Country Hardball

by Steve Weddle

  The old man twisted around, trying to pop his neck. He gave up. Took another drink. “You know who Myrna Loy is?”

  “From The Thin Man movies?”

  “Yeah, sure. That’s what everyone remembers her for. The Thin Man.” He smacked his lips together for a bit. “Ever see Across the Pacific? The Desert Song?”

  Roy said he hadn’t.

  “Jesus God.” The old man shook his head. “What a woman.”

  Roy waited, then, “Not sure what this has to do with Bonnie and Clyde.”

  “You were asking if it was worth it. I went to Hollywood back in the ’60s, looking for Myrna Loy. She was a little older than I was. She was probably, hell, fifty or sixty then. Saw a show on the TV the other day about that. Older women and younger men. They’ve got a name for that now. Can’t remember what it is. But we didn’t have shows like that back then. We had Mike Douglas and Andy Griffith. You probably don’t remember them either, but they were something special. They don’t make them like that anymore.”

  “Okay.”

  “So I go there looking for Miss Loy. You know she had four husbands? Divorced all four of them. What I’m going the long way around the barn to tell you is you go searching for something and you don’t know what you’re going to find. I go searching for Miss Loy and meet my Abigail Landry and we have two great boys and a great life. Luckiest man alive.” He leaned his head back on the recliner, looked off at something. “You go out looking for something, maybe there’s something looking for you. Maybe you need to let it find you.”

  “Somebody goes looking for the Bonnie and Clyde money, maybe they find it, maybe they find a lot of dirt.”

  “I don’t know what I’m talking about, Roy. Just looking at all these old pictures. You get old enough, you’re looking back at whoever you were and wondering how much of that person is left.”

  “You ever find Myrna Loy?”

  “I oughta tell you I met her and she was fat and ugly. Keep you from chasing after nonsense.”

  “You never saw her?”

  “No, just in the movies.” The old man found the remote on the side table, turned on some baseball highlights, then muted the TV. “Roy, you remember what I told you the first day I saw you? After you moved in with your grandma?”

  “You said if I leave grass clippings on your carport you’ll skin me alive.”

  The old man laughed. “I said you look like your grandpa.”

  “Yeah, well. I guess I ought to.”

  “Not that much. You know, you get pieces from everybody. But you got most of your pieces from him. He was a good man, your grandpa.”

  “So I’m told.”

  “And I’m guessing you were told your grandpa went looking for that money, too.”

  Roy looked away.

  “Your grandma tell you that? That where you got do our part.”

  “Just going through some old boxes of stuff at her house is all. Got me thinking.”

  “Got him thinking, too. Fool’s gold, Roy. Myrna Loy. Bonnie and Clyde treasure. Being a hero for your country. Damn it, you’d best just cut your grass and keep your head down, son. Stop hoping after something that ain’t there.”

  “Worked out for you, though.”

  The old man nodded. “Ask your grandpa how it worked out for him.”

  The old man turned the game back on, poured himself another drink, then fell asleep before the ice had melted.

  Roy stood at the wall, looking at the photographs. Cop shows from the ’60s and ’70s. Autographs from cast members. Notes they wrote the old man and his pants

  ON ACCOUNT

  Hurley’s truck wasn’t there when I pulled up, so I went around back of the place to look at the boat.

  I had a good enough setup to just tow the fucker right off if I wanted to, but that ain’t what I was set for. I went and knocked on the screen door in back. Shaky cinderblock steps next to a half-finished deck. Budweiser cans, stomped and squashed, spread around the yard like some drunk midgets had been playing a hopscotch game last night before the storm.

  Hurley’s girlfriend answered. Agreeable gal. V-neck T-shirt. Can of Bud. Nice, smooth tan. Not much else. She made a point of showing me she was cold. Couple points, I figure.

  “You Cleovis? You here for the boat?”

  I explained as how I was.

  She wanted me to come in and she’d get the keys to the trailer lock. No sense making a big mess of shit, she said.

