by Larry Brown
By the time I started drinking my third beer I had thought a lot about Mildred’s womb and had begun to wonder if by some lucky chance she ever got pregnant would the baby fall out prematurely. I wondered if any of the other men in that bar were facing that particular problem and didn’t figure they were. What I figured was it was a unique problem but not quite out of line with the rest of my life. It seemed for some reason or another I had always been given the short end of the stick. I knew that it had nothing to do with my nature or character and was just an unlucky streak of fate, just like when I had fallen off the persimmon tree limb four feet off the ground at my grandmother’s house and broken my arm and missed my own birthday party, then got back later with the cast on and there were only crumbs of cake in puddles of ice cream that flies were walking over on the picnic table, with all my little friends gone and all the toys and presents unwrapped and already played with.
By the time I started drinking my fourth beer I did not give much of a damn whether I ever got any more of Mildred’s puss or not. I knew that she had been home for quite a good while by then and was probably wondering where I was. I knew that she had probably already fixed supper and had noted my dead dog in the yard and was probably sitting out on the front porch looking for me to come in. I began talking to some young women shooting pool and took up a stick myself and shot about three racks of eight ball with them, losing all three for a dollar. I was merely hustling these young ladies and trying to get a line of trash going. I thought I could lure some of them off with the promise of a cold sixer in my truck later.
By the time I started drinking my fifth beer there were several long-haired tattooed muscled young men who had come into the place and they had scabs on their arms and boots and overalls on. They didn’t appear jocular and they looked like they had been out in the sun all day, working very hard. My skin was milk white and I had seven dollars left in my pocket. I knew it was about time for me to get in the road.
I went outside and got in my truck and got out of town quickly. I hated to think about my old dog lying there in the yard, unburied. I thought I might ride around for a while and think about him, and Mildred, but I didn’t know what good it would do. I had considered sending off for one of these pump-up penis deals but I thought they might be dangerous or at the least would not work.
Within ten minutes I was away from town and out on a back road that didn’t have lawmen patrolling it and I felt free there to open another suds I had iced down earlier. I knew that Mildred would want me in the bed beside her as soon as I got home, and I wasn’t looking forward eagerly to that. I felt like all our ministrations to each other were headed to a dead end and that nobody would care fifty years in the future what we had gone through. It left me feeling a little bit depressed and fearful, and I kept drinking, faster.
I rode for quite a while. I saw some cows loose from a pasture and weaved in among them. The locusts had crawled out of the ground after thirteen long years and when I stopped to pee on a bridge I thought my truck was still running because of them. They were beyond any loudness of bugs I had ever heard.
I had put away about eight beers by that time. My blood alcohol content was probably in the .10 range or maybe a little lower or higher. It didn’t actually matter. Squeezing her legs together didn’t help matters any at all. It was hopeless. I didn’t know what to do and I didn’t want to go back home. I kept riding, drinking, riding. I thought maybe I might run into somebody. I knew I’d eventually have to bury my dog. I knew she was sitting out on the porch, waiting on me. Watching all the lights coming down the road, wondering if each one was me. I felt sad about it and bad about it. I opened another beer and realized the folly of not stopping by the liquor store while I was in town and purchasing a half pint of peach schnapps to go along with my nice cold beers. I deliberated for several minutes over this dilemma and found it was probably an oversight on my part. I did not want to go home, neither did I want to be indicted by the Mississippi Highway Safety Patrol for Driving Under the Influence of alcohol. I observed that I was driving fairly straight and I had not slurred any words yet to my knowledge. Quite the opposite, in fact, and my eyes were not red and my blood pressure did not feel elevated. I felt that a short run back to town would not have astronomical odds in favor of my being overtaken after a highspeed pursuit. I turned around at a small place on the road and began to retrace my route back to civilization.
I returned to and from town without incident and once more resumed my erratic wanderings over country roads near my home. The evening hour had begun to wane and it was nearly dark. I knew if I stayed out much longer there would be some dramatic scene with Mildred upon my arrival home, and I wished to postpone that as much as possible. Mildred could never understand my wanderlust and my anxiety over her never-ending overtures of love and affection and requests for sexual gratification, which she constantly and at all hours of the night pressed upon me while I tried to sleep. However, I knew that however late I was, Mildred would probably only raise a token protest in lieu of the fact that I was home and could begin once more plunging fruitlessly into the depths of her passion. The only defense available to me was to guzzle quantities of alcoholic beverages that would allow me to arrive home in a state of lethargic consciousness in which a stupor might then be attained.
I did not know what I was going to do with Mildred or how I was ever going to be able to come to a life of harmonious tranquility where matrimonial happiness was a constant joy. The only good thing about it was it gave me a subject of regular worry that I was able to slide endlessly back and forth in my mind during my various ruminations and ramblings over blacktopped back roads. We were not social people and were never invited to parties, nor did we give parties where we invited people to them. We basically lived alone with each other on ten acres of land that was badly eroded in a house of poor quality. I was not drunk but I did not feel sober. The needle on my gas gauge was pointing toward E and had been pointing that way for quite a while. There did not seem to be anything else to do but return home and face the prospect of burying my dog/dealing with my wife. I could see her face just as well and her small ears, and I could see kissing her nose and her chin and her cheeks and the small hollow place inside her soft little elbow, and I felt like disaster was on the way, since it felt like one of those evenings that I’d already had too many of. I wanted to do all I could for her, but it didn’t seem like I could do anything for her at all.
