by Ben Stroud
AFTER THE GREENHILLS DROP Jimmy looped us back to 259, but instead of keeping straight on toward Longview he turned left on 31. “Stop one, need to swing by the house,” he said.
We’d never before gone home while on the clock. Pulled over for tacos, lingered in convenience stores, taken long routes, sure, but this was a line we were crossing. Still, I hadn’t bargained for a veto, so I kept my mouth shut, crossed my fingers, and soothed myself with images of me at The Hangout, right on time.
I didn’t know where Jimmy lived and was surprised when he took the ramp onto 135 and we drove past the oilfield shops that lined the edge of town. Out here there was no trace of the tornado, but it was ugly all the same. The road was four-lane, a big highway in the middle of nowhere, and after we got to the last of five identical mustard-colored buildings with their attendant gravel lots, we pulled into a potholed driveway. Houses floated around us in a sea of tall grass. They sat on metal beams, hides of shagged tarpaper gathered about grayed, termite-ridden wood. Jimmy drove past them to a yard of smoothly packed dirt where a house in only slightly better shape than the others squatted on cement-block feet.
“My dad buys them,” Jimmy said, when he noticed me looking back at the houses in the field. “He’s going to turn them into lake cabins.”
He leaped out of the truck and, passing the front porch, started climbing through a window. I didn’t want to think about why, and staring out at the field of houses I ignored his legs wiggling over the sill and let my mind drift to the moon-flesh beneath Angela’s shirt. I struggled with my inadequate map, itched at not knowing how much ground had been lost to the guy from Jasper. Then a banging on the hood set my heart knocking in my chest. Jimmy. He opened my door and started pushing me toward the steering wheel.
“You’re going to drive,” he said. He’d shoved me halfway across the cab and now lifted himself up to where I’d been sitting, pulled a joint out from his pocket, and punched the truck’s lighter with his thumb. “I’m going to smoke.”
“We both have so much to live for,” I said. To no avail—one last push had me behind the wheel. I sucked at driving the trucks and I didn’t have my CDL. But the afternoon tugged, and fighting Jimmy would mean losing more time. I did some active visualization, me returned to the yard safe, then started the truck, backed around to straighten us up, and pretended not to be frightened as I got us past all those houses and onto 135, shifting through the gears and popping the stick until the engine stopped making its horrible grinding noises.
A mile gone, the lighter released and Jimmy grabbed it and touched it to the end of his joint. “Snow cones,” he said. “That’s stop two.”
THE SNOW-CONE STAND JIMMY WANTED was on the edge of the Family Dollar parking lot in Sabine. As I drove us there the truck kept losing its smooth gear, bucking and heaving until I tamed it with blind shoves of the stick. Meanwhile, Jimmy preened: he took off his glasses, undid his ponytail, combed his fingers through his hair, all with the joint pinched between his lips. When I at last got us to the stand he said, “Keep going, keep going,” until we were clear on the other side of the lot. I lurched the truck to a stop in a row of empty spaces, but Jimmy didn’t shift from his seat. Instead, he pulled a five from his pocket, passed it to me, and told me to get him a pink lemon.
“You’re not getting out?”
“Does it look like I’m getting out?” Then, calm again, “Get yourself something, too.”
“Okay, but you’re driving after this.”
“Fine. Just let me finish.” He held up the end of his joint.
I walked across the asphalt toward the stand, a cube of slapped together plywood painted white. On each side, above red, yellow, and blue circles, stenciled letters spelled “Sno-Cone.” Inside the stand a blond girl leaned against the back counter and paged through a magazine covered with exposé photos of some celebrity’s fat-curdled belly. A donation canister for the tornado victims sat beneath the list of flavors.
“One pink lemon, one blue coconut,” I said, putting Jimmy’s five on the counter. The girl flicked her eyes at me, smacked her gum, and repeated, “One pink lemon, one blue coconut,” as if they were the two most boring flavors ever. She dropped the magazine on the counter and took two cups from the stack beside her, then turned around and filled them with shaved ice. The stand was raised up so that my eyes pointed directly at her butt. I envisioned myself somehow lodged in the tuck of denim between cheek and thigh.
