by Chris Offutt
“Reckon you need some clothes,” Jimmy said. “I know just the place to go. Bought me this fee-dora in town today.”
He removed his hat and admired it, turning it in the sun, flicking away imaginary dust. He stroked its crease gently. Tucker didn’t move. If Beanpole had sent this guy, he’d offer proof. Jimmy adjusted the hat to his skull at an angle he seemed to consider stylish.
“You like it?” Jimmy said.
“You need another one.”
“An extra in case it gets dirty?”
“One to shit in,” Tucker said. “And another one to cover it up with.”
Jimmy dropped his cigarette. He set his boots firmly, one slightly in front of the other, and rolled his broad shoulders. That’s all it usually took to intimidate men, especially little bastards gone to fat. Beanpole had warned him not to underestimate Tucker, but the hat was a damn twenty-five-dollar imported Borsalino. He gave Tucker his hardest glare. Tucker didn’t flinch or look away. Figuring to give him another chance, Jimmy removed the hat from his head and tipped it to the light.
“Man at the store said it sparkled with a gem-like radiance,” he said, “I can see it. Can you? A gem-like radiance.”
Tucker reached for the hat and sure enough the overgrown boy gave it to him. Tucker placed it over his right hand, made a fist inside the hat and hit Jimmy just below his breastbone. Jimmy folded in half. His backside bounced off the car and he dropped to his knees. He regained his breath enough to vomit a thin stream of diner eggs into the dirt, careful not to splash the hat.
“Got anything for me?” Tucker said.
“Glove box,” Jimmy gasped.
Tucker stepped around the car and opened the compartment. It contained a carton of Lucky cigarettes, and an envelope with fifty dollars and a printed note: MORE LATER. GO EASY ON JIMMY. WIFE’S BROTHER’S BOY. It was unsigned, testament to Beanpole’s wariness of the law. A carton was worth a lot of money inside and Tucker brushed the thought away—from now on he could smoke as many as he wanted and use actual cash for currency.
Tucker wondered if Beanpole’s sending this dolt was a sign of disrespect. More likely it was an opportunity to get rid of Jimmy for a day or two. If Beanpole wanted to convey a message, nobody would’ve been waiting outside the prison. Either he didn’t trust his nephew with money, or Beanpole wanted to pay him in person.
Tucker helped the boy to his feet.
“Didn’t have to do my hat that way,” Jimmy said.
“Should’ve told me you was Beanpole’s nephew.”
“I’m sick of folks only knowing that. Beanpole’s bucket boy. Thought maybe I’d just be Jimmy with somebody new.”
Tucker realized the boy resented his uncle and filed the information away. Jimmy tenderly pressed his stomach, then brushed the Borsalino of dust that was no longer imaginary. He fitted it to his head at a cocky slant.
“Where to first?” Jimmy said. “Whorehouse or haberdasher?”
“A what?” Tucker wondered if he was going to have to hit him again.
“Haberdasher. They got men’s clothes.”
“Gun,” Tucker said. “And a knife.”
They drove to the nearest town of Eddyville. At a men’s store he bought work clothes, a thick belt, and heavy brogans. Most of the jackets were Eisenhower style with a short waist that allowed wind to cut across his particulars. He bought a wool-lined denim coat long enough to cover a gun. The salesman offered a deal on a pair of gloves that Tucker refused, having never worn a pair in his life. If a man couldn’t work his fingers in cold weather, he wasn’t worth a nickel.
They entered Howorth’s Hardware Store, where a woman in her forties stood behind a multi-drawer cash register made of oak and marble. Beside her was a wooden barrel of pickles. Her hair swirled into a hybrid between a bun and a hive, each strand drawn tight from her scalp. She wore a smock over a floral blouse that covered what appeared to be the armature of a large brassiere. Jimmy addressed her chest and asked for guns.
“See Mr. Howorth in the back,” she said, and tapped a small silver bell twice. The sharp peal drifted in the air. When the sound dissipated, she chimed the bell three more times.
“Are you Mrs. Howorth?” Jimmy said with a leer he’d practiced in a bathroom mirror.
The woman moved her tight lips in the semblance of a smile and nodded. Jimmy kicked the barrel lightly, careful not to scuff his boot.
