Nightwoods - Charles Frazier [100]
Sleep is not a big part of the old boys’ plans. They haven’t slept for days except to nap briefly. Plenty of time to sleep when you’re dead, or when you get home to the wife. Up on the mountain, they stay awake all night feeding the fire and drinking their handmade raw shine from the recent past, such as a couple of days ago. Telling hunting tales and ghost stories and imaginary stuff about the incredible pussy of yesteryear. Many timeless jokes about one another’s dicks and dogs, their equal lack of skill. How the baying of any dogs but the speaker’s own signifies nothing. Also, religious moments of silence and clarity listening to coondogs singing in the distance.
Hard to find joy in the world so much of the time, but the old boys have found some here. It makes them feel young. A renewal of their powers, if only for the dark hours. Come dawn, a camp of hungover sleepless sixty-five-year-old men will look like a mummy convention. But that is for morning to worry about. Right now it is hardly midnight, and everybody seems magically like they did forty years ago.
Bud pours himself a cup of coffee and squats on his heels so close to the fire that, after a few breaths, he has to waddle back two steps to keep from singeing his eyebrows. No good way to conceal-carry a machete unless you’re wearing a long overcoat. Bud has his stuck through his belt, and it hangs below the waistband of his leather jacket and drags the ground as he squats.
One man points to the machete and says, Somebody’s been shopping at the Army-Navy and thinks they’re beating through the jungle in Borneo.
Then he starts right back where he had left off before Bud’s arrival, complaining about his wife’s housekeeping. Says, It’s so nasty most of the time at my place, I wouldn’t even eat a walnut that rolled across the floor.
Pretty soon, Bud’s clothes begin raising steam on his front side. He shucks his boots and sets them mouth-first to the heat. Sad little animals with their tongues out. His socks stick to his feet, bloody at heel and toe, and when he gets them off, his heels still peel away layer by layer and weep pink fluid. Little red threads net below the skin, pitiful capillaries ready to burst. Bud stretches his feet to the fire. The two big toenails already blue-black.
The smart-ass with the Borneo comment says, Take my word, those are going to fall off.
Bud finishes his coffee and pours his mug full of white liquor and begins trying to catch up.
Old Jones, the former bootlegger, sits a quarter way around the circle from Bud, keeping within himself, like he’s waiting to see if Bud will recognize him.
Which Bud already has, but he keeps cool about it. Not like Jones has much cause to hold a huge grudge. Probably doesn’t miss the long drives and the worry about the law. All that Thunder Road shit. And way too old to live through a stretch with the Feds. In general, life has probably been pretty good for him lately. Fair to partly cloudy since Bud appropriated his job. Semiregular payments, even though the real percentage is a lot smaller than the figure they agreed on back in the summer.
Yet, maybe, you have some sneering asswipe sit on your front porch lording over you, threatening you out of business, and then later, in a sweet twist of fate, that asswipe lands himself helpless in front of you as a test of your mercy. What do you do? Even Jesus, meek and mild, might give payback a passing thought.
And sure enough, before long, Jones says, Son, what the hell you doing up here?
Bud visors a hand to his brow, acts for the moment like all he sees is one more unknown face out of many in the fire glare.
—Got lost, he says. Nearly died.
Everybody laughs but Bud.
Jones says, No shit, Sherlock. Where were you headed? Making a run to Atlanta?
Everybody