“Is that Jimmy in that truck?” the girl said, back still to me as she stood at the jugs of syrups and pumped the cones with color.
“Which Jimmy?”
“You know which Jimmy,” she said.
“Well,” I said, “within the infinite possibilities of Jimmys, that very well could be the Jimmy you want it to be.”
She set the snow cones down. “Whatever. You can tell that infinite Jimmy to stop bothering me. Next time I see him I’m going to slap him upside his head.”
“I’ll pass that on to the Jimmys I know,” I said.
She picked up a rag and gave me a slit-eyed scowl. “Whatever it is you want, you ain’t getting it.” Then she turned around and ran the rag along the shelf beneath the syrups, where drips collected from the gummed and crusted nozzles. “But you can go right ahead and stare at my ass again.”
I blushed, didn’t say anything, and took the snow cones back to the truck. Jimmy was slouched in the driver’s seat, his head just above the window, watching the girl. I gave him his pink lemon, told him what she’d said, and for a few seconds we studied her together.
“She dispenses nectar,” Jimmy said, and scraped his teeth over the syrupy ice, slow and reverent. Sure, he had ape muscles and went to parties where people got drunk and naked, but he read fantasy novels, too.
After he tipped the last of the snow cone into his mouth he put the truck in gear and guided us to the street. Loose asphalt crackled beneath our tires. I ran over one more time what I’d decided to say to Angela that night. First I would ask her if she wanted a Mountain Dew, and when I brought her one I would put my hand on her arm and look her in the eyes and say she might be going back to Nacogdoches and I might be moving to Dallas someday, but now that we lived in a world with tornadoes what did that matter, we had tonight. Then I’d stay quiet for a moment and she wouldn’t say anything, just nod and let me take her to her car. And that would lead to other nights. Nacogdoches was only an hour away. I could drive there at least once a week.
IT WAS FOUR O’CLOCK when we got to Longview.
“I need something to eat,” Jimmy said. He looked at me, his eyes gone soft. It was the first he’d spoken since we left the snow-cone stand.
“Two stops is two stops,” I said.
“I’ll be quick. Please. You do something good, something good will happen to you. Rule of the universe.”
“Ha.”
“Your call,” Jimmy said. Then he smiled. “Angela Grimes.”
An acid shudder flashed through my stomach. “You know about Angela?”
Jimmy pretended not to hear me, slapped his palms on the steering wheel to the drum solo being spat out by 97X.
“What do you know?”
The solo finished, he said, “I’m too hungry and upset to remember.”
I looked at the green numbers of the clock. We could still make five if we hurried. “You’ll be quick?”
“You won’t even see me eat.”
Jimmy drove us to the Waffle Shoppe, a twenty-four-hour place on the corner of 80 and McCann with a sign that had a waffle the shape of Texas on it, a big pat of melting butter where Waco would be. Counting minutes, I’d suggested McDonald’s, but Jimmy had said he didn’t believe in McDonald’s, and then he’d repeated Angela’s name. Inside we took one of the stunted booths next to the counter, and when the brown-shirted waitress came by Jimmy ordered a jalapeño omelet. She looked at me and I said I didn’t want anything, but Jimm
y winked at her and told her to bring me a pecan waffle.
“So that girl at the snow-cone stand,” Jimmy said when the waitress left. “Beth. Last weekend I was at this party and her friend got me into a room and pulled down her pants and was like, ‘Fuck me,’ and so I did. And then Beth comes into the room all like, ‘What are you doing fucking my friend on my little sister’s bed?’”
“What’s this got to do with Angela?”
Jimmy blinked at me. “Nothing. I just needed to clear out my own shit. Beth’s the one I want and she’s just mean to me.”
The waitress returned, and plates and silverware clattered onto our table. Jimmy gave the woman his wide grin, said thanks, and sliced the end off his omelet and shoved it into his mouth.
“So,” I said. “You’ve got food in you now.”
“Oh, yeah, sweet little Angela. We go back.” He forked in more omelet. “Her brother throws big parties in Pine Tree. I was at one last night and she told me you loved up on her.”
I poured syrup on my waffle, let it pool over the edges.
