Scar Lover

  SCAR LOVER

  A novel

  HARRY CREWS

  1992

  This book is dedicated to my main most man,

  Sean Penn

  “Guilt is magic.”

  James Dickey

  BOOK ONE

  1

  Pete Butcher had not meant to speak to her. And he probably would not have if she had not stared at him so directly as she stepped out of the shade of the oak tree in front of her house to stand in the sun on the sidewalk. The only place he had seen her before was in the yard, close to the trunk of the tree, dim as a ghost in the deep shade. But this morning he had to pass within a foot or two of her because she had come out to stand on the sidewalk. He could, of course, cross the street, but that wouldn’t do now that she had her eyes locked directly on his.

  He felt a little chill on the back of his neck, and with the chill came the thought that she wanted to tell him something. Something he did not want to hear. Something personal. And in his experience, something personal was always something bad.

  People were forever telling him something he did not want to hear. Something bad. The only time he had ever been in San Francisco, he had been standing on a corner with a terrible hangover—sour stomach, splitting headache—standing on a corner waiting for the light to change, when a dirty little man walked up and said: “I’m passing blood.”

  The hangover pounded in his head. He reached out his hand to take hold of the light pole for support “What?” he said.

  “Blood.”

  “O.K. All right.” He turned his head.

  “Look at this.”

  When he looked back, the little man was bending over. There was a spot of blood on the seat of his trousers. Staying like that, bent over nearly double, the little man said: “Four days now, I’m passing blood. My stool is full of blood.”

  His stool. God. The light wouldn’t change. The traffic was too heavy to cross the street against it. He was stuck there on the corner with the filthy little man bent over, a spot of crusty blood big as a tomato staring up at him. He could, of course, have walked away without crossing the street. But he couldn’t leave the old man bent over proposing the bloody seat of his trousers to the world, leave him with nobody to look at it.

  “Hi,” she said.

  He didn’t want to answer her but he did; to do otherwise would be bad manners.

  “Hello,” he said.

  She had stopped right in the middle of the sidewalk and he was surprised by how tall she was. He himself was an even six feet and her eyes, deep-socketed under a pale wide brow, were bird- bright and very black and looked directly into his own and had about them something he could not put a name to, but whatever the name was, trouble was at its source. She looked as if she had just received bad news or else she had some bad news that she felt it was her obligation to give him.

  “I see you ever morning,” she said.

  “See me?”

  “Through the window in the front room there.” She turned slightly to point to a window looking out over the wide porch.

  He felt like he was taking root where he was standing and that the longer he stood there the harder it would be to move.

  He tried to think of something to say. Then: “I saw you once or twice out there …” He held up his arm and pointed. “Out there by the oak tree.”

  She shifted on her feet and said: “I come out for a breath of good fresh air sometimes in the morning.”

  She was getting him just a tad pissed off. She didn’t have bad news or good news or apparently any news at all. But she was going to make him late for work standing here talking about nothing.

  He concentrated on looking at her, really looking at her. He thought that might embarrass her into getting the hell out of his way.

  But she only stood very still and let him look his fill. She looked him directly in the eyes and didn’t move a muscle, not a twitch.

  Her face was a thin triangle, with a sharp chin and a high long nose whose bridge was perhaps too thick. And her cheekbones were high and flat as an Indian’s. Her skin seemed almost translucent, with tiny blue veins tracing a faint pattern at her temples, the veins disappearing right into her straight flaxen hair, which was fine and long and pulled behind ears that were beautifully shaped with full lobes, pierced and holding rings of heavy dull gold. Two things struck him simultaneously: Her face was strangely odd, quite unlike any face he had ever seen, and at the same time, she was beautiful. He realized perfectly well that her face was not the sort that people called beautiful or the world thought of as beautiful. But nonetheless he thought her beautiful all the same. Strange. It unnerved him. Maybe what he thought was beautiful came from her bright, deep-set eyes, troubled and pained even though she was smiling a tentative smile, a thin smile that seemed to want to tremble but did not.

  Her breasts were full and high, unnaturally full because her body was as thin as her face. The light cotton dress she wore fell straight from her wide shoulders with no break at all at her stomach and hips and yet her calves were full and muscled, reminding him of a runner’s. She wore thong sandals and her toenails were painted dark purple. It was only when he raised his eyes from the dark nails on her high-arched, finely shaped feet to her face that he realized she was utterly without makeup. Maybe that was what unnerved him. Her face could have been that of a freshly prepared corpse waiting for the finishing touches of the undertaker’s brushes to put the blush back into her cheeks and color onto her tremulous mouth.

  She made no move to get out of his way but only stood regarding him, her head slightly canted to the left on her long neck, in which a clearly visible pulse beat just above her collarbones, bones insistent and thin as a bird’s. He thought she would move to touch him. Without thought, not meaning to do it, he took a step back.

  “Not many mornings nice as this,” she said.

  “What?” Her voice had been low, nearly a whisper.

  “This time of year anyway,” she said in a voice a little louder. “Not many mornings nice as this.”

