Joe

by Larry Brown

  “What am I supposed to do with it?”

  “You supposed to brush your teeth with it.”

  “Well, how you do it?”

  She glared at him. “Shit, do you not know nothin? Here.”

  She showed him. He stood beside the sink with her, marveling at the foam that built over her lips. She turned the tap on and bent her head under the faucet and finally spat clear water into the sink and turned it off.

  “Now here. I ain’t got no germs, I don’t reckon. I thought everybody knew how to brush their teeth. Where you been all your life?”

  “Just around,” he said.

  “I’ll be in here when you get through. Hurry it up.”

  She left him in the bathroom and shut the door behind her. He stood looking at himself in the mirror, holding the toothbrush in front of his mouth, puzzling over it. He put it in his mouth and touched his teeth with it. He turned the water on as she had done.

  “Hurry up,” she called, a muffled voice from beyond the door.

  It felt strange and hard in his mouth. But he started brushing and it made his teeth feel good. So good that he kept on and on until she snatched the door open and stood there naked behind him. He turned with foam on his mouth, the handle of the toothbrush hanging slack.

  “Well goddamn, are you coming on or what?” she said.

  “I’m just brushin my teeth.”

  “Well, you done brushed em long enough. Come on and get it if you going to get it.” She flounced her fine ass away and got on the bed, waiting for him.

  He rinsed his mouth and turned off the water and put the toothbrush down. Looked at himself in the mirror and turned the water back on. He was still a little drunk and he wetted most of his face, rinsing his mouth out some more. When he had finished he shut off the water and looked at himself in the mirror again. In the mirror she lay behind him small on the bed, the dim lights showing her legs and stomach. Her red fingernails lay alongside her thigh. He cut off the light in the bathroom and went to her.

  “Hey.”

  “Hey.”

  “I got em brushed.”

  “Well good. Now come on. Kiss me.”

  “Like that?”

  “Naw. Open your mouth a little. Shit. Don’t push so hard.”

  “I like that.”

  “Lay down with me. Just relax. You’re nervous. Why don’t you take your clothes off?”

  “What for?”

  She raised her head three inches off the pillow and stared at him. “What the hell you think I got mine off for?”

  “Well, I didn’t know.”

  She got up and threw the chemise over herself and found her cigarettes and lighter and lit one. Her face leaning to him in the lamplight was so young, so childlike and so smooth and so unwrinkled. She had a few freckles.

  He reached over and got his beer and drank from it. He knew he was supposed to do something but he didn’t know what it was. And what he was looking at between her legs was to him a strange and hairy puzzle.

  She walked around the room for a while, smoking her cigarette, her arms folded.

  “Take your clothes off,” she said.

  “We got to go in a little bit,” he said.

  “Shit.” She went to the door and stuck her head out. “Joe!”

  Gary lay on the bed and looked at her. She talked for a while with her head stuck out in the hall and then Joe leaned his head in.

  “Boy, you all right?”

  He waved his beer.

  “I’m doin fine.”

  “Well, you better hurry up, now. We got to get you on home before long.”

  He heard her say something about giving him his fifty dollars back. There was some more arguing. After a while she shut the door and came back and sat down on the bed beside him.

  “Listen,” she said. “Do you want to do it or not?”

  “Do what?” he said.

  “Hell, boy, fuck. What do you think?”

  He didn’t know what to think. He had heard the word, from his daddy and Joe and the hands. Things were beginning to dawn on him.

  “Shit,” she said, and crawled down off the bed. “Take your pants off.”

  At first he thought she was going to hurt him and fought against her. He didn’t want any teeth down there. But he understood soon and, like Joe said, he didn’t last long.

  When the light was turned on and Joe stuck his head back in, he was still lying back across the bed with his pants around his ankles. Debi was gone, had sought herself a darker nook.

  “Boy, you all right?”

  “Yessir, believe I am.”

  The boy walked up in the dust of the road and saw his mother standing in the yard, looking at him. The sun was high and she had a stick in her hand. He put his hands in his pockets and felt of the money there. He turned around and headed back the other way.

  “You come here,” she called after him.

  “I’ll be back in a minute.”

  “You come back here.”

  “In a minute.”

  “Now.”

  He didn’t answer but walked around the curve of the trail out of sight of the house. Bees were buzzing in the patches of clover between some of the trees, and he looked back to see if anybody was following him. He looked to his pocket and brought the money out all wadded in his hand and started counting it as he walked. Money to him was something that was hard to make and hard to hold onto once it was made. But he enjoyed making it and he enjoyed saving it, and he began to look around for a good place to hide some more of it now that the work was over. The truck money was already hidden, but he never walked near it, would only walk there once more.

