by Larry Brown
It was late and Puppy knew he needed to get on home, but he hated to fold his hand. He was out of beer and he’d written a check to get into the game and it was lying out there now in the center of the table with greenbacks crumpled in piles, low mounds of quarters and dimes. There was a blue chip in front of him, two red ones, and a white one. Twenty-one dollars. He was holding two pair, jacks and eights, all different suits, and a three that he couldn’t match up with anything. And he knew better than to try and draw to a possible full house with it this late, and with this much money lying on the scuffed table, and twenty-one dollars in front of him that he could still stick back in his pocket. All he had to do was fold and go home. But he’d been losing all night, off and on, and knew it was time for his luck to change.
“What about you, Puppy?”
He glanced over at Wayne, who was holding the deck in his hand, leaning back in his wooden chair. A small cloud of smoke hovered over the table, a vague smell of musty furniture and rat poison that seeped from the corners of the room.
“I’m thinkin about it,” he said.
“Well don’t think all night. Some of us got to work tomorrow.”
He started to say something back but he’d already taken too long to decide. Good sense told him to get out, have money for gas and buy a few groceries. Trudy was going to be waiting up on him and if he came in broke again she wouldn’t even let him go to sleep.
“Bet’s to you, Puppy,” Tolliver said.
“I know it.”
“We gonna play or what?” Jimmy Jackson said. They were all looking at him and Wayne gave out a long sigh. There was an open half pint of whiskey sitting in front of him and he picked it up and took a small sip. He cleared his throat and set it down.
“What damn time is it anyway?” Tolliver said.
Wayne lifted his wrist and looked at his watch.
“Five till twelve,” he said. “Shit, I need to go after this hand.”
“I should have done gone,” Jimmy said.
It was two dollars to him and they could see how much money he had left, and they probably knew too that he didn’t have any more in his pocket. If he could just draw a jack or an eight. But Wayne probably had him beat anyway. Still, he hated to fold. All that money was out there on the table. If he could give her all that she might even treat him right for a change.
“Come on, Puppy, shit,” Wayne said.
“I’m out,” he said, and he dropped his cards on the table and pushed his chair back.
“Bout goddamn time,” Tolliver said. “Bet’s to you, Jimmy.”
Puppy got up from his chair and picked up his chips, walked over to the table where the kitty was, and brought it back over and set it on top of his cards. He stood and watched them finish the hand, watched Jimmy rake it all in with a small flush. He got his twenty-one dollars back when they cashed their chips in and then they put in three dollars apiece for the light bill and the snacks they kept in the old icebox and then it was time to go home. They put the cards away and the chips and Wayne waited for them all to get out on the front porch before he pulled the chain on the light that hung over the table. Puppy waited on the porch and then Wayne came out and locked the door.
The grass was high in the yard and the big black trees were full of dark leaves that waved gently over the silent cars parked in the grass.
“You got a beer, Wayne?” Puppy said. “I done run clean out.”
“They’s some in my cooler, Puppy. Help yourself.”
He walked over to Wayne’s truck and lifted the lid on the cooler. The others were coming off the porch and lighting cigarettes and going to their cars. He waved, said, “See y’all later.”
“Take it easy, Puppy.”
“Holler at me when you ready to lose some money.”
Wayne came on over and put his moneybag up on the roof of his truck and fished for his keys. The rest of them got into their vehicles and left. The yard was silent again after the cars went down the road.
“Thanks for the beer, Wayne.”
“Aw, you welcome. How much did you lose?”
Puppy turned around and leaned his back against the truck and took another drink of the beer. “About twenty dollars. Glad I got out when I did.”
He heard Wayne’s keys land on the fender of the truck and Wayne said, “I believe I’ll get me one for the road.”
Wayne moved down beside him and Puppy looked at the roof of the old house, stained near black with the sap from the trees. The stars were out and shining brightly and he could see them just beyond the ridge of the house. He heard Wayne rattling around in the cooler, heard him pull one out. Wordlessly he reached in his pocket for the opener and handed it to him.
“Thanks,” Wayne said. He opened the bottle and passed the opener back. Puppy slipped it in his shirt pocket. They stood there drinking under the dark trees. He felt bad about losing money again, didn’t know why he kept on doing it when good sense told him not to. He loved to play, but it cost to play, and sometimes it cost too much. But he had to get out sometimes, get away from that blaring television and all the racket everybody made. Some nights he thought he might explode if he had to sit there one minute longer. Some nights he just wanted to go play cards. Leaving like that didn’t make it easy to go home. But he had to go back home. He had to go to work in the morning.
“Shit,” he said. “I guess I better get on in.”
“Yeah, it’s late. I got to be on that dock at seven o’clock.”
Neither of them made a motion to move. The night breeze was cool and the beer was cold.
“I guess you heard Glen was home,” Puppy said.
Wayne took a drink of his beer and leaned against the truck. Puppy heard him rattle the change in his pocket.
“Yeah, I did. I guess he’s glad to be out. Three years would be a long time, locked up in a place like that.”
“I guess so.”
