by Larry Brown
By eleven she was upstairs in the room she had moved into with him. She took a long shower and washed her hair and then wrapped herself in a towel and sat on the bed to paint her toenails a dark red, her wet hair lying close against the back of her neck. She propped her feet in a chair to let her nails dry and when she was done she got up and dropped the towel on the floor and pulled some clean panties from a drawer. There was a short black nightie she had found hanging in the closet and figured was probably Gigi’s. Before she put it on she looked at the tag in the back, holding it out where she could read it: Frederick’s of Hollywood. Gigi had probably gotten it out there when she’d made some of those movies. She believed she liked wearing things like this.
She stood in front of an antique dresser with a mirror and spots of the backing had flaked off so that she resembled to herself an old picture standing there brushing her hair.
The walls in the room were beadboard and the big bed she shared now with Aaron was made of massive posts and so long he could stretch out to his full length. She already loved sleeping in it, having all that room. She’d locked all the doors and Aaron had his own key to let himself in. But she wasn’t ready to go to bed. She wished she had some new magazines to read. She’d already read everything that was downstairs in the main sitting room where the pictures of Aaron and Cully stood on the mantle.
Aaron had a nice cabinet for his television in the room, up on a table so that they could watch it from the bed. A small VCR was hooked into it but she’d never seen him use it.
She propped some pillows up against the headboard and then thought of something and went downstairs and filled a glass with ice cubes, got a canned Coke, went back upstairs.
When she was nestled comfortably in the bed again she poured the drink over the ice cubes and waited for it to chill a bit and found the remote on the bedside table and turned it on. She wished there was a satellite system like the one Sam had at his house. Here there were only a few channels. Some old movie was playing and she watched it for a while but couldn’t get into it, she’d already missed so much of it. A baseball game was on another channel, but the picture was fuzzy.
She drank some of her Coke and flipped it around, but she couldn’t find anything she wanted to watch. She still wasn’t sleepy. All that coffee.
She rolled over and pulled open the drawer on the bedside table, thinking she might find something to read, but there was nothing in there except for an old High Times and some insurance papers and some pens and pennies and a few yellowed handkerchiefs in a cellophane pack that looked ancient. She shut it and got up. She didn’t want to just lie there. She thought if she could find something to read she could maybe just do that until she got sleepy. The phone book was downstairs and she guessed she could look up a doctor’s number, but she’d have plenty of time to do that tomorrow. She wandered around the room. She never really had taken a good look around in it.
There were curtains on the windows and she fingered the clean lace trim. It would be nice to know how to sew stuff, maybe make some clothes. In Amy’s magazines she’d seen where women did that.
She looked through a dresser’s drawers but they held only Aaron’s underwear and some T-shirts. Or she thought they did. One corner of something black and plastic caught her eye, almost buried beneath his white cotton briefs. Standing there knowing she shouldn’t do it she went ahead and did. It was a black plastic box like the ones movies came in. She’d seen plenty of them at Sam’s house. She’d even taken them out of the boxes and shoved them into the machine just before they sat down on the couch with some KFC or burgers from a fast food joint in Batesville or Oxford. Holding it in her hand and looking at it and wondering just what movie it held. A good love story? Or was it a tale of revenge? Something to watch anyway. He’d never told her not to go poking around. Wasn’t anybody’s business what she watched.
She took it out of the box and turned it over in her hand, studying it. It didn’t have any kind of label on it telling what it was so what was it? You had to just stick it in and play it to see. Amy’d had some of those blank ones stacked up in a cabinet. Amy said some of them were videos of them out fishing and messing around on the lake. One was of a highway patrol picnic down at Grenada Lake. She’d told Fay she could watch that one if she wanted to see a bunch of cops getting drunk. She knew this was nothing like that. This was forbidden somehow simply by the unknowing of what it was. This might be like peeking in on somebody while they were sleeping, moving into their bedroom on quiet feet to stand watching them unaware of you in their dark safe room.
A little voice spoke, said Don’t do it, even said It don’t belong to you, but she didn’t listen to that. She turned on the VCR and switched the channel on the TV around and put the tape into the machine and then pushed play. She went back to the bed and leaned up against the pillows again and reached for her drink. She took a big swallow and then turned back around to the television screen and then blew it out her nose, all over her nice new nightie.
THE CROWD SEEMED sullen and to Aaron it felt like one of those nights that came along for him once in a while, one of those times when he let himself get to thinking about things too much. That shit in Gulf Shores. He could have caught the pilot on the ground somewhere and let him off with nothing worse than a severe asswhipping. But it had been such an easy thing to do. And he’d wanted her to see it, had in fact said it: I wouldn’t want you to miss this.
He was sitting at the corner of the bar, sipping on a draft. Two empty shot glasses sat just past his elbow holding the squeezed pulps of limes. He wiped at his mouth with the edge of his thumbnail. Bobbi was on the stage and she turned her head and winked at him. He smiled a tiny smile. Some functioning drunks had some tables pulled together at the edge of the stage and he was keeping an eye on them while waiting to throw out the one nonfunctioning drunk who was sleeping with his head on a table in the corner, one arm hanging down. The music was throbbing through the smoky little dive, Clapton and friends working out on “Bell Bottom Blues.” He liked Clapton.