  I came in and sat down at their kitchen table. A card table. Duct tape not quite covering up a cut at the edge. Three chairs. Unmatched.

  She hollered from across the hall. “Can I talk you out of taking the boat just yet?”

  I said Bill had been pretty clear about how I was supposed to conduct things with her no-account boyfriend. hat supposed to mean?”

  “mavHe’d suggested that I bring back the fucking boat and stop fucking around or he’d fucking shove a fucking ramrod up my fucking ass. I kinda gave her the short version.

  She came out into the kitchen. She’d taken off the T-shirt. I couldn’t see any tan lines from where I was, so I took a closer look.

  • • •

  After we finished, she brought me a can of beer and lay back down on the bed, resting on her elbows.

  “So maybe you come back for the boat next week?”

  I said I wasn’t so sure about that.

  She rolled over on her back and looked up at me. “See, Hurley’s got this job and he’s good for it. I mean, I’m kinda looking out for him, you know? Making sure shit gets took care of. That’s how come I’m offering this little payment to you, you know. Kinda on account.”

  I didn’t say anything. I thought about her asshole boyfriend. His worthless self.

  RECEPTION

  My Aunt Velma wiped the Red Man juice from her chin, put the coffee can back on the TV tray. “Doyle, you just need to get yourself down there and fix her antenna is what you need to do.”

  “I will, Aunt Vee, I will. Just gotta finish this up first,” I said. I pulled my cap up, sleeved off the sweat from my head.

  I’d been staying with my aunt off and on for the past year, ever since I’d gotten laid off from the flooring place outside Magnolia. Price of gas these days, wasn’t worth it anyway. I’d finished a line of caulking on the inside of the leaky window and was cleaning it up with the edge of one of those credit cards they send you in the mail. Sign up and spend $5,000 and I’d get 5,000 points to take the family to Disney World. I don’t have a family.

  So I dragged the edge of the card along the window frame, worked the caulking into the corners as best I could, then used a rag to wipe off all the excess. I wiped the card off on the same rag, then slid the card into my pocket where I used to keep a wallet. “She say what was wrong with it?”

  “Said it was broke. I don’t need her and her niece coming up here every damned day to watch my stories with me and eat up all my goddamned food. I swear I’ve never seen a girl put away so many gizzards in one sitting.”

  Her stories. As the World Turns. Guiding Light. Her stories. Her world. When I started staying here, she’d send me out on errands in the early afternoon so I wouldn’t get in her way. Most days I didn}, should have been’t have anywhere else to go, so I’d just walk up and down the road picking up cans out of the ditches. Down to Mr. Tatum’s place and then back again was pretty close to long enough for me to stay away. Usually managed enough cans to make it worthwhile, too. After a while I’d stay and keep my mouth shut. Little while after that, I’d say something about one of the characters. One day I said Blake Thorpe looks like Miss Angela down at the Texaco. Turns out my aunt doesn’t much care for Miss Angela. I didn’t say too much after that.

  “I’ll see what I can do,” I said, using a loose nail from the windowsill to clean some of the caulk from under my thumbnail, “but I’m not much of an electrician.”

  “Weren’t much of a plank layer before that, were you?”

  “They cut me back. Wasn�
�t my fault the housing market went to hell.”

  She wiped a little more Red Man from her chin. “You watch your mouth, young man.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Guess it wasn’t your fault Ellie walked out on you, was it?”

  I sent the tip of the nail into my thumb, coughed. “No, ma’am.”

  “Right. Right. What’s she doing now? Who’s she staying with?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I heard somebody down at the beauty shop say they saw her with that Dwayne boy used to go around with MeChell from the insurance place. Robert’s youngest.”

  “I wouldn’t know. I don’t see her that much.”

  “Yeah, well, whose fault is that?”

