Joe by Larry Brown

in the new grass threatening to bury it. Stumps the size of Volkswagens had been bulldozed into piles in the corners of the fields.
     
    “They gonna plant any of this this year?” said Joe.
     
    Curt tossed his can out the window and reached for anotherone. He felt of it. He looked at Joe. “You got any cold beers in that cooler?”
     
    “They’s a six-pack iced down in there. Goddamn, you done drank all them?”
     
    “Naw. I’m gonna swap one out with you.” He put the lukewarm beer in the cooler and took out a cold one and popped the top. “Hell, it’s been too wet,” he said. “It’s rained on it just about ever week. They tried cuttin part of it about three weeks ago and mired the tractor and brought a dozer over to pull it out and mired it. I reckon it’s still settin there if somebody ain’t done stole it.”
     
    They turned at a crossroads and headed back up into the hills.
     
    “I thought you’s goin to town,” Curt said.
     
    “I am. I got to stop and see Henry first and see if they’ve got a game up tonight. I need to win me a little money if I can.”
     
    They crossed the bottomland, the long rows whipping past and wheeling by like spokes. Butterflies wafted and flitted through the lush growth at the roadsides, snake doctors hovered like gunships. The road brightened and the shadow of a cloud stood immense and dark and held part of the land in shade, a line of demarcation halfway across the fields.
     
    “Look at that,” Joe said. “We got to try and work tomorrow if we can. It’s costin the shit out of me to lay out.”
     
    “Shit. If I had your money I’d throw mine away.”
     
    Joe grunted. He steered the truck between the holes in the road and tried to find some music on the radio. He’d been meaning to get a tape deck but he’d never gotten around to it. He punched a button and got WDIA.
     
    “Damn it,” he said. He twisted the dial around, and the radiosnarled and whined while quick-speaking Spaniards exhorted their wares and somebody screamed CASH MONEY and twangy garbled country music flared and diminished amidst roaring and fuzz and static until finally he snapped it off. The road twisted through stands of pine, hills of hardwood timber green as Eden. They went down into a smaller bottom where one old unpainted house sat back from the road, with dead cotton stalks all around it, even in what should have been a yard. They pulled into a short driveway.
     
    “You goin it?” Joe said, after he’d killed the motor.
     
    Curt looked dubiously at the house.
     
    “Naw. I don’t want to go in. I’ll just set out here.”
     
    “Suit yourself,” he said, and he got out and slammed the door and went up the steps onto the porch. He knocked on the screen door and stuck his head inside.
     
    “Henry? Hey, Henry.” Somebody answered and he stepped into the hall. The house was built with a breezeway through the middle and rooms on each side. The old boards bowed and sagged under his weight. Joe opened a door on the right but there was nobody in there. Somebody said something again and he went to the back of the house. The door he opened belonged to the kitchen, and three men stood in there at a table, hacking and slicing on the carcass of a skinned deer, two holding, one cutting, all of them trying to keep it from sliding onto the floor.
     
    “Now how’d y’all know I wasn’t the game warden?” he said.
     
    “Hell, they all out on the lake robbin trotlines,” said Henry. “You know anything about cuttin up a deer?”
     
    He looked at the thing doubtfully.
     
    “I’ve cut up a few. I ain’t no expert.”
     
    He leaned up against the wall and surveyed the mess on the table. It was covered with cut hair and caked with enormous clots of blood.
     
    “What are y’all tryin to do, cut it up into steaks or what?”
     
    Henry waved his knife. He was an old man with long white hair, overalls, no shirt or shoes.
     
    “We just trying to get it so we can eat it.