Joe

by Larry Brown

  The old man immediately reached over with grimed fingers and picked up a sardine daintily and bit it once and bit it twice and it was gone.

  “That was his,” she said.

  “He ort to been down here,” he said, chewing, wiping.

  The boy had moved far back in the brush. They listened to him while the beans warmed.

  “How much longer?”

  The woman stared into the fire with a face sullen and orange.

  “It’ll be ready when it gets ready.”

  She looked off suddenly into the dark as if she’d heard something out there, her face grained like leather, trying to smile.

  “Calvin?” she called. “Calvin. Is that you?”

  “Hush,” he said, looking with her. “Shut that shit up.”

  She fixed him with a look of grim desperation, a face she wore at night.

  “I think it’s Calvin,” she said. “Done found us.”

  She lurched up onto her knees and looked wildly about, as if searching for a weapon to fend off the night, and she called out to the screaming dark: “Honey, come on in here it’s almost ready Mama’s got biscuits fixed.”

  She gathered her breath to say more, but he got up and went to her and shook her by the shoulders, bending over her with the ragged legs of his overalls flopping before the fire and the girls silent and not watching this at all. The little one got up on one knee and put another stick on the fire.

  “Now, just hush,” the old man said. “Hush.”

  She turned to the oldest girl.

  “You water’s not broke, is it?”

  “I ain’t pregnant, Mama.” Her head was bowed, dark hair falling down around her face. “I done told you.”

  “Lord God, child, if you water’s broke it ain’t nothin nobody can do about it. I knowed this nigger woman one time her water broke and they wasn’t nobody around for a mile to help her. I tried helpin her and she wouldn’t have me.”

  “I’m fixin to slap you,” he said.

  “She wasn’t about to have me. I’s standing out yonder by the pumphouse and they come in there three or four and tied her down and she had the biggest blackest thing stickin out butt first . . .”

  He hit her. Laid her out with one lick. She didn’t even groan. She fell over on her back in the dirt and lay with her arms outspread like a witness for Christ stricken with the power of the Blood.

  The girls looked at her and then they looked at the beans. They were almost ready. The old man was crouched beside their mother, his hands moving and working.

  The boy was running back down through the brush and the woods, the wire singing one high shrieking note when he hit it. He stumbled panting and on all fours to the fire and noted his mother lying stretched out on her back and his father bent over her in an attitude of supplication and saw his two sisters watching the fire with hungry looks and yelled out, over the noise of the bullfrogs and the maddening crickets screaming and the murmur of the water running low in the creek: “They’s a house up here!”

  Joe rose early from a sleep filled with nightmares of shooting guns and swinging pool cues launched up in his face and stealthy blacks with knives who lurked around corners with their eyes walled white in the darkness or slipped up behind him on cat feet to take his life for money. At four-thirty he made some instant coffee and drank about half a cup. He put a load of clothes in to wash, moving through the brightly lit rooms while all around him outside the community slept. He turned on the television to see if there was anything on, but there wasn’t anything but snow.

  The dog was standing in the yard with his head up when he pushed open the door.

  “Here, dog,” he said. “Hey, dog.”

  He bent with the two opened cans of dog food in his hands and spooned the meat onto a concrete block at the foot of the steps. He moved out of the way when the dog moved in and stepped back up into the open door to watch him eat. Just a few grunting noises, the jerking of his scarred head up and down.

  The coffee was cold in the cup when he sat back down at the table. He pitched it into the sink and made another, then sat sipping it slowly with his arm laid out to rest on the cheap metal table, a Winston smoking between his fingers. It was five o’clock by then. He had some numbers written down on a piece of notebook paper that had been folded and rained on, and he spread it out before him on the table, smoothing it, silently rehearsing the numbers with his lips. The phone was on the table in front of him. He lifted the receiver and dialed.

  “You goin to work this mornin?” he said. He listened. “What about Junior? He get drunk last night?” He listened, grinned, then coughed into the phone. “All right,” he said. “I’ll be up there in thirty minutes. Y’all be ready, hear?”

  He hung up on a babbling voice. He listened to the clothes chugging in the machine and he listened to the silence he lived in now, which was broken most times only by the dog whining at the back step. He got up and went to the icebox and brought the fifth of whiskey that was in there back to the table. He held it in his hand for a minute, studying it, reading the label, where it was made, how long it was aged. Then he opened it and took a good drink. There was a canned Coke on the table, half empty, flat and hot. He made sure nobody had thumped any cigarette ashes in it before he took a drink. Coke, then whiskey, Coke and then whiskey. He wiped his mouth and capped the bottle and lit another cigarette.

