Joe

by Larry Brown

  He looked down at himself. “I don’t know what size,” he said. “My mama gets my clothes for me. I just wear whatever she gets.”

  What he was wearing was a pair of khaki pants that were pinched up around his waist with a belt that was six inches too long. A Kiss T-shirt and a pipe welder’s cap.

  “I think I got some jeans he can wear,” she said. “Let me go in here and see.”

  “Well, set down,” Joe told him. “I didn’t know you were out there. You oughta hollered.”

  “I figgered if I hollered again he’d nail me. I bet nobody comes messin around here when you ain’t here.”

  “Why I got him. I ain’t here much. Way things are now, some sumbitch’ll back a truck up to your door and just load up what he wants while you gone to work. He won’t bother somebody just walkin down the road, though. A dog’s smarter than you think. Anybody comes in this yard they better have a gun. I got to be here when they read the meter. Long as you stayed in the road he didn’t bother you, did he?”

  “Nosir. He just growled was all.”

  “You could have walked on off and he wouldn’t have done anything. The road ain’t his. He knows what’s his.”

  “Here,” Connie said, and handed him a pair of jeans. “Try these on. I believe they’ll fit you.”

  He took the jeans and looked them over and looked around.

  “Bathroom down the hall,” she said, pointing. “You can change in there.”

  “Yesm,” he said, even though she wasn’t four years older than he was. He found his way down the hall and went into the bathroom and shut the door. Then he groped around in the dark looking for the light switch. Feeling all over the wall. He turned it on and then he stood for a minute just looking at all the products scattered on shelves and around the sink and lined up beside the bathtub, a wide assortment of ointments and creams and shampoos and deodorants and colognes and aftershaves. He opened some of them and sniffed, and looked at their labels. Meaningless symbols printed there whose messages he could only imagine. In the mirror stood a wet boy-child whose hair was twisted all up over his head like a rooster’s comb. He found a brush on the sink and pawed at his hair with it, slicking it down long over his ears. There was long downy hair all over his chin and neck that he’d never shaved. Finally he pulled the threadbare shirt over his head and unbuckled the belt and pulled the wet trousers down over his knees and stepped out of them and stood naked in the room, his balls shriveled and drawn from the cold and the wet. He dried himself all over and put on her blue jeans. They were almost a perfect fit except that her legs were longer than his, so he turned them up at the bottoms four inches and went back up the hall. They were sitting down in the living room when he walked back in. He stood there holding his wet clothes in his hand.

  Joe got up. Worse than he’d thought. Wandering urchin wafted up on the shores of human kindness. Asking nothing but the chance to earn. Offering his hands not to take, but to make.

  “You feel better now?” he said.

  “Yessir. I sure do. I been wantin me some blue jeans for a long time. These is Levi’s.”

  “You welcome to them,” Connie said quickly.

  “You walk all the way over here?”

  “Yessir. I got caught in some bad rain about three miles from here. It come a storm over there.”

  “How’d you know where I live?”

  “I didn’t. I was just lookin for you. I’ll work. I need a job bad. I’m tryin to save my money and get me a car. Or a truck. If I had me somethin to go in I could get me a regular job. That’s what I need. But I can’t get a car till I get a job. That’s why I wanted to talk to you. My daddy don’t care if he works or not. But I do.”

  Joe paused to phrase his answer.

  “Well, son, I don’t know when we’ll get back to work. It just depends on the weather. We can’t even get into the woods till the roads dry up a little. That’ll be two or three days if the rain ever stops. But if it rains some more I don’t know when it’ll be. I wish I could tell you somethin but I don’t know myself. I’d a whole lot rather be making some money than sitting around the house here.”

  “Yessir,” Gary said.

  “Would you work in the rain?”

  “Yessir. It don’t matter to me.”

  Joe smiled and reached for his drink.

  “Well, I hate you walked all the way over here for nothing,” he said. “Let me slip my shoes on and I’ll run you back home. You ain’t moved from where you were, have you?”

  “Nosir. We ain’t moved.”

  “Just let me go back here a minute. Come on, Connie.”

  When they got back to the bedroom, she shut the door and turned around to him.

  “I feel sorry for that boy.”

  He sat on the bed and started pulling on his socks.

  “I can’t give him work when I ain’t got none myself. He can work when we start back if he wants to. Long as he don’t bring his daddy. That son of a bitch ain’t worth killin.”

  “I’m gonna give him one of my shirts. I got some old tennis shoes in here he can have, too.”

  He looked around at her and picked up a shoe.

  “Why don’t you just go ahead and get dressed and we’ll go to town and get us something to eat. If we going out we might as well go on and eat supper. We got plenty of time.”