  I don’t know how it went so wrong with Ellie. I should have done things differently, I guess. I just never knew which things. I walked to the back of the house to the couch where my pillow and radio were and scanned for any afternoon baseball games. On a good day, sometimes I could get a Texas Rangers game. I didn’t much care for any of them, but if they were playing the New York Yankees, at least I’d have someone to root against. Sometimes it just works out better to root against something.

  The weather was pretty clear, which isn’t always the best for picking up games on the radio. But after the weather we’d had, I’d take clear and quiet. Last week we had some awful storms come through. Took out a church up near Emerson and a couple of old farmhouses. Flooded most of the back roads around here. And other smaller problems. Like the antenna on Miss Imogene Crawford’s place.

  Aunt Vee screamed from the front of the house. I could picture her leaning up on the arms of the chair, taking a deep breath. “How’s about you fix that woman’s antenna right and that’ll be your rent check for the month? Think you can manage that?”

  So I took a couple of screwdrivers, a pair of pliers, a ball-peen hammer, and half a roll of duct tape, dropped them in a green pillowcase, and headed down to Miss Imogene’s house.

  By the time I got down to her place, I had sweat and grit on the back of my neck. I knocked at her door, and she let me in. She offered me a glass of water, and I sat down in the living room. Thick red and brown shag carpeting matched most of the furniture and made the couch look like a little hill in the floor. I sat down and she brought me a glass of warm tap water and I downed it in a couple of swallows.)s that.

  I started to tell her why I was there when she walked over to the television set and turned it off. I hadn’t even noticed the thing had been on. You get that way sometimes. You get something in your head that you have to do and you get focused on it so strong that you forget what you set out to do. You can get that way laying floors. You get so caught up in going one direction, then you look up and you’re caught in a corner and everything’s gone off kilter by a quarter inch.

  “Doyle, you know you don’t need an excuse to stop by, but I see you got a pillowcase full of something there.”

  I looked down at the tools and felt like I’d just dragged a mess of wet squirrels into her house. “Aunt Vee said maybe you could use some help down here on your antenna,” I said because those were the words I’d practiced on the way down and I hadn’t had time to think of anything else.

  She looked puzzled, turned her head like my Aunt Vee did whenever something really weird would happen. Like if someone would say, “Today, the part of Alan-Michael Spaulding will be played by seventeen flaming armadillos.”

  But then her niece started hollering from the back of the house somewhere. “I’m still hungry. I’m still hungry. I’m still hungry.” A chant almost, and she took that last “hungry” and let it linger out there like “hoooongreee” in some weird monster kind of rumbling. Then she was asking why can’t they ever have anything to eat and she knows it costs money and why can’t they ever get any money. She was walking and talking and by then she’d come to the end of the hall and could see that I was sitting there with a pillowcase between my feet.

  I started looking anywhere else. Over to the photographs on the fireplace mantle. Over to the shelves where Miss Imogene had all her collectible dolls. Shelves that were empty now except for the doll stands and the ghosting dust around the edges.

  So Miss Imogene sat there for a second until I thought of something to say. “She said your TV was acting up. Maybe you weren’t getting all the channels and could I help, she said.”

  Her niece’s name was Constance, but she went by Connie. And Connie said how much she liked my aunt’s cooking and how sweet she was to have them both over.

  I asked if they were having electrical problems after the storm.

  Miss Imogene raised an eyebrow. “Why would you ask that?”

  “Just noticed all the lights are off in the back is all,” I said.

  “Oh,” she said.

  “That’s environmental,” Connie said. “On account of the environment. We all have to pitch in and do our part.”

  I nodded. “Yeah. We all have to do our part.”

  We talked for a while longer about the weather. How hot it was going to get and how the weatherman said another big storm was coming that weekend.

  “How’s your aunt doing?” Miss Imogene asked.

  “Fine, I guess. What do you mean?”

  “I just mean, you know, what with your uncle’s passing on like that.”

  “Oh. Yeah. Fine, I guess. I don’t know. I mean, it’s been a couple of years, you know?”

  “I know,” she said. ; font-family: “Helvetica Neue”, Verdana, Geneva, sans-serif; } an H“But that don’t always matter, now does it?”