  He looked at the sky, brightening in the east. “I’ve not really give it much notice. Other things on my mind.”

  “Lordy mercy, I guess we all got that.”

  “What?”

  “Other things on our minds.”

  He recognized her voice as the voice of his people, flat, nasal, with hard r‘s, a voice that had drifted down into Jacksonville, Florida, out of the pine flats of south Georgia. It made him inclined to like her. But she had trouble—he could feel her full of it—and he did not like trouble. And certainly not other people’s. His own blood carried as much trouble as he thought he could deal with because the trouble in his blood reached back through his dead mother’s and father’s and crippled brother’s, who was not dead but ought to be. He ought to kill his brother. The thought would come to him sometimes in the dark of a sleepless night. He ought to kill him. He would have done it for a dog. But the release he would have given to a dog he would not, could not, give to his brother. No wonder his hatred for the world made it so hard, so very nearly impossible to live in it.

  “For some anyhow,” she said.

  “How’s that?” He had again lost the drift of their conversation, of what they were talking about—if, in fact, they were talking about anything.

  “For some,” she said, “this is one of them specially nice mornings.”

  His gaze had drifted across the street to the shadowed fronts of houses that looked as though nobody had ever lived in them.

  “Yes,” he said, “I guess so.”

  What he wanted to do was step around her and leave. He didn’t know quite how to do it without being unseemly. His mother had gone to great lengths to impress upon him the importance of seemly behavior, before a fiery
Sunoco truck had taken the pickup she was riding in with his father on the way to town to sell a load of hogs for money they needed for doctors worse than they needed the hogs for food. His crippled brother was expensive.

  “But for others, this won’t be a day at all,” she said, she too now looking at the houses across the street. “For some, what kind of day it is is the last thing on their minds.”

  He did not answer. He was not going on with this. Trouble that was not just trouble but pain as well had leaked out of her into the tone of her voice and he was not going on with this.

  “You haven’t been living there long,” she said, pointing toward the rooming house next door.

  “No,” he said, “not long.”

  “I know how long,” she said, “cause they taken Ma to the hospital four days after you moved in.”

  “Oh,” he said, not sure of what to say next. And then finally: “I’m sorry.”

  “Ma’s got the cancer,” said the girl.

  God, God. She was going to do it, tell him all of it, if he did not get away, but he did not know how to manage it without being unseemly. Her mentioning her mother had brought his own mother’s voice bell-clear into his ear, admonishing him against unseemly behavior and how generally sorry and no-good people were who did not avoid unseemly behavior. He stretched his neck to breathe. His lungs felt constricted. A drop of sweat turned loose in his left armpit and plunged down his ribs. The sweat was icy cold.

  “First they took one off,” she said, pointing briefly at her left breast.

  “I… I…” He started around her. Without seeming to move, she glided in front of him on her heavily muscled runner’s calves, her thonged feet sliding on the sidewalk without a sound.

  “They weren’t through with her then though,” the girl said.

  He found that rather than look into her eyes suddenly gone flat and lightless, he had dropped his head back and was staring up into the sky. There were no clouds, no sun.

  “I wish it was something …” he began.

  “But it’s not,” she said. “The other one had to come off too. But it seems like she’s gone be all right. Live anyhow. We won’t know for five years, they say, if it’ll come back or not.”

  “I’ve got to go.” He glanced at his wrist as though at a watch. But he didn’t own a watch. His wrist was naked. Maybe she didn’t notice.

  “First the left one,” she said, “and then the right one.” She looked off toward the place where the rising sun was finally breaking clear of the houses across the street and said bitterly: “God only knows what’s next.”

  It sounded to him as though death was next. “I have to go.” But he did not move.

  “That’s where Daddy is now,” she said. “He’s over there at the hospital. Waiting to see how it all comes out. She might come home anytime now. They say she’s strong enough.”

  He had seen her father every day since he moved into the boardinghouse. Her father sold firewood for a living, and worked tirelessly over the woodyard at the side of the house under the arching limbs of the oak tree. Everything he did was done with muscle and sweat. No electric saw, no gasoline. One-man bow saws instead. A lot of mallet, ax, and wedge. He had often wondered how a man could support his wife and daughter with such work.

  “I guess I better get going,” he said.

  She leaned toward him and spoke rapidly. “You like to come and eat supper with me tonight?”

  “I don’t think I’ll be able to tonight,” he said.

  “Thought you might be tired of that boardinghouse cooking.”

  “That’s thoughtful of you,” he said. “And don’t think I don’t appreciate it.” He edged past her.

  Just as he was about to take the first long stride away, she said: “I was lying. Wasn’t even thinking about the boardinghouse or the cooking. Wasn’t even thinking about you. I was thinking about me.”

  He had his back to her. All he had to do was keep going. But his dead mother’s voice was loud in his ear. This girl was talking to him. He couldn’t just walk away when she was still talking, so he was frozen, one foot stopped half in the air, like a rabbit caught in the lights of a car at night.

