Tidewater Blood by William Hoffman

Author:William Hoffman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Algonquin Books
Published: 1998-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

22

I WALKED THE lonesome road till I passed a glen shaded by drooping honey locusts. Tired and sweat-slick, I turned in and let down on the wild grass. I shucked off my shoes, lay back, and looked skyward to see buzzards circling high, wobbling, their wings dipping. Not yet, you bastards, I thought, and closed my eyes.

I slept, and when I woke, the sun slanted toward the western ridge, and I sat up thirsty. I heard water running. I walked under locust shade to a stream winding through the grass and knelt to drink. The water had a sulphur taste. Mine drainage? I ate my sardines and crackers, used the empty Nehi can to drink from.

I pissed, took off my jacket and shirt, and gave myself an upstream soapless wash. My socks were tattered, and I threw them away before I put on my shoes and limped back to the road. A strip of mountain shadow now lay across it.

Thunder. A swollen cumulonimbus slid like a zeppelin over the ridge. As I stepped faster along the road, a forked streak of lightning and more thunder. The first drops hit hard as ice pellets.

Lights ahead—a blinking, splayed redness. Closer, I saw it was a one-story, tar-papered tonk, the windows framed in jittery multicolored tubing. Over the doorway a red neon miner’s pick and a blue sign that read THE PIT. Grimy pickups parked on the gravel apron. Music thumped the flimsy siding.

Though rain fell harder and the drops had a biting edge, I hesitated before entering. I told myself there was little or no chance that word from Jessup’s Wharf about me had reached Shawnee County. Nobody in these mountains knew my face. As for police, I hadn’t seen a uniform since I entered the state.

I opened the roadhouse’s door and stepped into smoky, agitated light. Rough-looking trade sat on stools along the counter. Four booted men played pool at the single table, and a bejeweled jukebox pounded away on a platform made from raw lumber. Wooden booths held drinking couples. Maybe this was payday, or more likely the day welfare checks arrived.

Eyes rifled me as I shut the door. The place smelled of tobacco, perfume, sweat, coal. Smoke had settled into a stratum at the level of electric lights shaped like kerosene lanterns that hung from hooks screwed into unpainted rafters.

I shook rain off myself. It’d been a long time since I’d drunk a beer in a roadhouse and given myself to the music of lonely humankind. One brew for the road wouldn’t kill. Get me through till the storm stopped. I found a stool at the end of the counter near a cubicle that served as a kitchen. Eyes still followed. Chunky, bearded men drinking here, some with the mascara-like darkness around their eyes—coal dust over the years ground into skin. The man sitting to my left had rough-grained hands that made the Blatz bottle he gripped seem diminutive.

The short, thin woman tending bar wore a pink patch over her right eye.

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