by Larry Brown
“Well you a long ways from there,” he said. “What, your car tore up?”
“I ain’t got no car,” she said.
The driver killed the motor. The headlights showed stubby pine trees and rotted fence and the front edge of the road going out into nothing before he pushed them off. The truck rolled back a few inches. But she wasn’t afraid yet. She figured she could always run if something looked like it was about to happen.
“We been down on the river fishin,” the blond boy said. “We got some lines out down there. You live around here?”
She pointed back down the dark road to the hills she’d left behind.
“I lived back over yonder. I want to go to Biloxi. Are y’all goin that way?”
The blond boy laughed softly and scratched at the side of his jaw. She liked him even when he shook his head.
“We ain’t headed to Biloxi. You know how far that is?”
“No. Is it a long way?”
“I don’t know how many miles it is. You got to go down through the whole state.”
She raised her eyes to the bottom of the sky where the wide soft light still glowed within the distant trees.
“Is that Oxford up there?” she said.
“Up where?”
She nodded toward the hills.
“Up there. Where you can see them lights.”
The boy glanced that way and she saw his head move quickly up and down.
“Aw. Yeah, that’s Oxford.”
“Is that the way to go?”
He pulled back from the window and opened the door. When he got out and stood up, she took one step back. The middle boy slid over in the seat but he didn’t get out. She could feel him watching her but she couldn’t see his eyes. She thought he was the one who’d said what he said. The blond boy pointed with his beer toward the lights. He was tall and he had big muscles in his arms and she could smell the scent of fish on him.
“You can go through there,” he said. “But you’d need to get on over to Batesville and then get on Fifty-five highway and go all the way down. It runs clean to Louisiana. You’d be pretty close to Biloxi if you got down there.”
He turned back to her and she noticed that he was barefoot.
“My name’s Jerry,” he said. “What’s yours?”
“Fay,” she said. “Fay Jones.”
“Well. You want a beer, Fay Jones?”
“I reckon so. If y’all got plenty.”
It was breezy in the back of the truck and the wind kept her hair in her face. He sat beside her with his shoulders against the rear glass of the cab and he had trouble getting his cigarettes lit. There were two coolers in the boat, and they perched on the stern seat and propped their feet on one.
He was recently out of the navy and he talked about all the places he had been, Singapore, Hong Kong, Manila. He told her he lived with the two other boys in a trailer near town and that they all worked the second shift at Georgia-Pacific, made plywood. They’d been on vacation three days, he said, and had four more to go, counting the weekend.
At first she wouldn’t hold his hand and then after a while she did. She let him kiss her a few times, but when he tried to touch her titties she pushed his hand away. Sometimes she wished they were smaller. People were always looking at her, men, boys like this. He didn’t protest. She held her knees together and tried to hold her hair.
She drank one beer quickly and he opened another one for her. She could see the muscles in his back through the threadbare shirt he wore. After he gave her the beer he leaned over and kissed her again. She let him.
The road reeled out behind them and the white center line dotted out beyond the tailgate, faded, fell into darkness. Houses they passed growing smaller and smaller in the night. His body was warm next to her and the wind had become chilly on her skin, little pimples of flesh standing erect like her puckered nipples she could feel inside the bra. She didn’t know what they would do when they got to where they were going. She didn’t want the other boys around and she told him she’d heard what one of them had said.
“He’s just drunk,” he said.
They halted at a red light and she crossed her legs on the boat seat as cars pulled in behind them. The truck turned and went down a long hill past shopping centers and video stores and fast food joints. At another red light a cop in a cruiser never took his eyes off them, but the blond boy had already told her to hold her beer down while they were in town. The cop watched them until they pulled away and she was afraid he would pull in behind them, but he didn’t.
They went up the next hill in light traffic, kids in Jeeps and Japanese pickups cruising up and down the street. She wondered how kids got money for new vehicles like that. They seemed to be everywhere, pulled up in parking lots talking to others like them, gathered in groups laughing and leaning out the windows.
“What are all these kids up to?” she said.
“Aw they just hangin out. They ain’t got nothin better to do I don’t reckon.”
He seemed quieter now that they were in town. The pickup rumbled beneath them and turned and went up another street and then slowed to travel halfway around a massive white building lit by flood-lights and surrounded by tall oaks. Going away from it and watching it she said, “What’s that?”
“Courthouse,” he said. “Ain’t you ever been to town?”
“Not this town.”
The truck gained speed and now the wind was colder. She leaned in closer to him for warmth, her hair fluttering on her cheek and her eyes closed sometimes. His hand rubbed her back and her ribs. She could feel his fingers pause to outline the shape of a bone and she was ashamed of how thin she was and didn’t want anybody to see.
