by Larry Brown
He saw a car pinwheel twice end over end above a cloud of dust and a pile of torn metal where lights were aimed crazily and horns were blowing and steam was rising from buckled hoods and twisted frames and in that cloud of dust was somebody up above it, flying with no wings to the side of the road. He ran through the smoke and the shattered plastic, broken bits of red lenses crunching beneath his boots.
He heard a woman say, quite clearly, even calmly: “Mother, oh my.”
Then he was through it and climbing another bank of grass. He clawed his way up it and ran over a low mound of ground and kneeled behind a young tree to look back for a second to see the shit he had done. God almighty. He’d done fucked some people up. Killed some of them maybe. There wasn’t any way to turn back now. The blue lights were pulling in and stopping and more were coming from up the bypass. At this elevation he could see them coming, screaming, and he knew that some of them were probably state troopers. Pissed off, with pump shotguns just itching to shoot somebody like him. He got up and jogged away into the darkness of the golf course, where the short grass made for easy running. He would cross that highway again somewhere south of here. Later.
57
Wayne’s new orders came in on a noisy orange-and-white Coast Guard chopper that landed on the flight deck about 1620. Guys in coveralls and orange helmets passed out the mail and some cakes and cookies from home. The captain called Wayne into his tiny stateroom where he was working at his tiny desk. Wayne stood at attention before him, wondering what the hell he’d done.
“Stubbock?”
“Yes, sir.”
“At ease, sailor, look. SEC-NAV wants you over at Camp LeJeune ASAP for a match with this jarhead Johnson from Third MAW. I know it’s a rush job, but Admiral Hoozey called this in. Happens to be a big fan of yours. And I got a lot of shit to do. I may be getting shit-canned right out of this man’s navy for running over a sick whale. That’s some pretty ironic shit, ain’t it?”
“Sir? The admiral? Is a fan of mine?” Wayne said.
The captain nodded.
“The admiral saw you in Philadelphia and won fifteen hundred on you off the army brass. When you knocked out Stevenson two months ago. I picked up three hundred myself. Buys a lot of cold Schlitz, Stubbock.”
The captain had his pen in his hand and it was poised over the papers. How could he tell him he needed to go back to Memphis, not North Carolina? How could he tell him about Anjalee? He tried to stall.
“Sir, uh. That’s not long to train for a fight.”
The captain visibly recoiled and then recovered.
“Let me tell you something, sailor. Sometimes the United States Navy has to fight with no warning at all. Look at Pearl Harbor, sneaky bastards. You can stay on this tin can if you want to. I’m just waiting for retirement anyway. I’m short. I’m so short I can sit on a dime and swing my legs.”
Wayne didn’t know what to say. What about his headaches?
“I’m so short I can walk under a door.”
“Sir. Uh. I need to get back to Memphis sometime. Would it be possible for me to get some leave after the fight?”
The captain looked puzzled. “You just got some shore leave. Why you want to go back to Memphis? You’re from Ohio, aren’t you?”
He didn’t know what to say. He said it.
“I left something there, sir.”
“Well…”
The captain looked back up.
“What’d you leave? A girl?”
“Yes, sir,” Wayne said reluctantly. And then he stood straight and strengthened his voice. “Yessir. A girl.”
“All right, well…in that case…hmmm…” The captain hummed a few lines of “I Left My Heart in San Francisco” while tapping his fingers and then picked up another piece of paper and scribbled something on it and stamped it and handed it to Wayne.
“Look here. I got a woman in Tampa with tits that’ll make you weep when you have to leave port. You go whip this marine for the power and the glory of the United States Navy and I’ll give you a ten-day furlough. Guaranteed. There’s a colonel at LeJeune I’d like to win some of my money back off of anyway. We were in San Diego together. Asshole used to cheat me at pinochle.”
“Are you serious, sir? Ten days?”
“I’m serious as a heart attack, son.”
“Yessir.”
“Go pack your stuff, then. That chopper’s burning fuel waiting for you and it’s getting dark.”
He had to say good-bye to Henderson quickly. Everything he owned ended up in one olive-drab duffel bag. They stood in the passageway together, and Wayne tried to talk fast, but he just didn’t have time to explain it all.
