Father and Son by Larry Brown Read Free Book Online Page A

clock in your room just before sleep.

Barlow’s eyes were full of blood and he couldn’t find his gun. Things were still dripping on him and he could feel the blood cooling on his clothes. Blood sucked in and out of one nostril with a little congested sound. Some splinters on one of the boards were digging into his cheek, but he didn’t move. He heard the door open, the steps come closer. He lay still, his eyes open. He held his breath.
    Something hard prodded his shoulder, his head. He felt two feet straddle him. Then the bell on the register rang and he heard the drawer roll open, the flicking of the little metal arms, the feet removing themselves from over him. The lid on one of the coolers opened and somebody lifted a beer out and didn’t close it. He heard the bottle being opened, a long sucking bubbling. Must have really hit the spot. Then the steps moved away and around in front of the bar and off to the left of the door where one table sat back almost hidden in a corner. He let his breath out. His fingers explored the sticky wood but still they felt no weapon and he was weak and laboring by now to breathe so he concentrated on lying still and listening. For a while there was nothing to hear, but then a chair creaked, a body settled. The light was bright over him and it was a puzzle to him how he knew that.
    His last thoughts were memories, a time in 1956 when he got twoflats on his car and had to walk four miles. He stopped at a house for a drink of water and a blind old man was there on the front porch in a rocker. The blind man wouldn’t talk to him. He asked for water and the old man simply lifted his hand and pointed to a log shed beside the house. There was a pump with a long handle in there and a sluice and some canned goods arrayed on shelves. It was cool and dark in there and on a stone slab stood a quart fruit jar of water with which to prime the pump. It primed easily: he could remember the water welling up out of the earth into the pipe and rising up from the spout into the sluice and cascading down the trough, clean, clear, cold. He bent his sweating face to the water and drank long from it, wetted his head and his neck and hands and arms. In the deep shade of the trees in the yard he looked around. There were birds and a breeze. Sanctuary. He thanked the old man before resuming his walk in the sun but the old man only sat there with his opaque eyes and his impassive face like somebody made out of wood.
    He wished now for another drink of that good water. He heard somebody come in and he moaned, couldn’t help it, heard Rufus say he didn’t mess in white folks’ business and then he died.

The night was cool now and Glen had all the windows down so that a steady breeze blew through the car. It was a little past midnight.
    He drank from a warm beer and eyed his speed, not hurrying, not weaving, just going on home. The road swarmed with bugs and the night spoke to him in the voices of frogs and crickets. The black water alongside the road lay still and choked with bits of driftwood and empty beer bottles whose necks leaned out above the surface debris of twigs and bark, the trash thrown from passing cars.
    He stared at the road that unfolded before him, guided the car gently around the curves and past the lightless houses where dogs slept too and over little railed bridges barely wide enough for two vehicles to meet. A quarter moon rode high and pale among the stars that showed their cold fire through the black infinity that stretched above the trees, their dark green tops wheeling past the windshield.
    He slowed, checked his mirror, slung the bottle out, and turned onto a sand road that wound for miles through a vast forest of pines and oaks and the gullied wastes of loggers, splintered remnants of saplings leaning at crazy angles, past sleeping hulks of machinery, John Deere, Massey-Ferguson, going slowly, the tires whispering in the sand, the road turningand rising into