Then they were moving again, out of town, down a bumpy road with unlighted buildings and kudzu gullies where mangled cars were piled high behind chain link fences. A blue water tank stood high on blue legs, bathed in smoky light like the cars in the parking lot beneath it, steam rising from a flat factory roof. Walls of pine trees rushing past. They swayed on the boat seat in the curves, not talking much, just hiding from the slap of the wind and drinking their beer in small sips. The truck was going faster now and it went down into a hollow of black trees and wooden fences running out down the road behind them as far as she could see into the darkness chasing them. The brake light began to cast a dim red pall over the fence posts and patches of tar in the road. The truck slowed, screeched once, and turned into a dirt driveway. Tree limbs hung down and green leaves brushed the top of the cab and the truck lurched and swayed over holes and bumps in the drive. Beer sloshed from the can in her hand onto her skirt and one dark spot made a cold place on her leg.
“I need to go to the bathroom,” she said.
“Yeah. Just a minute.”
He took his arm from around her and sat straighter against the cab and turned up the last of the beer and tossed the can into the bushes they were going past. They made a swift little circle and the truck stopped with a jerk. The blond boy got up and went over the side of the bed and said something to the middle boy as he was shutting his door. She looked at the place they had come to. It was a grove of young pines with a double-wide trailer sitting in the middle of it. Sawn stumps still showed beneath it. A droplight wired to one of the trees lit a half-finished wooden deck littered with sawdust and wood scraps, a sawhorse where planks leaned. She could hear a baby crying and music blaring inside the aluminum walls.
She stood up. The blond boy had his arms uplifted to help her down. She put her legs over the side of the bed and half jumped, half slid, his hard hands holding her by the ribs until he lowered her feet to the gravel. He stood watching her for a moment. Then he stepped away and leaned over the side of the bed and tugged on one of the big coolers. The driver climbed up in the boat and stepped down between the seats and got ahold of the other handle and together they lifted it up onto the side of the bed. The blond boy held it there until the middle boy came over and helped him set it on the ground.
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nbsp; “We got to dress all these fish,” the blond boy said.
“We got one in there weighs about ten pounds,” the middle boy said. “You want to see him?”
“Yeah,” she said.
They moved it closer to the light and the middle boy raised the lid so that she could see down into the crushed ice where slick catfish lay black and shiny with their whiskered mouths and their dead eyes.
“Lord what a mess of fish,” she said. “What y’all gonna do with that many?”
The driver had gotten down from the truck and walked up beside them. The middle boy was sorting through the slimed bodies, trying to find the big one to show her.
“We gonna have a fish fry one night,” he said, grinning at her over his shoulder. “Drink some beer. Have a party. You like to party?”
“I reckon so,” she said. She smiled at them and took another sip of her beer. Her purse was hanging on her arm and she really needed to get to the bathroom, but she didn’t want to ask in front of everybody. From the depths of the cooler the middle boy pulled the curved and ice-cold corpse of a flathead nearly two feet long and held the dripping thing out to her like a present.
“He’s a nice one, ain’t he?”
“Sure is,” she said. She touched the slick flesh with her fingertip and then the boy dropped it back into the ice and wiped his hands on his pants.
“You can go on in if you want to,” the blond boy said.
She moved closer to him and stood there until the other two had picked up the cooler and started moving away with it.
“Where’s the bathroom at?” she said.
He turned and pointed toward the south end of the trailer.
“It’s down the hall. Linda’s in there but just tell her you’re with us. We’ll be on in after we get through with these fish.”
He didn’t wait for an answer but went to a toolbox on the deck and started looking through it. She saw him take out something and walk down toward the other two where they had gone around the end of the trailer. One of them had a flashlight and she could see glimpses of a rough table and the legs of their blue jeans.
She stood there alone and took another drink of her beer. Linda. And there was a baby but she didn’t hear it now. The music was still going inside, some strange guitar like none she’d ever heard, but then she hadn’t heard much, just what was on the radio when they had the truck or sometimes when the fruit pickers they used to work with brought a radio down to the groves. She’d always wanted one to carry around with her like she’d seen people do.
There was a path made from white stone chips leading up to the steps and somebody had spent some time laying a wooden border along both sides of it and there were posts stubbed up in front of the trailer where she guessed the rest of the deck would go. She stepped across the orange extension cords and around a broken Big Wheel and up to the steps. She didn’t know whether to knock or not so she just went up the steps and opened the door, poking her head in, looking around. There was carpet in the living room and shiny paneling on the walls. A cluttered kitchen to the right and something in a pan steaming on the stove. She stepped inside and pulled the door shut behind her. The strange and uneasy wail of the baby started up again somewhere. Down the hall to her left. But he’d pointed to the right.
A big stereo system stood against the back wall of the living room beside a television and music was coming from the speakers, loud and strong, the bass booming. She looked at the new furniture and all the record albums they had and saw how thick the carpet was and how nice everything was and knew now that she had done the right thing by leaving except that already she missed her brother.
She set her beer on a counter and started down the hall. It was narrow, and as the turned to edge past a folding clothes rack she bumped directly into a chubby young woman who screamed in her face and fell back against the wall with scared eyes and an awful look.
“Who in the hell are you?” she said, and Fay backed up.
“I was huntin the bathroom. He said it was down the hall.”
