The Beetle Leg by John Hawkes Page A

transparent. “So I can’t sit around with you,” snapped the lightweight ex-bronc rider, who in the beginning had ridden from many chutes with spurs entangled high on an animal’s withers.
    “Tonight,” Bohn leaned back, his lips bubbled, “you’re going to.”
    He saw the woman in the doorway. His mouth fell open—blue mash, blue gums and teeth—he saw her stare, he frowned and put his hands on the table as if to rise. “Yes, sir,” fingers sprung without thought into a fist, eyes back to the Finn, “we don’t get around it. You ain’t going to move, unless I say.” And the cook behind him, leaning between his needs, his body, and the fire, licking her lips as he, nodding before he spoke, looked at the same time toward the doorway and shook her silver braids, spoke to Camper’s wife.
    “No supper. You’re too late.”
    “That’s right,” Bohn’s eyes in the plate, hiding the mouth with the back of his hand, “kitchen’s closed.”
    For Lou his mouth was open, his chin still sagged. The berries, the purple fish roe, still hung in the air and filled a vanished face; she saw a crawling, half digested bunch of grapes, a birthmark—at a single mouthful—swelling into sight between his lips. Bohn never looked at her again.
    He had an old man’s kidney. He had an old man’s tumorous girth and thickly dying wind, a hardening on the surface of his armpits. Chest and shoulders were solidified against youth, bulged in what he assumed to be the paunch of middle age; he was strapping, suffered a neuralgia in winter, a painful unlimbering in the spring. A few fingers were broken, snubbed, since an old man labors from stone to knife to saw to possible tractor accident and back to the single burning of a match flame short in argument. He could laugh, sparsely, at the exploits of men over fifty who enacted, he believed, all they claimed; his own prowess, he told them, had been struck off, like a head of hair, by maturity. And he was, except for a few patches that had to be shaved monthly by a barber, bald; lost by pernicious exposure to the sun, kept from water and finally pulled out one night in a troubled sleep by bloody, rasping fingertips. He mimicked, with unclean, pyretic dignity, the limp folds under the chin, the cockles in the cheeks, the gasp of wisdom and inflammation, the rock-like, seasoned cough of the prime, half invalided buck.
    Bohn argued at, commanded his world and saw it under the pale of bitter years when imaginary friends die off. From this weathered mask and within this swollen body of whore-wounded time—he was thirty years old—skipped eyes blue and lively, curious for abuse, soured at the sight of visiting women passing close and strange among the undershirts, the beards of the members of his town.
    “Thegna’s finished for the day, pooed over all the cabbage you care to, ain’t you, Thegna?” And now and then, instead of speaking to or looking at the mustang buster, he thrust an arm across the table, struck the wood to keep the small man in his place. “You loved the boys already, ain’t you, Thegna?” The one arm on her waist, the other, just out of reach, aiming at the Finn, “In Fat Chance worried all of us at once.”
    Lou looked quickly at the small but rotund cook.
    Bohn broke away. He stood up and immediately, with a clatter of sticks, the frail, the chronically thin ex-rider left the table.
    Bohn stopped in the doorway and whispered once more to the trussed and stocky, water-eyed and trembling woman. “Thegna, did you pull on your big hip boots when the dam slid in?”
    She nodded, back against the stove, and continued to bow up and down her flushed and weeping head. The apron shot up in warm and baffled flight.
    “Thegna here will learn you,” he said as he quickly passed the flash of blue-green silk.
    Lou escaped the flaying of the tumbling canes.
    He shied, big and halting as he was, at the web texture of the flyless slacks and at the emerald apparatus that lived