  “No, ma’am. Guess it doesn’t.”

  “Well, she’d best stay safe. Got a feeling in my bones all heck is about to break loose.”

  “Sure that ain’t just rain coming?” I asked.

  “You joke all you want, but you heard what happened up there on the hill. Those Sawyers and Pribbles cooking up all those drugs until the whole house exploded.”

  &#r a child fill

  HOW MANY HOLES

  The light was fading away as they pulled into town for gas. “Need anything?” he asked Loriella, climbing out of the truck.

  She shook her head.

  Randy Pribble reached into his pocket, counted out some singles. A Camaro squealed in on the other side of the pumps, engine rattling.

  He put eleven dollars in the tank, walked in to pay. Saw a newspaper on the rack by the beef jerky. Picture of cops standing around a car, looking in the windows, red splatters from the inside. The story said the man had been laid off from some factory that morning. Father of three young boys. He drove around all day instead of going home. When five o’clock came, he pulled a pistol from the glove box, put a hole through his head. Above the car, the light had changed to green.

  When Randy got back, the guy from the Camaro was leaning against a post, trying to talk to Loriella through the truck window. He was a big guy, skin tight like a child’s balloon twisted into the shape of a man.

  Randy coughed, walked up behind him. “You got a problem?”

  The guy’s shoulders jumped, and he took a step back. “No. No. Just … ” he said, looking around the parking lot, “just saying ‘hi.’”

  “Well, maybe you oughta just shut your mouth, fatas” McWilliams said like set the s.”

  “Yeah. Sure. No worries.”

  Behind Randy, a minivan had pulled up, slowed, rattled around a pothole, kept going. He watched the fat man walk into the store; then he took a breath, counted the potholes in the parking lot. One at the van. Thought about what Loriella was going through. That part of life where the pastor takes you by the shoulders and talks about how God never gives you more than you can handle. Two more potholes near the road. Same as we all go through. A couple along the back. And all you get are the little things to keep you going. A lottery ticket. A good dinner. And Randy with barely enough cash for dessert. Forget about dinner.

  He saw the fat guy walking out of the store holding a piece of wood with the bathr
oom key. Thought about his car. That gold necklace with the cross. He watched the man turn the corner at the building, step out of the streetlight. Thought about the guy driving his Camaro through town, able to stop anywhere he wants to buy something. The sort of asshole who never checks his pockets before getting to the counter, never counts his change, never checks the soda machine for a loose quarter. The sort of asshole who goes to work on a Friday and puts twenty on the Cowboys because he thinks it’s fun to gamble. The sort of asshole who gets into his Camaro after work and stops for dinner and those drinks they make with four or five ingredients.

  Randy followed the man into the darkness.

  • • •

  Loriella was fingering the graduation cap tassel hanging from the rearview mirror when he got back into the truck.

  He asked her was she all right.

  “Not the same, is it? If I get my GED instead of walking.”

  “Diploma? You mean maybe you want to finish?”

  “I don’t know.” She pushed the tassel away, rested her chin on her hand. “I just don’t want to go back there, you know.”

  “Yeah. Nobody blames you.”

  “Blames me?” She turned to Randy as he pulled onto the highway. “Blame me for what?”

  “For quitting,” he said, checking traffic. “I mean for not going back. Hell, Keith ain’t going back, neither.”

  “Yeah, I heard that. What about his scholarship? Wasn’t he going to SAU?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t think he’s worried about that. He’s still kinda messed up and shit.”

  “Yeah. A lot of us are.”

  “He was with her. You know, when all of y’all left the party. They were gonna, you know. Right? You know what I’m saying?”

  “Of course I know.” Loriella wiped her nose. “Staci was one of my best friends.”

  “Yeah.”

  “She was gonna be a phlebotomist, you know?”

  “What’s that?”

  “Nurse who takes your blood.”

  “That right?” He nodded. “Like a vampire?”