Joe

by Larry Brown

  “I need some cigarettes, too,” he said, and started pulling his money out.

  The black proprietor came awake groggily and looked at the beer and put his hand on it and looked at the register and blinked and yawned. He looked at the child standing before him and said: “What kind?”

  “Winstons,” the boy said. “I need me about two packs, I reckon. And some matches, too.”

  The storekeeper hit some buttons on the register and pulled the cigarettes out of a rack over his head and bent beneath the counter for the matches. He pulled out a sack and put the beer in it and dropped the other stuff in on top.

  “You ain’t workin for the man, is you?” he said. The boy stopped and looked at him.

  “I used to,” he said. “I just bought his truck.” He pointed out the window. “See it out there? I got to wash it, though.”

  The man shook his head.

  “I think you could use you a new fender, too. Seven eighty.”

  The police car went screaming back by as he walked out of the store with the sack in his hands. He wondered what all the excitement was about. Bank robbery maybe.

  He drove out of town slowly, sipping happily on a cold beer, digging the music, the world as fine as he could remember it being in a lifetime.

  There was a woman Joe saw sometimes who lived in a small community twenty miles south of London Hill, and he rode down there one Friday evening to see if she was home. She lived alone and she had a lot of money that she liked to spend on him. He never saw her out anywhere at all and she never mentioned other men, never called, never bothered him, was always glad to see him. Whenever he got with her they would drink for days and wind up in hotels in Nashville or Memphis or Jackson, Mississippi, ordering room service and driving her white Cadillac around and mixing drinks in the car.

  The road to her house wound down through low hills and farms with ponds scattered throughout the green pastures. The evening he went, there were bats about and swifts coursing the coming night on their sharp-tailed wings. The earth lay doused in the cool of the approaching night and hay wagons with their loads of tiered green blocks churned slowly over the land with the helpers throwing the bales up. He breathed in the good scent of freshly mown fescue and slowly lifted a beer to his mouth.

  The road was white stone and the tires sang slowly as he eased into the night. Silage barns stood in the distance and he saw a bobcat enter its run and disappear through the bordering bushes. Catfish ponds lay faintly green in the gloom, and on one bank, a farmer stood, throwing out feed by the handfuls.

  The night moved in and he had to turn his parking lights on. He had to slow down once for a dog that was lying in the road. The dog got up grudgingly, it seemed, looking back over its shoulder as it walked to one side.

  “That’s a good way to get run over,” he told the dog.

  He sped up once he got on the state highway, his radio fading as he headed south. He changed to another station but it was no better. Finally he shut it off. He pulled his headlights on and the bugs swarmed in small knots ahead of him, blasting into the windshield and sticking there. The window was rolled down, his arm hanging out, and the wind was moving through his hair. The beer between his legs was empty so he pitched the bottle over the roof of the cab with a hard upward swing of his arm and looked back to see it sail into the ditch. He got another one from the cooler in the floor and twisted the top off, drank deeply and set it between his legs.

  Near a small road sign that advertised a steak house he turned right and went slowly down a patched asphalt road where trailer homes and Jim Walter homes sat side by side, their yellow lights glowing, the people reduced to dim forms in the yards, tires hanging from scrubby trees with ropes. Just past this, kudzu lay solid on both sides of the road as far as the eye could see, claiming every hill, every light pole, every tree. Eventually it thinned away and there were trailers once again. A mile past the last one a fine brick home sat back from the road, a long low structure with a well-kept yard and a white wooden fence that ran around all four sides of the property. He slowed and turned into the driveway, a gravel lane between pine trees whose limbs nearly brushed the sides of the truck. He crept down the driveway with the rocks crunching under the wheels. When he came out of the trees there was no car in the carport and no lights on in the house. He stopped.

  “Well shit,” he said. He sat there looking for a moment, knowing he should have called first. It was nearly dark. He shoved the gearshift up in park and got out, walked up the little brick pathway, looking at the flowers she had planted there, and stepped up on the small stoop and knocked on the door. From somewhere came the faraway yap of dogs. He knocked again and then turned and went back to the truck and got in and turned around in front of the house and went back out the driveway. A car was coming down the road, slowing as it passed him. A man was driving, with a woman sitting beside him, and they looked him over as they went past. He didn’t wave. He turned the wheel and lifted the beer to his lips and drove quickly back to the state highway and turned the wheel east, toward Lee County, toward Tupelo and a bigger city and more bars and more policemen available to get after him. Knowing it as he sped that way, not really caring.

  Full darkness descended and he kept drinking, tossing the bottles out over the roof and reaching for fresh ones in the floor. Later he stopped at a liquor store just inside Tupelo and bought a bottle of Crown Royal and checked in at the Trace Hall and pocketed the key without going to the room and got back in the truck and drove to a honky-tonk a few miles away. He hid his pistol under the seat and locked his truck. A sign outside the door promised the appearance of George Jones but he doubted it.

  There was a long bar inside, and of all the faces reflected in the glass, there was not one he knew. He took a stool and ordered whiskey and Coke and drank the first one within three minutes. When he motioned for a refill the bartender shrugged and poured.