“She said, hey, you know this guy, I think he works where you work, he felt me up in the parking lot, and I said I bet he was gentle, and then she said she was about to piss her panties and went in the bathroom. She had her frogs with her after some guy had snuck in her room and tried to lick them.”
“Did she tell you why she’s been ignoring me? Because she’s been ignoring me.”
Jimmy shrugged. “She’s always been one of those secret shy girls. You know, you think she’s all cool talking but then she gets spooked.” He licked mashed omelet off his lips. “I can tell you something, though. She’s primed. I’ve got a nose for it. You need to get your finger wet.”
He held his own finger up and danced it in a slow twirl. I slid down in my booth. Its seat was stitched with duct tape, the stuffing a memory, and the coils pushed back like they wanted to spring me out.
“It’ll be you or somebody else, and if it’s you you’ll hook her.”
A dizzy tingle skittered up my nerves. I darted an eye to the tables around us, empty except for one, a guy with a trucker’s beard and a folded-up newspaper. Jimmy’s plate was empty now, speckled with yellow grease and jalapeño seeds. On my own plate my waffle remained untouched, a soggy moon.
“We should go,” I said, and Jimmy turned his twirling finger at the waitress and asked for the check.
AT THE OAK RANCH DEVELOPMENT we drove past staked-off lots of plowed-over red clay and cul-de-sacs of two-by-four pine skeletons until we came to a small herd of near-finished houses. A second tornado, in the same storm, had touched down here, but it was smaller than the one in our town and had only scraped along the empty streets, tearing up roofs and breaking windows. Jimmy did his routine with the head roofer, a guy in a clean buttoned shirt and matching ball cap stitched with his company’s name. The man looked at the two of us, smiled, and told us he’d keep his twenty.
“Fuck him,” Jimmy said. He climbed up onto the bed and flung the pallet as far as he could from the house. “He wants to lug them, we’ll make him lug them. Get over there.”
I didn’t mind losing the twenty. Unloading the shingles on the ground was faster than putting them on the roof, especially once you got into a rhythm. It was four thirty now, and since Jimmy’s revelations at the Waffle Shoppe I’d had to do several of the slow-exhale exercises I’d learned in seventh-grade gym.
I hustled to the pallet. Jimmy threw the shingles down and I lined them up as they fell, pulling back as the next bundle soared toward me. Our bodies turned into simple, timed machines, I let my mind float to The Hangout. I wasn’t asking Angela if she wanted a Mountain Dew, I was just buying it for her, showing her nobody knew her like I did. Then I was telling her about living in the world with tornadoes. Her face was pointed toward mine, lips soft and open and sugared from her drink. If the stuff about the tornado didn’t work, I’d tell her I knew where the old man had died and that I could take her there, anything to get me with her. I wondered if she’d be wearing the same bra. The one before had been this thin cotton, with a useless bow between the cups that I wanted to untie and keep in my pants.
“Shit!” Jimmy yelled.
I looked back. A bundle of shingles was mid-air, meteoring toward me. I’d faltered out of rhythm, and the bundle’s corner caught my side, a deep punch beneath my ribs, then spun to the ground. I bent over, held my breath as tears gathered at my eyes and a bruise knuckled to life beneath my skin.
“Fucktard,” Jimmy said. “You awake?”
“Yeah,” I said.
“Then go pick those shingles up.”
The bundle had ripped open, silver shingles fanned out. Ignoring the throbs around my kidney, I scooped the shingles together and dumped them on the pallet. Jimmy hurled the rest of the shingles down and I fenced my brain, kept it away from that bow, and didn’t break the rhythm. By the time we were finished and sitting in the truck my side only ached a little and I was feeling pretty good. We’d get back just after five and I could still be showered and at The Hangout by six.
Jimmy drove us down McCann, then 31. No more wandering, we were headed directly home. Honks blared around us from the highway as Jimmy told me about some show he’d watched where wolves captured people’s souls. In the rearview mirror I saw we’d forgotten to tighten one of the straps. It whipped out off the side of the truck like a devil’s tail.