Upon entering my yard, I saw there were no lights on at my house and my dog was lying just as I had left him. Mildred’s car was not in the carport, which was a most unusual sight. I was not extremely steady entering my house but stumbled around only a bit before I found the light switch and turned it on. There on the coffee table, held down by an empty beer bottle, was a note that was addressed to me. It said:
Dear Leroy,
I have met another man and I have gone away with him. He has the equipment to take care of my problem and we have already “roadtested” it, so to speak. Forgive me, my darling, but he is the one man I have been searching for all my adult life. I have taken the cats but of our house and property I want nothing. My attorney will be in contact with you but as for me I must bid you adieu and wish for you that you will some day find your own happiness.
XXX,
Mildred
It took a while for the words to sink in, for the reality of what I was reading to hit me. Mildred was gone, apparently, with another man with a huge penis. The reality sobered me up some, so I went out to my truck and got another beer and walked back over to my dog. He was still there, still dead, only by then he had begun to stiffen a little as rigor mortis set in. I knew I needed to get a shovel and bury him but I decided it could wait until morning. I looked at my house and I could feel the emptiness of it already. I went up on the porch and sat down. I could imagine Mildred in a hotel room somewhere with the man she had taken, and I could imagine them moving together and Mildred’s happiness and total fulfillment and joy with h
er newfound sexual gratification. I hated that I had never been able to give her what she wanted. I knew that I would just have to try and find another wife. I didn’t know where to start looking, but I decided that I would start first thing in the morning, as soon as the dog had been given a suitable burial. There were plenty of women out there, and I knew that somewhere there was one that was right for me. I hoped when I found her, I would know it. I felt like one part of my life was over but that another, just as important part, was beginning. I felt a lot of optimism, and I knew I could get another dog. But I was already beginning to feel a little lonesome, and I could feel it surrounding the house, closing in. I tried not to think about it, but I sat out there on the porch for a long time that night, doing just that. I looked around for the cats, but it was true, she had taken every last one, looked like. It would have been nice to have had maybe just one, a small one, to sit and pet and listen to it purr. I knew they could be cruel and vicious, but I knew they needed love also just like everyone else. I thought about Mildred in that other man’s arms, and how fine she looked in a bathing suit. Right about then I started missing her, and the loneliness I have been speaking of really started to set in.
Gold Nuggets
It was a bar somewhere between Orange Grove and Pascagoula, one of those places where they charge you nothing to get in and then five dollars for a ten-ounce Schlitz. It was dark. Everybody had on sunglasses but me. My friend had gone off and I didn’t know what had happened to him. I knew what I was, though, and I was trying to learn to live with it. I thought if I could just make it through the night, that everything would be sort of okay when the sun came up.
This place sold nude dancing. Just Ts, no As. I said, Well, bring on the dancing girls. I knew I was suffering from alcohol poisoning, and that it had settled in my brain. I could drink one beer and I’d start thinking differently, about everything. This little girl who had not even graduated from high school pranced out on the stage waving a scarf around her head and stumbling in her high heels. Her poor little titties were about a 32A.
And then like sharks two women glided in on each side of me. The one on the left had dark hair in her armpits. Tremendous titties. I checked them out and drank half of my ten ounces, then eyed the right flank. Blonde, maybe pregnant. Already stroking the inside of my thigh.
Oooooooh. Ooo and 000 and 000. She scratched the head of it like a mosquito bite. She turned her head and yawned and came back beaming. They had nude paintings on the walls, sort of a celebration of sex, which I certainly had nothing against if I could just celebrate a little of it myself.
The little chickadee up on the stage was bent over in my face, revealing all her secrets, but I figured this kid already had two kids of her own at home and a babysitter waiting for her to show up. It made me feel slightly perverted.
“Why don’t you buy me a drank?” the one on the left said. “I’d love to have a drank.”
I fumbled around for my money. She helped me peel off three ones and raised her hand. They hadn’t even set it on the table when the other one leaned over and said she wanted one, too. So I bought her one. And told her to bring me another beer. I didn’t care. I wanted to wake up broke and sober. I figured if I couldn’t buy a drink, I couldn’t get a drink. We jawed some old shit, it didn’t matter what we said. We all knew the score. Their job was to rob me, my job was to pay for the robbery. All night long if possible.
I picked up the blonde’s drink and tasted it when she wasn’t looking. Grape Kool-Aid. Well, I thought, I don’t have to put up with this shit. She got up and took her drink with her and, I don’t know, poured it out or something, then came back all friendly wanting another one.
I’d gotten surly and terse. I was feeling mean. I’d had about all their shit I wanted to take. I figured there were some big dark mean motherfuckers waiting back in the shadows to break my head and roll me when I went to the bathroom. The little beaverette up on the stage had gotten down on her hands, legs spread, pumping that thing up and down. And I just shook my head.