He was breaking in a new guy behind the bar and he turned to him now. Somebody put a light hand on his shoulder but he didn’t look yet to see who it was.
“Eddie. Two shots of Rumpleminz, bud.”
The bartender nodded and reached for a glass, then went to the old tin box that Aaron had salvaged from a shrimp man years ago. It was packed full of ground ice and they kept some of their liqueurs in there.
He looked over his shoulder then to see who was there and what she wanted, and Wanda was about to bust out the top of her waitress rig. He watched her eyes. They looked timid.
He felt her hand slide up his hip. He removed it.
“No touchy feely in the house,” he said. “It ain’t good for business. They get jealous.”
She pressed in tighter against him and set her drink on the bar beside his beer. She smelled real good.
“You want a quickie?” she said, like a married woman. “I think the back room’s empty.”
“Wanda Wanda,” he said, knowing people were watching. “Wanda Hot Mama.”
She’d put on fresh lipstick and for thirty-three in that place she was not bad. She still had her figure and she knew about men. Then you’d get to talking to her in bed after it was over and she’d soften and you’d find out that she’d been raised in Alaska and that like some of them she pined to be in the movies and they meant the legitimate kind and they didn’t understand that the world was full of beautiful girls, or that buying them to make them do whatever under the sun and in the world you wanted them to on film took no more than money or drugs or the right promises or even maybe just helping them out of a little spot of bad luck.
“Why ain’t you been to see me?” she said. Her eyes were bright and wet and blue and there were jerky movements about her fingers. She fiddled with her cigarette and almost continually rubbed the tip of it in the ashtray or tapped at it. Had to have something to do.
“Busy,” he said. Not an unlikely sto
ry. The bartender set the shots down in a single glass and Aaron drained his beer. With a nod of his chin he said, “’Nother one.”
“I know what it is,” she said, and to him she looked like she was getting ready to pitch one of her little fits.
“Oh yeah,” he said. “I’m sure you do.” He nodded toward the clock. “Don’t forget you got to start to work in thirty-five minutes. See the clock?”
She didn’t bother to look and that pissed him off. She was here to piss him off, he knew that. He picked up the glass that held the schnapps and sipped at it. Eddie finished refilling his beer and set it in front of him, then moved down the bar to wait on somebody.
“How come you don’t come see me no more?” she said. She was beginning to get trembly all over now, not just her hands. He’d held her when she was cold one time, and her spine had shivered under his hands.
“You all right?” he said.
“You’ve been fucking that girl you brought in here, that Fay. You don’t even care about me. Do you?”
He saw the reaction on her face when his eyes changed. He picked up his beer and took it and the schnapps as he moved toward the corner and spoke over his shoulder.
“Let’s go out back,” he said. “Go on and get this shit over with. We ain’t gonna do it in here.”
He saw her taking that in and he could tell she wasn’t ready for it.
“All right,” she said. “Can I get me another drink?”
On the bar her drink sat half full.
“Sure,” he said. “Get you another drink. Meet me out back behind the door.” He didn’t wait for her or even look at her again but went around the edge of the bar and put his shoulder hard to the swinging door that was held shut by only a screen-door spring. He looked back over the room one more time before he went through it. One of the fluorescent bulbs was burned out in the hall and that was something else he’d have to do. Or maybe he could tell the new guy to do it. Some people were funny. They thought that if you hired them to do something they were only supposed to do that one thing and nothing else.
Cully’s office door was closed and he stopped beside it and took a sip from the schnapps and set it on the floor. He rapped on the door with his knuckles and drank some of the beer. He licked foam off his lip.
From inside came a toneless “What.” Aaron opened the door. A big girl with blond hair and tight white stretch pants was fitting the cups of a dirty bra over the fat mounds of her surgically boosted tits and she looked appreciatively at Aaron and kept popping her gum. Cully had his feet propped on the desk, pale jaybird legs above his socks. The desk was cluttered worse than the room.
“You through?” Aaron said.
“Not yet. What’s up?”
“I just need to talk to you sometime.”
The blonde reached for her top and slipped her arms through the sleeve holes and turned to face Aaron.
“Who’s the Viking?” she said to Cully.
He smiled with his bad teeth and Aaron wondered again why he didn’t go to the dentist and get the goddamn things fixed. His breath was like a septic tank. God knew how any of these girls stood to kiss him.
“That’s my little brother,” Cully said.
“Little half brother. I’m Aaron.”
“Well my. You’re just a big old thing ain’t you?”
She was taking her time fastening the buttons on her blouse, but to Aaron she looked only fleshy and used and old. How many like her did he see in the space of a year?
“This is Kristy,” Cully said. “She may go to work for us, what you think?”
Aaron sipped at his beer and watched her smile at him even as her hand went to Cully’s ankle and touched it. He heard the door behind the bar swing shut.
“I don’t know, give her a tryout, I guess. I got to go have a little talk with Wanda. I’ll be back after I see what she says.”
