Fay: A Novel

by Larry Brown

  Fay started to get up. She wasn’t feeling good. She was hoping that maybe Reena would let her lie down under the air conditioner again and rest. But another truck drove up the street and pulled in and parked beside the car. A man got out of it, glanced at her, then went over and knocked hard on the trailer door. She heard Reena say something and the man opened the door and went in. He pulled the door closed behind him. In less than a minute she heard yelling and things falling and then what sounded like the thud of a body hitting the floor. Then it was quiet. The man stepped out of the door holding some money in his hand. He gave Fay a long stare and she couldn’t look away. He was short, with black hair slicked back, and he stood there at the trailer step and counted his money, then looked up.

  “I got a job for a good-looking girl like you. Easy money. You could probably make about three hundred a night.”

  She only dumbly shook her head. He crammed the money deep into his pocket and winked at her and got into the truck and left.

  She was scared now. She went over to the step and pushed open the door. Reena was on the floor in a red gown and she was pushing herself up on one hand, trying to get up.

  When she saw Fay coming, she hung her head back down, and her dark locks shook. “Aw shit,” she said.

  Fay helped her get up to her knees, then up on one leg, and Reena’s fingers dug into her arm for support. She led her over to one of the benches next to the table and helped her sit down. There was a splotch of color on Reena’s cheek and a knot was growing under one of her eyes. She put her elbows up on the table and leaned over it with her head hanging down. She raised her face long enough to say, “Get me that whiskey in the cabinet.”

  She pointed and Fay went to it and opened it. There was tequila, bourbon, gin. She took down a pint of Jim Beam that was half full and looked in the cabinet next to it and found some glasses. She brought them over to the table and Reena leaned back and opened the bottle and picked up a glass and poured a drink. She held out the bottle.

  “You want some?”

  Fay shook her head and watched her drink a straight shot of the whiskey. Reena made a face and then poured another one. She turned sideways in the seat to sip at the next drink. She looked up at Fay.

  “Be a sweetheart and get me my cigarettes and matches out of the bedroom. If you don’t mind.”

  Fay got up and went back there. The covers were mussed on both beds and there were glasses and beer bottles scattered around. The stubs of thinly rolled cigarettes lay in an ashtray.

  “Bring me one of those roaches,” Reena called.

  “What’s that?”

  “Those roaches in the ashtray. I know there’s two or three in there. Bring me one.”

  Fay picked up one that was about an inch long. She got the cigarettes and the matches and took them out to her.

  “Thanks,” Reena said. She hung the roach in her mouth and slipped a match from the box and scratched it and held the wavering tip of fire to the joint and lit it. When she exhaled the first time Fay recognized the smell. What those boys had given her to smoke in the trailer. Only it was in a pipe then. She still remembered how bad she felt when she woke up that night.

  Reena took three hits and offered it to Fay, but she shook her head. Reena ducked her face and finished it, sucked it down until it was only a tiny scrap of smoking paper that she had to hold tightly between the tips of two fingers. Then she dropped it into an ashtray and blew out a big cloud of smoke. She poured some more whiskey into the glass.

  “Well. Do I look like hell?” she said.

  “You gonna have a black eye,” Fay said. “Who was that guy?”

  Reena waved one hand to dismiss him.

  “You don’t want to know who that guy was.”

  “What did he want?”

  “He wanted some money and he got it, too. The son of a bitch. I wish Chuck had been here.”

  “With that other man here?”

  “What other man?”

  “The one with the cowboy hat.”

  “Where’d you see him at?”

  “I saw him when he came outside. I was sittin on the picnic table.”

  “Doing what?”

  “Nothin. I was just kind of sittin there.”

  “Shit,” Reena said. “I was just about to go to sleep when that prick came in. Are you sure you don’t want a drink?”

  “I’ve had enough for one night I think. Why don’t you let me help you to bed?”

  Reena waved a shaky hand at her and took another drink.

  “I can’t go to bed now. I’m catching a buzz now. It’ll be hours before I’ll be able to get to sleep now. If that asshole had left me alone I’d be asleep. What happened to you? I come back right before dark and you were gone.”

  “I took off down the street,” Fay said. “I was almost out of cigarettes and I was hungry. Then I went down on the beach and I met this guy. He took me out to supper.”

  “Yeah?” Reena was studying her and she seemed agitated. “Yeah?” she said again.

  “I drank a bunch of beer and I must’ve passed out. I woke up and he was on top of me. Had it in me.”

  “God,” Reena whispered. “Men are so mean.”

  “I knocked some of his damn teeth out.”

  “Good.”

  “And left him naked in this place he took me to.”

  Reena smiled. “You did?”

  “I drove his van back up here and left it.”

  Reena looked at the glass and poured some more whiskey into it. She swirled it around in there and then just sat looking at it.

  “I had it happen to me one time too,” she said. “Coming home from work one night. I didn’t even call the police.” She looked up. “A person like me, some people can do like they want to with me.”