  She sat down on the bed beside him and folded her hands between her knees. “You reckon they’ve got anything to eat?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know whether they have or not.”

  “Why don’t you ask him?”

  “Ask him? Hell, I don’t want to ask him that. I don’t want to embarrass the boy.”

  “Well, what if they ain’t? What if he’s waiting on y’all to start back to work before they can get anything to eat?”

  “Shit,” he said. “I don’t know. Maybe they ain’t. They livin up there in the woods. I ain’t been up there but I know where they’re at. I used to birdhunt up there and it ain’t nothin but an old log house. Ain’t nobody lived in it for fifty years, I bet.”

  “Fifty years?”

  “Hell, it ain’t nothin up there,” he said, and got up to find a shirt in the closet. “Only people you ever see up there is either huntin or fuckin, one.” He turned around and gave her a grin. “Or huntin a place to fuck.”

  “Reckon who hit him in the eye?” she said.

  The bossman didn’t bother to answer that.

  The rain was streaming down the sides of the glass, the wiper blades hardly able to keep it at bay, when they pulled to a stop in front of the store. There was a watery visage of gas pumps and posts and a screen door, a yellow bulb on a cord illuminating the mosaic of bottle caps packed tightly into the red sand.

  “I reckon he’s still open,” Joe said. “How about puttin about ten dollars worth of gas in the truck?”

  The boy was sitting next to the window, and he got out wordlessly and went back to the pump and turned the lever, unhooked the nozzle and twisted off the cap. Joe went inside.

  Cigar smoke hung from the ceiling in layers, wreathing the old man, who was leaning back against sacks of flour with his endless newspapers and magazines and Civil War books. The roar of the rain on the roof shut out every other sound. He picked up his cigar and looked at his friend.

  “What you say, Joe?”

  “Reckon it’s ever gonna quit?”

  “Four inches on my gauge. These farmers is gonna be in a mess.”

  He didn’t know if the boy would come in or not. If he did he did.

  “Would you ring up some stuff for me, John?”

  “Sure.”

  He closed his paper and rose stiffly and went around behind the counter and laid the cigar in an ashtray. Joe picked things that didn’t have to be refrigerated, or things that didn’t need to be cooked. Vienna sausage and canned chicken and soups and chili and potted meat and Spam.

  “Would you slice me up about two pounds of ham and a pound of cheese?”

  W
ith the thunder cracking all around, the noise was near deafening. The old man went silently to the refrigerator, his hands slow and orderly. The electric saw ran unheard and the meat fell silently onto the tray with each pass. He got crackers and loaf bread, mayonnaise and mustard. He piled the cans up in his arms and carried them to the counter. The old man laid the wrapped packages beside them and rang everything up.

  “Have you got one big sack you can put all that in, John?”

  “Ought to have. This rain’s bad on y’all.”

  “Yessir, it is. Looks like every time I get a little ahead it starts in again.”

  John Coleman laid his pencil down and looked up, touched the side of his glasses with a forefinger.

  “Twenty-seven even, Joe.”

  “Ten dollars gas.” He gave him the money.

  “Out of forty. Three dollars. You don’t want all that in two sacks?”

  “This is fine,” he said, sliding it off into his arms. “I’ll see you, John.”

  “Don’t hurry off.”

  He stopped at the door and looked back. “I’m headed to town. You want anything?”

  John stood looking down, leaning one hand on the counter, scratching at the side of his neck.

  “You going by the liquor store?”

  “Yeah. What you want?”

  “Get me. Get me two fifths of some good whiskey.”

  “What you want? You want some Jack Daniel’s?”

  “Naw. Don’t get that. Get me two fifths of Jim Beam if they got it.”

  “They got it. You want some beer?”

  “Naw, I got some beer. Curt and them brought me some beer today. I wouldn’t mind having a drink of whiskey, though.”

  “All right. You gonna be up later on?”

  “Yeah, I’ll be up.”

  “All right then.”

  He went out and the screen door flapped hollowly behind him. He went around to the other side and opened the door and slid the sack in on Connie’s legs. The boy was seated beside her once again, keeping close to the door.

  “Boy, you gonna get wet again,” Joe said.

  “Yessir. Reckon I will.”

  It was no better when they stopped again. They sat for a moment, the wipers beating gloomily at the downpour. Joe was thinking that the sack would be all to pieces before he went a hundred yards. He pulled out the handbrake.

  “Wait just a minute,” he said.

  He went blindly out into the rain and raised the door of the camper hull, cursing, getting mud off the tailgate on his clean pants, fumbling in the dark for what might not even be in there any more. But it was. His hand found it and pulled it out.

  “Here,” he said, when he opened Gary’s door. The boy got out.

