Fay: A Novel

by Larry Brown

  “Aaron?”

  “Yeah baby.”

  She didn’t know whether to ask or not. He seemed nice now. And she wanted to. She needed to know.

  “Would you take me somewhere one day if I asked you to?”

  He had a beer between his legs and he picked it up and took a sip of it.

  “I reckon I would. Where is it?”

  “It’s a long way from here,” she said to his leg.

  “How long?”

  “Long way.”

  “I mean, like, three thousand miles?”

  “No. It’s not that far. Just back up where I come from.”

  He was quiet for a few moments. Maybe she shouldn’t have asked after all.

  “Sure,” he said. “When you want to go?”

  “I don’t know. Just sometime. It don’t have to be no time soon.”

  “Well,” he said. “You let me know.”

  “Okay.”

  The dash lights were glowing up above her and she could see the little dial on the radio in the cassette deck. She could see a red wire and a yellow wire hanging down. She could see the black tape wrapped around the wires. She could hear the steady rhythm of the joints in the road hammering at the tires. His leg was beneath her head. Like sleeping in the pickup with her head on her mother’s lap one of those nights so long ago, going who knew where again to be hungry some more.

  “Where is it?” he said.

  “Just a place I used to stay.”

  “You mean back up north?”

  “Yeah. The place I come from.”

  “Sure, baby,” he said, and he patted her again.

  “Now you just sleep, okay? Get some rest and I’ll have you back home in two hours. We’ll get in our own bed.”

  “Yeah.” She closed her eyes and felt the pickup move smoothly through the night and across the land, the tires a rocking whisper now, slow down, everything’s okay, maybe the trouble’s over, ease off, sleep …

  HE HADN’T BEEN home an hour when McCollum called him. He said he wanted to come over in a few days and talk to him. So Sam started looking for him to show up, but he didn’t. Just dreading it was the worst part and he needed to get it over with. Do something. Do anything. Find out where the hell she was.

  But days passed and nobody came down the driveway. He had to go back to the doctor and get his bandages changed and the doctor sat on a stool and talked to him.

  “You ought to come up and go fishing with me. I was on a bream bed other day, caught seventeen before I lost the first cricket. Old Jerry Lee’s fished in my pond before. You ever heard him play the piano?”

  He’d already taken the old bandages off and now he was finishing with the new ones. He taped a last piece down.

  “I don’t guess I have,” Sam said.

  “Shoot. That son of a gun’s good. He used to play up at the Embers in Memphis when I was about fifteen years old. We used to slip in there and see him. I saw Elvis in there one night.”

  “Is that right?”

  “Well it might have been an Elvis impersonator. It was back when Elvis was still alive. But he looked just like Elvis. Sounded just like Elvis. Far as I’m concerned it was Elvis. That’s what I tell myself anyway. You remember where you were when Elvis died?”

  Sam remembered.

  “Yeah. I was checking licenses down on Three-fifteen. Had a drunk pulled over. I got back in my car and had the drunk in the back-seat and somebody called over the radio and told it. The chief got all over their ass.”

  The doctor mused, sitting on his little stainless steel stool. He was a clandestine smoker and now he pulled one out and fired it up. He offered the pack to Sam but he waved it away. The doctor smoked Virginia Slim Lights or something like that.

  “Course, you know,” the doctor went on. “Everybody knows where they were at when Elvis died. It was like Jesus Christ, kind of, wasn’t it?”

  “I guess it was,” Sam said, and started putting his shirt back on.

  The doctor said, “Did you ever see him anywhere?”

  “No. I never did.”

  “I never did either except for that one time up in Memphis. But that was a long time ago.”

  Sam finished dressing and then buckled his belt.

  “Well,” he said. “I guess I’ll get on. I appreciate everything you’ve done for me, Howard.”

  The doctor stood up and took a drag, thumped his ashes into the trash can where he’d thrown the bandages.

