by Larry Brown
Puppy got up off the sidewalk. He was almost crying with his rage. “Why you son of a bitch, you hit my daddy.”
Ed Hall jumped in and popped Puppy twice on the nose, then danced out of the way. He had pretty good footwork. Puppy reached up for his nose and then looked at the blood on his fingers. He seemed amazed by it. Virgil tried to get off the pickup but he had an awful pain in his ribs. It almost took his breath away. He couldn’t believe what was happening. Puppy was following Ed Hall around on the sidewalk, swinging and missing. Ed Hall was jumping in and out like a banty rooster, hitting Puppy whenever he wanted to. People were coming up the sidewalk and from across the street to watch.
“Somebody call the law,” Virgil said weakly, not loud enough for anybody to hear him.
Puppy was starting to breathe hard and his legs weren’t steady under him. Blood was running into his mouth and it spewed out in little flecks as he talked.
“Why don’t you stand still?” he said.
“Why don’t you make me?”
It didn’t go on much longer. Ed Hall made a misstep and Puppy got his hands on him. He bent him backwards like a dancer and the tiny fists drummed on his broad back and the side of his head but Puppy bore him relentlessly to the concrete so that Virgil could see his eyes wide with fear as the bulk of the huge body that was hugging him so tightly began to smother him from sight. Puppy had him down, flat on his back, choking the shit out of him and beating his head senseless against the base of a parking meter when the city police arrived.
They sat in chairs at the jail with their bandages on. Virgil had scraped his ear somehow and his hand too and they’d wrapped them at the hospital. Puppy had numerous skinned places and bruises. They heard steps coming but they didn’t look around, just sat there staring at the wall. Bobby stopped in front of them and stood there for a second, then folded his arms over his chest and shook his head.
“Well?” he said. “Y’all able to walk?”
“I’m all right,” Puppy muttered. “Little son of a bitch.”
“What happened?”
“He started it,” Puppy said. “We wasn’t doing nothing but minding our own business.”
“That right? He says you cussed him.”
“He’s a lying bastard, too.”
Bobby looked down at them reproachfully. “Well. Whatever. I think you got more to worry about right now than the city police. W.G. called up here a while ago and wants to know what the hell’s going on. I’ve got a patrolman to take you back to your truck. He’s got your carburetor, too. Hope you ain’t lost your job over this, Randolph.”
“I hope I ain’t, too,” he said. He got up slowly from the chair. “I better not have.”
Bobby unfolded his arms and put his hands on his hips. He glanced at Virgil. “And what does that mean?” he said to Puppy.
Puppy gave him a look that Virgil didn’t like to see. Puppy was slower to rile than Glen but Virgil had always known the waters in him ran deeper.
“It don’t mean nothing, Bobby. You gonna take Daddy home?”
Bobby ducked his head and nodded. They could see just the brim of his hat bobbing up and down.
His voice was low. “Yeah. I’m gonna take your daddy home.”
“Okay then.” Puppy half turned for just a second, swung one hand out wide from his body, and looked back at Virgil, already beginning to move away. “Watch out for them left hooks, Pop.” And then he was gone.
Bobby dropped into the chair beside him. Virgil had his hands folded in his lap and he just looked at him. He’d probably have to listen to some more shit now. And still didn’t have his damn well running.
“What do you mean getting in a fistfight, at your age, right in front of God and everybody?”
Bobby was looking at him like he was a child and he expected the right answer.
“What’d he say to you?”
“What’s it matter what he said? He said something, we got in a fight, it’s over. I’ll pay my damn fine or whatever. I ain’t gonna whine to you. I don’t need you to take up for me. We took up for ourself.”
Bobby studied him for a little bit. Then he smiled a very small smile. “Don’t look like you did too good a job to me. How bad you hurt?”
“I’m all right. Just bruised some ribs a little. I just got to take it easy for a while.”
Bobby stood up. “All right, then. Let’s get you somewhere you can take it easy for a while.”
