Big Bad Love

by Larry Brown

  Now I had to consider all that stuff. I couldn’t deal very well with it. She was smiling in my face and I had all that money in my pocket and I wasn’t too fond of these fuckers who’d sent me down there to the Gulf to get all their shrimp for them. And all I was trying to do originally was buy a beer for a girl who shook her ass naked in a dark bar where dark people like me stalked their lusts.

  “She can’t drink a beer,” this chick said.

  “Why?” I said. “Listen, goddamnit, I’m getting pissed off at the way y’all treat these girls. What? Y’all own em?”

  “Yeah, that’s right,” she said. “We own em. They dumb enough to come in here and work, we own em. Buy em and sell em if we get ready to.”

  She gave me a look so hard I said: “Wait a minute. You ain’t that hard, are you? You ain’t that bad, are you? Why don’t you let her have a beer? What’s it going to hurt?”

  “It’s against the rules.”

  “What rules?” I said. “Who makes up the rules?” I leaned over close to her and said softly: “Have you ever questioned the rules?”

  “You so hot to take somebody out, why don’t you take me out?” she said.

  What? And maybe get my throat cut? (An anecdote to testify to this madness: The night before, I got pissed off at my friend because he was drunk and I wasn’t and I was ready to go and he wasn’t, I begged him five or six times too but he wouldn’t hear it, he was jumping hot with this beavette, so I split. Right down the beach to our hotel room. I thought it was only a block and it was like four miles. I had to sit down and rest a few times, and I found out something. At night, that tide goes out. There’s no water there. And you wouldn’t believe the nasty shit that’s lying down there. I mean, dead rotten fish, and Coke cups and stuff, and it doesn’t look at all nice with that moonlight pouring down over that slimy sand. And I found out later that it had only been a week before when some guy got his throat cut down there, from ear to ear, on the beach, at night, late like that, probably in the same exact spot I was sitting in. Boy.) But boy I’d wanted me some of this for quite a while, just like every other white man. I almost did a double-flip hotswoon.

  “Come on, baby,” she said. “Take a little ride wit me.”

  I followed her out the door, the back door, where black guys were muttering in the dark and I couldn’t tell if they were shucking oysters or not. She had it parked behind the Dumpster, where the lights didn’t shine. When we walked up to that machine, it did. Brand new Henweigh, red, magnesiums on all four sides; she had the Alpine Stereo System. I was almost scared to get in the car with her. But I did.

  “I got some cold cognac if you’d like some, baby,” she said, when she had the little jewel purring like a kitten at its mama’s titty. She sort of ran her hands up her legs and pulled the dress back.

  “Hold on,” she said, and I turned the cognac straight up. Brought it down immediately, wheezing and gasping and coughing, damn near choking to death. She rammed it out of the parking lot and hit second and squealed viciously on the corners until she hit a straightaway and we must have been doing seventy by then and she downshifted and braked sharply and whipped it around a curve and out onto the street, and then two streets over she pulled in behind a bread truck, and four big black guys jumped out with knives and guns and robbed my terrified ass while she hung out the window on her elbow laughing herself silly, the pee running down her leg, maybe, I guess, saying, Hoo boy, you white boys something else.

  Well, it scared the shit out of me, naturally. I felt weak all over for about twelve minutes. But then I got to thinking about it and said to myself, Well, it’s gone now, wasn’t anything you could do, you still got your hotel room, you can charge some beer on your MasterCard and haul ass in the morning before they check. That and plus I had five one hundred dollar bills folded into a minute thing in the heel of my right sock. I’d just tell my groovy employers that they’d stripped me naked, even looked up my ass. Real killers. So I started walking back up the beach. I’d sobered up a little, what with the robbery and all. I didn’t know how I’d get back into North Mississippi and my beloved pine trees. They’d specifically stated that they wanted headless shrimp. Like Captain Mike McDonald and his crew were going to sit back and shuck the fuckers. But that was just the kind of rich ignorance I was dealing with. I wanted to go out on the boat with them. I wanted to pull the nets. I wanted to see what came up from the ocean depths, what unspeakable stuff spilled out when they hoisted it up onto the deck.

  But the Cold Nugget beckoned. I could see it from the beach, from the dark water, from the sucking tide sucking further south with each suck. I had to sit down to get out my money. It was good money.