  A hefty bouncer with a black shirt and cold eyes watched him from a corner. Joe looked up and saw him watching and locked eyes with him until the bouncer looked away. The bar was dark and country music floated through the smoky air. Couples danced to the slow ones under turning lights. He saw a woman down the bar looking at him, smiling at him, whispering to her friend, turning back to smile again. He picked up his drink and moved that way.

  He woke in a strange bed, in a room filled with daylight. He rolled over and rubbed his eyes, his tongue like a thick pad of cotton. He was naked under satin sheets, his clothes hung carefully over a chair. His shoes were on the floor together, neatly, beside the chair. His wallet and keys and change and comb and pocketknife were on a table beside the bed. He dozed, slept again. Settling in peace he dreamed of the cotton fields of his youth, the shimmering rows spread out before him as he worked, the little plants falling away cleanly from the sharp blade of the hoe as he thinned them and dragged out the grass, the brown dirt turning darker as he chopped and stroked with the hoe, working his way toward the end of the row and the shade where the water bottle and his lunch waited. He worked an endless row in his dream and his mouth was dry in the dream and he came awake with a great thirst and sat up and rubbed his face and reached for his underwear and pants.

  When he opened the bedroom door, there were some framed pictures of teenaged children in a paneled hall and he knew none of them. The house he stood in was quiet. He could hear a lawnmower running somewhere. To the right was what looked like a kitchen and he had orange juice on his mind if there was any to be had.

  There were three plates smeared with the remains of eggs sitting on a bar, before three stools lined up next to the refrigerator. He moved to a double glass door and looked out into a back yard with lawn chairs and a gas grill and an above-ground swimming pool where children’s rings with the heads of horses and ducks floated on the bright water. There seemed to be nobody about. He went back to the refrigerator and opened the door, then shut it and read the note addressed to him: Joe, I had to go to the airport. Fix yourself some breakfast if you wan
t it. I’ll be back by eleven, Sue

  The night came back in a rush and he looked at his watch. It was ten-thirty. He opened the door again and pulled out a quart bottle of Tropicana and rummaged through the cabinets until he found a glass and poured it full. He stood at the bar and drank it down quickly and immediately felt better. He couldn’t remember exactly what she looked like, and he hated to stick around any longer.

  He was buttoning his shirt in the bedroom when he heard the front door slam. An unfamiliar voice called his name. He heard the sound of her heels clicking on the parquet flooring in the kitchen, then the muffled sound of her footsteps on the carpet of the hall. He turned toward the door. The steps paused. A vision of loveliness there at the door, an approving grin which he returned.

  “Hey,” he said.

  “Hey yourself.” She put her purse down and walked over to him and put her arms around him. She kissed him, a small good fragrance in his nose. Her breasts flattened against him and he held her by the shoulders. She kicked her shoes off and moved her hands down the front of him, reaching, touching. He kissed her neck. She pushed him backwards toward the bed. He didn’t protest.

  That afternoon they lay in the sun on chaise longues with a small cooler of beer beside them, rising to slip into the pool and float on air mattresses, bumping into each other with the warm rays on their bodies. She’d found an old pair of pants with a waist that fit him and she’d cut them off with pinking shears. Her body was tanned in a black one-piece, her brown hair just turning to gray. She was forty-one and she’d been divorced for two years. He learned that her two children had just left that morning for a two-week visit with their father in Orlando.

  There was a high wooden fence around her back yard and she lay with her eyes closed, floating on the air mattress with a small smile on her face. Joe watched her in wonder and kissed the tiny freckles at the tops of her breasts. When the sun went straight overhead she took him back to the cool sheets of her bedroom and rocked and swayed over him, that dreamy smile growing to a shuddering twitch of lips with her breath catching harshly in her throat, their bodies in total harmony with each other, the only one ever except Charlotte. She folded herself over him and kissed the side of his throat and stroked his arms and chest with fingers soft and sure. They talked in low voices and when the sun started down she drove him back to the bar for his truck.

  That night they had drinks on a patio she and the children had built themselves, porterhouses sputtering while small yellow flames leaped in the gas grill. She kept a careful eye on the steaks and cooked them just the way he liked them, bleeding red juices when she cut them with the knife. He held hands with her at times, something he hadn’t done in a long time, and had thought he’d never do again.

  Long after midnight he held her in the bed while her head rested on his chest. He listened to the slow measured sound of her breathing and wondered how any man could give up something like her. The sculpted ivory of her torso where the sun had not touched it made her legs and arms look black in the darkness of the room. Her lacquered fingernails rested lightly on his stomach. He dreamed again, but not of childhood fields. He dreamed of the prison yard and of clearing the roadside grass with sickles and the horses the guards rode standing over him drooling their slobber down on his bare back and of enduring it all, watching the days tick off the calendar one by one and the hot Mississippi sun bearing down on the truck patches, him on his knees pulling tomatoes and beans and peas, of the heavy wire mesh fences that fenced in the inmates, of the smoky lights that loomed in the darkness outside the camps, where in the black towers the unseen guards with their rifles sat watching for movement in the packed dirt beside the buildings. He twisted in his sleep, his legs moving. Near dawn he got up and put on his clothes and gathered up his things and let himself out of the house quietly, locking the door firmly behind him, not looking back, getting in his truck and turning on the parking lights, backing out of the driveway slowly, easing into the street, pulling the headlights on and reaching down for the last lukewarm beer in the cooler, eyeing the whiskey that was still on the seat. The gas tank was half full, more than enough to get home.

