Joe

by Larry Brown

  “I got to go to town first.” He grinned. “I got Curt out in the truck with me.”

  “What?” Henry said. “He scared to come in?”

  “Said you’s pissed off at him. Said he took a bunch of money off you other night.”

  “Why, the son of a bitch is lying.”

  “I figured he was.”

  “I’ll tell you what he got pissed off about. He got pissed off cause I wouldn’t loan him fifty dollars. Comes down here drunk, wantin to borry money off me to gamble with me. If I loaned him fifty he’d owe me a hundred. You ever heard of anything like that?”

  Joe picked up his cigarettes and put them in his pocket. “I ain’t surprised at nothin Curt would do. He’s got his mama’s pension check in his pocket right now. Fixin to cash it when he gets to a grocery store.”

  Henry shook his head.

  “Him and Franklin have pissed away every penny that old woman had. When Jim died he owned two thousand acres of land and had way over a hundred head of cows. And I mean by God worked his whole life to get it. I can remember when he didn’t have nothin. And now she ain’t got nothin. Taxes. It’s their own fault, I reckon. When them two boys was coming up they was a gallon churn used to set on the kitchen table. Was full of money, change. Quarters and dimes and nickels. Wasn’t no pennies in it. Franklin and Curt would get ready to go to town and they’d go in there and just scoop up a handful. They always had plenty of money but they never had to work for none of it. No sir, I ain’t loanin him no money.”

  “I’m fixin to take him uptown and get him drunk,” Joe said. “He knows where Franklin’s at, but he won’t tell me when he’s sober. I’ll get about a six-pack in him and get some of them old gals to rub some of that leg on him. He’ll tell me then.”

  “A drunk man tells no lies.”

  “You got that right. Well, I’ll be back after while, Henry. You don’t want me to bring Curt back with me?”

  “I don’t care. Leave him uptown and make him walk home if you want to. You can get you some of this deer meat when you get back if you want to. We ain’t got much room in the freezer.”

  “All right,” he said, and he went out the door. He closed it behind him and walked up the hall. He could see Curt sitting on the hood drinking a beer. He had his legs crossed, and was smoking a cigarette.

  “Is Henry in there?” he said.

  “Yeah. He said if you come in there he’s gonna shoot your ass. Come on, get in and let’s go.” He was going down the steps as he talked, and he stopped beside Curt where he sat on the hood. A truck came around the curve and it started slowing as it neared the house. They turned to watch it come.

  “I wonder who that is,” Joe said.

  “I don’t know. Looks like it’s comin in here.”

  It was. It slowed gradually and stopped beside the driveway, a white ’78 Ford truck with a smashed fender and a driver screaming strangled curses as he dragged something up from the floorboards. Fried hair and a yelling mouth fifty yards away, a man with blood between his eyes.

  “Is he talkin to us?” Joe said.

  “Goddamn!” Curt threw one leg off the hood and slammed his beer down and Joe had started around the other side of the truck when the barrel came out the window and smoke erupted. Two concussions back to back sent hot lead flying as they labored with their hands up beside their chests, cartoon characters slipping and losing traction in the loose gravel. They were shot before they could move three feet. Joe fell and covered his head. Another shot went over his back and slammed into the house. Curt sobbed aloud and crawled behind the wheel of the truck, blood running from his shoe. Joe’s ears were roaring and he heard the transmission of the truck grinding as the driver tried to shove it up in reverse. He got up and jerked the door open, hitting Curt in the head with it, and felt around among the beer cans under the seat for his pistol. His hand closed over it. He snatched it out and ran to the road. The pickup had backed into the field above the house and the driver was winding the wheel in a panic, looking out the window. Joe ran up the ditch, trying to shorten the range. The truck roared out, skidded, almost went into the ditch on the other side, and he stopped and opened up with the little .25, towtowtow, towtowtowtow! Two small medallions of paint leaped off the tailgate. As the truck pulled away, he threw the tiny gun after it. He slapped a hand up beside his ear and it came away slick with blood. His shirt had three holes in it that he could see, and more blood was coming from his arms and back. He wiped the blood away from his head and walked back to his truck. George and Henry and Stacy were on the porch, Henry with a 9MM Browning automatic in his hand.

  “You all right?” Henry said.

  “Hell yeah. I reckon. Where’s Curt?”

  They pointed to the truck. He knelt down and looked under it. Curt lay curled into a ball, his hands over his head.

  Joe stood up. The hood and the left front fender had been ventilated. Later, he would count twenty holes in them, little puncture wounds that could have been in him.

  “Come out from under there, Curt.” He pulled up the sleeve of his shirt and saw the ragged hole in his bicep. “Shit,” he said. It didn’t hurt.

  Henry and Stacy came off the porch. George stood back, both hands on a post.

  “Get out from under there, Curt,” he said again. “He’s gone now. How bad you hurt?”