  In front of the house the pines thinned away to scrub oak and bushes and sandy soil with scattered rocks. He looked back again and stepped off the trail, sighting on a big den tree where he’d seen coons leave in the evenings and return in the mornings, regular as bankers checking in and out of their offices. The woods were hot and dry and the leaves were noisy underfoot. He slowed down and stepped more carefully, as if he were stalking something. He had his first hangover and his head was not feeling good.

  There was a creekbed that was nearly dry in the bottom of the hollow and he stepped across that and looked up at the coon den. A young one regarded him from his hole high in the tree, just his head poked out, then withdrew his face and was seen no more. The boy stood beside the tree, scanning the woods around him. He was tired from his night but he thought of the girl constantly, every second, never stopping. He had begun to feel a feeling for her that he could not describe even to himself.

  When he had stood there for a minute or so, his eye picked out a small gray rock on a little hillside where pines had fallen long years ago and nature had weathered them down to their hard skeletal hearts. The rock lay among these lengths of prime kindling, and he walked over and knelt down beside it, looking back once to line up the den tree with his position. There was an old pay envelope in his pocket, and he pulled it out and put all the money in it except for one twenty-dollar bill. On both knees he scanned the woods around him, his eyes moving slowly, searching, noting particular trees and the clumps of honeysuckle and the matted nests of briers and the downed timber, listening for any sound there might be, but hearing nothing. When he had satisfied himself that he was alone, he carefully rolled the rock over and put the money beneath it and replaced it exactly as it had been for who knew how many years. There was a sudden feeling of eyes on him and he jerked his head up, both hands on the rock, but there was nothing, only the silent woods and the birds flitting through the tree limbs, the brief rattle of an Indian hen on a dead and acoustic trunk. His heart grieved with worry over the money, but the quiet woods lulled him with trust. He got up and moved away from the rock, careful not to disturb the leaves, and sighted back on it once more when he got to the den tree.

  The rock sat in a bright patch of sunshine, streaked with pale veins and bearing small growths of velvety green moss. The sound of his steps receded through t
he woods and diminished, faded, was gone. The wind blew gently and the shadows wavered over the ground. The fallen pines lay around the rock, the woods warm, airy with light, flushed with sunshine.

  After a time another noise appeared, a hushed step, a careful approach. The noise grew louder, a slow crunching of leaves underfoot, stealthy, heard only by one. A foot stopped beside the rock, an overall-clad knee came down to rest. A gnarled and shaking hand spread out over the rough warm face of the rock, trying to hold its secret there deep in the snakey woods.

  The new pickup sat idling at the curb in front of the liquor store, and he came out of the door with three fifths of whiskey in his arms and got in it. He liked the way the new truck smelled. It had a V-8 with an automatic and the salesman had talked him into getting one with air conditioning. He was glad of it now. He rolled the window up and turned the air on. He had owned it for about an hour.

  There was a new cooler in the floorboard with a case of Pabst iced down in it, and he shoved the top aside and got one out and put the top back on. The gas gauge was sitting close to empty but he figured he could make it to London Hill.

  He met a sheriff’s deputy not a mile out of town and looked in the rearview mirror to see if the deputy would hit his brakes. He did, briefly.

  “Fuck you, sumbitch,” he said, and turned his beer up. The truck had a good radio and he found a country music station and turned the volume up. George Jones was singing “He Stopped Loving Her Today.” He sang along with George, at peace with the world. After another mile or two the black car appeared far down the road behind him, trailing him slowly.

  “You motherfucker,” he said. He watched it for a while and saw that it was slowly gaining. The blue lights were not flashing. He sped up a little, eyeing the gas gauge, muttering under his breath. He went into a curve, and once he got out of sight of the deputy’s car and crested the hill, he drove onto another blacktop road that intersected Old Six, Camp Lake Stephens Road, pulling the wheel hard to the right and sliding the whiskey bottles across the seat. He mashed hard on the gas and drove to a small driveway about a hundred yards down the road and turned around. He sat there for thirty seconds and then roared back down the blacktop road. He pulled up to the highway and turned to the right again, then pulled out and took another drink of his beer.

  He caught sight of the cruiser again within three more miles. The car in front of him slowed and he eased up behind it. He could see the deputy looking back at him through the rearview mirror. Joe waved to him but he wouldn’t wave back.

  He followed him down the road for another mile and the cruiser sped up and pulled off. It went out of sight up the highway around a curve. When he went past Manley Franklin’s old store four miles later, it was pulled up on the other side of the building, facing the road, and it sped out after him, the blue lights flashing.

  “I figured that shit,” he said. He put on his blinker and pulled over on the shoulder and waited while the car eased up behind him. He dropped the empty beer bottle in the floor and lit a cigarette. The deputy took his time getting out. Joe rolled the window down and sat there.

