Father and Son by Larry Brown Page B

pair of leather gloves, some braided wire, a claw hammer with one broken claw, loose nuts and bolts, a sack of fence staples. He didn’t see anything for a weapon but the hammer, and if they both came at himagain, same time … it was pitiful to be old and still scared. But Clancy had been scared just about all his life. The white man. The uncrossable lines of things you could do and things you couldn’t. The water fountains and the bathrooms and the places to eat. He’d been born in 1906 and the old men from the old war still sat around the stores and talked when he was a boy. He’d seen hangings, the corpses of men burned alive. One of his uncles had been run down and caught by a bunch of white men because a white woman said he hadn’t tipped his hat to her on his mule. He’d never seen that uncle again and he’d been scared of things like that all his life and now just when it looked like things might be going to change, now when the president himself had helped get that colored boy into school over there at Oxford, here he was faced with this. Two dogs belonging to a white man. It didn’t seem right. And he didn’t have anything against the dogs. It wasn’t their fault that they were owned by a white man who owned a place he had to get into. They were just living on the place. They were just in their dogs’ way looking after what was theirs and they were scared because of something that happened and he hated to have to do it but he needed to get out of the truck and go in there. He couldn’t leave. And he couldn’t get out if they were going to take him down.
    It wasn’t that hard, really, not as hard as he’d thought it might be. He put the gloves on and took the pliers and twisted a short noose from one end of the wire so that he could make a sort of slipknot and when the dogs came snarling and snapping to the window he slipped the noose around their necks one at a time and hauled them strangling and screaming to the one-eared claw hammer and delivered the killing blows, blood running from their ears and their limp bodies underfoot when he stepped from the truck to see at last whatever in the world had happened to his brother-in-law.
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    Later in the day there were people standing in the yard wanting to buy beer, the ones who had come early, before the law blocked the road off, parked in their cars and pickups with cane poles sticking out the back ends of trucks and out the windows of cars with all the gear of fishermen, tackle boxes, minnow buckets, coolers, and chain stringers. There were two hearses since there were two funeral homes involved, one in the county and one in Pine Springs, shiny old Cadillacs with twelve-ply tires and white satin curtains and gleaming dusty hoods. The dogs were there in their dried blood like sleepers, flies clambering over them and busily depositing their larvae, a quick hatch coming in this weather. There was one minor altercation between a deputy and two drunks who became irate when they found they couldn’t buy any beer today. They were told to either be nice or leave and one did leave but was arrested for drunk driving before he ever made it back to the highway. The other one said something witty to the deputy and was clapped quickly in irons and taken to a patrol car and, when nobody was looking, rapped professionally upside his head with a heavy slapstick and rendered meek as a lamb on the stifling backseat of the cruiser. Smart motherfucker should have keep his mouth shut.
    There was much speculation among the spectators, it was a robbery, it was a crime of passion or a crime of drink, the dogs had been killed first, the dogs had been killed last. They could see the window shot out so most figured it was a shootout.
    The sun rose higher and those onlookers with enough sense to stay out of the way moved back into the shade of the loblollies to view the proceedings from the relative cool of that