“Well shit,” Henderson said, shuffling his feet. “You just takin’ off, just like that? I thought me and you’s gonna watch a bunch of movies this weekend.”
“I know,” Wayne said, and then he stopped. “I meant to tell you something. I met a girl in Memphis. And I…we…I’m going back down there. But I’ve got to fight this marine. I got to beat this marine.”
“I want to see it,” Henderson said. “I want to be there to pull for you, man, you the man with all the shit, man, you the man, man!”
“You can’t…I’ve got to go to North Carolina…”
“I’ll ask for a transfer.”
“How long will that take?”
“I don’t know.”
Then the captain stepped in between them, suddenly, from out of nowhere.
“What the hell’s going on? You burning taxpayers’ money on that deck, Stubbock. You better get it in gear.”
The captain for some reason had his helmet on. He hardly ever had his helmet on.
“Yessir.”
The captain turned away.
“Sir?”
The captain stopped. The straps of his helmet were swinging. He turned around.
“Can Henderson come, too?”
The captain got hot quick. He hardly ever got hot quick. Maybe the captain was losing his marbles over the whale shit. Maybe he’d been away from those big boys in Tampa too long. Maybe the permanent vacation he was about to get would calm him down some. And a big fat monthly paycheck for the rest of his life. With PX privileges.
“I don’t give a shit! Go pack, Henderson, I’ll send your paperwork later.” He turned away. “Hit a whale. Jesus. Even Nimitz never hit a frigging whale.” And then he wandered on off down the hallway, muttering to himself loudly about how the President didn’t know what a dork Admiral Zumo was.
Later: The chopper was sitting thrumming and jetting thin black smoke with its blades slowly winding up and it began with a small piercing whine that slowly grew into a noise that was steady and deadly and that soon blasted out every other sound, going WOCKAWOCKAWOCKAWOCKA WOCKAWOCKAWOCKAWOCKAWOCKA! The blades lifted and Wayne and Henderson, bent over with their duffel bags, scurried across the deck with their clothes rippling and climbed aboard and then it lifted off with its wheels rolling slightly and went about fifty feet aloft in front of the bridge and then turned above the deck and lifted higher and tilted and turned back toward the southwest, and its blades whipped into the night, and the chopper itself went out of sight except for its little red light that blinked steadily on its way to the great pine forests of North Carolina, where lived in those deep-green woods platoons and companies of running American warriors who sang an old song about kicking ass from the halls of Montezuma to the shores of Tripoli.
58
The cops had her in a room with a mirror in it. The ones who had nabbed her had given her to some other guys as soon as they’d gotten her to the jail. Anjalee knew from watching a million TV shows that it was really a two-way glass, and that another cop or maybe two or three more cops were sitting behind it, watching her talk to the plainclothes guy and listening to everything she said. They’d been talking to her at a desk with a bright overhead light. The room was none too clean. Broken tiles and smashed peanut shells. Some very flat cigarette butts.
They’d already
done the good cop/bad cop thing with her cigarettes. One cop had played good and would let her have a cigarette and one had played bad and wouldn’t. Right now the one playing good was back in the room with her, so she was smoking. She didn’t like him as much as the one playing bad. The one playing good had bad breath and dandruff and long nose and ear hair poking out all over the place, actually needed to have that seen about pretty soon with some type of barbering person.
The one playing bad was kind of small but muscular and had a nice clean head of hair and pretty cool clothes with good shoes, she always noticed shoes. He was outside somewhere. Maybe looking at her through the two-way glass. She wished he’d come back in because she was hoping she could fuck her way out of this.
“So,” Good Cop said, shelling some wet goobers from a paper bag. “Why’d you work over Miss Barbee over at the uh…?” He paused to chew and consult a card on his desk. “Pleasant Years Nursing Home?”
“I had my reasons,” she said. Pleasant years my ass.
He leaned forward. It was hard to keep from staring at the tufts of hair protruding from his ears. But she didn’t really want to look at his nose, either. She settled for staring at the middle of his forehead.
