Fay: A Novel

by Larry Brown

  “What you going to do?” Reena said.

  “About what?”

  “Hell, a place to stay for one thing. You can’t just sleep on the beach down here, the cops’ll roust you. Or somebody’ll cut your throat for you. You got any money?”

  “I got a little. Not much.”

  “You got enough to stay in a hotel room tonight?”

  “I don’t know. How much is that?”

  “Shit. Probably about thirty dollars over here at the Holiday Inn. You might could find a cheaper place, though. There’s a bunch of motels up and down the road here. They’re probably cheaper than the Holiday Inn. As a matter of fact I know they are.”

  “I don’t think I’ve got enough for that,” Fay said. She was starting to get scared now, thinking about being out on this beach late at night where just anybody might come by. She was afraid the law might be looking for her.

  “I’d offer to let you stay with me for a while but there ain’t hardly enough room in there for us as it is,” Reena said. She rolled over onto her side and picked up a pair of sunglasses from the towel and put them on. “You ever turned a trick?”

  “You mean like trick or treat? Naw. They never did let us do that.”

  Reena rolled over onto her belly and shook her head. She had a good tan and her dark hair was shiny and clean.

  “I mean fucking a man for money. Sucking him off or something.”

  Fay spoke quietly. “I ain’t never done nothin like that. I wouldn’t, neither.”

  Reena looked up.

  “Don’t say what you would or wouldn’t do, honey. Cause one day you might have to. I turn a trick or two just about every night I work at the club. I have to. I ain’t got no choice. My kids got to eat.”

  “What about that guy at your place? Don’t he work?”

  “He did. He was a shrimper on one of these boats out here but business got bad when all these Vietnamese come in and they had to let him go. That was two months ago. He’s been looking for a job but he ain’t found one yet. So he watches the kids for me and cooks and cleans.”

  “Does he know about this other?”

  “You mean the tricks? He knows I dance. He don’t know for sure about the other. It ain’t none of his business and I’m about tired of his shit anyway. I’m just scared he might beat me up if I throw him out.”

  “My lord,” Fay said.

  Reena sat up and finished her beer and tossed her can onto the sand. She opened the lid on the cooler and got out a cold one. She sat with her knees up and grains of sand clinging to her feet.

  “I hate to fuck somebody I don’t even feel nothing for. But I’d feel a lot worse if my kids didn’t have nothing to eat.”

  She had turned her face away for a moment but now she turned back and rested her hand briefly on Fay’s.

  “I didn’t have shit when I was growing up,” she said. “And I ain’t got nothing right now. I’m just trying to do better. I want my kids to have more than I did. It ain’t their fault that I’ve done the way I’ve done. You want another beer?”

  “Sure.”

  Reena handed her one and Fay drank off the last of what was in the can and set it in the sand. She opened the fresh one and lay back on the towel.

  “How hard is it to learn that dancin?” she said.

  At Reena’s Fay could see that the door was open on the RV and then she saw the man sitting on the front step wearing just a pair of jeans.

  “I guess they’re up,” Reena said, and pulled in and parked. “Will you help me get my stuff out?”

  “Yeah.”

  She got out and opened the back door and reached in for the towels and the collapsed umbrella and her purse. Reena got the cooler and they went across the sandy yard in their swimming suits. Reena said something to him and he looked up at Fay. Not a happy look and she saw it.

  “Chuck? This is Fay. We’ve been down to the beach for a while. The kids up?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “I fixed em some cereal and they’re in there eating.”

  He got up and stuck his hand out. Fay took it and shook and could see him looking at her titties, her legs. She didn’t like him.

  “Hi,” was all she said. She looked around. The black pellets covered the picnic table again. Chuck and Reena were talking. She went over to the table and put the towels and the umbrella on it and sat down. She was tired and wondered if maybe she couldn’t just stretch the towels out under the tree and ball up one for a pillow and take a nap. The beer had made her sleepy on top of the big breakfast she’d eaten. She was used to taking a nap whenever she wanted to.

  Reena set the cooler on the ground and Chuck bent over and took off the lid and got a beer from it. He sat back down on the steps and opened it, looking up at Reena. He had four or five tattoos on his arms and shoulders and he was burnt-looking from the sun, heavily muscled, dull reddened eyes behind sleepy lids. To Fay he looked lazy and maybe dangerous.

  She tried not to listen but it was plain they were getting into an argument. She looked away, down to the end of the street where it stopped in a trash pile of split garbage bags and cardboard boxes, scattered beer cans and broken lawn chairs. Their voices were getting louder and it was something about money. She got off the picnic table and walked across the yard, away from them. It might be better to just go on, take her suitcase from inside the trailer and find someplace to change and go on down the road. Go somewhere, but where? She barely even knew where she was, only the coast. She almost wished she’d never left home. At least she hadn’t killed anybody there. Why did Sam ever have to start messing with her in the first place? But she knew all the answers to that. There wasn’t any use in thinking about it. What happened had happened and it was too late to go back and change any of it. This was what her life was now. She’d just have to deal with it.

