Joe

by Larry Brown

  “Can I help you,” the butcher said, when he stopped in front of Wade.

  “Y’all got any meat scraps?” Wade said.

  “Meat scraps?” He looked out from under his cap, his hands moving busily and with trained efficiency over his goods. He stopped and rested his forearms over the back of the case and looked up the aisle.

  “Yeah. Just some old bones or meat scraps for dogs. You got scraps to throw out, don’t you?”

  The butcher shook his head and he didn’t look happy. “I don’t know how much we got. Have to go back in the back and see. Ain’t cut much today.”

  “I want some if you got some,” Wade said. “I got some dogs at home.”

  “Well, we kinda busy,” the butcher said. “I can go look when I get through with what I’m doin.” Then while he shuffled the meat he mumbled about his own dogs and his daddy and his daddy’s dogs, the full meaning of which Wade couldn’t understand.

  “Well, where’s the manager?” Wade said. “I’ll go ask him.” He started looking around wildly.

  The black man stood erect quickly. “Naw,” he said. “Naw, don’t go ask him. Hell, I’ll go get it.” He turned away and started toward the back.

  “Y’all got a bathroom around here?”

  The butcher pushed open one of the doors and jerked his thumb to the right. “Round back.”

  “Y’all care for me usin it?”

  “Help yourself.” He banged the doors when he went through.

  The old man left his cart in the detergent aisle and stepped quietly through the swinging doors. He didn’t see anybody back there among the cardboard boxes of ruined lettuce and black bananas, wet mops, sacks of potatoes, spilled cat litter. There were two massive white doors on the left. He walked all the way to the back of the room and looked to the right. He saw the door marked Men. The door was open and the light was off. He jerked his head left as the butcher came through with a box on his shoulder and went into the rear of the meat market, saying soft motherfuckers to himself. Wade went to the double doors and looked back out, toward the front. There was nobody out there. He knelt by the second freezer door and felt of the Miller tallboys stacked next to the white frost that oozed from the bad gasket at the lower corner of the door and crept across the floor, up the sides of the cans like a fungus. They were cold as ice, sweating thin beads of condensation. He took two from the plastic template that bound them and put in each pocket the champagne of bottled beer, then rose and made his way to the bathroom, where he turned on the light and locked the door.

  When he emerged, belching, ten minutes later, he’d smoked two cigarettes in utter comfort and buried the empty cans in the trash bucket beneath wads of toilet paper he’d taken off the roll and stuffed in there. He retrieved his cart from the aisle and went down to the meat case. The same butcher looked up and saw him before he could press the button again. He came out of the meat market with a large cardboard box, marked on the side in heavy pencil NO CHARGE.

  “Here,” he said, and handed it across. It was a heavy box, the sides bulging. Wade just barely got it in his cart. He opened the flaps and looked inside. Bonemeal and bad briskets and the pink tails of pigs. He nodded.

  “All right,” he said, but the butcher had gone back inside. He glared as Wade pushed his cart away, then swung his meat cleaver down to the block with a vengeance.

  Pork and beans were on sale, four cans for a dollar. A dozen went into his cart, along with two loaves of the cheapest bread. When he turned into the beer aisle he’d spent all he was going to on food.

  He stopped and mentally added up his purchases. He considered the weight of his goods. Displays of beer were lined up on both sides of the aisle, the shelves stacked with many different brands. He ignored the imported and went straight for the domestic. Budweiser was $3.19 a six-pack for twelve ounce. Shit, he thought. He looked at a twelver to see if he could cut the cost. It was $5.99.

  “Thirty-nine cents,” he said, and a woman standing next to him jerked and looked at him and moved away. Busch was a little better at $2.98 but still he shook his head. The Old Milwaukee in cans was the best comparable buy he could see at $2.49 for fourteen ounces. But then he saw twelve-ounce bottles for $2.09. He stood there in a dilemma for three or four minutes trying to figure. For a fleeting moment he considered putting some of the bread back. Then he thought about the pork and beans. He was looking back and forth from his cart to the beer. And then he realized that he hadn’t even considered cigarettes.

  “Shit,” he whispered. A boy sweeping the aisle was trying to sweep around him.

  “What’s the cheapest beer y’all got?” Wade asked him. The boy stopped and scratched his head. He looked around as if seeing it for the first time, since, in fact, he was.

  “I don’t know,” he said.

  “Well, see if you can help me. You got anything cheapern this Old Milwaukee? It’s two forty-nine.”

