by Larry Brown
Naked in the room she’d sat just at the edge of the sliding glass doors that opened on to the balcony and looked out at the rolling water, at the people still walking, still collecting shells, while the television played silently behind her and Aaron slept and the waves spoke out there.
Now the boy had the umbrella up and there was shade to lie under. The boy bent with a piece of chalk and wrote FORREST on a green plate at the back of one of the recliners and then he was gone.
“Well come on,” Aaron said, and he bent to pick up the cooler and the radio he’d bought. She had a new mesh bag with suntan lotion and potato chips and sandwiches, her brush. Two big towels lay folded at her feet. She picked them up and got the bag and they slid in under the shade on the recliners, but then she told him to get back up and put a towel across each one and then they lay down. Aaron moved the umbrella a little where the sun was burning down on her feet.
“That better?” he said.
“Yeah. Thanks. This is nice.”
He reached into the cooler for a cold beer and brought it out, ice clinging to the sides of it. He popped the top and drank some of it, leaned his head back.
“Shit,” he said. “We may stay three days.”
Fay was fiddling with the radio, trying to find a good station.
“You got my sunglasses?”
“Here.”
He slipped them on and lay still. Just for a moment he did. Then he got up and pulled off his shorts and laid them at the foot of his recliner and lay back down in his green trunks. She looked at him.
“How much you weigh, Aaron?”
“About two sixty most of the time. How about handing me my cigarettes, baby?” She handed them. “I drop a little in the summertime cause it’s so hot. I’m down to about two forty right now. But I’ll pick it back up this winter.”
“How come you’re so much bigger than Cully?”
Careful questions, as if the answers didn’t matter much. Just making conversation. He seemed okay with it.
“Cully’s daddy wasn’t as big as my daddy. My daddy was about six foot three. He weighed damn near three hundred pounds. Genetics, you know? Like horses. Or dogs. Or, I don’t know, gorillas.”
He pulled down his sunglasses from his eyes for a moment and smiled at her, then pushed them back up.
“So he ain’t your whole brother?”
“My whole brother? That’s a good one. He’s really my half brother. Mama was married to Cully’s daddy and he got killed in a car crash in North Carolina. I think Cully was about four or five when she married Daddy. They met in New Orleans, got married after a week. She said it was love at first sight. You believe in that?”
She was still messing with the radio. There was a lot of static on it and then a station came in clear as a bell and she pushed the antenna on out and set it down. Rock and roll. She liked it. Made her want to dance.
“I don’t know,” she said. “I kind of think you need to get to know somebody first.”
He nodded and pulled one leg up and looked out over the beach. He seemed happy. She knew by now that he would let you in for a while and then shut you out, that there were different sides to him.
“Well,” he said. “I guess there’s a lot to be said for that.”
About that time out of the corner of her vision she saw the plane coming. She shifted onto her side and watched it come. It was a pale tan, and out behind it hung a string of red letters that read FOOD FUN AJAX DINER NIGHTLY. The plane flew slowly and far up there she could see the pilot, just a dark blob against the cockpit window facing her. It was only about a hundred feet high. It droned. It flew the length of the beach and she watched it until it turned and went off into nothingness.
“We’ll take a ride this afternoon,” he said. “Show you some of the country.”
“I may just want to lay here.”
“I think we’ll take a ride,” he said.
They had lunch at three o’clock after showers and some hard fucking on a soft bed. He hadn’t mentioned Gigi and she hadn’t said anything about her. The place was cool and dark and he called bartenders and waitresses by name but didn’t introduce her to anybody. He ordered a steak medium rare and she had a salad and a hamburger. She drank iced tea and noticed that he drank only water. Not like him, from what she knew of him. He only ate about half of what he had and seemed nervous and preoccupied. He tapped his fingers on the table. She finished eating and pushed her plate away and he stood up and she got her purse and followed him to the register where he paid cash and left a tip for the waitress. Then they got back into the truck.
For a long time they had been following a sand road that seemed to lead nowhere. There had been houses earlier on the road but they had left them all behind and now there were some dumps with cast-off washing machines and crates of bottles and the road was rutted. The truck dipped and swayed. He drove carefully. By and by she began to see the ocean out there and far far off what she recognized as the beach where their hotel was. She had asked where they were going but he hadn’t answered and she didn’t ask again.
Finally the road ran out and there was just a turnaround where he pulled in and backed the truck up and shut it off. He looked over at her, his hand still on the ignition key, his eyes blank behind the sunglasses.
“Get on out,” he said. “I wouldn’t want you to miss this.”
She did as he said but she had to pee. She told him so and he pointed to some bushes behind her. Going over to them she looked back once and saw him raising the hatch on the back of the camper hull. The grass was high in the sand and she didn’t figure anybody was around anywhere.
She made her way back through the tall grass to see him leaning against the fender with a beer sitting on the hood. Next to it was a gun with a long barrel, a thing fixed on the top like the deer rifle Sam had kept in his cabinet in the hall at his house. Aaron looked at her and then turned his eyes back to the sky and the bay. She couldn’t imagine what. Then she heard the plane droning off in the distance.