  A whole new shift had come one. I settled at a table, my hands trembling just a little. I knew the sister was going to come back a little later, and I didn’t know what to do about it. My ass was in a crack. I tried to figure out how much they had taken off me. It was somewhere around three hundred dollars. I had two hundred dollars’ worth of coolers in my pickup.

  The women were still dancing, except that the junior high shift had come on. I was really starting to feel like a degenerate, and sick with what it all finally came down to. Getting robbed is kind of like getting your ass whipped, in that somebody else has beaten you. It doesn’t matter that he’s got a gun or a knife, you could have had a gun or a knife too and fought for your money. I decided to go armed from then on, just as soon as I could afford a gun or a knife.

  I was wobbling at my table a little. I knew people could probably see it. I hated that, sort of, didn’t want to be drunk in public, but didn’t know what to do about it right then. There wasn’t anything would fix it but another drink. I summoned somebody and somebody brought one. I was getting eyes from the bar again.

  I didn’t want to mess with any more of those girls. I’d already seen the fine ones, up in Memphis, where they let them go naked in front of you and then expect you to behave yourself. I knew in some men that kind of stuff caused rapes, which is why it was dangerous to offer that kind of stuff to the general public, since a lot of times the general public had a hard dick and little conscience. I decided to just sit there and nurse my beer, lick my wounds, and see if the chick walked back in.

  There were guys groping chicks in the corners. I didn’t know what the hour of night was. Late was all I knew. My friend wasn’t anywhere around. He knew the name of the boat and I didn’t. He knew the dock they docked at. But he’d probably already had his throat cut and was being eaten by fish, or the dogs and cats at the seafood plants. It didn’t make me just real happy or at ease sitting there waiting for him. Maybe he’d given up on ever finding me and had just gone back home. That’d be real hucky ducky if that was the case. If he’d taken my pickup that’d be real uncool and I’d have to catch the big Hound going north emptyhanded. Rich fuckers like they were, they could get things done. They might even hire my legs broken. I knew they knew plenty of people they could sub it out to.

  I ordered another beer. Some waitress brought it and I gave her some money. She popped her gum and gave me my change. I lit a smoke. Just then I noticed a guy sitting near me, almost at my elbow. He looked sort of hungry. I glanced at him, and then I didn’t pay any more attention to him. All I wanted to do was just drink until something happened. I knew if I drank long enough, it would.

  I got a little philosophical sitting there, surrounded by all that sin, feeling so mired down in it. I hadn’t been raised to go into places like that. And there I was in one. I didn’t know where the sun might find me. I just hoped it wasn’t a place as dark as that one.

  That guy leaned over and groped my leg. I sighed.

  I’d had to deal with a thing like that once before. It had been a long time ago and I’d nearly forgotten it. A sailor had bought me a drink and then touched me in an unwelcome way in a bar. I thanked the sailor for the drink and told him to get his hand off my leg. He removed it and said he didn’t mean anything by it. Then he told me about his wife and fa
mily and friends for twenty minutes. Then he bought me another drink. Then he put his hand on me in an unwelcome way again. I remember sighing inwardly. I leaned over to the bartender and told him I hated to get thrown out of the bar, but if that guy put his hand on me again in an unwelcome way again I was going to have to knock the shit out of him. Then I told the sailor exactly the same words. It made him hot, and words were said, and I wound up choking him. It hadn’t been nice, and I knew this thing probably wasn’t going to be nice either.

  I turned around and looked at this guy. He had a cap shoved back on his head, and some missing teeth, and a black eye. His hand on my leg felt like a granite claw. I looked into his eyes. They were tinged with yellow and red, and they looked a little wobbly.

  He was a real big guy.

  I sat there and held my beer, wondering what to do. For all I knew he could have been a henchman, one of hers. I knew to operate like she did she had to have henchmen.

  I finally told him he wouldn’t believe how much I’d appreciate the shit out of it if he’d get his hand off my leg.

  I thought Yeah, their goddamn shrimp. Their damn shrimpy minds. Why do you want to put yourself in the employ of people like that? Who have no interest in you other than what you can do for them? I was really getting sleepy and I yawned several times. It didn’t look like my friend was going to show up and I knew somebody had to go down to the dock the next morning and try to find that boat. And not just any boat. That boat, where they were selling them for $1.35 a pound medium jumbo, cutting out the middleman and passing the savings on to the consumer. I decided I’d be best off booking for the local hotel, so that’s what I did, like a fat man’s ass.

