Jasper bites back the words he wants to say. He can feel them boil up inside him. He swallows his anger. Says instead, ‘I never done dishonest work.’
Yancey snorts but does not answer him. He’s ticking boxes on some form Jasper cannot read.
Jasper clears his throat. ‘What will I be doing there?’
‘Does it matter?’
He hesitates. ‘Yes.’
A smile plays on Yancey’s lips. ‘Why? What does it matter what scum like you do?’
Jasper looks to the tiny window that teases him with light. It’s hard to breathe in the room it’s so stuffy. So hot. ‘It’s my life,’ he says, his words hanging vulnerably between them. He waits for an answer that never comes, then asks, ‘Ain’t there any other jobs goin’ I might be better suited for?’
Yancey doesn’t even bother looking back to the list he had previously referred to. ‘See, that’s the problem, son,’ he says. ‘You ain’t suited for a good life.’
Jasper can’t bite his lip any more. The rage inside him boils up and spills out. ‘You must not get any action,’ he snarls, ‘when you’re not fuckin’ people over.’
Yancey smiles. A look on his face as if he’s enjoying this. ‘I sure as hell get a whole lot more than you do, son,’ he says, and chuckles lightly.
Jasper’s fingers dig into the armrests of his chair. He can feel his nails cut into the cracked dry leather. It’s like he’s in prison all over again, no air, no room to breathe, some guard up in his face telling him he’s unworthy to live. And maybe I am, Jasper thinks, maybe that’s why death has always come more easily.
Yancey Sutton tears off a corner of the piece of paper he’d been writing on. His eyes mock Jasper, and Jasper wishes this were prison after all and not the office he sits in now. In prison there were ways to deal with enemies, even if they were guards. Outside, it seems to Jasper, it’s too hard to tell just who’s right and wrong. Seems the whole world, these days, is made up out of enemies. Of wrongs he’s done he’ll never be able to put right. He takes the paper the other man’s handed him. A phone number and an address are scribbled there.
‘You call that number ’n’ they’ll give you your work details. Pay ain’t great, but you weren’t an easy sell.’ Yancey chuckles. ‘Now get on outta here.’
Jasper rises slowly, paper still clutched in his hands, eyes still lowered to it. He is in the doorway already before he stops. ‘I ain’t gonna be one of the ones like you mentioned earlier,’ he says. ‘One of them ones that goes on back. I’m done with trouble. I just thought I’d tell you that.’
Yancey shakes his head. ‘Boy,’ he says, ‘you got trouble stamped all over you,’ and returns to the papers on his desk.
The sun bakes the concrete, reflecting, blinding, off everything it touches. Uneasiness has crept over Lizzie, and she cannot quite place what’s newly unsettled her. Watching Jasper walk into the parole office for a moment had felt like he was gone again. And there’d been a part of her that breathed easy when she saw him walk away. There was another part of her afraid to let him go. Afraid he might not come back. She sits out in the parking lot waiting for Jasper to return from his parole meeting, parked in the shade cast by the buildings. Sunlight reflects off car doors and mirrors. She’s got the window rolled down; her elbow rests in its open frame. The engine and the radio are both off. A small part of her thought of just driving away. Of leaving him there. But where would he go? The townsfolk had certainly made Jasper’s unwelcome clear in church the day before, scorn etched deep on every face. What would she tell her girls if she came on home alone? The question she does not ask herself, is ‘Would you miss him?’ She’s not sure she has an answer to that. She’s not sure she’s ready to know it. Joanne would miss him. She had never thought her daughter would grow so fond of him. What was I thinking letting a man like that get so near her? And yet Lizzie feels it’s OK somehow. She trusts her brother not to hurt her child. Or so she tells herself again and again. It’s good for Joanne to have a man to look up to; Lizzie simply can’t help but shudder at the choice of man. And yet, she thinks, whose fault is it but mine?
She’s still thinking about her daughters when the door to the parole office finally swings open, and Jasper steps blinking from the dark shadows of its doorway. He shields the sun from his eyes, though he still stands in the building’s shade. Like some pale creature out of a dream, newly released from some long-forgotten nightmare. She does not honk her horn. He knows where she is parked.