  The deputy walked up beside him, and he was a new man Joe didn’t know, a stranger behind shiny sunglasses.

  “Nice truck,” the deputy said.

  “Thanks.”

  “Noticed you ain’t got a tag on it. You just get it?”

  “About five minutes ago. I do something wrong?”

  “Not that I know of.”

  “What’d you pull me over for then?”

  The deputy rubbed his chin. He rested the knuckles of one hand on the butt of his gun. The leather holster creaked like a new saddle.

  “How much have you drank?”

  “I ain’t drank nothing but one beer. I got three bottles of whiskey right here if you’d like to examine them.”

  “They told me you were a smartass.”

  “Who told you?”

  “You think that was funny a while ago, trying to outrun me?”

  “I wasn’t trying to outrun you. I got off the highway and took a piss. Ain’t no law against that, is it?”

  He was a young man, with thin arms. The widest part of him was the belt and the gun around his waist. Joe pulled the gearshift down into drive and stepped on the brake.

  “If you’re through shootin the shit I’m ready to leave.”

  “I ain’t through talking to you.”

  “I think you are.”

  He pulled off and left him standing there, reached in the cooler and got another beer. He watched through the rearview mirror as the deputy got back in his car and killed the blue lights. The car had not moved from beside the road by the time he lost it from view, and he didn’t think about it or look back any more. Randy Travis was singing a song of love and heartbreak on the radio, and he was much more interested in that.

  He pulled in at John’s store and got out, took the gas cap off and locked the premium nozzle open so that it flowed slowly into the tank. He carried one of the fifths inside the store.

  “Hey, John,” he called.

  He turned at a noise beside the door and the storekeeper was standing out there with his hand on the screen, looking at the pickup. He stepped inside, shaking his head.

  “How about loaning me about ten thousand this afternoon?” he said.

  Joe set the whiskey on the counter and pulled a wad of bills from his pocket, thumbing through them for a twenty. He pulled one out and put it beside the whiskey.

  “I think I got a good deal on that one, John.”

  “It’s pretty.”

  “Thanks.”

  “I like that color.”

  “I looked at a red one I started to get but I liked that one better. Come on and get in and we’ll go for a ride.”

  He was just kidding, but the old man looked at his watch and said: “By God, I don’t guess there’s no reason I can’t.”

  “Well hell, good, come on. Wait a minute.”

  He went out the door and released the lock on the nozzle and finished filling the tank, twenty dollars even. When he stepped back inside, the old man had put his money inside a bank bag and was holding his pistol and a couple of cigars taken from a box on the counter, and was standing there with another cigar in his mouth and the whiskey in his pocket.

  “Twenty even, John.”

  The storekeeper nodded and said, “Let’s hurry up and get out of here before somebody comes by.”

  “You taking that pistol with you?”

  “Hell yes. I got about sixty thousand dollars in here.”

  “Damn. You got another gun I can borrow?”

  “This one’ll do.”

  Joe held the screen door open for him, then opened the door of the truck so he could pile his things on the seat. John Coleman walked back to the store on nimble feet, wearing socks and sandals. He locked the door and slammed it shut and started out to the truck but went back and unlocked it and reached in and cut off the power to the gas pumps and then locked it again. A car came down the road, slowing down hurriedly, swinging in.

  “It never fails,” he said, from where he stood beside the truck just about to climb in. He lifted the lid on the cooler and looked inside. “Lord have mercy, boy,” he said. He looked up at Joe. “Let’s go. Quick.”

  They got in and Joe pulled the shift down into drive.

  “You don’t want to wait on this guy?”

  “Hell naw, don’t wait on him.”

  But the driver of the car had already gotten out and was walking over to the truck. He had long black hair, a dirty T-shirt, and very greasy hands. He wiped his nose and leaned in the window of the truck. Joe noticed how close his hands were getting to the upholstery of his nice new nice-smelling truck.

  “Mr. Coleman? How bout opening up for me?” he said. He shook his head and looked around inside the truck.

  “I’m going somewhere,” John said. “I’ll be back after while.”

  “You ready, John?” Joe said.

  “Yeah,”
John said. “I’m ready.”

  “I need to get a few things, Mr. Coleman,” the man said, but Joe let off the brake and the truck moved. The man grabbed the outside mirror, printed the chrome with grease, and said, “Now wait a minute.”

  Joe put the brake on and shoved the shift into park.

  “Let’s go, Joe,” the old man said. “Hell, he don’t want to do nothing but charge something.” He bent over and reached inside the cooler for a beer, and Joe saw something cross the black-haired man’s face at the sight of the back of John Coleman’s head.