Lucky Strikes

by Louis Bayard

  “Don’t see why not.”

  He put his feet on the counter and tipped himself back until his head rested against the wall. It was about the scariest position a man could find to sleep in—one tip in the wrong direction, the stool would’ve gone right out from under—but Hiram, he kept his balance, and when I checked back a half hour later, he was sleeping in the exact same position. Soon as he heard the bell over the door, though, his eyes sparked open and the stool come back down, and the words was out of his mouth before he’d even quite woke up.

  “How may I help you?”

  Chapter

  ELEVEN

  The letter from First Bank of Virginia came in the next day’s mail. It was addressed to a dead woman.

  Dear Miss Brenda Hoyle,

  It has come to this bank’s attention that you are three months in arrears on payments relating to Account #3231A.

  Previous communications have met with no response. We ask therefore that you consider this your final notice. Please be advised that, should you fail to remit one hundred and thirty dollars by June the first, your account shall be considered in default, and repossession proceedings shall be undertaken.

  Most sincerely yours,

  Mr. Wallace Paxton

  Commercial Loans

  So here’s the thing that I haven’t made crystal clear yet. For all the green Hiram was bringing in through the store, we was drowning in debt.

  It started from the day Mama bought the place. She had to take out one loan for the station, another for the house. We owed the bank, we owed the jobber. We owed the Pillsbury supplier, the Coca-Cola supplier. We owed the cheese man, the iceman, the Kelvinator man. We owed Ma Bell, we owed Standard Oil. We was okay on taxes, but we didn’t have a scrap of insurance. We couldn’t even afford to pay ourselves wages.

  The only thing we owned free and clear was the truck, and that was about nine months away from being a piece of junk—it was held together by chewing gum and pagan prayer—and if I’d gone and sold it that very day, I’d have got maybe forty bucks. Ninety bucks less than what I needed to find in two weeks.

  And I wouldn’t have had no truck.

  Well, first thing I did was call Chester. He got there toward sundown, looking damp and wilted in his blue blazer.

  “Let’s walk,” I said.

  We couldn’t walk very far, ’cause I had to keep an eye on the station. So we’d travel ’bout a hundred feet down the road’s shoulder, then cross and walk back the other side. We did that a couple times, then I handed him the letter.

  “It’s a pickle,” he said after reading it.

  “That’s one word.”

  He folded the letter back up. Tapped it against his temple.

  “We could go to court,” he said. “Buy you a little time.”

  “How much?”

  “Depends on the judge. A month, maybe two. Worse comes to worse, we declare bankruptcy.”

  “Shit.”

  “That’s not the end of the world, Melia. It just gives you a little breathing room, keeps your creditors at bay.”

  “For how long? How long you think before Harley Blevins comes swooping in? You don’t think he’s got half this county’s judges in his pocket?”

  We angled our heads toward the road. Watched a mare drag an old hay wagon up the hill.

  “I can help,” said Chester.

  “Yeah? You’re telling me you got a hundred and thirty dollars right there in your trousers.”

  “Well, not in my trousers…”

  “Come on, Chester, you can’t even afford to paint your house. You spend your days keeping poor crackers out of jail. You telling me they’re paying in cash now? I thought it was quilts and moonshine, mostly.”

  “I could call people.”

  “Listen. It means a lot you trying, but you don’t even know what we’re up against here. I mean, we’re deep in it.”

  “Then let me do something.”

  I kept walking.

  “At least give me credit for trying,” he said, following after.

  A crow landed on a split-rail fence, give us the eye.

  “I’m at my wit’s end,” I said. “I mean, how long do we keep trying? Mama used to say if you can’t make a go of a thing, it weren’t never meant to be.”

  “You think she honestly believed that?”

  “Hell if I know.” I swung my head back toward the station. Hocked a gob of spit on the ground. “I could never be sure what was goin’ on in that head of hers. Brenda’s Oasis—this is just another one of her damned dreams. And I’m the one who gets to clean up after.”