The beer was about half gone and he hated to ask Wayne for another. Sometimes he had good plans, solid plans, work hard and save his money and do better in general. But the weekends always rolled around and there was always something inside him that cried out for a little freedom even if it was only fleeting, like this: a little beer, a few games of cards. And it almost always ended up on Sunday night, just like it was now, out of beer, almost out of money.
“Get you another beer, Puppy, if you want one.”
“Okay. Thanks.”
He finished the one in his hand and set the bottle in the back of Wayne’s truck, then groped around in the melting ice of the cooler and fished out another one.
“I guess you heard about Frankie Barlow,” Wayne said.
The words came with no warning and Puppy felt dread deep inside himself. Something bad was coming and it wasn’t going to surprise him much.
“Naw. I ain’t heard nothin about him,” he said.
Wayne lifted his bottle and drank from it, then leaned his elbows back on the truck bed.
“I went across the river to get this beer this afternoon,” he said. “Couldn’t get in the drive over there. Cops had the road blocked off.”
Puppy wished suddenly that he didn’t have to go to work in the morning. He wished he had a whole case of beer and a tank full of gas so that he could just ride and drink beer all night and not have to worry about tomorrow or any other man, surely not his brother.
“I talked to some fellers over there at the other store. They said somebody went in Barlow’s place and killed him last night. I just thought you might have heard about it.”
“Naw,” Puppy said. “That’s the first I’ve heard.”
Their words were soft in the black and gently moving air and he wondered why Wayne hadn’t brought it up in front of the others. Maybe it was because they had been friends for so long. He stood there and sipped his beer. A fox barked and a whippoorwill was calling somewhere off in the woods that surrounded them.
“When did Glen get in?”
“Yesterday. I got up early a
nd went down and got him.”
After yesterday he should have expected this. He thought about all those nights and days when he had wondered about his brother down there in that place, what he was feeling, what he was missing. All that time of knowing it was just a break in time and events, that they were only going to hold him back for a while from doing the things he said he’d do, that when it was over he would come on home and start doing them.
“They had some pretty bad blood between em, didn’t they?”
“Who?”
He heard Wayne pause and take a drink of his beer. “Hell. Glen and Barlow. Wasn’t that the cause of all that trouble he got into?”
He felt far apart from Glen here, close to midnight, standing in this cool black yard. But he had been so far away from him for so long that it was not a new feeling, and he took another sip of his beer.
“He went to the pen cause he run over that little boy of Ed Hall’s.”
It was quiet for a moment, and he hoped Wayne wouldn’t say anything else about it, or think anything about his silence. He felt a little sick to his stomach, and it was going to be a long ride home now.
“Well,” Wayne said. “I guess I better get on home. Six o’clock’s gonna come early. I’ll see you, Puppy.”
Puppy fished in his pocket for his keys as Wayne started past him. “Take it easy, Wayne.”
“You be careful, Puppy.”
He said that he would. He got into his car and started it and pulled out ahead of Wayne. He turned the lights on and wished he had just one more beer. He thought he might be able to get to sleep if he had just one more. But he was out. And it was time to go home.
There were only a few patrons left in This Is It, it being near midnight and only the drunk and the jobless remaining. Glen was perched on a stool at the end of the bar and he’d been talking to an old man named Reeves who had been trying to sell him a car and had bought him a few beers. The old man had gone now and Glen was sitting there nursing the last one and wondering how much money he had left in his pocket. He’d convinced himself that he hadn’t done anything wrong with the girl, that she’d asked for it, that it was all a misunderstanding and there was nothing they could do to him. He didn’t much want to go home, but he knew he had to be in the probation office bright and early in the morning.
He looked at the clock on the wall behind the bar and saw the hand pointing to ten till. Nobody had fed any money into the jukebox in a while and the bartender was boxing up the empty bottles and counting his dough.
“How about one more over here,” Glen said, then turned up his bottle and finished it. The man behind the counter reached into a cooler beside him and opened a beer and set it up on the bar.
“One dollar,” he said. “Better drink up there.”
Glen took his time reaching into his pocket for the money and he pulled out a crumpled wad of bills and slowly extracted a mangled single from it. He laid it on the bar and the bartender picked it up and stuck it in his pocket.
“What’s your hurry?” Glen asked him.
The bartender only glanced over his shoulder for a moment, stacking the money in little piles before him. Glen figured he had a good bit back there. A right smart.
“I ain’t in no hurry. I close in ten minutes.”
“Aw hell.” He took a sip of beer. “Maybe you better give me one more for the road then.”
The bartender kept on counting his money. He did nod his head, though. Glen wondered just how much he had back there. The way he was kind of hiding it with his body as if he didn’t want anybody to see it. He sipped his beer and watched the man’s back. He was a pretty big man. But he thought he could probably take him.
“I said how about one more for the road here.”
“I heard you.”
He still didn’t turn his head. He was flicking bills through his fingers and stacking them. He stopped doing that and picked up a pencil and wrote something down on a piece of paper and reached for a bank bag to his right. He bundled the money with rubber bands and unzipped the bag and put it all in there. When he set it aside and turned around he saw Glen looking at it, a little blue bag of canvas with a big brass zipper. He reached toward Glen and under the counter and brought out a little hammerless revolver with a big bore and put it on top of the money. He stood there for a moment and looked at Glen.