TEN MINUTES AFTER FIVE and the yard was already dormant, that sweet time when the start of the next day was at its farthest. The sun hung high above the far sheds, a lone white dot. The other trucks had been pulled in for the night, angled one next to the other, like children put to bed, and I had to get out and unlock the gate. As I swung it open I thought about Angela and my hand and how the two would soon join.
I had gotten the gate wide enough for the truck when a door slammed, echoing out into the yard and jostling the image of me and Angela in The Hangout’s parking lot. I looked around, caught Mike shooting toward me from the office, and at the sight of him my stomach flipped over on itself like a badly turned pancake. His face was red, and his throat made a grinding noise, like some possessed person in the movies. I clung to the gate and heard Jimmy brake the truck behind me.
Mike’s glare jumped from me to Jimmy and back again before he got his throat to working. “You took the wrong dadgummed shingles to the wrong dadgummed house! I just got a call from Greenhills. The customer came out of her house and looked up and what did she see? Chestnut shingles. What did she order? Silver Lining.”
I stood there, my fogged brain not computing what this meant for me, The Hangout awaiting.
But after another quick bout of throat grinding, Mike said, “You want to keep this job, you better get out there right now and fix it.”
The little hopes I’d been tending popped and crumpled beneath my skin. We’d have to load new shingles for the Longview house, then get the shingles we’d dropped there and take them to Greenhills—we wouldn’t be done until eight, and by then it’d be the Jasper guy with his arm around Angela, getting his hands wherever he could, making dates to see her in Nacogdoches.
“How about early tomorrow—” I began, but Mike turned his red face on me and I swallowed whatever else it was I was going to say. Jimmy started bitching, then gunned the truck and told me to come on. I gave him my chained-dog look, like just step closer and I’ll maul you. All the hours I’d gotten through and we’d fucked up before we even knew it. Good-bye, Angela. Then I dragged myself around the front of the truck and up into the cab. I mean, Jesus, but it would take a dozen tornadoes to get me the life I wanted.
THE DON’S CINNAMON
When Burke returned to his rooms from his morning visit to the sea baths, Fernandita, his maid, was shaking the bugs out of his mosquito net. He lived in cramped quarters, on the second floor of an old mansion between the wharves and the post office. The mansion’s ground floor was given ov
er to a molasses warehouse, and its top floors had been cut into apartments. Burke occupied one of these, an old bedchamber in the back of the building that was partitioned into three rooms and looked over the harbor. One room served as his bedroom, its neighbor as his small study and parlor, and the third room, barely a closet, was Fernandita’s.
“Your food is on the desk,” Fernandita said, giving the net one more vigorous shake before sweeping the loosed mosquitoes and other insects onto a scrap of newspaper. A skinny, toothless, yellow-skinned woman past middle age, Fernandita was Burke’s only companion in the city.
Inspecting his breakfast, Burke picked a green beetle from his eggs and tossed it into the grate, where Fernandita had lit a small flame, then he sat and ate as he read again the letter he’d received from Don Hernán Vargas y Lombilla. My business is most delicate, Don Hernán had written, giving no further clue to the nature of his problem. Burke hoped for a challenge, and let his mind wander once more, imagining all the possible conundrums the don might present him.
He was at the start of his life, twenty-two, a free gentleman of color who had left his home in the lower Brazos not a year before. His mother had been a slave, his father a Texas sugar planter. Burke had come to Havana after his father died, freeing him, as he thought that here he might make use of his Spanish and his knowledge of the sugar business. But his various inquiries at those trading houses open to negroes met only with vague promises of later openings, and within four months he was down to his last pennies. It was then he’d read an account of a mystery baffling the city: a nun in the Convent of Santa Clarita had been poisoned, yet she seemed to have no enemies and the walls of the convent were most secure. Puzzling over the story and the details of the nun’s life, Burke had soon figured out how it must have been done. The dentist who visited the convent had mixed her toothpowder with arsenic. Burke wrote the captain-general with the solution, and the dentist, taken by the police, confessed to the crime. Unbeknownst to the nun, she had been named in the will of a wealthy coffee grower, an uncle, and were she to die the legacy was to pass to a distant cousin—the man who’d bribed the dentist.