  “Fay?” Reena called, and she turned. Chuck had put on a shirt and he was walking toward the little pickup, turning up the beer as he walked. Reena was standing at the door of the trailer and motioning for her to come on in.

  “Come on and meet my kids,” Reena said. “Then we’ll lay down and take us a nap if you want to. Chuck’s gone down to the dock for a while.”

  She followed her up the steps and into the tiny living area where the two children sat with bowls of milk and cereal in their laps. They were watching a miniature television, a boy about three and a little girl who looked to be about five. They both wore shorts and T-shirts and both of them were very fair. Fay smiled at them.

  “Hey,” she said.

  “This is Jimmy, Fay,” Reena said. “And this is Clara. Can y’all say hi to Fay?”

  “Hey,” the little boy said. “We got the cartoons on.”

  The girl didn’t say anything and barely looked up from the TV screen.

  “They sure are cute,” Fay said.

  “Yeah. Their daddy won’t help me take care of em. Just set that stuff down anywhere, Fay.”

  There didn’t seem to be much room to put anything. Reena was going down a short hall and called back to her to follow.

  There were two beds in the back room, short and compact, with thin mattresses. Reena reached over and turned on an air conditioner that had been fitted into the wall and then patched around messily with silver tape.

  “Well this is it,” Reena said. “You can sleep on that bed and we’ll try to figure out something else when we get up. I got to get some sleep. Let me just go tell these kids something right quick.”

  Fay sat down on the bed and it sagged. But she was so tired she could have slept on the ground. She pulled back the sheet and heard Reena telling the kids not to go across the road and not to wake them up. There was no door to the room. She could hear the TV playing, small explosions, laughter. Reena came back into the room and took off her swimming suit and looked at Fay. She looked like somebody who had lost weight.

  Reena winked at her and slipped beneath the sheet on the bed, turned on her side and didn’t move. There was just the mound of shiny hair, a
nd the sheet stretched tight over the curve of her rump.

  The TV played on in the front space. She heard the children talking. She didn’t go to sleep for a long time. She didn’t know if Reena was asleep or not.

  “How bad does it hurt to have a baby, Reena?” she said, but Reena didn’t answer, only shifted a little in the bed, and coughed lightly in maybe what was her sleep.

  WHEN SHE WOKE there was not any sound and the light had changed in the room. The air conditioner had been turned off and her thin pillow was damp with the sweat from her head and neck. The bed Reena had slept in was empty and she couldn’t hear the children or the television.

  She got up. There was still sand clinging to her feet and her legs. She rubbed at her arms going up the short hall and then she leaned forward and took a careful peek into the living area. It was empty of people and the screen door was closed. Her suitcase was still stuffed into the overhead bed and she pulled it down and went to see if there was a lock on the door. There was. She locked it and went back to the bedroom and pulled off the swimming suit and found a clean bra and panties, a blouse and some shorts. She put them on and put the swimming suit in her purse.

  She went out the front door and stepped down into the yard, then looked up. The sun was over in the sky and she thought it looked like late afternoon. The car was gone and there wasn’t any sign of the children. She went back inside to the living area where the sink was and the small refrigerator and looked around for a note, thinking maybe Reena had written her one, but there was nothing, just the two empty cereal bowls in the sink and two spoons. She opened the refrigerator and looked into it. Some bologna and some mustard and mayonnaise, a half-empty jar of pickles, some eggs and bacon and a few soft drinks. That was it. She closed it and got her purse and went back out into the yard. The little cooler was sitting there beside the step. She carried her purse and a beer over to a lawn chair. The beer was still cold when she opened it and took a sip.

  She found her cigarettes. She only had about half a pack left. Maybe later if nobody showed up she could walk back down the beach road. There were some liquor stores and gas stations she’d seen earlier scattered up and down the road. But she didn’t want to lug her suitcase and she didn’t want to leave it here. She guessed she could hide it in some bushes along this street somewhere if she had to, come back and get it later.

  Some of the children’s toys were lying around in the yard: a bucket and a plastic shovel, a red-and-white tricycle, some tiny yellow trucks alongside balls and big plastic bats spattered with dirt that some former rain had kicked up on them. She drank the beer and eyed the clouds above. It looked like it was clearing off.

  There was not much traffic on this street. Once in a while she would see a car or a truck turn into a driveway down the hill. She could hear a radio playing somewhere. An old woman across the road was down on her knees pulling at weeds in a flower garden. She looked up at Fay and waved one time and Fay waved back: Hey old lady.

  She sat there and thought about Sam and the last time with him, that day before he had gone in to work, and all the times before with him and it got so bad she had to quit thinking about it. She never had been one to cry much but a few tears ran down her cheeks and dripped off her chin. She sniffed and rubbed slick mucus away from her nose with the back of her hand. Goddamn people. Always fucking something up. And wasn’t this just a great place to be in? Nothing but a fucking dump. But it beat nothing, didn’t it? She thought about Reena fucking people for money. She probably closed her eyes or something while it was going on. The dancing Reena had told her about sounded kind of good, the money part. But did you really have to take your clothes off? Couldn’t you just dance in a swimming suit or something? She didn’t want to get up in public and take her clothes off. And even if she did start doing it, how long could she keep on before her belly started swelling and everybody would be able to tell? Men who were paying to see a woman dance wouldn’t want to see a pregnant one dance. And what exactly was a pervert? It sounded kind of nasty in some way. Maybe guys who jacked off or something. She’d asked Sam about that one time, about jacking off. He said every boy did it. Him too. She wished Reena would come on back. She just felt like she needed to know a little more before she jumped off into this thing. The money she had wasn’t going to last long. It would buy cigarettes and a few sandwiches for a little while, and then that’d be all she wrote.