“You like pickles?” he said. “A good-size pickle?”
Tucker turned away and walked a dimly lit aisle between metal bins containing hundreds of pipe fittings. Jimmy followed. His boot heels had metal taps that rang with each step, announcing his progress like a belled cat.
“Them older ladies got the biggest dugs ever was,” Jimmy said.
“Don’t talk,” Tucker said.
Jimmy gritted his teeth to quell a response. All his life he’d heard variations of shut up, hush up, quiet down, and his mother’s firm “Enough,” but no one had ever ordered him not to talk. He didn’t like it. He had a right to talk, same as any man, but he’d hold off for a few minutes at least.
The rear of the store held a long slab of white oak, marred by stains and nicks. Rifles and pistols lined the back wall, hanging on wooden pegs wrapped with cotton to prevent them from scratching the gunmetal. In the middle of the wall was an open doorway where a man in a greasy apron stood. He was tall with long hands, slim-fingered as a banjo picker. Pushed up on his balding head was a special set of glasses that magnified small work. His grandfather had started the store and his father had nearly run it into the ground by making bad deals while drunk. It had fallen to him to stave off the creditors. He’d made a few mistakes, including a marriage to a woman he didn’t like. The store’s legacy would end with him and when the time came he wanted to go out big. He planned on disappearing to Myrtle Beach alone.
“Fellers,” he said. “What can I do you for?”
“Needing me a pistol,” Tucker said.
“Call me Freddy Three on account of I’m the third Frederick Howorth. Everybody does, or just call me Three. I’ll answer to damn near anything. But I got to ask you something you might not like. Half the town works at the pen. And I know all of them. My opinion, you got the look of someone who might’ve just got out.”
Tucker waited for the man to say whatever was on his mind. Beside him he felt Jimmy’s tension spread like clay mud in rain, the kind that can catch a man’s foot and pull his boot off with the next step.
“I don’t like being the one to tell you this,” Howorth said, “but there’s many a man who got turned loose and bought a gun in town and held the place up. Way it is, nobody in town will sell a gun to a man fresh out. It’s not me. It’s the town. I can’t help it.”
“How about I buy one,” Jimmy said. “I ain’t been inside.”
“That’s a way around it, sure enough. But it’s a little too late. I’m sorry. I surely am. I’m a businessman and don’t like turning away business. But that’s the way it is.”
At waist level beneath the man’s apron Tucker saw the bulge of a pistol. He figured a cut-down shotgun lay just out of sight under the counter. He turned away, aware of the man’s vision boring into his back as he walked the length of the store. Tucker gave Mrs. Howorth a polite nod and pushed the door open. He heard Jimmy stop. Tucker turned and watched him unzip his pants and reach inside his fly, take a half-step to the pickle barrel and tip forward on his toes. Quick as a gnat, Mrs. Howorth withdrew a small-caliber revolver and aimed it at his chest. Jimmy halted, back arched and heels lifted, his body seeming to freeze in place. He scooted backward and out the open door.
On the sidewalk Jimmy zipped his pants and devoted nearly a minute to adjusting his belt buckle. It was shaped like a silver horseshoe glinting in the sun. Tucker hoped it still had some luck because the boy needed all he could get.
“You mad at me?” Jimmy said.
“No,” Tucker said. “I don’t like pickles.”
“Damn, she pulled th
at gun slicker than owl grease. Some kind of little stinger, wasn’t it.”
“Looked like a thirty-two,” Tucker said.
“See how fast I got my peter out? It’s not wearing underdrawers that does it.”
“You saying you ain’t got no drawers on?”
“Waste of money,” Jimmy said. “If you wipe, who needs them?”
He laughed, his face losing all the forced toughness and transforming to a child wanting approval for a failed prank.
“God-double-damn,” Jimmy said, “that’s the kind of woman I been wanting. Stacked up like a brick shit house and gun-handy as a deputy.”
“Uh-huh,” Tucker said. “You best go back to not talking for a spell.”
“Okay. Where to now?”
“Next town toward home. I ain’t spending another penny here.”