  “Damn, Joe,” said Henry. “You bleedin like a stuck pig.”

  “I’m all right. Little son of a bitch. I’ll fix his ass. Get out from under there, Curt.”

  “I can’t,” said the small muffled whine in the dirt.

  “Why not?”

  “Cause,” he said. He waited a moment. “I shit in my britches.”

  Joe looked at Henry and Stacy and grinned. “How you know I didn’t shit in mine?” he said.

  It happened that the old man and the boy had been walking down a road with their bags of cans.

  “I’m bout give out,” Wade said.

  “You want to stop and rest?”

  “Yeah. Let’s set down a minute and see if anybody comes by.”

  They sat and sat and sat.

  “I don’t believe nobody’s gonna come by,” Gary said.

  “Just shut up. We need to get us a car.”

  “I’d like to have me a new car. I know what I’d buy, too. I’d buy me one of them SS Chevelles with a automatic transmission and tinted windows. And blackout mags. I’d run everybody around here.”

  The old man lay on his back and pulled his hat over his face.

  “You know what?” the boy said.

  “What?”

  “If we’d get us a car I could get my driver’s license.”

  The old man grunted and turned on his side.

  “You can’t get a driver’s license. You don’t know how to drive.”

  “If we had us a car I could learn, though. How much you reckon we could buy us a car for?”

  “I don’t know. It depends.”

  “Depends on what?”

  “Depends on how much they want for it.”

  The boy pondered this and reamed out his ear with his finger, producing a crescent of brown wax on his nail that he wiped on his leg. He looked around.

  “Let’s walk on up the road. Ain’t nobody gonna come by here. We might catch a ride up at the crossroads.”

  But the old man was sleepy and did not answer. The boy reached out and jostled his leg. His father moaned and turned in his sleep. He was lying in an ant bed. Ants were crawling over his shoes.

  “You better move from there,” Gary said.

  His father’s head collapsed onto an arm. He’d begun snoring.

  “All right, then,” Gary said. He sat there for a minute. He reached out and shook his father’s leg. “You better move,” he said. The old man pawed out at him, wheezing muttered words under his breath.

  The boy sat and watched him sink deeper and deeper into sleep and fitfully begin a tortured turning and moving, as if his bones lay uneasy in his flesh. He whined onc
e, sharply. His mouth jerked open and his nose twitched. He slapped groggily at his face and missed. The boy grinned. The old man bowed his back on the ground and stuck one hand inside his overalls and scratched. He panted gently, like a dog in labor, his face contorted. He seemed to nod vague agreement to some unspoken truth in his sleep. His limbs stopped moving momentarily and he lay on his side with one hand caught between his knees and the other arm pillowing his head.

  It was as if a bolt of electricity suddenly penetrated him. His eyes snapped open and a look of such dread appeared in them that it was no surprise to the boy when he screamed.

  “Haaaaaaaaaaaaa!” he said. He was off the ground like a shot, running, jerking at the straps of his overalls and falling with a foot caught in his hands, trying to get his shoes off. But he couldn’t even wait for that. He got one off and jumped up again and began a demented parody of aerobics or teenaged cheerleaders caught up in gymnastic attempts and twitched and hopped one-footed over the asphalt, making strange and meaningless gestures, emitting all manner of oaths, motherfuckers especially, a series of impotent ravings like one crazed with hydrophobia or loosed from a madhouse. He kicked one shoe flying and it sailed into a tree and hung there. The boy stood up and watched him.

  “I told you to get up,” he said.

  The old man shucked clean out of his overalls and stood slapping them against the ground in his dirty shorts and T-shirt. He drew his shorts down to his knees so that his flaccid asscheeks and purple-headed penis were revealed among unbelievable amounts of short gray fur. Tiny red marks were all over his skin, as if he’d been sprinkled with a shotgun.

  “Why didn’t you tell me I’s layin in a ant bed?” he said.

  “I told you.”

  He started putting his clothes on, stepping into his overalls, but then he stopped and drew them back off and turned them inside out and inspected them minutely. He was still looking them over when they heard something up the road and saw a white pickup heading their way, coming across the bridge.

  “Yonder comes somebody,” said the boy.

  “I ain’t blind. Get down yonder and get my shoe out from that tree.”

  He got into his overalls and fastened the galluses and the boy went down into the ditch and picked up a stick and knocked the shoe loose, then tossed it up on the bank. The old man sat down in the road to put it on. The truck slowed and he watched it come. He was tying his shoelace when it pulled up beside him. He got up and looked through the windshield and went past the grille to the other shoe and picked it up and started putting it on. The boy came out of the ditch and stood beside the road. The driver of the truck was looking at them.

  “What are y’all doin?” he said. He weaved behind the seat a little and turned up a Busch tallboy, and the old man homed in, going to the passenger window and hanging his arms down inside.

