Empty Pockets

by Dale Herd

  Jack Cutler slid them all back together.

  The man, a sallow-faced, thirty-five-year-old in a brown suit and a bolo string tie said, “I know it’s evil, but I can’t help myself. You can’t help me, can you? Tell me how I can stop,” yet excited looking as he spoke.

  Jack put them back in the glove box.

  The next man had an old Cadillac without air-conditioning and a real sheriff’s badge, which kept him from getting speeding tickets, he said, and a plea, after Jack said, “It’s not for me,” that he shouldn’t think he usually wanted to do this, this was a special circumstance that he knew he would pay for later, that just to have these thoughts was a sin.

  The feeling off this man was slightly different than off the previous man. This man was genuinely upset. It was as hot inside the car as it was outside, and Jack thought, How can people stand this heat? His T-shirt was soaked in sweat.

  The third ride was into Pensacola, this driver saying his mother was dying of cancer and he was only driving up and down the highway as he didn’t know what else to do. She was hospitalized right now, and he would drive Jack as far as Mobile, he had nothing better to do, if Jack would. Then he got mad and said, “I could kill you. I could strangle you in your own spit, you know that?” They were already into the industrial section on the outskirts of Pensacola.

  Jack looked at the gray stubble under the dyed-black mustache, the broken vein in the man’s right eye. The man’s hair was coal black and shiny like it had been painted. Jack didn’t know what to say, so he said, “You think your mother would like that?”

  “You’re getting your scrawny ass out here,” the man said, then softened his voice and warned Jack to watch out for the niggers, that he was likely to get his head broke if he tried sleeping off the road and wasn’t careful, that every year some unknown white boy was found dead along these roads, usually a northern white boy, dead with a fractured skull, that this country had no place for people who didn’t belong here. “You hear what I’m sayin’ to you?”

  “Sure,” Jack said, getting out. “Thanks. I’ll remember that.”

  It was a long walk into the heat-drenched town carrying the duffel. Jack bought some grilled chicken on a stick from some kind of a Cuban street vendor and then saw a pawnshop and went inside.

  There was a big silver floor fan set up on the glass counter blowing warm air toward the doorway. The air was really warm. It took a moment for Jack’s eyes to adjust. He tried on a pair of snakeskin cowboy boots that fit him like they had been custom made. They were six dollars. He thought very carefully about them. He only had thirteen dollars left. What was six dollars? In L.A. they would cost two hundred. If he could find them. How far would seven dollars take him? How far would thirteen? The bicycle was five dollars. Jack was sick of homos and rides from homos. The bike was an old-fashioned American standard, large balloon tires, single-speed sprocket, a black rubber pedal on the left, only a shiny steel peg on the right. The pawnbroker didn’t have another pedal.

  “It’s still a good deal,” he said, over his toothpick.

  It was dusk by the time Jack made his way through Pensacola.

  He knew he couldn’t sleep under the city pier, not knowing what the tides were doing, but it felt good to be moving in the humid air on the old road to Mobile. He pedaled easily for some time, the canvas duffel strapped across the thick handlebars, glad he’d spent the money for the bike, with all the landscape lying quietly and clearly in front of him, detailing exactly how everything was so he didn’t miss any of it.

  He was well out of the city by now, and he rode across a concrete bridge raised some thirty feet over a wide, lush delta and a shallow, meandering river. He stopped and got off and stood there for a while. The evening star was out and the sky was rose colored and reflected off the surface of the water. Swallows were flying out from under the arches of the bridge, working in long, then quick, turning curves and slashes in the darkening air above the river grasses.

  Jack wondered what they were feeding on.

  His legs felt good and he felt good, but about ten miles farther out a truck came by and almost hit him, honking its horn as it swerved out of the way, and he began to worry about riding in the dark.

  It was almost an hour later when he came into Magnolia Springs.

  Across the road was a hardware store with its lights on. The building was old and painted yellow. He rode across and rested the bike against the wall. There was a veranda, and a bell jangled as he crossed the threshold.