  It was hot as hell in the parking lot the next morning. Some firemen were having a convention in the Holiday Inn, and they had ladder trucks set up in the parking lot, and they were giving rides to the general public. Since I was general public, I got on one. I had the fear of maybe getting up there and puking down on somebody a hundred feet below. But it was really impressive up there above the roof of the Holiday Inn. For one thing, you could see all those shrimp boats out there in the water running their nets. The sun was shining, but the sky looked smoky. It looked like they were just dredging ton after ton of little shrimps up. It made me feel a whole lot better, looking out over all that industry. I sort of got the big picture sitting up there and realized how small and unimportant my quest was, in light of the tons of available seafood already destined for restaurants all over the South. I decided to just find a shrimp boat docked with a fresh load, jew them down as much as I could, load up and haul ass.

  I had a little difficulty manipulating in the traffic. There were two lanes going seventy miles per hour and the white sand beaches were loaded with women in bikinis. I wondered if any of the little beaverettes from the Gold Nugget were out there sunning but then realized they were probably in American History class reading about Benjamin Franklin. I wondered what he would have thought about all that shit, women running around nearly naked and all. I passed the Gold Nugget, which was on the ocean side of the road. It looked deserted, empty, boarded up. It was only eleven a.m., though. I started to pull in and then I said Naaaaaaa. I went on down the road until I got to the harbor, where gulls were flying, and masts were sticking up everywhere. I parked as close as I could and got out. The sun was burning down, and the beer started running out of me. I didn’t know how many I’d had the night before. It must have been some kind of ungodly amount, judging from the stuff that was pouring out of me. I couldn’t hardly see for the sweat in my eyes.

  I started walking down the dock, checking everything out. I didn’t know which section I was in. I knew I had to get to the right section, but I didn’t know if I was in it or not. There were some neat sportfishermen lined up smartly along the dock with names like Judy and Becca and Mama’s Dinghy. I kept walking and looking.

  I was wanting a cold beer. I could feel the weight of all that expectation on me. I knew something bad must have happened to my friend, and I didn’t feel real good about it. I didn’t know how I’d be able to explain it to his wife and all. It had all started out so innocently anyway. We were just going to go down there and goof off a few days, make a shrimp run. Be back at work on Monday. There it was Monday and I didn’t have shit to show for it. I knew they’d can me. The job I had wasn’t worth a damn anyway, just putting washers in little holes. It wasn’t anything that made me feel real fulfilled.

  I was lost, and people could tell it. There were people with caps on, and old women weighing plastic baskets of shrimp, and other people with tanned skins and sunglasses watching me stumble around on the dock. Millionaires, probably, some of them, up from Orlando or Jacksonville or Destin, just taking a week off. I kept walking, and was grateful for my own shades. If the eyes were the mirror to the soul, I didn’t want anybody to see inside mine. I kept walking. I knew all this was just a temporary setback. It didn’t mean that I couldn’t ever be saved from my life, or that I’d never find the boat I was looking for. Somewhere, somewhere there, was a connection I could make, and I knew that all I had to do was stay out there until I found it.

  I staggered on down the dock, looking, sweating, among browned women in the sun, diamonds glinting, doing all I could at the time, knowing the sun would always go down, and another night would come, that our forms of salvation were ours to choose, as blessed to the misguided like me as any church.

  Waiting for the Ladies

  My wife came home crying from the Dumpsters, said there was some pervert over there jerked down his pants and showed her his schlong. I asked her how long this particular pecker was—I was drinking beer, not taking it half seriously—and she said it sort of resembled a half-grown snail, or slug, she said, a little hairy. It was so disgusting, she said, and gave off this little shiver, doing her shoulders the way she does.

  Well, a sudden unreasonable anger suddenly came over me, and I slammed my beer down. I’d already slammed several down. I said by God I’d go take care of the son of a bitch. I said, If it ain’t safe for women and kids to walk the roads, what’ll you think’ll happen when lawlessness takes over, and crime sets in, and the sick and the sexually deviated can sling their penises out in front of what might be some little kid the next time? She was just too tore up to talk about it any more. Had to go lay down and hold one forearm over her eyes. That sort of made me mad. This unknown guy getting his own personal tiny rocks off had messed up my own sexual gratification, and besides that, by God, it just wasn’t right. Here I was a working man, or had been, and come to find out it ain’t even safe to lay over here in your own bed and let your wife take the garbage off.