  Once Chester had gone, I headed back to the house to make sure Earle was on top of his homework. (Boy’s all right with sums but will do anything to get out of reading.) From the edge of my sight, I caught a little figure out there between the tire swings. It was Janey, her hands full of linen bandages and an old tangerine peel cupped like a stethoscope to her ear.

  If there’s one thing you’ll learn about that child, it’s that she loves playing nurse. She likes to think she’s at the Battle of Manassas, tending to soldiers. (Blue, gray, she don’t care.) She takes their pulse, listens to their hearts, checks their joints, but mostly she bandages. Limb by limb till each of those soldier boys is a by-God mummy.

  In the old days, she’d make Earle play soldier, but she’d want him to lay there for hours, dying slow, till he couldn’t stand it no more. Then she started doing it with logs and branches and fallen tree trunks, and that’s what I thought she was doing now till I saw the trunk move. A flesh-and-blood arm, answering to Janey’s call, and another arm doing the same, and soon as I drew near, I could see the arms belonged to Hiram. Flat on the ground, quiet as church, half-smothered in bandages.

  “Janey!” I called. “You oughtn’t be wrappin’ up Daddy Hiram.”

  “It’s all right,” he called back. “She’s fine.”

  So on they went, Hiram laying there and Janey whispering in his ear—You shall live, brave soldier. I stood for a stretch watching. Wondering, I guess, how it all might look through the eyes of Mr. Wallace Paxton of the commercial-loans division.

  Then I remembered.

  I had met Mr. Wallace Paxton!

  The last time we’d fallen behind on payments, Mama had asked him to come over for supper. He was thin and pink and easy to bruise, with a bow tie that drooped almost to his chest and a mustache that looked like it was ready to crawl off his face. Mama fed him some of her ham and biscuits and sun tea, and just to seal the deal, she worn a green cotton housedress that showed off her assets. For near an hour, she shined on him, and when he staggered on out of there, she said, “What do you think, Mr. Paxton? Another couple months?”

  “Well, all right,” he said.

  I took his letter out of my pocket, read it through one more time. Asked myself how I could possibly sway Mr. Wallace Paxton without Mama’s dress or Mama’s figure. Hell, I didn’t even know how to smile. Seemed to me all the advantages of being a girl was lost on me.

  I heard a whisper of tire on the gravel behind me. Rolling up to the pump was Harley Blevins’s butternut Chevrolet Eagle. The door opened, and out stepped Dudley, in that damn Buck Rogers suit, rumpling his hair and staring round.

  “You cut it right close,” I said. “Five minutes more, we woulda been closed.”

  “I know what time it is.”

  “Yeah? And where’s His Highness?”

  “Back home.”

  “Plotting his next devilment, I guess.”

  “I don’t know nothing about that.”

  “Like fun you don’t. Social workers and sheriffs. Loan officers. Before long, I reckon the U.S. Army’ll come down on us.”

  He left some spit on the ground. Smeared it into the gravel with his shoe.

  “Y’all sell Bit-O-Honeys?”

  “Sure we do.”

  I watched him walking toward the store, all arms and legs, his head bobbing like it wasn’t quite screwed on, his ears sticking o
ut like gourd shells. How many times had I seen him walkin’ that selfsame way and never given it a thought? What was so different ’bout this time? All I know is one second, I was reaching for the nozzle, and the next, I was following him.

  “Hey!” I called. “Got something you should see.”

  He followed me round to the back of the store. The noise from the road fell away, and the sun dropped from sight, and it felt like the world dropped from sight, too. There he was, looking at me, wondering what the hell was going on, and I was wondering the same thing till something lit up in my head, and I shoved him against the wall and mashed my lips against his. So hard I could feel his front teeth banging against mine.

  Now, I had always had definite notions about how my first kiss should go. It was gonna happen in a glade. Bees drowsing, birds humming. It was gonna be soft and tender, and the boy was gonna lead, and I was gonna yield, the way ladies do in the movies, all rustling silk.

  But my first kiss happened against the back wall of a general store, with gas fumes in my nostrils, gravel crunching under my feet. It weren’t tender, and it was the boy who yielded. Looked kinda like he’d been stabbed. (I found out later I’d knocked the wind out of him.) Whole thing didn’t last more ’n a second or two.