  After a while Reena got up and made Fay some coffee, but kept drinking the whiskey until there was only a little left. When she finished that she got some gin and mixed something and sipped it. Fay got a cup of the coffee and Reena got down a pan and filled it with water and boiled a couple of eggs apiece for them. They peeled them and ate them with salt and pepper. Then they went back to the tiny bedroom, took off their clothes, and lay down and went to sleep.

  Chuck woke them up at two o’clock calling Reena’s name. Fay opened her eyes and saw her get up and pull on a robe and go out. She lay there with the sheet over her and heard the children’s voices up front and out in the yard. The thought hit her that she needed to get out of this place and go somewhere else, but she could hardly think about moving right now. So she drifted back off to sleep with the sounds of arguing in her ears. Like so often before.

  She woke finally and knew she had to go down in the bushes and get her suitcase. There were a few more changes of clothes in there and some clean underwear. She felt incredibly dirty and it seemed that already she had gone back to the way she had been living before she met Sam.

  It was just as she’d thought it would be when she went out to the front room again: everybody gone. She went back for her sandals and picked her way down through the bushes behind the trailer and found again the mattress piled up against the boxes and retrieved her suitcase, carried it back to the trailer, opened it on Reena’s bed and took out a few things, clean underwear, a ribbon for her hair. She closed the front door and found some soap and standing naked at the little sink washed herself as best she could and dressed in the clean clothes. Then at the same small sink she washed out the old underwear and the shorts and the blouse and the swimsuit and then looked through a window at the back of the trailer and saw a clothesline out there at the edge of the bushes. She carried the clothes out there and found some clothespins and hung her things up to dry. Eyeing the sky and the late hour and knowing they probably wouldn’t be dry before dark. But where did she have to go anyway?

  She ate a piece of bologna from the tiny icebox. It was curled and dry. She went out and sat on the picnic table again. The evening grew darker and she could hear the cars and the traffic down on th
e road that ran along the beach and she wondered if the van was still sitting there.

  She was still sitting there when full dark came. Her supply of cigarettes was dwindling again, but there was nothing to do really but sit there and smoke and watch for the lights of cars coming up the street and try to tell if one of them was Reena coming in. There was some music playing up the street somewhere but she didn’t think it came from a radio. It sounded more like a live band. She thought about walking down that way just to have something to do.

  She decided to get up and get her purse and go down the sidewalk. She thought maybe she could find another store somewhere that had something to eat.

  She went back inside and closed the suitcase and put it on the bed she’d been sleeping on. There wasn’t much in it anyway, nothing worth stealing. She wasn’t worried about Reena but she didn’t like Chuck’s looks. Her money was in her purse and she had that on her arm.

  Going down the sidewalk the music got louder as she got closer. Before she got to the corner she could see cars and pickups parked all up and down the street and people moving around in a yard on the right. That was where the music was coming from. She saw people dancing and some of them looked to be about her age. Two boys with guitars were up on the porch with a couple of black boxes with red lights sitting between them. There was a drummer behind them and she stopped under a tree for a minute to see what was going on. It looked like everybody out there was drinking beer and smoking cigarettes. A pang of something went through her. She wondered what would happen if she went back to see Sam. Would he put her in jail if he found out what she’d done? There wouldn’t be any way to find out unless she went back, and then if things were bad, it would be too late. She ached for him. And this baby she was carrying inside her, what was going to happen to it? She had to be in some place where she could raise it when it came and it had to be a safe place for both of them. She remembered her little sister being born in an old barn they had found and how her mother had lain in a pile of hay with only a few thin blankets for comfort for two days before she could get up and how scared she had been, thinking her mother was going to die. A long time ago, she guessed about twelve or thirteen years now. She wasn’t really sure how old Dorothy was. And Gary. She thought about him less and less. Worrying about her own stuff. Living the good life with Sam those few short months. She could always hitchhike back home. But that would just put more of a burden on her mother than she already had now. She couldn’t go back, not to Sam and not to her family. Maybe something would happen. Maybe tomorrow she could go out and try to find a job somewhere. She had to do something. She couldn’t just keep staying in that trailer like that.

  She moved out from under the tree and walked past the yard, watching the young people dancing and listening to the music. Several grills were going and she could smell food cooking and it made the spit start up in her mouth. She could see somebody turning hamburgers on one of the grills and dishing some of them out to other young people who stood with plates in their hands. She walked by, looking. A few people waved at her and she waved back and smiled. But they didn’t invite her in to share their party and she went on down the street alone into the darkness that waited beyond the last street lamp she could see.

  The sand below the crest of the beach was smooth and wet and there were lights moving far away out there in the distance. The beach was almost deserted except for an occasional solitary person still sitting on a beach towel in the darkness. She walked by two figures moaning and struggling against each other in the sand, the girl on her back with her legs locked around the boy’s back and his white buttocks moving up and down on her. After a while she found a place where there was nobody close by and she sat down in the sand and studied the darkness. The cries of the birds were hushed now and there was only the sound of the traffic on the road, which had slowed down some. Sunday night and people going back home, back to jobs on Monday, children back to playing in their yards.