“You ain’t finished the one you got,” he said.
Glen pulled another dollar from his pocket and put it on top of the bar. It lay there between them. “I want one to take with me.”
“You look like you’ve had about enough.”
Glen looked at the clock. It said five till. He turned his head for a moment. There was a man sitting four stools down whose head was almost on the bar.
“What about him?”
“I done cut him off.”
“What you gonna do with him?”
“What’s it to you?”
Glen straightened up. The bartender was smiling at him.
“It ain’t a goddamn thing to me. I just want another beer to take with me.”
The bartender chuckled and stepped back to the cooler, brought out a beer, and opened it and set it on the bar.
“This one’s on me, buddy. But it’s time to go.”
The bartender had folded his arms and was standing before Glen to see how things would go. Glen took another drink of the beer in his hand and looked at the money again. Then he slid off his stool and captured the other beer and went across the floor to the door. He turned around and looked back. The bartender was moving down the bar, cutting the lights off, the small neon signs that hung in the windows. Glen saw him coming around the corner of the bar and he pushed open the door and went on outside. The door locked behind him. He looked back. The bartender was watching him through a small window set into the door. He went on out to his car. There were two other vehicles out there. A small light high on a pole shed some light over the cars and the small beads of dew gathered on the hoods and the roofs. His keys were in his pocket and he got them out and opened the door and slid in behind the wheel. The motor turned over slowly when he twisted the key but it caught and he sat there revving it. He turned the lights on and read the fuel gauge. Bad news there, too, almost on E from his riding around and beer drinking. But enough to get home probably. He was pretty drunk but it wasn’t that far. The tires crunched over the gravel as he backed the car around and pointed it out toward the road. He had been thinking about Jewel and the lushness of her body, the softness of her mouth, the way it looked when she unbuttoned her blouse or slid her panties down over her legs. He’d seen her naked in the moonlight, had kissed her on his knees while she lay stretched and ready on a blanket in the woods. He pulled out into the road, checked a little late to see that nothing was coming, and then eased down the road, shifting slowly, holding one beer in his hand, the other between his legs.
It was a little hard to see. The road would get unfocused on him if he stared at it too long, so he had to close one eye sometimes to get it back on track.
He fumbled in his shirt pocket for a cigarette and fished one out and got it into his mouth. The window was down on the other side and the wind was whipping the flame of his Zippo but he finally got it lit. He tried to find some music on the radio, fiddling through the static left by closed stations and the fuzz that came over the airwaves. On a nice clear night you could get a station out of Chicago, but this night it eluded him, only brief patches of music and a lot of roaring and whining. The dial was lit, a bright red line straight across the numbers, and he kept turning the knob, trying to keep the car on the road. He almost ran off it a few times, trees and ditches suddenly veering up into the windshield.
He drank the beer he was holding, gripping the cigarette and the steering wheel with the other hand. She wouldn’t care what time it was. As long as he’d been gone, she wouldn’t care. What she wanted anyway.
The road was crooked and sometimes the car would slide over to the shoulder, where the dirt
was lumped up from the grader blades. Then he’d have to wrench it back with a violent motion of the wheel and the rear end would slide in the gravel.
“Goddamn road,” he said.
He wondered if his drunkass daddy was home. Go by there and see him, tell him what a sorry son of a bitch he is. Let him know a few things. Like what a sorry son of a bitch he is and things like that.
The road climbed up over some steep hills and it was like riding a roller coaster down into the bottom of them, rocks and gravel flying. Becoming airborne. As he himself would be if he didn’t watch it. But it leveled out a little and followed the backs of ridges, their wooded hills and vast hollows full of lush green growing things. Crickets singing in places to deafen the ears almost. What did it matter if he didn’t even report? What could they do to him? Send him back? They wouldn’t do that. They didn’t want him back, and had told him so at the gate. Don’t come back. We don’t want your kind around here no more. Because you can’t pick enough cotton. Because we have to wash your clothes and things, fix your meals. Wasting the taxpayers’ money.
He knew she wouldn’t be gone anywhere this late. She’d be home, sleeping soundly in her bed, or maybe even waiting up on him, a small light burning in the front room where she sat just yearning for him again. Before the weekend got over. Get one more fuck in before she had to start cooking all those hamburgers again. A little last happiness before all those hamburgers, that might be good. Lie naked and hold each other against a world that was so hard. And no talk of marriage again. He’d explain to her that it wasn’t good, that it promised things it couldn’t deliver, that it led to people hating each other and doing bad things to each other and then there were children and things could happen to them so that what you wound up having was not what you’d hoped for to start, a long life, happiness, good times, no. You could rock along for a while and think everything was just fine and then turn around and you were in the goddamn penitentiary. Then you’d be out there chopping cotton. Then you’d be out on the roadside in the hot sun cutting grass with a sling blade and people looking at you when they drove by in their nice cars.