“They better be good ones. You could be going up the river on this one. I see on your rap sheet where you couldn’t make it as a hooker in our fair city.”
He dawdled with a rubber band for a little bit. He’d brought back the ashtray that Bad Cop had taken away and she thumped some ashes in it and took a long slow drag, let it trail out her nose.
“Some of your boys are worse than some of the ones they’re after.”
He raised his eyebrows. They even had dandruff in them. He had about the worse case she’d ever seen. An epidemic on his head.
“She slapped this old man,” she said.
The cop didn’t say anything for a moment. He just gazed at the wall.
“Are you sure?” he said without looking at her.
“She slapped him twice.”
Now he did look at her.
“Why’d she slap him?”
She waited a moment before she answered, thinking about her grandmother. She remembered how her grandmother had smelled.
“He messed in the bed.”
The door opened and the one playing bad cop stood there.
“Are you willing to testify to that?” he said.
She straightened in her chair.
“What do you mean? Why?”
“A few old people died over there who weren’t very sick according to some relatives who called it in. We think maybe she’s got something to do with it. We’re getting ready to do an investigation.”
The names and faces, the watery eyes behind the glasses hit her with a new shock: Mr. Pasternak, Miss Doobis, Mr. Munchie, Mrs. Haddow-Green. Sweet old farts every one. She leaned back and crossed her legs.
“Hey, close the door, Ronnie, huh?” the one playing good said.
The one playing bad came on in after he shut the door and sat down at the scuffed table. He was wearing an empty brown shoulder holster over his burgundy sweater.
“I like your sweater,” Anjalee said.
“So does my girlfriend who made it. You want me to tell her, Acey, or you want to?”
“Why don’t you tell her, Ronnie.” Acey said, and then scratched with all his fingers at his scalp briefly but furiously.
“You know there’s people who can help you with that,” Anjalee said.
“Who? I’ve tried everything!” he shouted. “I’m about to go absolutely! Fucking! Wacko!”
“What the shit, Ace.” Ronnie said. “Having a bad-hair day?”
“Sorry, Ronnie. Look. I gotta go wash my hair with this medicated crap my wife got me. You give her the lowdown about her probation and all that bullshit. I’ll be back later.”
And he got up abruptly and rushed out of the room. The door slammed. She didn’t feel anybody watching her now but Ronnie. His eyes were brown and sad, like a sick beagle’s.
“Look,” he said. “Miss Barbee’s healed up enough to be transferred from the Med to here and we’re holding her until we can find out if we can charge her with anything. But your ass is in a crack, ’cause you violated your probation by not going back to work at the old folks’ home.”
He leaned over a little bit. He was half smiling.
“You know what it means. Handcuffs. Wearing an orange jumpsuit. They can strip-search you and look up your ass any old time they want to. And take it from me, the women in the Shelby County Jail are not the gentle refined kind who’ll offer you a bite off their Hershey bars. You know we can send you off. Or just keep you here.”
He’d said it now and she was scared shitless all over again. What’d she ever come up to this fucking place for? She remembered all those women-in-prison movies at the Pontotoc drive-in with her mother moaning and groaning along with some guy in the back seat.
“Yeah. I know.”
“Where the hell you from, anyway, Mississippi or some fucking where?”
“Yeah. Toccopola,” she said in a small voice.
“Another hick comes to town.”
“So did Elvis.”
“Oh crap.” He laughed a short one. Then he picked up some papers on the desk and looked at them and then dropped them.
“This is your arrest report. You got nabbed by the couch cops giving blow jobs at Fifi’s Cabaret? Jesus. That rat palace should have got shut down a long time before it did. I heard Fifi got deported back to Kyrgyzstan.”
“Yeah. But they didn’t actually catch me giving anybody one.”
He folded his arms across his chest.
“It’s against the law to try to rob a bank, kid. Or to offer up your sweet monkey for money. In this state anyway. When’d you start selling your ass?”
She looked up at the wall and away from him. She swung her leg.
“A long time ago. But I worked in that club for a while.”
“How long did that go on?”
She turned her face back to him. Still swinging her leg.