Blonde, she leaned over, sort of stroked my neck.
“You gonna buy me another drank?” she said.
“Buy your own damn drink.”
She looked offended. “Well, honey, if you don’t buy me another one I’ll have to get up and go.”
I told her not to let the door hit her in the ass. Of course she got all huffy and left. Then I turned on the other one.
“And you,” I said. “You can just get your ass up and go, too. Fucking grape Kool-Aid. You want me to tell you what you can do with your grape Kool-Aid?”
She didn’t say anything. She just looked away, and immediately I felt like an asshole. Sometimes I feel like an asshole about ten times a day. But I didn’t want to be hustled. There I was, all the way off down on the coast, didn’t know how I was going to get back, my friend had gone, and I had less than I’d started out with. Shrimp money. People depending on me, already buying their crab boil and their cocktail sauce. So there was only so much leeway I had. Maybe I could haggle the guy at the boat down, maybe I couldn’t. If I spent their money and then couldn’t haggle, I was up Shit Creek. But at that point I wouldn’t have minded legging down.
In dark places you can’t see much. But on the side of this girl’s face sitting next to me I saw something shining down her cheek. And I thought, Well, you asshole, you messed up again.
“Shit,” I said. “I’m sorry.”
She looked around and tried to smile. “It’s okay,” she said.
“I didn’t mean to be rude to you,” I said.
“It’s okay.”
But it wasn’t okay. I knew it wasn’t okay and she knew it wasn’t okay. Here she hadn’t done anything but ask for a three-dollar drink of Kool-Aid and I’d tried to run her off.
“Let me buy you a beer,” I told her.
“I can’t drink a beer.”
“What? You don’t like beer? You got some medical problem?”
“Oh no. I like beer fine. I’d love a beer.”
“Well, hell,” I said. “Then drink one.”
She got sort of close to me then. She leaned over to my ear, so I could look right down that Big Valley.
“They don’t ’low it,” she said.
“Don’t ’low what?”
She jerked her head. “You know.”
I looked in that direction. Then I saw the mean-ass momma watching us. Black chick, about thirty, medium fro, teeth probably filed to tiny points. Definitely not a vegetarian.
“Listen,” I said. “If I want to buy you a beer, can’t I buy you a beer?”
“Well, I don’t know,” she said. “They don’t like for us to drink.”
She smelled sort of bad. I was crazy and I knew it. Maybe her husband—if she had one—she probably did—was a shrimper and she shrimped with him in the daytime. Maybe she’d been down in the hot hold all day long shoveling up shrimp with a shovel. I didn’t care about any of that. She was a human being. She had the right to drink a beer. Even a drunk knows that.
“Just wait a minute,” I said. I got up from the table and staggered over to the momma. A hard chick. You could tell it from her eyes. No telling what she’d seen or done in her life. I wouldn’t have wanted to fistfight her. She could have been pretty and might have been at one time. No more, though. All she was after was money. Money to get the hell away from that dive she’d found herself in.
“Listen,” I said. “I want to buy this girl over here a beer. Do you care?”
She turned a cold pair of eyes on me. Eyes that cut me to my soul. They went up and down me, and stopped on my face. How many had she seen like me? I’d never seen such contempt.
“We don’t ’low it,” she said, nearly whispering. But then she leaned over. “But you can buy me a drink if you want to, sugar.”
She didn’t look bad. She had some huge ones. All I had was shrimp money. I could see the sunshine coming down on my head the next morning while I was trying to find the Elvira Mulla
or the Vulla Elmirea or the Meara Vulmira or the WhatEverltWas. There had just been whispered, hurried conversations over the phone, and I didn’t even like the people involved. What if the nets had holes in them or the shrimp weren’t sleeping?
Well, this chick wasn’t bad. She was hard. But I could see that she could be soft. Money softened her. She’d smelled money on me and right away she’d softened. Maybe she’d take me home. I didn’t know. But I was so damn lonely, and horny, that I was willing to take a chance on almost anything. Plus, I was drunk.
For a minute there I sort of got the big picture. You back off from anything and get the big picture, you can figure out almost anything if you figure on it long enough. I looked at myself and I thought: Now listen, you got all this money belongs to all these people and you’re supposed to take care of it. Now what the hell’s gonna happen if you show up without the money or the shrimp either one? What if you just blow all the money, and don’t buy the shrimp, and go back home to all those people who’ve already bought their crab boil and crackers and cocktail sauce? Well, you’re gonna have some people pissed at you, that’s what.
But, now, think about them. Think about Ed, that son of a bitch, think about him in the first place. Did that son of a bitch ask you if you wanted some shrimp last year when he went off to Pensacola and went deep-sea fishing and didn’t catch shit? When he puked in a bar that Milos López once actually got thrown out of? Did that s.o.b. ask you if you wanted him to bring you some shrimp? Hell naw. Fuck him.
And who’s the other one? Ted. That fucking Ted. That bastard. You ought to whip his ass just on general principle. Son of a bitch. Did he ever invite you over to his private bass lake when they were jerking those ten-pound lunkers out of there? Hell naw The son of a bitch even called the law on some kids.