  “I’m just so lonesome,” she said. “I’m scared. Ma gitting sick and them cutting the whole front of her off. Daddy at the hospital all the time. And me here by myself in—”

  Whirling around, he cried: “I’ll come. I’ll come.” He did not want her to tell him about her mother’s disease, her father’s pain, her own loneliness in the enormous, dark, unpainted and rotted two- story house. He could not bear such details. He did not know what he would do if she started on it all again that night, but for the moment he had stopped her. Maybe even changed her a little. She was smiling.

  “My name is Sarah,” she said before he could turn from her.

  “Pete, my name is Pete.” His voice was too quick, too loud.

  “I know,” she said, as he was about to hurry away from her.

  “You know?”

  She made a vague gesture toward the boardinghouse. “Mr. Winekoff.”

  He turned and fled down the sidewalk, knowing that what he had come to think was true. Max Winekoff was trouble. Anybody who was ancient, retired, and had nothing to do but walk over the entire town every day gossiping, taking care of everybody else’s business but his own—mainly because he had no business to take care of—had to be trouble. Pete, walking fast because he was late, couldn’t tear his thoughts away from old man Winekoff, and he wondered seriously if the bastard ought to be killed. Pete knew he was capable of doing the job. As twisted as his world had become, he thought he might be capable of anything.

  2

  The Jacksonville, Florida, Bay Street Paper Company was separated from the St. Johns River only by dozens of railroad tracks. Pete had decided the St. Johns River must be the dirtiest river in the country. The thick hot wind blowing off it smelled of garbage, gasoline, and raw human waste. A ditch full of shit that would, he was convinced, burst into flame if you set a match to it.

  The stink of it and the explosive colliding of boxcars ramming into each other filled the warehouse—big as a blimp hangar—through which he had to pass to get to the boxcar where he and George worked. Nobody referred to George as George. They called him the Burnt Nigger, but never to his face. To his face, they used no name at all. Except for Pete. From the very beginning, if Pete had to talk to him he used the man’s name. He was not going to call the man a burnt nigger just because he had been branded across his back from shoulder to shoulder. Pete tried to avoid talking to him altogether, but that, of course, was impossible. After all, the two men did spend the entire day in a boxcar together. And George was Pete’s worst dream come true. He had the habit of talking for what seemed like hours about nothing but things personal and horrible, full of death and threats of death and not just blood but also demons.

  But Pete had to hang on to the job because he had no options. When he discovered in less than a week that he was not going to be able to take going to school at the University of Florida under the GI Bill, he had come back to Jacksonville and finally found this job in a boxcar with George just before he got down to his last twenty dollars. Pete had no skills except for a strong back. And that was all the boxcar demanded.

  He was lucky to have any job at all. Jacksonville was filled to overflowing with south Georgia dirt farmers looking for work, looking to sell their sweat and callused hands, because that was all they had to sell. There had been very little rain for the last three years running and the drought had forced thousands of desperate men and their desperate gaunt women and children to flood into Jacksonville. So enduring George was just one more thing he had to do. He simply had no choice.

  “You late again, goddammit!” screamed the foreman to Pete as he came through the metal doors at the front of the warehouse. Pete was not, in fact, late. The huge clock on the wall showed that he’d managed to make it with two minutes to spare. But the foreman said that to everybody who
came in even if they were thirty or even forty minutes early, which nearly everybody was. Some men were as much as an hour early. This was not the time or the place to be out of a job. So the men did whatever they had to do to please the foreman. Pete thought the foreman was probably crazy from too many years of breathing gasoline fumes and the odor of unflushed toilets coming off the river.

  The foreman talked with a dead cigar stub caught in his black teeth—Pete had never seen him without it—sitting behind the thick mesh wire that caged him in where the metal doors opened into the warehouse. Pete had never seen him except from the waist up, because he was always sitting on a stool in the wire cage, which he apparently never left. The rumor was that the foreman sat on a chemical shitter the entire working day so that he would never have to stop screaming at the people who worked for him. Pete couldn’t vouch for that one way or another. He saw him only when he came into work headed for the boxcar that was always waiting for him, and then again when he left at quitting time. He did see him the few times he and the Burnt Nigger came into the warehouse to eat lunch. The warehouse was very nearly as hot and airless as the boxcar but its shadowy dimness somehow made it seem cooler.

  A whole squadron of forklifts raced dangerously between the aisles of high-stacked paper products, headed toward the huge trucks backed up at a wide wooden dock that fronted on Bay Street. The foreman controlled it all from his wire cage with a battery-operated bullhorn. For so small a man, the bullhorn sounded like a trumpeting elephant when the foreman demanded to know where a forklift was or why it had not finished loading a truck. Despite the oil-belching forklift engines, the foreman’s voice always carried above the roar, angry, demanding, and unreasonable.

  He was fascinating to Pete, who could have watched him all day, the blood always high in his tobacco-colored skin, the veins at his temples looking as though they would burst. It was rumored he’d been in that wire cage for forty years screaming at the forklifts, which were known only by numbers, never by the names of the drivers.