  From the backroom a woman’s voice called, “Be right there.” A short, gray-haired woman with her hair tied back in a bun, wiping her hands on an apron, came out.

  “I was pouring out some old coffee,” she said. “What can I do for you?”

  He told her, and she left and brought back a box of reflectors. He took a big, round red one and asked if she had some scrap wire. The reflector was sixty-five cents, and she brought the wire when he was outside trying to figure out where to tie it on.

  “Why don’t y’all tie it under the seat?” She sat down on the steps. “Hang it from the coils.”

  “That’s a good idea,” Jack said, already starting to wire it into place.

  “Where y’all coming from?”

  “Pensacola.”

  “Lord, that’s a long way. You mean you rode that bicycle from Pensacola?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” he said. “It’s not that far.”

  “Let me fix us some coffee,” she said.

  Jack sat down on the steps. She came out with the coffee and sat down again. Across the road the streetlight was swarming with bugs. Her oldest boy was dead in Vietnam, she said, he’d been about Jack’s age.

  “His name was William, but we always called him Beau. Were you in the war?”

  “No,” Jack said, “I got out of it.”

  “I’m glad,” she said. “Let me get you some more coffee.”

  “No, I don’t want to bother you. I should get going.”

  “It’s no bother,” she said.

  “No, I need to go.”

  “Where are you going to sleep?”

  “Somewhere down the road,” Jack said.

  She reached out her hand and touched his, held on to it for a moment, and he thanked her again, giving her the coffee cup, and walked off the porch and got on the bike and waved good-bye to her.

  For the next few blocks a dog began chasing and barking at him and then fell back. It was quiet for a while, and then he was moving up alongside a wide waterway with the road running empty of cars. Lights came from houseboats moored on the far shore. Voices sounded across the water, and he saw the silhouettes of a man and woman standing inside a lit doorway of a houseboat facing each other, the air smelling of brine and oil and mud. And then it was dark and he pedaled until much later, swarms of mosquitoes attacking him as he rode, and slept on the floor of a tiny laundromat on the outskirts of Mobile that luckily had screens on the windows. Some of the mosquitoes had been biting right through his jeans. He never knew they could do that. He’d always hated mosquitoes, and now he hated them even more.

  He was really glad to be off the road.

  “It’s the cold,” the pawnbroker had said. “I think the cold keeps it repressed and they get down here in the heat and just let go.

  “They drive down from Chicago, all them northern boys. What they do is rent an entire motel, like the Windjammer down in the Keys, that’s got all the rooms facing an inner corridor, ’n’ once everybody’s checked in, unlock all the inside doors to every room, ’n’ then go around and lock all the outside doors so’s no one else can get in.

  “About a hundred of them boys all through the holidays, never go outside once. Not even to eat, bring all their own food with ’em, see.

  “Them are the boys that musta been picking you up.”

  In the morning Jack’s body was stiff, his thighs swollen, and his right foot sore from the steel peg. There were bites all over his body, and blood on his lower back and th
e side of his neck that came off in smears on his fingers.

  When he went out the air was already muggy and, following the road inland along a bayou, a warm wind rippling the brown water, Jack went by a series of fishing shacks on posts in the low tide mud, then along the tree-shaded road past a mile of abandoned-looking, tin-sided warehouses, and on out into the real countryside with the wind dying as the heat increased.

  Everything was pedaling, pedaling, pedaling.

  Purple and red flowers wildly lined the road. A farmhouse cleanly white in the distance was surrounded in thick waves of elms. The bicycling grew harder, and he was standing, counting the strokes, going up another hill, then he was coasting, the wind blowing the heat off his face. Far ahead the road had water on it. The tires ran silently. There were fields and fields and fields. The trees were spread far apart, stilled, growing, looming up. The spokes caught the wind and howled. Birds curved leftward above the trees. The road leveled off. The heat was pulling sweat from him in warm rivulets. His T-shirt was soaked. Everything was dreamlike. He needed something to eat. He let the bike coast on out and fade to a halt. He got off and walked. The trees were in closer, growing right to the edges of the road. You could only see a little way in between them. He pushed the bike, ate an orange, and got back on again and started slowly moving his legs, not trying to do anything but quietly ride.