He put his hand out. Virgil looked at the hand and then he looked up at the face. A gentle smile, a big strong arm. He knew it was more than he deserved, and he was grateful for it.
“Thanks,” he said, and he let Bobby help him up out of the chair. His ribs were hurting and he guessed stuff like this was always worse when you got older. He didn’t know how he was going to get his well fixed now.
The man across the desk from Glen had been studying the application for a long time, much longer than it should have taken to read it. There wasn’t much on there. He’d worked here for two years before he’d gone to Parchman, and he’d seen this office before. Drab green walls and a crooked set of venetian blinds. A chipped tile floor and squeaky wooden chairs. He’d been wanting a cigarette but he didn’t see an ashtray and he was intimidated about asking. But it shouldn’t have taken this long anyway. The man in the chair behind the desk had not raised his head for several minutes. Glen cleared his throat but the man didn’t look up.
Wait around on this asshole all day to make up his mind. He didn’t even want the job anyway, but he had to have one somewhere. And no telling what they’d put him to doing. They might stick him back in the paint room or somewhere, have to wear one of those masks all day long, be in some cramped little place doing the same thing over and over. He was hoping maybe he’d get on in the stockroom or at the shipping dock, someplace where he could drive a forklift or fill orders and not be stuck on the assembly line putting screws in holes on stove frames forty hours a week. Handling insulation. There were a lot of bad jobs in this place, and some people had been doing them for twenty years. This was just temporary. This was just for the probation officer. And he needed the money anyway. What he’d taken out of Barlow’s register was just about gone. A few more nights of drinking and eating drive-in hamburgers and it would be gone. He wished the guy would hurry and make up his mind.
The man didn’t put the application down. He just kind of released it from his hand and let it float down to the desk. It spun a little and turned, sliding across the desk, and slipped over the edge and wafted down to the floor. Glen looked at it. When he raised his eyes the man was watching him and not kindly. The man didn’t seem to fit behind the desk. He was too big for his clothes. His eyes were cold with the look of a hawk, unblinking, steady, not cruel but not caring either. Indifferent then. As if Glen’s livelihood and his request for employment once again at the Rangaire Corporation didn’t matter one whit.
“You thow everbody’s application on the floor like that?” Glen said.
The man leaned back in his chair and crossed his arms over his belly. The chair squeaked. Outside the room there was the slam of presses and the tortured whine of metal being torn and ground away. A palpable hum of noise and the dim shriek of shouting voices.
“You don’t know me, do you, Mr. Davis?”
Glen studied him. He knew he’d never seen him before. But the man knew him, that was plain.
“Naw. I don’t know you. Am I supposed to?”
“You knew my son briefly. He’s gone now. Overseas. Fighting in another goddamned war they’ve got started.”
“What’s that got to do with me?”
The man leaned forward slightly in his chair for a pencil that was on the desk. He held it by the eraser and turned sideways in the chair and began tapping the lead on the edge of the desk. Just gently tapping it. Making tiny little noises that mixed with the sounds from the factory behind them.
“There was a basketball game at the high school. One night years ago. You might
not even remember it. I think you were drunk.”
“I been to a lot of basketball games,” Glen said.
“My son was sixteen,” the man said. “A boy. He accidentally bumped into you coming out of the bathroom and you hit him in the face and broke his nose. Do you remember that, Mr. Davis?”
He remembered a fight. He’d been drinking and fucking in a parked car and he’d gone inside to use the bathroom. In those days he used to pick up girls at the ball games. It wasn’t even a fight. The boy had never even seen the punch coming. He had bumped into him and said he was sorry almost simultaneously and had started turning to walk away and Glen had hit him with a straight left hand without thinking, automatically, and the boy had gone down hard.
The man was waiting for an answer. Glen shrugged.
“Barely. It was a long time ago. Look, mister, I’m just trying to get me a job.”
“You’re not going to get one here. You’re lucky I didn’t come after you myself. Now don’t let the door hit you in the ass on the way out.”