  He turned off the lights at five-fifteen and went down the steps and across the wet grass of the tiny yard and no one saw him leave. The stars had gone in but dawn had not yet paled the sky. The dog whined and nuzzled around his legs as if he’d go, too, but Joe pushed him away gently with his foot and told him to move, then got in the truck.

  “Stay here,” he said. The dog went back under the house. The whiskey went under the seat. He cranked the truck with the door still open, found the wiper switch and watched the blades slap against the dew on the windshield. The truck was old and rusty and it had a wrecked camper hull bolted over the bed, where the poison guns and jugs lay in wreaths of dust and where the scraps of baby pines left from the past winter had dried into kindling. Spare tires and flat ones, empty beer cans and whiskey bottles. He sat revving it until it would idle and then he shut the door and turned on the lights and backed out of the driveway. It coughed up the road, missing and lurching, the one red eye in the back slowly fading toward the dawn.

  There were five of them standing beside the road with their hands in their pockets and the orange tips of their cigarettes winking in their lips. He pulled up beside them and stopped and they climbed into the back, the truck shaking and jarring as they sat. He stopped twice more before he got to town, taking on one rider at each halt. It was getting daylight when he drove into the city limits. He eased under the red light at the top of the hill and turned onto the project road with the back end sagging. The blue lights of the police cars that were gathered in the parking lot washed the gray brick walls in sporadic sapphire, while the strobes flashed and illuminated the junked autos and spilled trash and overflowing Dumpsters. He pulled up short and stopped and sat watching. There were three patrol cars and he could see at least five cops. He stuck his head out the window and said: “Hey, Shorty.”

  One of them climbed down from the back and walked up beside the cab to stand next to him. A thin youth in a red T-shirt.

  “What’s goin on, Shorty? Where’s Junior at?”

  The boy shook his head. “Somebody fucked up.”

  “Well, go see if you can find him right quick. I don’t need to be around these damn cops. They’ll think I did it.”

  “I’ll go get him,” the boy said, and he moved off toward the nearest building.

  “Hurry up, now,” he said after him, and the boy broke into a jog. Fifteen or twenty black people were standing in a group on the sidewalk, watching. Most of them were wearing undershorts or nightgowns. One cop was keeping the crowd herded back.

  As he sat looking at them, the police led a man in a pair of white jeans to one of the
cars. His hands were cuffed behind his naked back. They opened a rear door and one of them put his hand on top of the man’s head in an oddly gentle act and kept him from bumping his head as he got in. Some of the workhands in the back end of the truck started out but Joe called for them to stay put, that they didn’t have time. He lit a cigarette and saw a red glow moving through the pines behind them. He swiveled his head to see an ambulance coming slowly with the siren off. Somebody dead, no urgency, had to be. Then he saw the foot. Just one, turned with the toes up, sticking out past the left side of a patrol car. A black foot with a pale bottom unmoving on the asphalt. If he hadn’t been in such a hurry he would have gotten out to take a better look. But the ambulance had pulled up now and the attendants were unloading a stretcher from the back. They wheeled it around, two men in white jackets. They bent over the body and then the foot was gone.

  “We ready now,” the boy said beside him. There was another boy with him.

  “That you, Junior?”

  White teeth gleamed in the dying night. “It’s me. You let me have a cigarette, Joe?”

  He pulled a pack off the dash and shook one out for him.

  “Hell. I thought that might be you laid out yonder, Junior. What’s done happened?”

  He lit the cigarette for him and Junior stood there a moment. He smoked and yawned and scratched the side of his jaw with the fingers that held his smoke.

  “Aw, Noony been drunk and talkin his old shit again. Bobby’s boy shot him, Mama said.”

  “Just get up front with me, Junior. Let’s go, Shorty. We got to haul ass.”

  He put it up in reverse and waited for Junior to come around. Junior got in and then he couldn’t get the door to stay shut.

  “Slam it hard,” Joe said. “They all in back there?”

  “I reckon. Shoot. I was still in the bed.”

  He backed the truck around quickly and pulled it down into low. He took off, but the gears crashed when he tried to shove it up into second. He pushed in the clutch hard and tried again. It finally caught, but the valves rattled as it struggled up the hill.

  “I got to buy me a new truck,” he said. The black boy beside him giggled like a girl. “Where’s your hat, Junior?”

  “Run off and left it. Shorty say you’s fixin to leave me if I didn’t come on.”

  “Hell, we late. Be daylight before we ever get out there. I guess ever one of y’all needs to stop at the store.”

  “I got to get somethin to eat,” he said. “What you take for this old truck if you buy you a new one?”

  “This truck ain’t old. It’s just got some minor stuff wrong with it.”