  The old GMC with the battered fender was parked near a wooden bridge on a gravel road three miles from London Hill, and the old man was sitting on a downed tree with his shoes and socks off, paring his toenails with a pocketknife. From time to time he looked over the lip of the creek and watched a big perch that was riffling over the shallow water, flitting here and there above the sand bottom on feathery fins. Once in a while he rubbed his swollen knuckles.

  He could see the youngest girl moving in the back beneath the camper bed, the truck rocking slightly each time she moved on the cot and turned uneasily. There was a good breeze easing the heat underneath the massive oaks and he fanned at his opened shirt with his hat. From time to time he lifted a bottle in a paper sack and drank from it, watching up the road, waiting.

  After a while a slowly growing noise began to creep its way into the uncertain realm of his bad hearing, and he cocked his head to determine from which direction it was coming. He saw it round the curve, a plume of dust rising close behind it like a small brown tornado that was content to stay in the middle of the road. It was a white Ford pickup. Soon he could hear the rocks speaking beneath the tires.

  The girl sat up on the cot.

  The old man nodded, putting his hat back on his head, getting up with studied slowness and crossing the ditch to lean against the fender.

  The truck slowed, pulled up behind and stopped. Willie Russell was driving and another man was with him. They didn’t get out. They sat there on the seat like mutes or idiots, looking back and forth at one another and at him leaning on the fender.

  “Hell,” the old man said. “Cut your motor off.”

  Russell cut it off. Wade walked over to the Ford and put his hand on the side mirror.

  “Where’s she at?” said the driver.

  The old man motioned with a cocked thumb over his shoulder.

  “Thirty dollars,” he said. “Apiece.” The one on the passenger side already had his money out. The mutilated driver bent forward in the seat, struggled with his back pocket for a moment, and drew out a cracked brown billfold. He pulled money from it, worn bills greasy and soft as chamois. They paid the old man the combined sixty dollars and he counted it and nodded and pocketed the money. He turned without speaking and walked up the road to sit on the roots of a big tree in the shade about a hundred and fifty feet away.

  They got out of the truck together and looked both ways up the road. They entered through the back door of the camper. The door came down. It closed with a rattle, rattled again, then slammed hard. The old man fanned himself with his hat, lifted his whiskey from a pocket, and looked off into the distant fields burning under the sun.

  After a while the truck began rocking, the worn springs creaking mildly as if in some weak protest or outrage.

  Gary was in the woods, by the spring. He held his knees and rocked there, back and forth, the wet rag he had soaked in the spring water pressed to the eye already swollen shut. The day was hot and the sun lanced down between the trees and he felt it on the back of his neck like a warm hand. The spring bubbled gently and the leaves whispered quietly and he saw before him not unlike a dream the seven states they had lived in, transient, rootless, no more mired to one spot of territory than fish in the sea, Oklahoma, Georgia, California, Florida with tall and black-haired Tom falling off the truck and the truck behind them running over his head. That was in 1980. He could see other states, other days, mild ones, mountains in the distance, the little tarpaper shacks where they had once lived. Miles and miles of blacktop highway, the bundled clothes, the mildewed quilts after a night of sleeping on the side of the road. All his life he’d been hungry, all his life waiting behind the old man for whatever scraps of food were left, watching the quick champ of his stubbled jaws, the food disappearing rapidly from the plate, the lowered eyes of his mother as if she hadn’t noticed t
hat something was wrong. They’d never furnished an answer for Calvin but he remembered him clearly because he had carried him. He had white hair, white as cotton. They had been living in a camp outside Oklahoma City. There were tents pitched everywhere, and everybody did their cooking outside over fires. But they had little to cook. His father stayed gone most of the time, and when he came in, it was late at night, and there was always trouble, and arguing, and Calvin crying for something to eat, sucking at the meager breasts of his mother even after there was no more milk, and she would shush him, rocking him, both of them crying together in their emptiness. He remembered all that. Finally there was no work for them. The Mexicans had come in a flood and the old man cursed about them, saying how they’d taken all the jobs to where a white man couldn’t get work.

  There was a city they walked into one day. They went to a park and located a water fountain, sat down in the shade that Fourth of July. Children raced over the grass, chasing balloons, and people were sitting on the ground eating from picnic baskets. His mother went among the happy people, stooping and bending, saying things to them, getting something here, pointing back to them, getting something there, and he sat with his father and the girls and Calvin in the shade until she returned bringing them chicken legs and biscuits and sandwiches. He took a chicken salad sandwich and broke off little pieces of it, pinched small bits off and fed them to his little brother, watching him gum the bread and meat. He found a cup and filled it with water and gave him small sips.