“Not long. I met this guy. I’ve been with him for a while. I mean, I stayed with him for a while. I’ve got somebody else now.”
That seemed to amuse him.
“Why don’t you try for a regular relationship with somebody that doesn’t involve them paying you for sex?”
She shook her hair out of her eyes and looked back over at him.
“’Cause I guess I kinda like the way it feels.”
His eyes changed and so did his body posture and his voice got lower.
“How much do you charge?”
“It depends on what I need. Right now I need to get the fuck out of here.”
He leaned back and studied her. He lowered his gaze and looked long at her breasts. Like he was thinking them over. He gave them that little smile again.
“You know what?” he said slowly. “I’ll bet we can work something out where you can be released on your own recognizance in case we need you to help us out later. I mean, with the approval of your probation officer, of course. You’ll have to check back in with him but I can probably straighten it all out.”
Anjalee looked around. She stopped swinging her leg.
“Where’s he at?”
“He’s probably around somewhere. We’ll go find him. But it might take a while.”
“That’s okay. I wasn’t doing anything anyway.”
“Well, come on, then. My car’s outside.”
59
The little dog must have had a wet dream. That’s what it looked like. He whined and jerked in his sleep in the laundry room, behind the washing machine, for a pretty long time and his legs looked like they were running except that they were stretched out on the floor, pedaling like somebody on an exercise machine. Then his little red rubber rod came out and he leaked some stuff right on the floor. Then he went back to sleep. Or never woke up. No telling what Miss Muffett would have said if she’d seen that. She might have shit a b
rick.
60
Merlot called Farm Bureau in Oxford and told them about his minivan getting shot up, but they weren’t surprised, oh no. They knew all about it because it had been in the paper that afternoon along with the stuff about the massive car wreck out on the bypass in which, amazingly, nobody had been killed. His agent, who was an avid coon hunter and owned a number of champion treeing Walkers that were standing at stud for three hundred dollars a pop and was forever trying to get Merlot to go out for a night in the woods with him, in a low and confidential voice also informed him that the unidentified man who had attempted to carjack him had escaped from the hospital where he’d been taken to get doctored for the wounds Merlot had inflicted on him, and had superficially stabbed a Dr. Kubuku, from Nairobi, and had superficially wounded a police officer whose name the paper hadn’t released. There was also a search going on for a missing constable down in Yalobusha County, some guy named Perkins. That was in the paper, too. Merlot was pretty flabbergasted that the guy had escaped. His agent, D. C. Henry, told him it was no problem, that they had a shonuff nice late-model Four-Runner Limited repo they could let him have until the cops turned loose of his minivan and it got fixed. It had low mileage. Penelope drove him into Oxford after they did it again and over to the office on the west end of town so he could sign some papers and they almost never got away from there for having to tell the story to people over and over and introduce Penelope over and over. The only problem was that the Four-Runner was sitting in a lot over at the agency in Batesville, which was run by a guy named Smiley, but that turned out to be not a problem at all since Penelope happily drove him over on some of her administrative-leave time and they picked it up. It was a pretty cool ride. They got the keys and walked around it admiring it and then got inside it and cranked it up. It was a pearl color with gold trim on the outside and nice tan seats that got warm when you flicked a switch and it had a very good sound system with a six-disc CD changer in it. They didn’t know that the deadbeat it had been repoed from had left it with almost a full tank of gas because he was inside Larson’s Big Star on University Avenue buying a suitcase of Bud Light and some pigskins and a few Slim Jims when the repo boys grabbed it off the parking lot with a special wrecker made just for grabbing repos off parking lots in thirty seconds or less. Merlot went back inside and signed some papers to take care of all that and then kissed Penelope goodbye in the parking lot. She was seated but leaning out the open door of her red Blazer, pale smoke jetting from the tailpipe. Merlot stood inside the door and squeezed one of her cyclopean breasts surreptitiously and softly while he gave her a long kiss that he figured looked like Dick Burton giving it to Liz Taylor back in their heydays. After a while he pulled back and looked into her eyes. They were moist, but she didn’t blink. She didn’t blink much.