  They stopped under the red light and waited for it to turn green. Another cruiser came up the hill and turned in with its blue lights flashing. He pulled the shift down into low and took off again, clashed the gears and dropped it into third. The truck sputtered, lurched violently and died. He cranked on it and the lights dimmed until he pushed them off.

  “Ragged son of a bitch,” he said. It cranked finally and he wound the hell out of it in low, up to almost twenty-five before he dropped it into high gear. It rattled a loud complaint but it went on.

  “Linkage messed up,” said Junior.

  “Let’s see if we can fix it at dinner.”

  “All right.”

  They turned at the intersection and took the road that led out of town. The stores were just opening.

  “Say you was still in the bed, Junior?”

  “Yessir. I got off with Dooley and them last night. Don’t even know what time we got in. It was late.”

  “I guess y’all was drinking some whiskey.”

  “Shoot. Whiskey and beer both. I won me a little money and then got drunk and lost it.”

  Joe looked out at the coming morning. It was coming fast.

  “Shit,” he said. “We got to hurry. Y’all can’t stay with it in this heat. Gonna be ninety somethin today.”

  “You done got the ice?”

  He started to touch the brake and then he shook his head, mashing the gas harder instead.

  “Why, hell naw. We ain’t got time to go back for it now. There’s probably still some left in the cooler. Freddy may have some. We’ll get some out there if he does.”

  “Let me get one more of them cigarettes off you.”

  “Up there on the dash, son. I’m gonna have to start takin cigarettes and beer out of you boys’ pay. I went out to the truck other evening after we quit and it was one beer in the cooler. Y’all drink it up fast as I can buy it.”

  “Them old cold beers good when you get off,” said Junior.

  “Well I guess so when it’s free.”

  They rode in silence for a few miles, the dark trees whipping past on both sides and the lights beginning to come on in the houses along the road. Once in a while they had to straddle a smashed possum.

  “And say that was Noony that got shot? Was he the one that used to work for me? Little short guy?”

  “Naw. That’s his brother. Duwight. Noony the one been in all that trouble with the law. I think he spent about three years in the pen.”

  “He did? When was he down there?”

  “I don’t know. He been out I guess three or four years.”

  “I just wondered was he the one I used to know one time. What did he get put in the pen for?”

  “I think he cut somebody. He just got to where he stayed in jail all the time. He’s on probation right now.”

  “He is?”

  “He was. Motherfucker dead now.”

  Joe got the last cigarette and crumpled the pack and threw it out the window. He leaned over the steering wheel with both arms as the old truck rushed along. He could hear faint cries coming from the back and he grinned.

  “Goin too fast for them boys,” he said. “How come that boy to shoot him? What? Did he come over there fuckin with him?”

  “I imagine. Aw, I know he did. He always think he have to be fuckin with somebody. I knocked him in the head with a speaker one day.”

  “You did?”

  “I sure did. He come over at Mama’s one day, said I owed him some money. I told him he better get his ass out I didn’t owe him shit. Told him he want some money get out and work for it. What I have to do.”

  “Then you knocked him in the head.”

  “Knocked a durn hole in his head. Mama said he got shot about three o’clock. Been out there till the garbagemen found him.”

  “You don’t know what time y’all got in?”

  “Naw. It was late.”

  “He wasn’t out there when y’all got in?”

  “I don’t reckon. He mighta been.”

  Joe cracked the vent wider and flicked the ashes off his smoke.

  “Well, I’ll tell you,” he said. “Folks lookin for trouble can find more than they want.”

  Junior nodded and crossed his legs.

  “You right,” he said. “You exactly right about that.”

  They unloaded from the back end at Dogtown like a pack of hounds themselves and went into the store talking and laughing and opening the doors on the coolers, reaching for milk and Cokes and orange juice. Joe watched them milling around inside while he pumped gas into the truck. Cars were coming along the road with their lights on, carrying people headed to work in the factories who had to be on the job by seven. He had done that and he was glad he wasn’t doing it now. He shut off the pump and hung up the nozzle and looked at his watch as he went in.

  “Y’all hurry up, now,” he said. They were getting Moon Pies and crackers and sardines and cans of Vienna sausage.

  At the counter Freddy looked up at him with a sick smile as the men lined up in front of him with their lunches. Freddy charged their food and drinks and smokes to them each day and was paid off on Friday when Joe brought them by. He kept their tickets in little pads beneath the counter.

  “Hey, Joe,” he said. He stopped writing, sighed deeply and put down his pen. “You want some coffee?”

  �
�I can get it.” He found a Styrofoam cup and poured it full, then dumped in a whole lot of sugar and stirred it well.