  The boy went from display to display, checking prices.

  “I guess we got this here,” he said, tapping a stack of quarts. “It’s sixty-nine cents.”

  Wade eyed it doubtfully. “What’s that shit?” he said.

  “Says. Misterbrow. Somethin.”

  “ What’d that be for a case? Ten and two. Six ninety and . . . one thirty-eight. Be . . .” He looked at the boy.

  “I don’t know,” the boy said.

  “Be eight twenty-eight.”

  “Plus tax,” said the boy.

  “Plus tax. Which is . . . what? A nickel?”

  “Six cents now.”

  “Six cents. Six eights forty-eight.” He was wagging his head slightly from side to side. “Almost nine dollars.”

  The boy didn’t say anything.

  “But that’s three gallons of beer,” Wade told him. “Ain’t that right? Twelve quarts to the case?”

  “I guess.”

  “But I still got to get some cigarettes. And tax on all that . . .”

  “I got to sweep this floor,” the boy said.

  “What’d I say while ago? Nine dollars. So a half a case’d be bout four and a half. Gallon and a half of beer. And this other ...” He turned his head and looked back to the Old Milwaukee. “Two six-packs five dollars. Fourteen times twelve . . . ten’s a hunnerd and forty . . . and twenty-eight . . . that ain’t but a little over a gallon,” he said. The boy had dropped all pretense of trying to sweep. He was just listening to him.

  “Half a case of that’s what I need,” Wade said. “How bout takin six of them out for me?”

  In the end he ditched six cans of pork and beans into the freezer section along with one of the loaves of bread, and wound up with five packs of generic cigarettes instead of a whole carton of Camels. He shoved into line and waited for the girl to set his things on the counter. He moved his head from his goods to the register like a tennis spectator as she rang it all up. He winced when she added the sales tax.

  “Goddamn,” he said. “ Y’all the highest place in town, ain’t you?”

  She just leaned on one arm and tapped her nails on the counter and gave him a shitty look while he pulled out his money. A boy sacked the groceries and started to push the cart out the door.

  “I got it,” Wade told him, and went out onto the sidewalk. He had all his groceries in one sack, but the meat scraps alone were almost more than he could carry. He looked out over the parking lot as the sweat leaped out of him. He saw a parked cab and he pushed his cart down the ramp and went over to it. There was a pony tailed young white man sitting at the wheel.

  “You got a fare?”

  The man glanced up from his paper and flipped some ashes off his cigarette down the door. He looked at his newspaper again and turned a page.

  “I’s supposed to had one but if she don’t bring her black ass out here in about two minutes I’m fixin to go eat dinner.”

  “What’ll you charge me to carry me out to London Hill?”

  The driver looked up.

  “London Hill? Hell, that’s way out
in the country.” He shook his head a little. “I don’t know.”

  “What’ll you take?” Wade said.

  “How far is it?”

  “It’s bout ten mile.”

  He looked at his watch. “Let’s see,” he said. He looked up and squinted from the sun. “I’ll cut the meter off and run you out there for ten dollars.”

  “All right.”

  The driver got out in a hurry and opened the back door, saying, “Hurry up and get your stuff in fore that nigger woman gets out here.”

  When the passenger was settled comfortably in the back seat with his groceries around him, he dug into the sack and found one of the hot quarts on the bottom. He pulled it out and twisted the cap off, then turned the bottle straight up.

  “Put that bottle down, damn. These cops in town see you they’ll have my ass.”

  He took it down. “What?” He was talking to the cab driver’s eyes in the rearview mirror.

  “Hell, feller. You can’t be drinking beer in my cab in town. Don’t you know that?”

  “Well, you got a cup or anything?”

  “Naw, I ain’t got no cup. Just wait’ll we get out of town.” He picked up his mike. “Wait’ll we get up on the bypass at least. I’m fixin to check out for dinner there, Ethel.”

  He pulled out into the street.

  “You get that woman at Midtown?” said the radio.

  “Did not there. I waited on her thirty minutes.”

  He went down the hill and turned east.

  “Well, she called back there and said she’s ready. Swing around and take her home before you go to dinner.”

  He put his knee up and clenched the mike, steering with one hand.

  “I’m heading to the service station right now with one goin down. This thing’s hot as a two dollar pistol, too. I might be able to get her in about a hour there. Maybe. Ten four?”

  He stopped at an intersection and looked both ways, then pulled out. The radio sputtered, making the sound of frying bacon. He cut down the squelch and swung up onto the ramp and mashed the gas pedal to the floor. He met Wade with his eyes in the mirror.