Seventeen dollars and sixty cents. He held it in his hand and laid it on the seat of the car and looked at it. He had a full tank of gas in the car, but it was drinking it pretty fast. He didn’t know if it was because it had set up for so long or what. He thought about riding over to Puppy’s and getting him to take a look at it, but he was probably working today.
He looked at the money again and put the bills back in his wallet and slipped it into his hip pocket. Sitting in the parking lot he looked out over the concrete walls of that big cage and thought about the lives going on inside it, how they were strapped into this place almost like he had been strapped into that other one. But they could go home at night. Their cars and pickups were waiting for them on the hot asphalt. He cranked up his own car.
“Fuck all of you,” he said out the window. “I didn’t want to work here anyway.”
He headed back up the little blacktop road he had come down and then halted at the stop sign and looked both ways. A truck was coming, stacked high with mangled pine logs, their limber ends wagging and swaying. The truck rolled past in a grind of dust and falling bark that landed in the road. Glen pulled out behind it. The car wasn’t running very well.
“Come on, you son of a bitch,” he said, watching the speedometer and listening to the motor. “Goddamnit,” he muttered. He pressed harder on the gas and it smoothed out a little, but it made him uneasy. He didn’t want to get broken down on the road somewhere. If he just had some money everything would be all right for a while. He wondered if Virgil had any. Maybe, maybe not. The little bit of Social Security he drew each month probably didn’t go too far. But he didn’t have to pay any rent, and he didn’t have to take care of anybody besides himself. His light bill probably wasn’t much. He bought a little food and whatever he drank and his cigarettes. A little dog food for that puppy. It looked like he was still raising his own vegetables. So if he was saving some, where would he stash it? Would he have it in the bank? Or would he have it stuck back in some drawer, or under a mattress? He’d never been one to use the bank very much. Glen had never even seen him write a check. His mother had kept a small account, had sent him money from time to time when he was in the pen, little ten- and fifteen-dollar checks that he cashed to buy cigarettes and 7UPs.
The log truck slowed ahead of him, turned left, and went down another road. The car smoothed out some. He guessed it was probably around ten o’clock or so. Puppy would be at work, but the old man was probably home. He didn’t feel much like spending the whole day looking for a job. It was probably going to be the same story everywhere he tried when they saw that missing three-year gap and found out he’d been in the pen. He’d have to answer all their questions, humble himself to a bunch of pencil-pushing assholes with their little chickenshit paychecks and rules and hours. Their time clocks to punch. He didn’t want any of that anyway. He just needed about a hundred dollars. That would keep him going for a while, just until he got on his feet. He thought he’d drive by the old man’s house and see if he was home.
He pressed harder on the gas and listened to the motor. It seemed to be sounding stronger and stronger.
There was a chair in the yard beneath the small tree, a magazine lying under it whose pages had been riffled by the wind. He walked over and looked down at it. He knelt and reached under the chair and picked it up, turned back the pages and gazed at the cover. A spotted trout leaped there with a hairy fly imbedded in its jaw and a line stretching back to a tiny man standing far away on the bank of a stream. The date on the cover was March 1959. He used to love to read these things and he remembered this one because there was a story in it about bears. The subscription label bore the name Emma L. Davis. One more remnant of his mother. One more thing she had done for them.
He dropped the magazine in the chair and looked around. The Redbone puppy was lying under the porch watching him. He walked toward the house. The puppy came out wagging its tail but he paid no mind to it. When it came up and tried to lick his hand he just kicked casually at it and told it to get away. It seemed puzzled, standing there watching him go up the steps and over to the screen door.
He pulled it open and stuck his head inside.
“Hey. Daddy. You here?”
A house full of silence answered him. He stepped inside and took a few steps down the hall.
“Hey. Old man. You asleep?”