  After she rested, she got up and brushed off the seat of her pants and headed toward the lights down the beach. Cafés and stores and gas stations. She walked slowly and ignored the occasional catcalls from boys in pickups and cars still cruising up and down the beach road. A long brown limo pulled up beside her at one point and kept pace with her for a while, but when she turned her head to look at it the black glass in the windows reflected only her own distorted face and the figure of her walking along beside it. She didn’t know what to make of it but knew that somebody was inside watching her. Finally it sped on up the road and was gone.

  She kept walking and looking out over the beach. It was almost completely empty now and once again she could see the trash that people had left, paper cups, beer cans, plastic bags. A small dog trotted along down there, stopped and watched her for a moment, then went on, disappearing into the blackness. She could see the harbor lights up ahead and knew she was close to the restaurant where they had eaten last night. She seemed to remember a gas station near there and a few stores. They had to have something to eat in some of those places.

  By the time she got to the harbor the wind had begun to pick up and dark clouds scuttled along the belly of the sky. Thunder rumbled far off and in the distance through the clouds came flashes of light flickering. All she needed now was to be caught out in the rain. She started walking a little faster.

  When she went by the restaurant it looked like a slow night. And she didn’t want to go in there again. She kept walking.

  A brightly lit service station was across the road. She could see people pumping gas and there were beer signs in the windows, a sign that said SANDWICHES. The traffic wasn’t heavy right now so she went ahead and crossed both lanes, running just a bit on the other side when she saw cars coming. One car flashed its lights at her and as it zoomed by she saw that it was a police car. She watched for the brake lights to come on but they didn’t. Maybe they had her description already. She’d get the sandwich and then she’d get off this main street. She didn’t want to walk back up to Reena’s trailer but she didn’t know what else to do.

  Another hundred feet and she was walking across the concrete in front of the station, angling past some trash barrels where two big cats were tearing into a bag of trash somebody had left on the ground there. Inside it was clean and bright and she went immediately to the big coolers in back and grabbed a cold drink from a rack of them and opened it and took a sip. She looked around. The other coolers were full of beer, juice, milk. She walked past them, looking into each. They had sandwich meat and cheese. There were racks of potato chips and shelves of candy bars. She picked up a Mounds bar and a bag of plain chips and went back down the coolers to another box sitting on a table. Inside it were all kinds of sandwiches. She leaned closer to look and saw ham and turkey, egg salad, pimiento, all kinds of things to eat. She opened the glass door and reached in for a thick ham and cheese, then carried her things up to the counter and waited. There was a short line and some kid was running the register. He looked like he was about fifteen or sixteen. Two men in front of her paid for gas and bought cigarettes and beer. She moved up after the last one had gone and set her things down, drew in a breath, said, “Hey. How you doing tonight?”

  The boy nodded and smiled shyly.

  “Pretty good, I reckon. That all for you?”

  “Let me have a pack of Salem Lights, please.”

  She ducked her head and went for the money in her purse. When she raised her head he was searching in a rack over his head and he pulled down the cigarettes and tossed them onto the pile of stuff there and started ringing up her stuff. He looked up when he was done.

  “That’ll be five twenty-four, please.”

  She pulled out a ten and handed it to him. He made change and gave it to her. She thanked him and went out the door sipping on the cold drink and wondering where she could go to eat.

  Back on the sidewalk she looked both ways. Far up the street she could see a sign that said BUS STOP and she headed that way. Bugs were swarming around
the street lamps set on top of the high poles and the traffic was sparse again and slow-moving. She knew there would be a bench at the bus stop where she could sit and eat. She didn’t think she could wait until she got all the way back to Reena’s trailer.

  It took a minute or two to walk up there. She knew she had to get out tomorrow and look for a job. She figured she probably looked awful and she wished there was some way she could take a shower and wash her hair. But if there was a shower in Reena’s trailer she hadn’t seen it. She wondered how they stayed clean, and then remembered that for many years of her life she’d had not much of a way to stay clean, either.

  It took her twenty minutes to eat and when she was done she stuck the candy bar in her purse and put the trash into the bag, took the last sip from the can and dropped it in there, too, got her purse up on her arm and stepped over to the trash can on the corner and threw the sack in there. There didn’t seem to be anything else to do but walk back up to Reena’s and wait for her to come in. But no telling what time that would be and she didn’t look forward to sitting there waiting. She guessed she could go on in and get back on that bed and go to sleep.

  But she didn’t want to be alone in there if Chuck came in by himself. She sat back down on the bench and looked across the road. Even the harbor lights were starting to dim now, and the restaurant where she had tried to eat the oysters had gone dead black. Suddenly she didn’t want to be out on this street by herself, so she got up and started walking back the way she’d come, looking around as she went.

  There was only one place down the beach that seemed to be still going. It was the little brick shack with the cutout of a woman in black silhouette rising from the roof. She had passed it on her way over here but she hadn’t paid it much attention. It looked like a beer joint or something to her. When she got alongside it and looked at it from across the road, there under a pole that held a bright light was Reena’s car, or at least it looked like her car. She stopped on the sidewalk to take a better look at it. It seemed to be the same shape, the same size, the same color, tan with a brown roof.