“Who said? You like to scared the living shit out of me.”
Fay motioned toward the front.
“Jerry? That boy out there? They got a big mess of fish they caught.”
The baby wailed louder at the other end of the trailer, a sound of anguish that trailed off under the thunder of the guitars screaming in the living room.
“I think that music woke him up,” Fay said.
The woman went past her and muttered, “What do you know about it?”
Fay turned to watch her go. “I don’t know nothin about it,” she said to her back. “I just wanted to go to the bathroom.”
She stood watching the woman go across the living room and down the hall to the other end of the trailer and then a door shut somewhere and there was nothing to hear but the music pounding in there. She didn’t know what to do. She was used to going in the woods but those boys were back there and she was afraid they would see her. So she just waited. A minute passed and then the woman came out of a room down there carrying a baby dressed in a sleeper. When she came by the stereo she reached out and turned it down. She stopped at the edge of the hall and rubbed the child’s back, jostled it up and down. The child was looking at Fay with its fingers in its mouth.
“It’s down the hall there,” the woman said. “Two doors down.”
Fay didn’t say anything. She turned and went down there and saw the commode and stepped inside and shut the door, raised her skirt and lowered her panties to her knees and sat down. She closed her eyes and breathed a long sigh of relief and leaned forward until she was through. It smelled kind of funny in the bathroom and there were float toys for the child lined up on the floor in front of the tub, pajamas and socks folded neatly on a shelf. She dabbed at herself with some tissue she pulled off the roll and got up and fixed her clothes and flushed the commode. She never had turned loose of her purse.
When she stepped back out into the hall she didn’t see anybody. The rest of her beer was still sitting on the counter and she picked it up and took another drink of it, but now it was warm and tasted flat. She didn’t feel like she ought to go and sit on the couch. What she wanted was to lie down somewhere for a while and find out what to do next.
She went into the living room and listened to the music for a few minutes. There were a few framed pictures of the woman on the walls, taken when she was younger, thinner, her hair a lighter color. A .22 rifle leaned in one corner, the stock painted red. Magazines were piled beside the couch, spilling onto the floor.
She sipped her beer again and saw a window in the back wall beside the stereo and walked over there. By cupping her hand over her eyes and pressing her face close to the glass she could see the boys out back, working their pliers at the fish hanging on the trees by their heads, stripping the skin away, the light dancing and moving on bloody hands, bloody meat. She pulled back lest they see her watching them and went across the room again.
She opened the door and went down the steps and closed the door behind her. The woman was sitting in a lawn chair beside the path, letting the child stand, or try to. It didn’t appear to be old enough to walk yet.
“Hey,” Fay said. “I’m sorry if I scared you.”
“I don’t never know who’s here and who ain’t,” the woman said.
“I caught a ride with them.”
“Where’d they pick you up at, across the river?”
“Yeah.”
“I don’t know what they want to bring all their whores over here for.”
“I ain’t no whore.”
The woman turned her head to something out across the dark trees. The floodlight was shining on her face and her eyes were red. The child tried to take a step and she turned loose of it, but it almost fell and grabbed her by the knee.
“If you’re gonna stay here you’ll have to help with the bills,” the woman said. “And I’ve done eat tonight. If you want anything you’ll have to fix it yourself.”
; “I’ve done eat.”
The woman nodded to herself as if this seemed to satisfy her.
“They drunk?”
“I don’t believe they are. I couldn’t tell it if they was.”
“How many fish did they ketch?”
“They got a whole mess of em. They got one weighs about ten pound.”
“You ain’t got a cigarette on you, have you?”
Fay turned to the light and opened her purse and dug in there for the crumpled pack. She pulled it out. There were two or three left. She shook one loose and stepped closer to her, held it out. The woman took it and put it in her lips and stretched one leg out, feeling around in her pocket.
“Shit. Left it in the house.”
“I got some matches,” Fay said, and searched through her purse again until she found them. When she handed them over, the woman turned loose of the baby and the baby was startled and waved its arms for a second and then fell. Even though it was too late to jump for it Fay almost did. The baby was lying on the ground and the woman was trying to get her cigarette lit.
“Shit,” she said. She picked the baby up and held it standing between her knees and finally got her smoke going and passed the matches back to Fay.
“Is that your baby?”
“Yeah. Stays sick half the time. I just about had it asleep when you come in.”
Fay could see a few stars shining through the branches of the sheltering pines. She could hear traffic on the road out front. She looked around for a place to sit but there didn’t seem to be any more chairs. The baby had put part of its hand in its mouth and was watching her shyly, almost smiling, and she couldn’t tell if it was a boy or a girl. It had been a long time since she’d been this close to a baby, and she smiled back at it.
“Well I don’t know where we gonna put em,” the woman said. “I told Charles he needed to buy another deep freeze and he said we ain’t got no place to put it and I said well build somethin cause the one we got’s full of deer meat already and I’ve done eat that till it’s runnin out my ears. They’s a chair over yonder if you want to sit down.”
“Where bouts?”