He stands there, letting his eyes adjust to the brightness of the day. What little rain fell the night before has long since dried up, the whole world around them still parched and cracked and dry. We need a proper rainstorm, she thinks, and wishes for a breeze to cool, but when the wind finally does gust, the air still feels hot, and there’s dust that blows along with it, sticking to her sweaty arms and neck as grime. He starts to cross the parking lot to her. His hands deep down in his pockets, shoulders hunched. Had she just seen him now for the first time in all those years, would she have known him as her brother? A part of her thinks not.
Then her heart locks and she wants to scream. She can see what is about to happen before it does. Her mouth opens, but there is no sound, and she is not certain what she meant to scream. A warning? But, no, there are no words for this, and her mouth falls closed again, silent.
Lizzie watches recognition dawn on Jasper’s face. The woman stops short, maybe twenty feet from him. She’s wearing a green dress with a floral pattern that reaches down just below her knees. White sandals. Her dark hair is long and loose and blows behind her. Oh, God, no, thinks Lizzie, please, God, no.
Jasper opens his mouth to speak. He says something Lizzie cannot hear; nor can she read his lips. He stands motionless. His arms rise slowly, outstretched, palms open as though pleading. The woman spooks like a rabbit. Zero to full speed in a blink. Runs inside the nail salon, door swinging after her. Jasper stares after her, but does not follow. He stands a moment and runs his hand through his sweat-soaked hair. Then he turns back towards Lizzie, and slowly starts walking to her.
He opens the door and slides onto the seat and closes the door after himself. Hard enough that it shuts tight. Just short of a slam. Lizzie can’t control her breathing. Her mouth’s gone all dry. He does not look at her. Says, ‘I hadn’t counted on that.’
Both hands on the steering-wheel, but the engine still off, Lizzie stares straight ahead, afraid to turn to her brother, afraid of what she might see etched in his face beside her. ‘What’d you say to her?’ Lizzie’s voice scarcely a whisper it’s so soft.
For a moment she is not sure he plans to answer her. ‘I told her she looked beautiful.’ He turns to her, his eyes unfocused as though seeing another face than hers.
A trucker from Illinois spilled his coffee on her near the start of her shift, and now, as she sweats, Katie can smell the overwhelming richness of the brew as its odour clings to her. It smells to her like she’s sweating coffee, and that, mixed with the deep-fried scent that always clings to her after even the slightest moment in the kitchen, is enough to make her stomach turn. She wonders sometimes just how Tom does it, stuck in that sweltering kitchen all the time, bent over the cooker and hot tubs of grease, deep frying. But then again, she thinks, Tom doesn’t also have the coffee smell to deal with.
She’s nearly certain that trucker spilled the coffee on her on purpose, too. Right across her breasts when she’d leaned over to take his plate away. The coffee hadn’t been hot, he’d been there nursing it for the last couple hours, but the shock of the liquid against her flesh had still made her cry out. She hadn’t liked the gleam in his eyes as he apologized either, his eyes glued to the stain as it spread across her chest. It’s dried now, the stain that is, but the dark colour of it against her white blouse still draws unwanted attention to her cleavage, and Katie feels self-conscious with every customer she serves.
The dinner rush, if you could call it that, is long over now, the diner mostly empty.
Tom’s sitting on his stool in the kitchen, smoking a cigarette and flicking through yesterday’s paper, the usual sizzle of the kitchen quiet all around him. A trucker sits at the counter finishing off his chicken fried steak, his jeans low on his hips so that his crack hangs out as he leans forward, his pants too tight to accommodate the large expanse of his gut. A family sits in a booth by the window, a mom and dad and their little tot, up now long past her bedtime. She’s a cute kid, and Katie’s enjoyed watching her while she worked. Katie brought the tot crayons earlier while her parents were waiting on their food, and the little girl drew stick figures and a house. The parents had chatted to Katie for a while, and they had seemed real nice. They were from Dallas on their way down to South Padre Island. When Katie said she’d never been to Dallas, they had laughed and said they didn’t believe her. After that, she didn’t have the heart to tell them she’d never seen the ocean. ‘That’s why we’re taking Molly,’ the woman had told her, smiling. ‘This’ll be her first time to the beach.’ They seem to Katie a happy family. The kind of family she hopes herself to have one day. The kind that eats together and takes vacations. And laughs at the nonsense their little girl coos. The kind she would have liked to grow up in. She wonders if maybe, one day, she and Josh will have that together. A family like that. She wonders if he’ll send for her next year when he’s off at college. If he’ll remember to drive back home to see her. It seems to her that maybe, if he could just take her with him, she could truly leave all this behind. They could start their own family and find some new place to call home. They could just pass through towns like this.