  “Shit, Sam, anytime. Come on up and go fishing with me sometime. The Killer might be out there one day, you never can tell.”

  “I’ll do it,” Sam said, but he knew he never would. He liked the doctor but when this was over he wouldn’t want anything to remind him of these last weeks and he wanted to try and forget as best he could about the burning man in the truck. And the charred boy in the road. McCollum was coming to see him. He kept thinking about that.

  He shook hands carefully with the doctor and went down the clean white halls of the hospital and jingled the keys in his hand. His truck was sitting in bright sunlight in a pool of heat and he unlocked the door and slid onto a hot seat. As soon as he had it cranked up he turned on the air conditioner full blast and sat there until it cooled off a little. He’d sold Amy’s shop the day before to the two girls who had worked for her, Suzy and Amber. He could have probably gotten more for it if he’d turned it over to a real estate agency, but he’d wanted to be rid of it and had let them have it for a hundred and thirty-five thousand. The check was in the bank and the billfold in his back pocket was packed full of hundred-dollar bills. Just in case he needed anything.

  He backed out of the parking slot carefully, retrieving his Ray-Bans from the visor and slipping them on. The dash vents were roaring cold air directly into his face and he drove to the end of the parking lot and stopped. Looked both ways. He pulled out and turned right and went two hundred yards and put on his blinker just as he got to the gas station. He stopped under the metal roof and shut off the truck and got out.

  He felt pretty good, considering. He took off the gas cap and put it on top of the bed wall and turned on the pump and put the nozzle in. He locked it down at a slow flow and watched the numbers rolling on the pump for a few seconds, then went on inside.

  Ludell was behind the register with a few customers in front of her. She was short and wide and today she had on a blond wig. Some days she wore a red one.

  “Hey sugar,” she said.

  “Hey Ludell. You got any catfish?”

  Her blunt fingers moved nimbly over the keys and she reached up for a pack of cigarettes.

  “Yeah but you better git it now.”

  He went around the people waiting and looked into the warmer. There were seven or eight fillets left. Plenty. He didn’t need but two or three.

  He turned away and went down to the beer coolers and stood there for a second, then opened a glass door and reached in slowly for a six-pack of Michelob. He moved to the chip rack and stood there studying the bags, then reached for some barbecued pig skins. Something to munch on sometime. He’d figured maybe she’d write him. Hell, did she know the address? By the time he got back up to the register there was only one person left and he was paying. Ludell took the money and gave him his change and the guy shuffled toward the door lugging his sack of dog food. Sam set his beer up on the counter and reached for his billfold.

  “You get them bandages changed?” she said.

  “Yeah, just now.”

  “Let me see em over here a minute, baby doll.”

  He smiled and put his billfold on the counter and held his hands out. He’d known her since she was sixteen and had a two-year-old baby that she kept behind the counter. Now she was twenty-five and had four more but none of them were in today. She turned his hands this way and that, examining them critically.

  “That ain’t too bad,” she said.

  “No. Not too bad.”

  “You got to be more careful. Can you cook and stuff?”


  “I manage. Can I have some of that catfish?”

  “You can when I’m done holdin hands with you. When you gonna take me out like I been askin?”

  She turned loose of one of his hands but held the other one in a static handshake, massaging the length of his thumb with hers, studying the bandages. A few of the buttons on her knit pullover were undone and she was showing about ten inches of dark cleavage.

  “I don’t know,” he said, and began to mumble some stuff about trying to take it easy.

  “Huh,” she said. “You take me out I’ll show you a good time. I can drive and everything. And you ain’t never seen me git dressed up.”

  “Maybe we can take a ride sometime, Ludell.”

  “Well don’t just think about it, do it. I take off every day at four. Sharp. And you know where I stay. I’ll send them younguns over to Ruthie’s.”

  “Where they at now?”

  “Over at Ruthie’s. How much catfish you need?”