  He rode all morning, drinking water as he went, rarely seeing any cars, the landscape heavily wooded now, more pine than deciduous, desolate, the heat seeming to change in density with each mile he went. The arch of his right foot was beginning to ache, and he thought, I should get some pieces of wood and tie them together on the peg.

  His foot really began to hurt and, coming to an abandoned watermelon stand, he stopped to rest and find some wood to tie onto the peg.

  He rested the bike against a corner of the stand and looked around; maybe there would be a well with some water to refill his bottle. All around him the landscape was perfectly quiet.

  There was nothing and going inside he lay down on a bench under the broken roof and looked up at the sky. Towering cathedrals of clouds, sun-filled in their centers, drifted across the broken opening. The air was so hot it was palpable.

  The pawnbroker said the woods were full of snakes, that snakes would be on the move looking for water because of the heat.

  Jack leaned over and looked under the bench.

  “If you smell cucumbers,” he’d said, “that’s a copperhead. My momma got bit by one. She was picking peaches and jumped down by a fence and got bit on her ankle. Every year at the same time her ankle’ll turn the color of copper, with purple patches on it. You don’t wanna go off the road and camp in the woods. Hope is your best shot with a cottonmouth. There ain’t nothin’ else you can do. Just make sure you don’t step nowhere near one.”

  Outside the road glistened, the surface of the asphalt a slick black as the heat brought up the tar. The tires of the bike were heavy with the tar.

  How much hotter could it get?

  Wiping sweat off his face, he lay back down, grateful for the shade.

  Another enormous cloud drifted across the edge of the roofing.

  When Jack awoke he realized he hadn’t even known he’d fallen asleep and, sitting up, saw that his thighs were even more swollen. He had to walk around for several minutes to get them loose enough to get on the bicycle again. He had cooled down some, but the air seemed even heavier than when he fell asleep, and within three minutes of riding he was again drenched in sweat.

  He hadn’t fixed the pedal and every time he pushed, pain shot through the arch. He pedaled on his toes, but after a while that began to hurt. On the flats he would pedal mostly one legged. When he came to the slightest grade he got off and walked, pushing the bike.

  The sky was completely clouded over now, and coming down a long hill he saw a small crossroads store painted dark brown. Two yellow gas pumps stood on concrete biscuits in the dirt driveway. The roof was tin that extended out as a canopy for the pumps.

  As Jack bumped off the pavement and rolled onto the dirt he saw a large Jax Beer, a large Nehi, and a smaller red Coca-Cola sign nailed along the open door and a long wood bench against the wall. He was really thirsty. He got off the bike and walked it over to the store, then leaned it up against the wall. There was an outhouse against the stand of pines behind the store, and at the side of the steps a thin black hose coming out from a spigot.

  He ran the water for a moment and started to drink. The water was warm and had a rubbery, bitter taste, and he spat it out and then ran the water over his head and neck, letting it soak into his T-shirt.

  He could hear voices coming from inside the store and he turned the water off, coiled the hose, and set it back down on the dirt.

  The store was dark inside and the floor creaked as he walked in and the voices stopped.

  An old man was sitting on a stool behind the counter and two other men were sitting in chairs by the ice cooler. Jack walked over to the cooler, slid open the door and reached down in the cold water and fished out a glass bottle of Coke. He popped the cap in the bottle opener, then picked out four yellow apples from a peach basket full and carried them to the counter.

  “That’s a dollar ’n’ two bits,” the old man said, “less’n you’re not drinking the Coke here.”

  “No, I’ll drink it here,” Jack said. “I’ll drink it out on the bench.”

  The old man didn’t have any teeth in his mouth. They were in a water glass by the cash register. An open tin of Copenhagen was next to the glass. He obviously chewed the tobacco without his teeth. There was a small, barefoot boy with close-cropped blond hair and blue coveralls standing next to one of the men in the chairs, staring at Jack.