  “We just messin around,” he said. “You ain’t got another one of them beers, have you?”

  The man behind the wheel studied him carefully. He opened his mouth and let out an enormous belch, then threw the can out into the road. His face looked as if somebody had been ahold of it with a hatchet in years past.

  “Where are y’all goin?” he said. He spoke very slowly and he could hardly speak at all.

  “We just pickin up some cans,” Wade told him. “You got one of them beers I could borrow off you?”

  The man looked at him as if he couldn’t figure out what he was. He turned his head, slowly, steadily, and looked for the first time at the boy.

  “What’s he?” he said. “What’s? Yonder’s a can right there you can pick up,” he said, pointing to the one he’d just thrown out. “Fuck it,” he said. “I’ll get it.” He opened the door and held on with both hands and moved over to the can with his arms out for balance and bent over ever so slowly in the road and picked up the can.

  “Where’s you sack?” he said. “Where is your sack.”

  He leaned against the hood and turned the empty can up to his mouth. He wobbled when his head went back and then he took the can down. He stumbled backwards along the fender, trying to steady himself with his arm on the hood, but he didn’t stop until his shoulder touched the windshield.

  “Whoa,” he said. He was offering the can. “That’s one more.” He ran his fingers up over his forehead and pushed his hair back. “Whew,” he said. He looked owlishly about. He straightened back up and put both arms on the hood. The boy couldn’t keep from staring at his face. The man saw him looking and said: “The fuck you lookin at?”

  “I ain’t lookin at nothin,” Gary said.

  “What are y’all doin?” he intoned again.

  “Let me get one of them cold beers off you if you got another one,” Wade said.

  The man was trying to find a cigarette in his pocket and he finally found one. He turned it over in his hand a few times and stuck the filter in his mouth and then lit it. He smoked it for a moment, took it out and looked at it, then stuck it back between his lips.

  “I tell you what I’ll do,” he said.

  “What’s that?” Wade was grinning, his eyes knowing, shining, as if they shared some secret.

  “I’ll give you a beer if you’ll get me one while you in there, but first I got to tell you somethin.”

  “All right.”

  “Call him over here too.”

  “Who?”

  “Him.” He pointed to Gary.

  “C’mere,” Wade said.

  Gary walked over and stood beside his father. He looked at a place on the man’s neck.

  “Look at me,” the man said.

  Gary looked at his face. “What?” he said.

  “I said look at me.” His eyes were dark and rimmed with redness. Gary looked. Looked deep at the hate burning in there, meanness ingrained but neutered by alcohol, impotent. Nothing to fear but still he feared something. He knew that he and his father would get in with this man and go wherever the road led as long as the beer held out. And he feared that.

  “You see my face?” the man said.

  “I see it.”

  “I went through a windshield at four o’clock one mornm and I don’t give a fuck.”

  “Say you got a beer?” said Wade.

  “I got a whole fuckin case.”

  “You want me to get you one?” said Wade, already heading for the cooler in the back end.

  “Yeah. Y’all want a ride?”

  Wade said that they did.

  “Well, hop your fat ass in.”

  The boy was squeezed up between the two men with his feet on the hump, while Wade was freely smoking Willie Russell’s cigarettes. Telling one lie after another. Russell had told them about ten times that he’d gone through a windshield at four o’clock one morning and didn’t give a fuck.

  “You want a cigarette?” he asked Gary.

  “I don’t smoke.”

  “Well hell, try one. You might get started.”

  “I don’t want one,” he said.

  “Smoke one,” Russell said.

  “I don’t want one.”

  “What, you a candy ass?”

  “Naw.”

  The boy tried to sleep but he couldn’t sleep with them talking. They went over roads he hadn’t seen before. They pissed in the road and ran off the road. Russell opened the glove box and pulled out a Remington twelve-gauge shell and showed it to them.

  “You see this?”

  They saw it.

  “I don’t give a fuck who it is. He can’t stand up to this. That’s double-aught buckshot. You believe me?”

  Wade was jovial, chuckling with a cigarette hanging out the corner of his mouth. Benevolent. A Samaritan to guide his driver over the sand hills and through the rough dirt roads, down the highways of patched asphalt lined with rusted wire and thickets of blackberries. Dark fat cows with white faces stood knee-deep in grass, their jaws so slowly working their tufts of fescue and their eyes fixed with such blank stares that they seemed stoned on a more potent weed. Willie Russell kept drin
king, but he didn’t seem to be able to get any drunker. In the watered ice at the bottom of the Igloo, Wade found a fifth of peppermint schnapps and they started passing it back and forth, talking like old friends, the ice water dripping on the boy’s legs and soaking through instantly to his skin.

  “I don’t let no sumbitch slap me,” Russell said.

  “A sumbitch slaps me better look out. You know it?”

  “Well,” Wade said.

  “Cause I’m fixin to kill him.”