  When he got back out to his truck he went around to the driver’s side and opened the door and set the sack on the seat, then took the nozzle out, replaced it on the pump and put the cap back on the gas tank. He had a cold one open by the time he pulled out of the station. Thinking about everything so much made him want to drink more. There was some relief in it.

  He took some long swallows once he was on the road back to his house and reached in and tore off a piece of the fish and took a bite. His new bandages were going to get grease on them. Unless he used rubber gloves. But Ludell had put some napkins in the sack and he got one to wipe his fingers on. He was thinking he might just find an empty picnic table under a shade tree on the lower lake and eat there.

  The road was newly overlaid and a deep black with stark white lines along the shoulders but they hadn’t put in the center line yet. He slowed down when he saw the road crew but they were stopped, he guessed to reload with paint, and they moved him through with a red flag. He waved.

  He tried to remember when it had been that he’d taken Fay down this road and he knew it was the day they buried Amy but now the date wouldn’t come to him. He couldn’t see how he could have failed to mark it in his mind. He gave his head a slight shake and took another long drink from his beer. He still had enough time off to head south and get a hotel room somewhere down there. If he left on a morning he could be there easy before dark. He could just be a tourist for a few days. Nobody had to know that he was a cop. It wouldn’t be any problem. It was a slim chance but at least it was a chance. There was no telling where she was but he knew he wouldn’t be able to sit around the house by himself for long. Hell no. He had to look for her. Lost people got found sometimes.

  The road was curvy and sometimes he met cars and trucks towing pop-up campers or boats or trailers hauling four-wheelers. It was this way now every day in the summer.

  Where the road forked he kept going straight and rolled through the curve at the base of the levee and looked up at the tractors mowing the back bank at a steep slant. He didn’t want that job. He didn’t know how they kept from rolling over and he knew that sometimes they did.

  He cut his speed and started looking for a good spot under some of the trees. He took the second road in and cut his speed to ten miles per hour. The road ran under the trees and it was shady and relatively cool there. He cut his air conditioner off and rolled down his window. People were everywhere wearing shorts and swimming suits, tending their fires or blowing up air mattresses for waiting children or just sitting in lawn chairs eating and drinking. A peaceful camp of humans. He liked them this way. He didn’t like them the other ways he so often saw them.

  There were a couple of empty tables but they were close to where people were camped. He didn’t want to get too close to anybody if he could help it. He slowed enough that a person walking beside him could keep up and just kept watching around him. But soon the road curved back toward the dam and he drove back out to the highway and stopped. Two trucks were coming from the right and one put on its blinker and turned in beside him and the other one kept going. He pulled out behind it, taking a sip of his beer, checking things out in his rearview mirror. It was an almost constant habit when he was in the cruiser, a thing born of long years of driving. He felt sometimes like he’d spent two thirds of his life behind the wheel of a car, the same roads over and over.

  At the next place he turned in again and drove into another grove of trees. This one didn’t look so full. It looked pretty full over close to the beach, but he didn’t go that far. He saw five or six tables off to the left and he turned slowly off the asphalt into the grass and drove the pickup carefully over to the closest one and stopped and shut it off.

  There was a good breeze blowing there and he set his stuff down and stepped over the concrete seat and eased down. He put both feet under the table. The catfish was still hot and he pulled out the white bag that held it and reached in for some packets of ketchup like those you get from a burger dude. Napkins too. Ludell had always had the hots for him. A lot of women liked cops and he guessed there was something about the uniform or the authority or something he never had been able to figure out.

  He wished he had some lemon juice. Just didn’t seem right without it. But it was only a gas station. The Michelob was about to get warm so he finished it and tossed the bottle toward an open fifty-five-gallon drum with a plastic liner and it sailed in. He opened another one and threw the cap at it but missed. He got up and walked over there and picked it up and put it in the garbage.

  After he finished eating, he opened another beer and he got back in his truck. He backed out and pointed it toward home, but then turned and went back across the base of the dam so that he could drive around the curve and take the upper fork and then ease across the levee before sundown and look at the water.