  She got up and went back into the trailer and closed the suitcase. She came back out the door and walked around behind the trailer and looked off into the woods down there. There were dense pines, thick shade, snarled growths of honeysuckle and other plants whose names she didn’t know.

  Out of sight of the trailer she found an old mattress folded over against some boxes and jars and she raised it up, made sure no snakes were under it, and slid the suitcase down in there. Then she headed back up toward the yard and got her purse and put her smokes and lighter back in there and went down the road walking and looking around. The old lady had gone in or moved somewhere else in her yard.

  There seemed to be a couple of daylight hours left before dark and she thought that would be enough time to walk down to the beach road, find a store, get another pack of cigarettes and walk back to Reena’s trailer, be still sitting there in the yard when she came in. She had to find out about this dancing job and get Reena to show her how to do it.

  She walked barefoot for a while and then had to get out in the street where a portion of the sidewalk ran out. She dug the sandals from her purse and slipped her feet into them.

  The neighborhood got better as she went along. The trailers started giving way to wooden houses with railed porches and barbecue grills sitting on them, neatly bricked homes with wire mesh fences and chickens in pens. There were some of the biggest roosters she’d ever seen in some of them, tall birds with black shiny feathers and blond tails. She saw groups of skinny children with black hair sitting in some of the yards and old men and women with the same features sitting on porches and reading newspapers or cooking on the grills.

  She was trying to remember how Reena had gotten up to the trailer. There was a stop sign on down a ways and she seemed to remember her turning there. And when she got up to the corner and looked, she could see the water out in the bay. It didn’t look that far.

  Halfway down the hill, before she crossed the next street, she stopped beside an old house with gray and red paint, fancy woodwork on the edges of the roof and over the porch, all kinds of flowers planted and growing in the yard. There was a low stone wall that bordered the sidewalk and she sat down on it and rested for a while.

  She hoped a store was close by. All she wanted to do now was find one, get what she needed, maybe a sandwich too if they sold them, and go back to her lawn chair to wait for Reena.

  After a few minutes she picked up her purse and crossed the street at the stop sign. Cars and trucks were going down the road and people were still out on the beach. Some people were far out in the water but the water was only up to their waists. She couldn’t get over it. Something about it just didn’t look right. She hadn’t thought it would be that shallow that far out.

  When she got down to the beach road she didn’t see anyplace to cross, so she stopped and watched the traffic for a while and waited until there was an opening and she darted halfway across. She had to wait in the middle of the road while some more cars and trucks came past and some blew their horns at her. When she saw another opening in the traffic she scooted across and stopped. The Denny’s where she had eaten was way down the beach. She looked the other way and saw a gas station sign she recognized, but it was a long way off. Sometimes they sold beer. She’d seen her daddy buy beer in gas stations before. Sometimes they had sandwiches too. So she started walking that way, trudging through the sand again. People were lying everywhere on the beach now, children playing, music going, radios playing in cars where young people were grouped up near the road, talking and laughing. She heard a few whistles but she never looked to s
ee who’d made them. She just kept walking. The gas station didn’t seem to be getting any closer. And it wasn’t as late as she’d thought it was. There must have been some clouds over the sun earlier because it was glaring down on her now and she could feel sweat beading across her brow. She wiped at it and kept walking.

  Up ahead she could see a wooden walkway and after a while she reached it and got up on it. It was elevated above the beach and now she could see farther out into the water and along the beach where the people were packed in side by side, some drinking beer, some lying on their bellies under the sun, couples, older men and women, girls in groups of two and three wearing skimpy swimsuits and their legs and arms nearly black from the sun. The darkest white people she’d ever seen. She wondered how they could get enough time off from work to spend that much time lying in the sun. She guessed some of them were rich and didn’t have to work. Maybe some of them were dancers like Reena and only worked at night.

  The wooden walkway stretched for a long distance in front of her and there was a long white sign beside it that said WELCOME TO GULF-PORT. When she got on the other side of it she looked back and it said WELCOME TO BILOXI. The gas station was closer now, but the walkway ran out, and she had to get back in the sand. She was really getting hungry now and she hoped they’d have some sandwiches.

  The traffic passed beside her in a steady flow. On the high side of the road she saw old homes set back from another street that ran parallel to the one she was walking along.

  She went on. The heat seemed to creep up on you here, to gather its forces slowly and then hit you all of a sudden. She could feel rings of sweat spreading under her arms, but there were no trees to rest under here on this side of the road. All the trees were up in the yards of the nice houses.