  “What?” he said.

  “Put this over it. Maybe it won’t fall apart before you get home.”

  Connie put the sack down on the seat and he slid the plastic garbage sack upside down over the groceries while the rain lashed him. When he had it wrapped he gave it to the boy.

  “I hate I can’t take you no closer. You couldn’t get up that road in a Jeep now.”

  “This mine?” the boy said. He acted as though he couldn’t believe it.

  “Hell, it’s just some stuff. I’ll come see you when it dries up. We got plenty to do when the weather gets right.”

  He didn’t wait for an answer but shut the door on Connie and went around to the other side. He got in and shut the door, pushed in the handbrake and ground the transmission into first. He blew the horn and they pulled off.

  In the black and howling night the boy stood there with his heavy sack in his hands and hugged it tightly, one dim red eye moving away from him and the sweep of white light boring a tunnel of rapidly diminishing size down the rain-slicked highway, the water flashing in front of the lights until it passed from sight, until the sound of it ebbed, until even the tires sang away to nothingness and he was alone.

  He turned his face up to the streaming heavens and they answered. He was immersed. He let it pelt his face. Blacker nights he’d not yet seen. Ground bled to sky, woods to road. But he knew the way. He turned and started up through the mud.

  The creeks were raging with dark water, angry and swollen. He stopped on the bridges and rested. The mud was thick and it made for hard walking in his new tennis shoes. The food was in his hands and no one would know if he stopped now and opened something and ate. But there was a black wall of nothing that somewhere held his family, and his home, and it was that he headed into with ever quickening steps.

  The owner of the package store on top of the hill had the doors open at ten o’clock sharp. He was sandwiched between a pizza parlor and a hair salon, and it was a good location because business sometimes bled over from each flanking establishment. He kept his clocks exactly on time, so he knew it was not yet a minute past ten when the first customer of the day stepped inside and nodded. A patron of dubious financial stability who might have spent the previous evening in a ditch, judging from the amount of dried mud slathered on his boots and overalls and flaked on the side of his face. An old man with rolled-up sleeves and a battered hat and a nervous tongue that he dabbed across his lips. The owner straightened from his newspaper and looked at the first customer.

  “Can I help you with something?” he said.

  “I’s just lookin,” Wade said. He moved over in front of a shelf and stood there with his hands at his sides and studied the bottles. Looking at the prices, the owner decided. To see what he could afford. Probably had some quarters and dimes in his pocket, hoping it was enough. Or waiting for a chance when his back was turned to grab something off the shelf and run outside with it.

  The owner took three steps and cut off his only escape route and stood between the door and the counter, idly studying an inventory list. He was low on the Turkey half-pints and the Popov fifths. Two cases each. He made little notations on his sheet. He glanced around at his customer. An unpleasant aroma was beginning to fill his immaculate little store. He narrowed his eyes at the man. The man didn’t move, didn’t look around.

  They usually headed straight for the wine cooler, for the Thunderbird and the Boone’s Farm and pure grain alcohol. He didn’t like them loitering, had signs forbidding it, in fact.

  “If you’re looking for something in particular I can show you where it is,” he told him.

  “I don’t know what I want.”

  “The wine’s in the cooler.”

  “I don’t want no wine.”

  “Well, what do you want?”

  The old man turned just his head in an odd way. “I know what I want but I don’t know what you call it.”

  The owner sighed. Dealing with these people over and over. With the depths of their ignorance. The white ones like this were worse than the black ones like this. Where they came from he didn’t know. How they existed was a complete mystery to him. How they lived with themselves. He tossed his list onto the counter without ever thinking he might have helped make them the way they were.

  “Can you describe it?”

  The old man turned around. He looked at the bottles on the opposite wall. “Well, it’s clear,” he said.

  “Is it vodka?”

  “Naw.”

  “Is it gin?”

  “Naw, it ain’t gin. It’s kindly thick-like.”

  The owner wiped a hand across his face. He could have sold the whole thing at a good profit to his son-in-law months before. He went back to the cooler and opened the glass door and reached in, brought out a cold half-pint of peppermint schnapps and held it out.

  “Is this it?”

  “I don’t know.”

  He carried it to him, all the way to the front of the store. He handed it to him.

  “Is that it?”

  The old man was looking at it carefully, holding it close to his face and moving his lips.

  “I don’t know if this is it or not. It looks kindly like it. What is it?”

  “Schnapps.”

 
“What’s it taste like?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t drink.”

  The old man looked at him curiously. When he looked at the bottle his brain seemed to stop working. Finally he raised his head.

  “I don’t know if this is it or not. What if I buy it and this ain’t it?”

  “You mean, what if you drink some of it and then decide you don’t want it?”