To the Bright and Shining Sun by James Lee Burke

Author:James Lee Burke [Burke, James Lee]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster, Inc.
Published: 2010-08-31T05:00:00+00:00

Perry sipped the beer until the hard, tense feeling inside him began to fade. The barmaid came back from the front doorway and leaned against the counter in front of him. Her face had an unnatural shine in the light. She took a cigarette from a pack tucked inside her shorts and waited for him to light it.

“Ain’t you got a match?” she said.

He handed her a book of matches from his shirt pocket. Her eyes were black in the flame.

“You’re the first I seen to put one of them two in his place,” she said. “I’d like to see them both laid out behind here some night.”

“I didn’t put nobody in his place.”

“There ain’t many men around here that’s gone up against Little J.W.,” the man next to Perry said. He wore a dirty straw hat and there was a streak of chili on the side of his mouth. “I seen him beat up on a feller with a chair leg once, just for looking at him the wrong way. Woodson would be proud of what you done.”

“I didn’t do nothing,” Perry said. “I don’t want no more trouble with him. He’d a-cut me open if the bartender didn’t stop him.”

“You wasn’t backing off from him none, and we all seen it,” the man said.

“I didn’t say nothing against him, and I ain’t a-doing it now. If he’s got it in him for trouble, that’s his business. But I ain’t the cause of it.”

“I’ve put up with that little sonofabitch since I come to work here, and I ain’t seen another man talk back in his face yet,” the girl said.

Perry knew the stories that would spread about the barroom incident with Little J.W. By that night people would say that he had backed down both the J.W.’s, and they would remember little of what actually happened. In telling the story to other miners who came off the picket, they would say nothing of the sweated areas on his shirt, his moist palms, or that rigid, naked feeling in his stomach when he waited for Little J.W. to bring his knife out of his scabbard. The next day the story would be even more distorted, and then someone would stop Little J.W. on the street and casually mention that he’d heard something about a seventeen-year-old ex-Job Corps boy backing him down before a room full of people. Later Perry would have to face the J.W.’s somewhere again. He would have to tell them that he had nothing to do with the rumor and then be accused of lying and cowardice, or fight both of them with any weapon he could get his hands on—neither of which he wanted to do. He was determined not to take any more abuse or threats from them; but even if he fought one or both of them and won, they would eventually catch him alone on a road at night, and the next day someone would find him lying in the weeds or thrown down the hollow.

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