by Larry Brown
He was careful about drinking on the road. He knew you had to give a police officer a reason to stop you. Or be just in the wrong place at the wrong time and have to drive through a roadblock.
He listened to music on his truck radio without really hearing it, his ears ignoring the songs for the thing that lay like a stone in his mind.
She was so young. She was so much younger than him. People would have mistaken her for his daughter, their child for his grandchild. By the time Fay was thirty he’d be an old man almost.
And so he worked his way around to start thinking that she might be better off without him, maybe, just in case he never did see her again. But then he knew the forgetting her would go on forever and never die. Even when he lay dying he’d think of her and wonder what had ever happened to that family of hers, the ones she’d told him about who had lived in those woods.
AND MEN. WHY did they act the way they did? Here you were nice enough to offer them a really good piece of ass and what did they do? Turned it down over some whore who had wound up dead. He was going to get his ass in some bad hot water if he didn’t talk to somebody pretty soon. People were already saying they were going to fire him. Joe Price said he believed Sam didn’t know anything about it and she was sure that was so. It was just that talk about that girl, whoever she was. They were telling so many things. And Mr. Grayton was in such a foul mood all the time now.
The top was down and Loretta’s hair was blowing in the wind. Boys in sporty trucks honked at her when they passed and she just smiled. He wouldn’t be expecting her back this quick. She shouldn’t have drank so much that night and passed out like that. Almost every time she was off she was drinking something now, and there had already been that one scrape with Mister Jimmy Joe when he’d stopped her for weaving but all he’d done was fuss at her like he was her daddy and make her go in front of him all the way home, about fifteen miles, making sure she went in with his headlights shining out there on the road. She felt sorry for his old busted foot that always hurt him so much.
She pulled over when the first beer joint came up outside the city limits. She stopped the car close to the building and got out and went inside. The door closed behind her and the car sat there running. A little black smoke was jetting out of the dripping tailpipe. Traffic passed on the highway behind it.
She came back out a few minutes later with a sack in her hand and got back into the car with it. She backed up and pulled down across the sloped lot and looked back to see what was coming and then spun out, some rocks kicking across the asphalt, the tailpipe spouting some more black smoke.
She thought Sam would be good in bed. He had good hands, a nice mouth and he knew how to kiss. All some of them wanted was to just stick it in and hump a couple of times and then shoot off in you. What the hell good was that? Hell, she wanted to be kissed, she wanted to be touched, if they didn’t know what she liked all they had to do was ask her. And it had been going so good with him, he hadn’t had to ask her anything, and then, poof, he was gone. Not gone but over there making another drink. She should have just stripped naked right in front of him. Got on the couch and spread her legs. He might not have been able to stand it then.
There was a half-pint bottle of peppermint schnapps in an Igloo Playmate on the seat beside her and she pushed the lid back and took it out. Cold drops of water fell on her white pants. She got the top off and held it in the fingers she was holding on the steering wheel. There was nothing in her rearview mirror except for one truck topping a hill way behind her so she took a hit.
So. He wouldn’t be looking for her back this soon. She’d just go over after while. Try it again and see how things went this time. He might have thought it over by now and wished he’d done something different.
The truck was closer now. But he was just a trucker. He’d probably look over at her when he passed. He might even blow at a woman in a convertible with the top down and her hair flying all over the place. She took another sip from the bottle and then screwed the cap back on tight. She decided she wouldn’t put it back in the cooler just yet. It would stay cold for awhile, long enough to get a few more sips on down the road. She could slip it back into the cooler when it started getting too warm to drink.
The truck started closing the distance on a downhill grade and she saw it creep into the frame of her side mirror and then from the corner of her eye she saw the long red and shiny nose with its chrome bumper start to pull alongside. She picked up the beer from between her legs and took a drink.
She’d just have to try a little harder with Sam. She had to remember that he was a widower and that he’d probably been messing around with that woman before his wife ever got killed. She must have been really drunk to have driven right up under a log truck. And then this girl got killed so he had a lot on his mind. All this trouble he was in with the department. She knew she could get him calmed down if he’d just let her. Then maybe they could talk. He probably needed somebody to talk to. He was probably dying to have somebody to talk to.
The truck came to a rolling pace beside her and she looked up for a glance into the high window. She had on her green halter top and she could see that it was a grinning young man up there behind the wheel. She grinned back but she kept her eyes on the road. He rolled along beside her for a half mile or so, and then he blew the air horn and she waved at him without looking and he came on around her and then crossed over into her lane, and she saw the black smoke from the twin stacks when he shifted up into a higher gear and gained speed and started to pull away from her, the truck growing smaller in the growing distance between them, smaller, smaller, tiny, finally just a moving dot trailing a thin pipe of smoke.
AARON PUT HER back into the downstairs room she had first stayed in and she took a shower. He brought some of her clothes down and took a mop and bucket to the floor beside the pool table while she stood naked beneath the streaming water and blinked against the spray that was coming down into her face. She felt better after it was over. She kept looking down for what blood was still coming out of her.