Katie wipes sweat from her forehead with the back of her hand. Above her, the ceiling fan struggles to move the stagnant air, shaking as it rotates. She’s topping up the Heinz bottles with extra ketchup. Not Heinz, but Penny reckons no one will taste the difference, and so far she’s been right. ‘Penny sure does know how to save those dimes!’ Tom had said to Katie one evening, when they were closing up, and Katie had laughed real hard when he’d said that to her. Tom had chuckled, too, though Katie’s fairly certain Penny would not have found it as amusing, her staff laughing at her expense like that.
A bell chimes as the diner door swings open. Katie turns. ‘Josh!’
He grins. ‘Hey, baby.’ But there’s something off in his smile, in the way he says his name for her. He crosses the room to the counter in front of where Katie’s filling up the ketchup bottles. The trucker, three stools down from him, glances up as Josh sits down, but when he sees Katie lean across the counter to peck Josh a quick hello, he mumbles something under his breath, and turns back to his food.
There’s something off in Josh’s kiss, too, but still Katie forces a smile. Maybe I’m imagining things. Out loud, she says, ‘I didn’ know you were comin’ in to see me tonight.’ She smiles her cutest smile. The one she knows he likes.
‘I hadn’t planned on it, baby. Something’s …’ he hesitates ‘… come up.’
She feels the smile fall from her face. ‘What is it?’
His eyes drop to the stain on her top. A smile briefly plays at the corners of his mouth as he nods towards it. ‘That’s a new look.’
‘Oh, shut it.’ She crumples up and throws a paper napkin at him. It bounces off his shoulder onto the counter before them.
He smiles at her, and for a split second it seems everything’s going to be OK. Then his smile falters and he leans forward across the counter. ‘We’re fixin’ to ride on up to your house,’ he whispers. ‘I wanted to swing by here first, see that you was here.’
Her throat goes dry. Her chest feels cold. ‘Why?’ she whispers. Her eyes search his.
He takes her hand and holds it on the counter before them. ‘I wanted to make sure you were safe.’
She feels her hand go clammy in his. ‘Why wouldn’t I be safe, Josh? Why are you going to my house?’ Confusion wrinkles her brow.
‘We have to do something, Katie.’ His voice is hushed but urgent. ‘We can’t just let him go round scaring folks.’
She pulls her hand from his and straightens. ‘No, Josh.’ Her words pierce the stuffy room, too loud against the muted backdrop of the radio. The trucker looks over, then grunts and turns his attention back to his dinner. In the booth by the window, the father is still drinking his coffee while the mother holds the tot and rocks her gently back and forth. Behind Josh, parked out front, is his pickup, another older model of truck parked up beside it. Katie can see shadowy silhouettes moving in both vehicles. ‘Just how many of y’all,’ she whispers hoarsely, ‘are fixin’ on goin’ on up to mine?’
He follows her gaze out of the window. ‘There’s a good few.’
She can barely speak, her throat’s so tight. ‘What are ya’ll fixin’ on doin’?’
He reaches out and runs the back of his fingers down the side of her cheek. ‘We have to put the fear in him is all, baby,’ he coos. ‘We can’t have him going round the way he is.’
‘Did something happen?’
He hesitates.
‘Please,’ she whispers, ‘what happened?’
‘He saw Rose,’ Josh says quietly, ‘and Eddie ain’t havin’ that.’
The Elvis clock on the back wall chimes the hour, and Elvis’s hips swivel and jiggle the time. Katie’s whole body goes cold. Like all the sweat on her brow has seeped back into her head. ‘What about Mom? And Joanne?’ Her heartbeat quickens to panic.
‘Don’t worry ’bout them none, baby,’ he murmurs. ‘Nobody got beef with them.’