“Don’t,” she said, and took only one step forward, but he raised a finger to his lips for a moment. Far off she could see it coming, the red plastic letters fluttering out behind it, a tiny thing like a toy set aloft by a child’s hand.
“How you know?” she said. “How you know it’s the right one? What if it’s some other guy?”
“Not a chance,” he said. He picked up the rifle and slipped his shades off and fitted his eye to the scope. “I called the airfield. I got this motherfucker’s number.”
It came over the beach with the engine noise growing louder and she saw now that Aaron was waiting for it to turn. She watched him track it with the barrel and she saw him push a black button behind the trigger just as the plane banked and started to come past them seventy yards out, looking very big and sounding powerful. The rifle boomed, and boomed, and boomed, knocking his shoulder back, and the plane dipped crazily, righted itself to not quite level, and then a wing pointed downward and it began to fall.
And Christopher Justin Dodd in his high berth above the white beach saw glass splinter beside his face and then another round punched a hole through his shoulder. It passed through his collarbone on the other side and then blood was running out from the bottom of his sleeve. His hands wavered on the stick. He tried to make his feet do something. The last solidpoint caught him dead through the third rib and then the earth and sky swapped places. He felt the plane heeling over and was helpless to stop it. When the ocean came running to meet his starboard wing he did not know that he lay bleeding for a stolen piece of ass. For a brief moment he thought he saw the black shining back of a swimming dolphin. And then the world went totally dizzy and he knew in his final moments that he was going in for the last time.
It was hard on her, seeing it. Once they were back on the highway she moved over next to the door and wouldn’t look at him. He didn’t seem to care, only sipped his beer and looked casually out at the seafood restaurants and the big shops where they sold sh
ells from Philippine waters. The sky was the color of a robin’s egg and once they got back into the city limits the traffic was terrible.
“What you want to do?” he said, finally. “You want to go to a bar? There’s some good ones around here. Or we could drive on over to the Flora-Bama.”
She sat on the seat with her legs crossed and her arms crossed over her lap.
“I think I’d like to go back to the room and lay down for a while.”
He studied her for a moment, stopped at a red light, the blinker going. “Suit yourself,” he said.
“How you know it was him?” she said. “How you know you didn’t shoot somebody who …how you know it was him?”
She wished she hadn’t told him now. She could have kept it to herself.
“I made some phone calls,” he said. “While you were sitting out front getting drunk.”
“I wouldn’t have got drunk if you hadn’t left me out there by myself. Your brother’s the one that got me drunk.”
The light changed and he stepped on the gas hard and turned the corner. They were back on the main strip now. Cars all over the place, people trying to cross the road in shorts and swimsuits, old ladies in terry cloth robes that stopped halfway down their sad thighs and the old men with them with eyeglasses and white hair on their paunches.
“So what?” he said. “Are we fighting already?”
“I guess goddamn we are.”
“Well I’ll just drop you off at the room and you can sull up or whatever. I’m gonna find me a place to have a couple of drinks and I think I’ll go swimming about dark. What, are you wanting to go back or something?”
“I ain’t said that.”
“Well what the fuck is it then? Did you not want the son of a bitch dead? You said yourself you started to run over him. You think that bastard ought to get away with something like that?”
“I don’t know.”
“Well what do you know?”
“Nothin, I don’t guess.”
She could tell he was getting mad. He stopped in the road in front of the hotel and put the blinker on again. Traffic was speeding toward them, a long barely broken line of it. Tic, tic, tic went the blinker. She thought she was going to throw up. He stamped it hard and cut in front of an oncoming truck that blew its horn. Aaron stuck up his finger and muttered, “Fuck you,” then swung into the parking lot. He pulled around to the door where the luggage carts sat and shoved it up into park. He dug into the pocket of his shorts and pulled out a key for their room. He put it in her hand. She sat there looking at it. He had one arm curled over the steering wheel and he was looking through the windshield at the hotel next to theirs.
“What kind of a man would I be if I didn’t take care of somebody who messed over you?”
“I just didn’t think you had to kill him.”
“Well. I did.”
“I guess you did,” she said, and opened the door, but he reached out for her arm and squeezed it tight.
“Look,” he said. “We can end it right here. Is that what you want?”
It was hot out in the parking lot. She could feel the heat seeping in through the open door even while she was cooled by the vents in the air conditioner that were blowing onto her face.
“No.”
“Then straighten up, goddamn it.”
She sat there on the edge of the seat. He hadn’t hurt her with his fingers and even now they were slacking off, lessening, easing their grip on her.
“I think I just want to go lay down for a while.”
He nodded and turned loose of her. He picked up a green polo shirt that was on the seat and slipped it over his head, worked his arms through the sleeves and pulled it down across his belly. He rubbed at his mouth with his fingers.
“All right. Go on up to the room and lay down and rest for a while. I’m gonna go have a few drinks and I’ll come back. Then we can decide where you want to go eat supper.”
“I thought you wanted to go swimming.”
“We can do that too. I’ll be back in an hour or an hour and a half. Okay?”