They drove highway 62 to the town of Princeton and bought a gun without incident, a long-barreled Colt thirty-eight Police Special. A four-inch barrel would hide better, but Tucker liked the idea of wearing the same gun as lawmen. They stopped at a roadside diner called the Trixie Grill and took a booth, sitting in their jackets and hats, countrymen in town. Tucker ordered fried chicken, green beans, cornbread and coffee. Jimmy refilled his empty stomach with another breakfast.
Clad in a white dress, lightly stained from food, the waitress walked briskly away, nylons brushing her thighs with every step. Her dark hair was pulled back in a ponytail, the sides held by bobby pins tipped with plastic. Tucker couldn’t recall the last time he’d seen bobby pins, didn’t know he’d missed them. He watched her hips twitch. From the dormant region below his belt he felt a vague heat.
The waitress brought their meals on heavy ceramic plates and refilled their coffee. Tucker began eating in a methodical way, forearms on the table to guard his food, one hand holding the edge of the plate in case he needed a weapon. He didn’t think he’d ever eaten better chicken. Six years he’d waited for cornbread and it was too dry.
Between Princeton and Elizabethtown they stopped twice for Tucker to avail himself of gas station facilities, the food having slid through his bowels like Sherman through Georgia. After years of rocky constipation from prison chow, his guts had turned sloppy. Jimmy knew better than to comment. Growing big early and able to whip his buddies in a fistfight wasn’t enough to match Tucker, whose age was indeterminate and size misleading. His damn eyes didn’t even pair up. Worse, the son of a bitch had armed himself.
Jimmy traveled with a pistol under the seat but it had slid along the floorboards out of reach, occasionally clanking against an empty Coca-Cola bottle with a dull sound that irritated him. He’d imagined a gallivanting journey with a real outlaw, first to a bootlegger, then to a whorehouse. But all Tucker wanted to do was chain-smoke and stare out the window. Not even ten years older than Jimmy, he’d already been to war and prison. Tucker ran shine at the tail end of the wild times, earned Uncle Beanpole’s respect, and had a reputation for toughness and honor. Frustrated by his inability to impress the man, Jimmy felt restless. Nothing had worked except his thwarted impulse to piss in the pickles, which seemed to amuse Tucker into a short-term softening that had already passed.
He straddled a flattened squirrel, then swerved to run over a snake warming itself on the blacktop’s edge. In the rearview mirror he grinned as it writhed, its back end flopping.
“Got him,” he said. “I pure despise a snake. You see his tail flopping?”
“It’s a snake. Pretty much all tail.”
“How’s your guts holding up?” Jimmy said.
“Better.”
“Good,” Jimmy said. “What was it like? In Eddyville I mean.”
Tucker slowly counted to a hundred before answering.
“First day,” Tucker said, “they put me in a cell with the biggest man I ever saw. Name of Bullethead. His head went up to a point, more like a howitzer shell than a bullet, but I didn’t say nothing on that.”
“Showed good sense there,” Jimmy said.
“One ear gone, just a hole in the side of that head.”
“Did he have a fake one?”
Tucker lapsed into silence, wondering how the boy had got this far in life. Tucker reached into his shirt pocket and removed a cigarette from the pack. It was a prison method of getting a smoke that prevented people from seeing a pack and bumming one. He turned his head to light it, the Zippo flaring, his hand cupped to hide his grin.
“Well,” Jimmy said. “What happened?”
“He said with two to a cell, one was a husband and the other a wife. Said the new guy got to pick being a husband or a wife.”
Tucker stopped talking and waited, knowing he wouldn’t have to wait very long for Jimmy to ask the obvious. It took less than ten seconds.
“What’d you pick?” Jimmy said.
“I told him I’d just as soon be the husband.”
“No shit,” Jimmy said. “What’d he do?”
“Well, he looked at me a minute. And he said, all right then, come over here and meet your wife’s pecker.”
“What’d you do?”
Tucker blew smoke and squinted as the wind flung it back in his eyes. The cigarette was burning faster on the side facing the window and he dabbed spit on it to even the fire.
“Thing is, Jimmy, what would you do?”
Jimmy adjusted his posture and gripped the steering wheel tightly. The answer was clear, and he tried to work through Tucker’s words to figure out if it was a trick question. His brother used to do that when they were kids, and still did upon occasion—ask questions with no good answer. It occurred to him that Tucker was making a comment about his masculinity. The idea made Jimmy mad.