  “All right,” he said. “You can get happy now if you want to.”

  He drove swiftly on the country road. Wade swayed slightly in the curves with his beer in one hand and a piece of the picnic ham in the other. Things were much changed from what he remembered from years ago. New houses, fields where woods once stood, a new county high school. Even the road was new.

  “Say you live out there at London Hill?” the driver said. He didn’t look around.

  “Right the other side of it.”

  “You don’t know old Joe Ransom, do you?”

  The old man thought about it a while. He’d known some Ransoms at one time, back when he was much younger. Thirty or forty years before.

  “I don’t know,” he said finally. “I used to know a bunch of folks out there. I been gone a long time, though. What’s his daddy’s name?”

  “I don’t know. You ain’t never heard of him?”

  “I don’t reckon.”

  “I just wondered. He’s supposed to live out there somewhere. I just thought you might know him.”

  “I don’t guess I do,” Wade said. He dug into the sack for another piece of meat.

  He was halfway finished with the second quart when he told the driver where to turn off.

  “How much further?” the driver wanted to know.

  “It ain’t much further.”

  “I got twelve miles on this thing already,” he said, and he looked over his shoulder when he said it.

  “I’ll pay you.”

  Tractors were toiling their way through heavy clouds of dust. Trucks were parked in the fields with their loads of fertilizer and seed. The taxi sped by and left them behind.

  “Bunch of farmers out here,” the driver said.

  “It’s about another mile up here where you turn off. Big dirt road to the left and you go up this hill.”

  He slowed the driver down, and as they turned onto the dirt road he pitched the second bottle out the window. The track was rough and the car bellied and bumped over the ruts.

  “I ain’t gonna get stuck up in here, am I?” the driver said.

  “Naw. It ain’t much further.”

  They went across a wooden bridge where a creek lay shallow within the banks, an eddy sluggish and brown and studded with stones showing their moss-grown faces, stepping stones for the coons and foxes and possums whose tracks dotted the sandy silt and went up the slopes of young cane, thick and nearly impenetrable, over the slides of beavers crusted with sun and broken open into jigsaw puzzles of hardened mud. Through fields of unnamed bushes and sagging wire, between oaks leaning to form a tunnel of shade, the dusty cab sped rocking and jarring, rocks flying.

  “Damned if you don’t live back in the sticks,” the driver said.

  “Here it is,” Wade said, pointing. “Just drive right up in there.”

  The driver stopped and eyed the iron ruts left by tractors. He shook his head.

  “This is far as I’m goin,” he said. “I done come fourteen miles and you said it wasn’t but ten.”

  “Hell, you can get up in there.”

  “Not in this car.”

  He shoved the shift into parking gear and got out. Wade climbed out on the other side and slid his box of scraps and his sack onto the ground. The beer bottles clinked.

  “Owe me fourteen dollars,” the driver said. Wade looked at him for a little while and then took the money out of his pocket and counted it. He had four dollars left after he paid his fare. He bent and stuck it into a sock and straightened. There was a cloud of dust far down in the field traveling along the rows. The driver put the money in his pocket and got back into the car. The old man had already started walking off with his hands empty when he leaned out and said: “You not goin to take this stuff with you?”

  Wade turned around and looked at him. “I got somebody can carry it,” he said.

  Curt Fowler was on his front porch taking the last sip from his last beer. He pitched the can into the aluminum boat that sat beside the porch just as a pickup with a camper bed came over the hill, the tires sucking gently in the mud. The truck slewed slightly as it swung into the yard and came to a lurching halt beside the single tree, where a rope hung. The door slammed and Joe got out and came around the front of the truck with five beers in his hand.

  “What say, Curt.”

  He walked up to the porch and sat on the step.

  “I knew somebody’d bring me a beer if I set out here long enough,” Curt said. He helped himself to a beer and opened it and started pouring it down his throat.

  “You ain’t fishin today, Curt?”

  “Naw, hell, water’s too fuckin muddy, it rained like a sumbitch over here last night. You ain’t workin today?”

  Joe had on his sunglasses and a pair of knit slacks the color of cream and a new green velour shirt with tan piping around the collar. His shiny black loafers had mud on them.

  “My niggers can’t work in the rain. Afraid they gonna melt, I reckon. We’s in a bad place, anyway, and I was afraid we wouldn’t get out so we just come on to the house. It’s been like that near every day. Where’s that sorry-ass brother of yours?”