  “Y’all’s a Yankee,” the old man said as Jack put the apples on the counter.

  “No, sir,” Jack said.

  “Yes’n you are.”

  “Y’all ain’t stirrin’ up trouble, are ya?” came a voice from the corner.

  This was the skinny little man in the farmer coveralls whose eyes Jack had felt on him when he took out the Coke.

  “What trouble?”

  “Niggra trouble,” the little man said.

  “No, sir,” Jack said.

  “Tha’s good,” the old man said. “Tha’s good. Where y’all from?”

  “California,” Jack answered.

  “California,” said the little man, looking over at the old man behind the counter. “A Californian is the one that’s shot Medgar Evers.”

  He looked at Jack. “You know that?”

  “Who’s Medgar Evers?”

  The old man behind the counter laughed. “One of them uppity niggras that lived in Jackson.”

  “California’s fulla queers,” the little man said, “you know that?”

  “I don’t know that,” Jack said.

  “You go to school?” Jack said to the boy.

  “I ain’t big enough,” the boy said.

  “How old are you?”

  “Six.”

  “Lemme explain it to you,” the storekeeper said. “People like you don’t know the history of the South. After the war them niggras, or colored folk, whatever you want to call ’em, was as bad as could be. Hell, they was rapin’ ’n’ lootin’ ’n’ killin’, getting all big headed, causing the worst of their own troubles. Now that’s how the Ku Klux Klan rose up. Keep ’em from taking everything, see.”

  Jack glanced over at the little boy, who was staring back at him. The other man, sitting back in the shadows, said, “Why you lookin’ at my boy?”

  “I’m not,” Jack said.

  He took out five quarters and laid them on the counter, pushing them to the old man.

  “You know why niggras have big nostrils?” the little man said.

  Jack didn’t answer.

  “’Cause they got big fingers,” he said, laughing.

  Jack took the apples and the Coke, glanced back at the two men and the little boy, and walked outsi
de.

  Far off across the road, rain was slashing down into a hillside of trees. The rain was blue gray with sunlight at the edges. He sat down on the bench and watched it lashing the trees in marching columns of shifting smoke, leaving everything behind a bright, gleaming green. He put the apples on the bench. The Coke bottle was cold from being in the icy water of the metal cooler and he pressed it against his temples and cheeks, then the sides of his neck, before drinking it.

  He could hear the same voices coming from inside, but he wasn’t listening to what they were saying. He didn’t care what they were saying. He took the Coke down in several long, smooth swallows, feeling the burn in his nostrils and throat.

  There was an open wood box by the doorway half-filled with empty pop bottles and he got up and put the bottle in one of the slots, then walked back and picked up the apples, taking them with him out into the heat, tucking them inside the duffel, and got on the bike, thinking how quickly the sky had clouded over.

  He rode out onto the roadway, going up a slight hill along a split-log pine fence. Far up the hillside a band of horses stood side by side, not moving, nose to tail, tail to nose, heads drooped to the ground, not feeding, the heat too heavy for their bones.

  As Jack came closer, the air extremely heavy now, he expected them to move or to look up, but they did neither, just stayed as they were. And suddenly the rain broke, silver sheets drenching everything, Jack could barely see, soaking everything through and through, everything immediately cool, three days and nights of steadily numbing heat gone in an instant, all the horses suddenly whirling, two sprinting off in the sheer joy of the rain, the bay revealing itself as a thoroughbred racing full out, rapidly away down the fence line, a brown blur washing out in the silver.

  And just as suddenly the rain was gone, and Jack rode until dusk, sometimes walking, sometimes coasting, seeing nothing save the second-growth pine mixed with the deciduous trees and the thick tangles of brush. The pine was patched with blister rust, and once Jack thought he saw a snake vanishing into a dry clump of grasses and he didn’t like the feeling it gave him.

  That night he slept in an empty farmhouse on top of a broken kitchen table, hanging the duffel up on a nail so nothing could crawl into it, then taking his jeans off and folding them into a pillow. For a time he sat up in the dark, eating an apple, stretching his legs out, trying to get comfortable.