  “Sorry,” I mumbled.

  Which, now that I think on it, was the first time I’d ever said sorry to Dudley Blevins.

  I jerked my head away and took a step back, but then he wrapped his hands round my shoulders and pulled me toward him and kissed me right back. I could feel his tongue folding round mine. I could taste the peppermint inside his cheeks, feel his breath on my skin.

  When we pulled apart again, there wasn’t a smile on neither of our faces.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe we should take a walk sometime.”

  “Okay.”

  “How ’bout Sunday?”

  “Sure.”

  “Only it can’t be during church. My aunt’d kill me.”

  “How about after?” I said.

  “After,” he said.

  “Four, maybe?”

  “Four,” he said.

  “Okay, then.”

  So I went and filled the Chevy Eagle, and he went in the store and bought his Bit-O-Honey and left some money on the counter and got in his car without a look my way. I started to wonder if maybe I’d dreamed the whole thing, but as he pulled out, he lowered the side window and poked his hand out. Let it wiggle a second in the breeze. Like an aspen leaf.

  Chapter

  TWELVE

  “Melia!” said Janey.

  It was Sunday afternoon, and Hiram was dozing in his armchair, and Janey and Earle was sitting under the dining table—their den of thieves, they liked to call it—playing their ten millionth game of old maid, and I thought my way to the door was clear, but then Janey poked her head out.

  “Where you going?” she asked.

  “No place.”

  “How come you put on a dress?”

  Now it was Earle’s head poking out.

  “Would you look at that? For crying out loud!”

  “Reckon I’m allowed to wear a dress,” I said. “Don’t have to be just for funerals.”

  But Janey was crawling toward me now like a bluetick on a coon. “It’s more ’n that. You combed your hair and washed your face.”

  “Sweet Jesus,” said Earle.

  “Something ain’t right.”

  I was about to answer, but the heat went rolling up my throat. The next second, Janey sprang to her feet.

  “Holy smokes! Melia’s going out with a feller.”

  “No, she ain’t,” said Earle.

  “She is, I tell you!”

  “Melia, are you going out with a feller?”

  “Well—Jesus, I’m—I’m goin’ out is all.”

  “Who with?” Janey wanted to know.

  It crossed my mind to lie.

  “Dudley Blevins,” I mumbled.

  “Who?”

  “Dudley Blevins. Now you leave it there or…”

  But Janey was giving me her look. That I’m-so-sorry-you’re-so-stupid look.

  “What?” I said.

  “You sure took your ever-sweet-lovin’ time about it, that’s all.”

  “I don’t even know what you’re talking ’bout.”

  “Dudley’s been sweet on you since forever,” she said. “What’d he have to do, hire a crop duster and scrawl it cross the sky?”

  This was news, I confess.

  I started running through all the things Dudley would do around me. Tip his head to one side. Shove his hands in his pockets and jangle the coins real loud. Sometimes I’d catch him leaning back against the car, like he owned it, only as soon as I caught him doing it, he’d straighten right back up and start itching round the back of his head. That’s what being sweet was?

  “Nuff of your fool talk,” I said. “This ain’t a date. It’s a business meeting.”

  “Bet I know what business,” said Janey.

  “Hush up.”

  “Business!” she shouted.

  Just loud enough to shake Hiram out of his nap. He come rolling up from his chair, eyes wild. “What? What is it?”

  “Guess who’s goin’ walkin’ with Dudley Blevins?”

  The clouds on Hiram’s face melted off. “Well, now,” he said. “Mr. Sun Tzu would be most pleased.”

  We stared at him.

  “The Art of War,” he explained.

  We stared some more.

  “If your enemy’s forces are united, separate them,” he said.

  “But Dudley ain’t our enemy,” said Earle.

  “He let me bandage him all the way to the shoulder,” said Janey.

  “He may or may not be our enemy,” said Hiram, “but he’s most definitely related to our enemy. As such, he might be useful.”