She’d have to catch him asleep and get the car keys if it was locked or find the gun if it was not hidden under the seat but somewhere else. There might be all kinds of hiding places in a house this big and old. She might have to look every chance she got.
She dried herself in the bathroom and stood on a rug that somebody had made. There were yarn birds worked into it, colored figures somebody had formed with their hands. She wished she knew how to do stuff like that. She wished she knew more about being a woman.
Even if she knew how to sew birds into a little thing you stood on naked after your shower, would she ever have anybody of her own to show now? Did something like this mess up your insides? For good? The doctor hadn’t said.
She cried then, finally, her eyes closed where nobody could see, leaning against the cabinet mirror with her sore belly up against the cool porcelain of the sink, droplets of water lying on her arms and shoulders and legs. She didn’t make any noise much.
Pretty soon, when she was putting on some clothes, she heard the El Camino’s pipes and they swept a wave of stereophonic rumbling along the side of the house that filled the air and vibrated in it and moved on out to the street and down the road.
LORETTA THOUGHT IT was time to go on over now. She hoped he was home. She was real interested in how things would go once she got over there. It might be totally different this time. You couldn’t tell about men sometimes because they’d say one thing and then do another.
She had all her stuff. She had a teddy in a Wal-Mart overnight bag with toothbrush, makeup, extra cotton panties and cigarettes and Trojans. She had some Kama Sutra oil in there and some incense and two tightly rolled joints of sinsemilla she’d bought on Beale Street in Memphis. The lingerie was a black number with skimpy panties trimmed in red and she had a garter belt and stockings that matched. She had a pair of high heels in there too so that she could get dressed up all the way if she needed to.
She turned off onto t
he lake road and went up the hill with her hair blowing back. She took a glance at that bottle of schnapps riding there with her and picked it up and looked at it. It was over half gone but hell, so what? She got the cap off and turned it up again and then looked into her rearview mirror and saw two guys wearing ball caps trailing close behind her in a pickup with a boat behind it. She sped up. Assholes were watching her drink. Why didn’t they find some other place to go riding around?
She put on her blinker and turned off and they whined past. She was looking for that mailbox. She unscrewed the schnapps and took another hit, then put the cap back on it and laid it on the seat. That mailbox was kind of hard to see, right in a curve. She kept driving, looking for it, went into a curve, saw it, hit the brakes too late and overcorrected it skidding with her eyes fixed and wide right into the mailbox and knocked the whole thing down amid some weird noise.
The dust was still settling when she got out and looked. Damn. Knocked it clean off at the ground. That was just fucking great. Now if he was home, she’d get to go down there and tell him she’d knocked his mailbox down. Or … tell him that his mailbox was down. She wondered if she had a dent in her car. If he was down there, he wouldn’t know who hit it.
She stepped around to the front, holding her beer. Looking around. Right here on the side of the road where just anybody could come by and she did work for the highway patrol. She was actually an officer herself even if she didn’t carry a gun.
She turned the beer up and killed it, then tossed the can into the bushes behind his driveway. She looked at the bumper. It didn’t have a scratch on it. Both fenders were okay. It was just that his mailbox was bent all to hell and the post was broken.
Weird mailbox too. She bent over and studied it. It looked like somebody had tried to paint something on it one time but most of it had flaked off. She studied some of the patches of paint, trying to figure out what they were. But there was just too much of it gone.
Well. She’d have to drag it out of the driveway if she wanted to get down it. She did that, laid it in the grass beside her car. She got in and shut the door and then wondered if that beer was still cold. And shit, she was still sticking out in the road. She moved it up, held her foot on the brake, reached down on the floorboard on the other side, where nestled against the hump seat sat the sack that held the beer, the top judiciously folded. Oh yeah. It was still cold. She opened it and eased rolling forward, thinking something like Fuck his damn mailbox.
It took her a few minutes to get down the drive because it was so narrow. But she liked the way it twisted through the pines. Little bridge, then the house. Cool.
Well the truck was gone. Truck was gone and the cruiser was still there so no telling where he was. Unless somebody had his pickup and he was sitting in there in the house or something.
She cut her car off and got out with the beer. It was about the middle of the afternoon. It sure didn’t look like anybody was around.
He had a nice place. Go skiing every weekend if you wanted to. She’d seen that big boat. Lord that’d be fun, ice down a bunch of beer and get out on the lake and cook hamburgers and get drunk and fuck. Swim if you wanted to, all the time, right here. Private beach down there, wouldn’t be anybody coming up in there throwing out beer cans or anything. Run their ass off if they did.
House was new, wouldn’t be too hard to keep clean probably. He was a man, he probably wasn’t too picky about how clean the place was. It would be real nice to live here.
Maybe the timing was just bad. Maybe later on everything would settle down about this dead woman and he’d talk to them like they were wanting him to and everything would go back to normal for him and she could get to know him. She could take it slow if he needed her to. Not too slow. Slow for the first hour maybe. She could slip her teddy into her purse and have it in the house, be ready to slip into the bathroom and change when he wasn’t looking.