“Okay.”
“Fay?”
“What?”
“Nothing. Just go on up and rest.”
She got out and shut the door gently. He pulled away. She stood there in the overhang of the parking garage and the shade it lent and watched the end of the pickup go around the corner where the indoor swimming pool was and where through the glass windows she could see children swimming and splashing. Then she turned and went deeper into the shade, across the concrete that had been wetted by the feet of the guests, toward the stairs that led up to their room.
Son of a bitch got just what he needed. The bastard ought not done that to her. And maybe he shouldn’t have done it in front of her. It would have been easy enough to leave her in the room or on the beach, tell her he was going down the road for some cigarettes and another six-pack. But he’d wanted her to see it. He’d wanted her to know that he could take care of her. But now she was all fucked up with it and acted almost like she even felt sorry for the son of a bitch.
He got off the main drag and turned down one of the little roads that were lined with oyster shells and people were already standing outside restaurants, women in dresses and the men wearing shorts. He didn’t like having the rifle back there but as long as he didn’t fuck up, get drunk or hit somebody or weave, nobody was going to pull him over and hassle him. She’d get over it. They could go out for a nice meal tonight somewhere and have a lobster or something.
He cruised down one street and turned off on another. A cop car was waiting at a stop sign. He pulled up, stopped, kept his eyes straight ahead. The cop went on. You just had to be cool. You could get away with almost anything as long as you were cool. People hauling dope halfway across the country and speeding because they were nervous. But don’t mess up and they don’t usually pull you over. Even if you do have two pounds of cocaine in the trunk. The trooper who had stopped him outside Clarksdale last year had only been unlucky. He still remembered the cop’s nameplate: Banks.
He saw the place and wheeled in, parked it, shut off the motor and considered the pistol under the seat. He sat there for a moment, thinking about it. Finally he just reached over and locked the other door and got out and grabbed his smokes. He shut the driver’s door and locked it and checked to be sure that it was locked. It was. He went on in.
A guy he knew vaguely named Pinky was still behind the bar and he swung one hand and shook with Aaron when he sat down.
“What up, bro?” Pinky said. “Ain’t seen you in a while.”
“I ain’t been here in a while.”
“How’s your brother?”
“He’s fine. Y’all got any on the half shell?”
The bartender mopped at the bar with a wet rag. He was big shouldered and like Aaron his nose had been punched more than once. He seemed good-natured.
“Right back here, all you want. How many you need?”
He thought for a moment. Dinner later but maybe real later, depending on how she was, if she felt like going out. So go ahead and eat.
“Let me have a dozen and a Maker’s Mark on the rocks. Make it a double.”
“You got it,” he said, and he turned away, said something through a wooden opening at the back of the bar, and started making the drink. Aaron kept his eyes on the bottles behind the bar and didn’t look around. When Pinky set the drink in front of him he reached for it. He picked it up and sipped it. He looked at his watch. It was almost six o’clock. He wanted to hurry up and get this over with and get on back. Find some decent place to eat supper. And maybe tonight they could walk on the beach if she wanted to.
Pinky mixed a drink for somebody at the end of the bar and took it and a Heineken and a Miller down there and got the money and made change and closed the register and when he was finished he came back over to Aaron. He leaned on his hands.
“What’s happening in Biloxi?”
“Nothing,” Aaron said. “S
ame old shit. Hot as a son of a bitch. Like always.”
“Where’s that blonde you had over here that time? You still sporting her around?”
“Nah.” He pushed his glass around on its napkin. “She’s done went on to greener pastures.”
Pinky stuck his fingernail between his two front teeth and picked at something.
“Damn she was fine. You ain’t got her phone number on you have you?”
“What’s the special today?” Aaron said.
Pinky pointed. “It’s over there on the board.” Aaron looked. He’d come past it on the way in without glancing at it. A large chalkboard on legs sat just past the register and it listed the catch of the day or whatever was on sale. Aaron sipped his drink. The girl behind the register was one he’d seen before but he didn’t know her. He watched her smile at the people she was waiting on. She was tall and had a red ribbon in her hair and she wore a short flowered dress over good legs and Aaron thought she was fine but not as fine as Fay. He had to hold on to her. Maybe he could watch his temper a little better. He didn’t want to run her away. The only thing was that baby. He didn’t know what to do about that.
There it was, on the board at the bottom: Bonita, stuffed or fried, blackened or broiled. He noticed that it was $11.95 and came with a house salad, choice of potato, bread and soup.
Hell. Maybe he needed to bring Fay over here and let her eat. He’d always heard they had good food.
He glanced at his watch again and saw how slowly the time was moving by. It was always like this. He’d told Fay he’d be back in an hour and a half at the latest. And shit, only thirty minutes had gone by. He was ready to rock and roll with it.
The oysters came sliding through the panel on a big brown platter and Pinky put them in front of him. Aaron ordered another drink and tore open a pack of crackers and stirred some extra horseradish into the small cup of cocktail sauce and scooped the first one from the shell. Pinky stood back and watched him eat like a man who was scared to speak.