  Well, if there’s one word I’d never have thought to put alongside Dudley Blevins, it was useful. How exactly was I supposed to use him? I thought of Mama plying herself against Mr. Wallace Paxton from the First Bank of Virginia, and then I thought of me banging teeth with Dudley, and it was like two different games.

  “Y’all make my head ache,” I said.

  I was nearly to the door when I heard Janey say, “You shoulda put on rouge.”

  Now, I was too shamed to admit it, but I’d spent a good half hour looking for Mama’s rouge. Her clothes was all where we left ’em, still full of her smell, but those little female tricks she used to have at her call—the lipstick tube and the eye pencil and the face powder and the tortoiseshell hair clips—they was as good as gone.

  Well, never mind, I thought, walking out to the road. I wouldn’t have known what to do with ’em anyway. He’s gonna get the real me, I thought. God help him.

  Now, it so happens I also had particular notions about my first courting. The feller was supposed to get there on time, for starters. He was supposed to roll up in—well, not a Bugatti or nothing, but a Caddy or a Packard. He’d be wearing a shirt with peppermint stripes and suspenders and a nice boater and black patent-leather shoes. Maybe an alpaca scarf.

  Well, Dudley wore a work shirt and scuffed work shoes, and he rolled up ten minutes late in an old DeSoto delivery sedan that looked like it’d been driven round the moon and back.

  “Where’s the Chevy Eagle?” I asked.

  “Hell, my uncle’d kill me if I took that out on a Sunday. This here’s my buddy Elmer’s. Drives like a peach.”

  “I bet.”

  “Climb on in.”

  Also in the courtship of my dreams, the feller was gonna open the door for me.

  “Where we going?” I asked.

  “I dunno.”

  But he drove straight and true, like he had a place in mind. Sure enough, once we’d gotten off the Loop Road, he pulled over in a clearing and cut the engine.

  “What about here?” he said in a casual kind of way.

  I peered out the window. All I saw at first was a row of poplars, but from the l
ate-afternoon shadows, a little notch peered back. A trailhead.

  “Holy Christ,” I said. “You want to go walking in the woods?”

  “Sure.”

  “But I didn’t wear no dress so I could get all nature-y.”

  To be honest, it wasn’t even the dress I was thinking of, it was Mama’s sandals. She’d seen Joan Crawford wearing them in a Movie Mirror feature, so she’d ordered knockoffs from J.C. Penney’s, but they never did fit right, so after a couple of weeks, she’d tossed ’ em to me.

  “You’re the one that’s got the dainty feet,” she’d said.

  And what a wonder it was. To know I had something dainty about me and to be wearing Joan Crawford’s shoes. Point is, I didn’t want nothing happening to those sandals.

  “Can’t we just walk on a street somewhere?” I said. “Like normal folks?”

  “It’s cooler in the woods.”

  Well, here was something Mama and I had never got the chance to talk about. What exactly happened to gals who went walking in the woods with boys?

  “I don’t know, Dudley.”

  “What’s to know?”

  “It’s just I ain’t exactly acquainted with this here stretch of woods.”

  “I am.”

  “Besides, I gotta be back in an hour. Two hours tops. They’re expecting me.”

  “We’ll be back,” he said. “I brung my pocket watch.”

  With a little smile, he drew it out of his dungarees. Old as time itself.

  “Your uncle give that to you?” I asked.

  “My granddaddy. He was with the railroad thirty years, and they let him keep it. Ain’t it fine?”

  Something in how he said that—proud and shy.

  “All I care is if it keeps time,” I said.

  “It does.”

  “Well, okay, then.”

  I got out of the car slow. Watched Dudley hoist a rucksack over his shoulder and amble toward the forest. Long, easy strides.

  “How ’bout I go first?” he said.

  “Okay.”

  “Keep me in sight, now.”

  “Then don’t go fast.”

  He slipped into those poplars like some kind of woodland critter, but me, I stopped right on the verge of that trailhead and made myself look back. There was the sky. There was the road. Dudley’s cousin’s sedan.