‘Then why were you checkin’ if I was here, if it’s gonna be so safe?’
He hesitates. ‘Just in case,’ he says eventually. ‘You know I don’t like you near him.’
Her turn to pause. ‘Be careful.’
Outside, one of the pickups honks its horn, calling him. He grins. ‘I’m always careful, baby.’ And he turns to go. He’s halfway out of the door before she stops him.
‘Josh?’
He turns.
‘Don’t hurt him, OK?’
The trucker looks up from his meal again. The father up from his coffee. The mother looks to the father, and the tot, oblivious, sticks a crayon in her mouth and gurgles rather loudly. Josh nods to Katie and shuts the door behind him. The headlights on both pickups switch on, momentarily flooding the diner with light. She watches as Josh climbs into his and as both trucks pull out. Her hands are shaking when she picks up the Heinz and she has to set the bottle down so she doesn’t spill its refill. A small bit of tomato ketchup slips down her fingers to the outside of her right hand just under her pinkie. She stares at the drop of ketchup transfixed, her mind miles up the road, back home already. The colour of fresh blood.
There is no moon, but the sky still glows blue-black, alit with stars. Jasper lies in his boyhood room, his feet hanging off the end of his bed. His hands are behind his head, and he gazes up at the white of the ceiling sky above him. Carefully, one by one, he relocks the doors inside his mind that hold back his memories. There are places he does not let his mind wander. Things better forgotten. There are parts of him so filled with hate, so coloured by hatred, that he has grown to loathe them. To loathe what lies inside himself.
He hadn’t thought he’d see her. Not like that. Not so soon. He doesn’t want to think about her. The way she was. Before. Or the way she looked today, her face newly flushed with surprise. And fear, he reckons, yes, that was fear in her eyes. He doesn’t want to think about how that might make him feel.
They didn’t speak the whole drive home and dinner had been no different, Joanne pestering them with questions that fell on deaf ears till eventually even she’d fallen silent, moving the peas around her plate, piling them in tiny stacks held together with mashed potato. He had been glad when his own plate was clean. Was glad that Katie was at the diner and her judgemental eyes were off him. He did not go out on the front porch with Lizzie after dinner. Did not watch the sunset. Went straight up to bed instead. The girls’ bedroom door had clicked shut long ago, and
Lizzie’s footsteps followed down the hall shortly after. The house is silent.
It takes him a moment to notice the headlights that reflect off the road to dance across his white, starless ceiling sky. Circling like searchlights. Odd, he thinks, cars drivin’ out this way at this late hour. Then he hears the engines purr and spit and rev. Horns honk and tyres squeak. Engines are fed more juice and revved more loudly. He hears the shouts of men; the crickets go all quiet. Though the room is warm, Jasper feels a chill pass over him, and the tiny hairs at the back of his neck stand on end with warning.
He sits up slowly, swinging his feet to one side, placing them lightly on the floor. The wooden boards feel smooth and cool beneath his bare feet. He sits, body tensed, ears straining. He does not go to the window to look out. He can guess what lies below. Since church, a part of him has known this must be coming. A part of him has been waiting. Slowly he rises from the bed and pulls on his jeans and the old Coca-Cola T-shirt he wore straight out of prison. He does not look in the mirror. Does not pause to put shoes on. He opens the door slowly so it won’t squeak, though why he’s being so quiet he cannot say – the racket outside is more than enough to wake the whole house.
He steps out into the hall, the floorboards creaking under his weight. The voices outside call louder now, jeering, taunting. He can almost make out their words, but cannot recognize the tones or tell how many men are out there. A click behind him makes him turn sharply. Joanne peeks from her bedroom door, dirty blonde hair tangled around her, shorts and top barely covering the woman she’s becoming. Don’t ever change, he thinks. Don’t ever age.
She rubs the sleep from her eyes. ‘What’s going on?’ She yawns, too tired still to know that she should be afraid.
‘Get back in your room,’ he growls.
Her big eyes widen and blink. Awake. She steps back inside the darkness of her room, closing the door. He waits to hear the latch click shut, then turns and goes downstairs.
He can hear the voices now, louder, growing in confidence.
The Last Days of Summer Page 22