“I like women,” he yelled. “All of them—tall, short, old, young, fat, and skinny. By God, I’d push my girlfriend out a window to fuck someone else.”
“You got a girlfriend?”
“No. But I ain’t no damn cake boy.”
“Nobody said you was.”
Tucker gave a slight grin. Provoking this boy was easy. His brain was a dam missing a river. Tucker laughed.
“It ain’t all that funny,” Jimmy said.
“Maybe not. But you getting mad was.”
“My brother used to do me that way. I never liked it.”
“Big brother, I bet.”
“That’s right,” Jimmy said. “Two years older. James was always telling me some bullshit.”
“Say your brother’s name is James?”
Jimmy nodded.
“You do know,” Tucker said, “that’s the same as Jimmy.”
“I heard that. But I don’t reckon my folks did. They liked both names. You got a thing to say about that?”
Tucker shook his head. He lit another Lucky and watched the land slide by. Jimmy hadn’t been raised right and Tucker worried about his own son growing up without a father. Rhonda had sent him a grainy black-and-white photograph of a fine-looking child, hair white as an old man’s. Tucker never showed the photo to anyone but looked at it every night.
Prison had sped the passage of time even as it moved at a slow pace. He decided not to run shine anymore. With the ten thousand dollars Beanpole owed him, he’d be able to get by for years. He could garden and hunt small game for the table, raise tobacco for cash, get a few chickens and hogs and one good cow. He mainly looked forward to seeing Rhonda and the kids.
Chapter Eleven
Zeph Tolliver rose at sunrise every day, observing an amalgam of his own inner clock and the territorial calling of songbirds in the woods surrounding his house. He lay in bed, listening for the creak of his mother’s rocking chair on the porch. Beulah wore work pants, the only woman on the hill who did. She rolled the cuff of one pants leg to form a cotton trough for flicking the ash from her cigarettes, painstakingly hand-rolled with gumless OCB papers.
Zeph rose and dressed and joined his mother. She faced him with her opaque eyes, blind from cataracts. A patch of ground fog lay in a low dip of land, the rest of the mist alrea
dy swirling away. Golden light filtered through the autumn trees.
“Turned off cold,” she said. “What’s the leaves doing?”
“Softwoods are yellowing on.”
“Poplar?”
“Mostly all dropped. A few sugar maples.”
“Ones facing west?”
“That’s right. Without no hill blocking the sun.”
“One good rain will knock half down.”
“Reckon,” he said. “You calling for it?”
“Not yet, I ain’t. But three, four days.”
They drank coffee. Her skills at weather had increased with age. For more than seventy years people had asked Zeph what his mother was calling for, and she was seldom wrong. Zeph heard the intermittent drilling of flickers seeking bugs.
“Hard as they hit a tree,” his mother said. “I don’t know why their eyes don’t pop right out of their heads.”
“Yep,” Zeph said.
She’d gotten fixated on sight since losing hers and lately he’d begun worrying she was going around the bend. Even blind she walked the field beyond the house, sometimes entering the woods at night.
“How high’s that grass getting to be past the old smokehouse?” she said.
She pointed the correct direction and he looked at the grass moving in the breeze, the swaying tops heavily furred by seed.
“Past knee-high,” he said.
“Is it fell over yet?”
“Not yet,” he said. “I got to go, Mom.”
She nodded, a nearly imperceptible motion. Creases lined her face like old bark. Her silver hair fell down her back to her waist. He wondered how much his mother could see, if it came and went, if she still recognized his features. Lately she’d begun touching his face as if memory seeped through her fingertips.
He drove his old truck to a dirt road, then followed the ridge downslope to the blacktop. A narrow lane ran behind the elementary school. Beyond it ran the shallow creek, now reduced to a few separate pools in which minnows and crawdads struggled to survive. Increments of water evaporated each day, evidenced by a fresh rim of dirt around the edges. Zeph understood that water slowly vanished, drawn into the sky and returning as rain. He wondered what kind of schedule evaporation ran on, how wind could blow invisible water to another part of the county.