  I didn’t figure I’d need no gun or anything, but I did take my beer. I figured since he’d already dropped his drawers he’d be done hit the bushes, and I thought I could ride around some and listen to country music songs about drinking and cheating and losing love and finding it, since it looked like I wasn’t going to be pumping any red-hot baby batter into my own favorite womb any time soon.

  Riding over there, I thought about the injustice of how a few people could fuck up everything. I’d heard about these people sucking toes and stuff. I didn’t want it around me. I even devised a plan. I left out a few details early on there but my wife had gone on to say that she’d seen this guy sitting there in his pickup before, when she’d been going down the road to some other place, just sitting there, not dumping any garbage or anything. Waiting on his next victim, I supposed, some innocent person he could terrorize. I said well I’d just start keeping my shotgun in my truck and ride over that way about every day, and the next time I saw that pickup (she said it was a blue Ford) I’d just stop and haul it out and peck up his paintjob a little bit until he decided to get his ass back to wherever he came from in the first place.

  I got over there and of course there was nothing there. Just a bunch of trash and garbage on the ground right in front of the Dumpsters, and treetops people had dropped off, and wet magazines on the
ground, and a little thin sad puppy scared of me somebody’d dropped off, so hungry he couldn’t decide whether to stay or run. A son of a bitch who’ll drop his pants in front of some woman he’s not familiar with is the same kind of son of a bitch’ll drop off a puppy like that, thinking somebody’ll give him a good home. Good home, my ass. Some of these Vietnamese around here’ll eat him.

  I didn’t know how far this perversion thing had spread, how much word of it had got around. I didn’t want to sit there in my pickup thinking people driving by had already heard of the pervert and might think I was him. I tried to call up that puppy. I got down on my heels and clicked and whistled and snapped my fingers and talked nice to him, but all he’d do was roll over with his legs up in the air and his tail between his legs, peeing on himself in little spurts. Somebody had ruined him, beat him, stomped him, him roughly the age of an eighteen-month-old baby, in dog years. I knew some Humaner would come by and capture him and take him to the pound. I should have gone on and killed him. How would the gas be any better than a knock in the head to him? That might’ve been Napoleon Bonaparte reincarnated running around there, sniffing coffee grounds.

  I took off down the road there and rode around a while. What would have to be wrong with a guy to make him flang his thang out in front of women? It had to be some kind of guy who couldn’t get any pussy, was too messed up in some way to get some from anybody, even for money, wanted some bad, and had developed this overpowering urge to gratificate himself, ergo, like the mirror is to the image, himself twinned in their eyes, what he imagined to be his big penis, his brutal, killing penis, swinging like a nine-pound hammer, suspended out there for all womanhood to draw back and gasp from, which, in his opinion, was what was happening.

  I felt sort of bad for the guy. I didn’t know if I needed to go talk to Daddy about it or not. I figured the guy was holloweyed, sat in a dark room with his mother watching TV all day long, eating popcorn, and waited for late evening before he started stalking his lusts. I was beginning to get a pretty good mental picture of him already. He was about fifty, with wattley skin around his neck, shaky hands, maybe a dirty cap pulled down low over his eyes and white stubbly whiskers on his jaws, weak chin, bad shoes, one of those belts about ten inches too long for him with the excess hanging loose. Yeah, he was starting to form up in my mind. He was a wimpy sumbitch from back yonder. His had not been an easy life, and he might not have all his mental faculties. He might stand in line at the welfare office every Wednesday, holding his mother’s hand, and she might have cared for him like this since he was a baby. She might’ve had bad love, or love run off, or he might’ve been in the womb too long. They had some little awful house way back up in the woods around London Hill or somewhere, with tin cans out in the yard and mud on the porch, and bleak was a word they didn’t understand, since that was the world as they knew it. She didn’t know why he took off like that in the evenings sometimes, and she’d never recognized that he might have secret needs he was too scared to tell anybody about, or maybe she didn’t even think about stuff like that.