She walked out by the edge of the yard, out by the trees, toward the cruiser. Big old trees. Good and shady. No yard much to mow. And he’d sold that beauty parlor of his wife’s, and people said they’d heard he’d made out like a bandit, had gotten a whole lot more for it than they’d paid years ago they said, so he had plenty of money even if he did lose his job. Hell, if she could get in with him, she might not even have to work. She could probably just go ahead and retire since he’d probably find something else to do if they fired him anyway.
She stood there looking at his cruiser. It needed a wash job. Looked like a bunch of tree sap had dripped down on it. Every time she’d seen him in it, it had been clean.
Well there was no worry about the mailbox anyway. She could just come back later. Some other time when he was here. She could always call him and leave a message if he had an answering machine and he probably did. She thought they required him to have one. They didn’t require her to have one but she had one. She could leave a message or write him a …
Sign. There was one on the seat of the cruiser. Looked like a piece of … beer carton.
She turned her face to the driveway behind her. It was absolutely quiet. She took a sip of her beer, cocked up the toe of one sandal, wiggled her foot on its heel and stood there reading it through the side glass. She read it twice. She looked up again. If he came in now she was just standing around here waiting for him.
She leaned on the car. It was that girl they’d been talking about. The one Tony told her had stayed with him. The one he’d seen at the funeral. The one Sam wouldn’t tell them anything about.
She sipped her beer. She walked over to her car for the schnapps and her cigarettes and walked back up to where she’d been and leaned against the fender. She wondered how long it had been inside the car and why he hadn’t found it before now. Maybe he had and had already left to go down there and get her. And maybe he just hadn’t looked in the car in a few days. Or a week. She knew somebody from the department had brought it over here. Maybe he hadn’t driven it since the fire.
She stood looking into Sam’s woods and twisted the top off the bottle again. She turned a drink down her throat, felt the cast threads on the glass neck against her lips. It wasn’t as cold now. It was almost gone.
So he’d kept not one woman on the side but two women on the side. Sure fooled her. He’d never once offered to flirt with her. Well he was quiet. He wasn’t like Joe Price, who would almost just come right out and ask for it.
What now? Go home? Sit in front of that TV by herself and drink some more beer? She was sick of that. She was sick of fucking these total strangers she met in all these bars. They didn’t have any money and sometimes not even a job and why did she have to be so easy when she was drinking? She was tired of waking up with people she didn’t know and seeing their dirty socks on the floor. She was tired of fucking these cowboys with big boots and big hats and little dicks and pleated shirts who sold insurance and drove jacked-up trucks with tires big enough for a tractor and set up so high you had to use a stepladder they carried around in the bed to climb up into the cab. She opened the door of the cruiser and reached in and got the sign and started tearing it into some smaller pieces. She was tired of a lot of things and just one more on the list was somebody she was trying to give her good loving to not wanting it.
When she had it into enough bits she carried it out toward the gravel beyond the car and squatted down and piled it up. It was hard to light at first but she just kept the lighter pushed up against the edge of the pile and soon enough it caught. She stood up and watched it burn. She looked up the hill. Nothing was coming. He wouldn’t know anything about this. She’d still have a chance at him.
The little pieces of beer carton flared up for a while and then the flames subsided. She stood there until there was only a pile of thin black crispies. And she scattered them with her foot before she walked back up to the cruiser and closed the door.
SAM WAS DRIVING, down on 32. He passed in and out of rain and back into it again, had to turn his wipers on and the cars and trucks that came
by pulled running beads of water around their spinning wheels and the tires hissed as they passed and faded into the gray blur of rain in front of him.
He couldn’t get making love with her out of his mind. That first time and all the times since then and how she had learned from him and had a joyful pride in her naked body and loved so much to show it to him. He drove thinking about all that, and the rain beat down, and the wipers slapped at it, and the red taillights in front of him were bleary and distorted. He thought he’d better go on home. Check to see if she’d called.
SHE EASED HERSELF down on the bed and propped both pillows up against the headboard and stretched out gratefully, raising her legs up slowly. The sun was bright out front but the heavy curtains didn’t let too much of it in. She just wanted to stay here and rest. That would be the best thing for her. He was going to be real nice all the time for a while probably. She wondered if Arlene would come back right in the middle of all this.
She was thirsty but she didn’t want to go out to the kitchen and get anything right now. Right now she just wanted to rest. She closed her eyes.
Cars were out on the road. She could hear them. She felt so sleepy now.
Why did that doctor have to go up in there? She hadn’t understood a thing they’d told her. She’d never heard of such, didn’t know all that was up inside her, embryos and stuff. Said they had to get it all cleaned out. She thought it all had come out. It looked like it had. She’d looked at it on her knees there by the pool table, before she’d passed out again. It was too small to tell anything about. About like a little tadpole the way it was shaped. It hadn’t known nothing yet.
Had it?
It wasn’t like it was a real person.
Was it?
It would have been, though. It already was. It was alive and it had been living in her. That was the main thing. It was alive.