He turned and reached for the doorknob as she started moving behind the desk. If he didn’t get out the door pretty quick he’d probably have to watch her suck him off and he damn sure didn’t want to see that shit.
He pulled it shut behind him. Wanda was pushing open the back door and she stood waiting for him, framed by the dark night behind her. The glare of the fluorescent bulb in the ceiling made harsh shadows under her eyes. He picked up the schnapps and she stood there until he came out. He kicked the brick over and she let the door to on it. Somebody had gotten one of the lawn chairs but there was a plastic milk crate ten feet away and he kicked it into position close to her and sat down on it.
“All right, Wanda. Sit down and let’s get it over with. What you got a bug up your ass about?”
She didn’t say. She wandered out from the building and looked toward the dark water and the wet sand that lay flat and slick out there. He took another sip of the schnapps and then nestled the glass carefully into the sand at his feet.
“If you ain’t gonna use this lawn chair I’m gonna sit in it.”
“Go ahead,” she said, still facing away from him. He didn’t like her turning her back on him like that. He didn’t get up. He rested the beer glass on his knee. Why did they always have to fall in fucking love? Why wasn’t just plain old fucking enough? Why did they have to get all these dreams going in their heads and mess everything up?
“I may just go somewhere else, Aaron.”
“Well,” he said, thinking it over. “Don’t let the door hit you in the ass.”
She whirled around.
“I never promised you a damn thing, Wanda.”
“What about that new one? You promise her anything?”
“That ain’t none of your business. So don’t go poking your nose into it.”
She took a few steps toward him. “What you gonna do? Beat the shit out of me like you used to do Reena?”
He made one hand into a fist and she ducked her head and spun around and when she turned back she’d changed her tune.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “Forget I said that.”
“You getting a big mouth, girl.”
“I didn’t mean it. Okay? I’m just upset. It’s just that I miss you. I thought … I guess I thought we had something.”
He watched a tear leak out of the corner of her eye. It was probably a fake. People in movies learned how to do it so that meant other people could learn how to do it. It was always some shit like this. He knew he could take her back there right now and fuck her and she’d be happy but only for a while and it was only the short-term answer. Tomorrow or next week she’d be singing the same old tired shit again.
The silence gathered around them. The wind blew at his face while she sipped at her drink, her good brown legs muscled in the half dark. That had rocked him and held him tight. Sometimes the silence worked for him. Sometimes with a woman it was best to just be quiet.
He drank some more of the beer and lifted the glass of schnapps and drank from it again and finished it. He leaned over and set it against the foundation of the building, concrete blocks chipped and worn of their black paint. Trash and cigarette butts lay there alongside ripped foil packets that had held condoms. She sounded like she was talking to herself. In quiet. In wonder.
“I know a lot of shit on you. Child neglect. Selling dope. I let you talk me into making that tape. I even did that for you. And I don’t know why. Cause you ain’t nothing but a fucking loser.”
He set the beer glass down, got up with a sigh, and when she tried to run he caught her with no more trouble than a cat with a mouse in a closet. He was mindful that she had to work tonight.
His big hand cradled her jaw and throat and she dropped her drink. He looked into her eyes and gave her punches that went solidly into her ribs, high, middle, low. He hugged her to him and chopped her hard in a kidney, once.
“You fuck with me you’ll do worse than piss blood,” he said. He had her up against the building by now, his hand over her mouth, her pretty blue eyes wide with disbelief at the pain he was bringing her like a present or a place to live
in. He shoved her face away and turned her loose and she stumbled along the wall and there by the light of a hotel up the beach and beyond the dark walkers and sitters on the beach she fell to her knees and then over onto her hands and propped herself there breathing deeply. Strands of her hair stood outlined in the backing light. He went over to his milk crate and picked up his beer and didn’t watch her. She lowered herself into the sand and drew her legs up with her face turned away and stayed that way for a while. Serving drinks later she’d find grains still in her clothes, her hair.
After a while he finished the beer and he got up and went back inside to get another and find his stash and his pipe. He left the brick in the door so that she could get back inside, clean herself up, get ready to start waiting on the drunks.
THAT WANDA WAS on the tape, with two men at the same time. It looked like they were in a hotel room. It was a strange thing to her to watch. She could stop it and rewind it and watch them do everything again, over and over, endlessly. Breathlessly.
After a while she got hot and bothered and the more it went on the worse it got. She stopped it one time and went to the window and looked out but there were only the dark forms of the boats across the road. No lights from Aaron coming in. And maybe he’d be late. But she hoped not. Not now.
DAVID HALL CAME to see him that afternoon. He was out on the deck drinking another beer and he wasn’t careful where he was thumping his ashes. Or dropping his butts. There were eight or ten flat ones between his feet. But when he heard the car coming down the drive he got up and walked to the corner of the house and looked out there to see the shiny gold sedan pulling up behind his cruiser. He could see David behind the wheel. He set his beer down and went through the living room and opened the front door just as David was coming up to the steps. He stood there waiting for whatever else was going to visit him. He wondered if it might be possible to disappear into someplace like Nebraska.