The bed in the front room was empty, the sheets rumpled and swept halfway to the floor. The television dead and black. There was no telling where he was. Probably over there fucking that old woman again. It looked like he would have had enough by now. All those nights he’d stayed gone. What had they done about Bobby? Had they met somewhere? Had they done it in a car or a motel or out in the woods? All the arguments and the screaming when he came home, all his mother’s tears. Sad times and the weight of them still pulled at him. And now Bobby carrying on with Jewel. Somebody was going to pay for that. Nothing but a bunch of sorry son of a bitches around him his whole life.
He walked on down the hall, calling out a few more times. By the time he got to the kitchen he knew there was nobody home. The empty cups they’d used were still in the sink, the coffeepot sitting where he had left it on the dead stove eye. But now there was a pint bottle of whiskey on the kitchen table. He picked it up and opened the screen door. Some chickens were walking around on the back porch. He stepped out there, watchful where he put his feet. He shooed and kicked at the chickens and they fluttered squawking. The old cars baked under the sun in the yard. Some of them had been sitting there for as long as he could remember, junkers hauled in and never hauled out, cannibalized for parts, rusting lower and lower into the ground each year, his mother’s beggings to his father to remove them falling on deaf ears.
He sat down in a chair and took the cap off the whiskey and turned the bottle up. It burned going down and his eyes watered a little. He put the cap on the arm of the chair and studied the faded hulks before him.
“Why don’t you clean this damn place up?” he asked softly. He shook his head and took another drink. After a while he got up and put the cap back on the whiskey and stuck it in his back pocket and began moving through the house, looking for money.
The first place he tried was Virgil’s bedroom. He was loath to go in there, more so after he saw his mother’s clothes hanging in the closet. Standing there in front of the opened double doors he touched a white dress with small blue spots, a matching belt that hung in braided loops at the waist. He could see her walking in it, her purse in her hand. He rubbed the material between his fingers, felt the smoothness of it slide on his fingertips. He let it drop. Her shoes were there on the closet floor in a pile. Her one good coat stuffed in between the dresses. Why did his father keep all this stuff? He guessed he had loved her at one time. He didn’t know when things had gone so wrong between them. Things had gotten jumbled together in his mind. Times and events. After she’d gotten sick he’d thought of trying to escape, but it always
seemed so hopeless to him, standing at the back of a truck loading or unloading with other prisoners and looking off into the distance at the fields burning under the hot air, the thousands of acres of Delta land that stretched away to the far tree lines and somewhere out there ending in twelve-foot razor wire. The guards rode horses and carried shotguns for those who would run. Nights locked into the camps and everything outside alight with the beams from the fence and the invisible guards with their bolt-action deer rifles. He never had tried them, never formed a plan. Three years sometimes didn’t seem that long. Sometimes it seemed an eternity. He had missed her cooking. And missed it now this moment he stood looking at her clothes.
He turned away from the closet and looked at the things in the room. A dressing table like Jewel’s, small white bottles and jars still sitting there. A hand mirror facedown on an embroidered doily. Walking closer he saw envelopes addressed to his mother in his own hand. He pulled back the chair and sat down at the table and picked one from the pile, turned it over in his hand, looked at the postmark. It had been written nearly two years before. With something like dread he opened the flap and pulled out the thin folded pages. That time came back to him as he read the first lines. He was saying how much he wanted to be home and how hot it was and he could remember being on his bunk with his pillow turned sideways and propped against the angle iron that formed the headboard, a tablet on one raised knee and radios playing, the babble of voices around him and the blue pants with the white stripe down the side of each leg. Sock-footed and the overhead light smoky and dim and home seeming so far away. It all came back to him, how it smelled down there, how it sounded at night with that constant talking and shouting and radio music and how he could write a letter to his mother and make it go away for small bits of time. In the letter he never mentioned his father or Jewel. He talked about working in the fields, told her he was sorry for what he’d done, that when he got out he was going to do better. Things he wrote to make her feel better, things he knew she wanted to hear. Little lies that maybe buoyed her heart up some. In those spaces of time when he wrote the letters he felt that he was somehow with her, somehow sharing her presence across the distance that separated them from each other.