  It was still bright with sun and the ski rigs were busy working across the waves. He could see the red bluff where his house sat once he got a third of the way across. The speed limit was thirty but there was nobody behind him so he slowed to a crawl. He had the window open and the breeze was blowing in and they had Johnny Rodriguez on the radio singing about a woman who had a hillbilly heart. He thought he knew one like that but Fay would have lost a part of her life if she’d stayed with him, that’s what came to him. Never would have gotten to run around with boys in souped-up junkers, never would have kissed a boy with beer on his breath on some dim road in a pine forest, never would have hung out with single people her own age or gone to movies or had dates or talked on the telephone to her friends and girlfriends or slept over with them. Never would have gotten to ski with young friends like those he could see down below streaking across the lake and gleaming wetly in the joy of their youth.

  So lost in thought he was that the horn on the car blared before he even saw it and he jerked the wheel to the right as the car came by, the people in it studying him with strange looks. Somebody was behind him now, too. He sped up some and watched the road a little better. Far out in the distance the trees lined the borders of the lake like faint green velvet, but the water was too choppy to mirror those images. Never before late evening or morning.

  She would have just gone straight to being married and a mother. And now if he couldn’t find her she was going to go ahead and be a mother without the marriage. Unless she got rid of it. Would she do that? Did he even know her well enough to be able to decide if she’d do something like that or not? But she’d spoken fondly of children, that much he knew. He didn’t think she’d get rid of it.

  Why wouldn’t she come back or at least call and let him know she was okay or where to come get her? Hell, if nothing else, just to let him know she was alive. Because there was always that to think about, too. Somebody could grab her. It happened.

  The beer was almost warm by the time he got to the end of the levee. He finished it and dropped the bottle on the rubber mat on the passenger side and settled his hand on the wheel and sped up once he got out of the thirty mile an hour zone. Four curves and he
was turning down the road that led to his driveway. He stopped by the mailbox and lowered the lid and it was crammed with magazines and bills and circulars. He had to reach twice to get it all and pile it up on the seat beside him. A little more of the bird was gone now. It was down to about half a bird. He guessed one day before it was all completely gone he ought to take it down and put it in the house and get a new one. Soon. He’d do that soon.

  He wasn’t expecting company but he had some when he pulled into the yard and parked. A red Olds ’88 convertible was parked behind his patrol car and on the porch steps sipping a wine cooler was the little thing whose voice was so sweet when she answered him on his radio. She had on a pair of white jeans and a red-checked shirt whose tails were knotted about her midriff. It was the first time he’d ever seen her out of uniform and he could tell she filled the jeans pretty good.

  He got out with the rest of the beer and left the mail on the seat. She was sitting there grinning at him when he put one foot on the first step.

  “Hey Sam. I thought I’d come by. Hope you don’t care.”

  “I don’t care, Loretta. How’d you find me?”

  “I just asked around.”

  Jimmy Joe had told her, maybe Joe Price. She was just a little bit drunk and grinning. Not too drunk. She was just about to slide over the edge. He didn’t know if he wanted her to. It would be so easy to slide himself.

  “You ain’t drinking and driving are you, Loretta?”

  “Look who’s asking,” she said, pointing to his beer.

  “I ain’t drunk,” he said, and went up the steps and stopped beside her.

  “Neither am I.”

  “I may get that way, though. Why don’t you get up and come on in? How long you been out here?”

  Once in the house she excused herself quickly to go to the bathroom and he nodded toward it. He put the beer in the icebox and pulled out a canned Coke and got ice from the bin and put it in a glass. There was a cabinet beside the icebox high up where he kept his liquor and he reached up for a fifth of Evan Williams and pulled it down and tore the seal with his teeth and the bottle made a bubbling noise when he tipped plenty of whiskey in. It was a big glass. He popped the Coke open and poured it full. He set the can down and picked up the drink and sipped it. It was too strong but that was okay, standing there sipping it, looking down the hall to where she had gone.