the sedge,

      along the ditch.

      No doubt rabbits are trembling

      beneath the swift shadow of this early harrier,

      hungry, borne up not by air

      but by beauty.

      In the distance the patrol approaches at port arms, in a line of skirmishers, Teutonic, in search of Celts. Their eyes burn with murder. Their pace is deliberate and unceasing. Yet, it is I who have found them and not the reverse, and they are the sign that I am not at home. I do not share their fondness for kartoffels.

*[Interviewer’s Note to the Reader: Here Junior Ray rose from his chair and walked into the hallway where he went to a door behind and beneath the staircase, the usual location of the steps leading to a basement, but there are almost no basements in Delta dwellings, for, indeed, they are already in one. He opened the door to a deep if not large closet; then, standing on the threshold, he bent over, rummaged about briefly but noisily and hauled forth an enormous light-tan canvas hunting coat, of which not only the game pockets but the coat itself—buttoned up and bound into a bundle with lengths of cotton rope—bulged and strained at every stitch and seam with the weight of what appeared to be angular objects. He lifted the grotesque and bloated garment from the floor of the closet with both hands and carried it with him back to his chair in the living room where he dropped the swollen coat upon the floor between our two chairs. This odd package contained Shaw’ notebooks.

      From a sitting position, Junior Ray, as though thrusting his bold hand into the jaws and uncertain darkness of a sleeping catfish, reached and grabbed and tossed, one by one, each of the notebooks at my feet until the heap stood at the height of my knees.

      The notebooks themselves were not actually notebooks: they were ledgers, a plentiful supply of which had been available to Shaw in the almost empty and long-unused plantation commissary that still stands even today in slow decay on land once owned by Shaw’s great-grandfather on his mother’s side, Captain Pemberton Whitworth Ferry, a native of North Carolina, who had obtained land in the Delta in the 1840s and had moved, at first, his family to Carrollton just up in the Hills, then, later, after the Civil War, had moved them, finally, down into the Delta’s fertile alluvial jungle.

      I picked up one of the ledgers, thought briefly of Thomas Wolfe, and opened it to the first page. I quickly examined the contents of that page and that of several more. A rapid survey of the pile confirmed my impression that every page of each book was completely filled, back and front—in pencil. Shaw’s handwriting was atrocious but quite readable. And that was a great relief.]

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