Joe

by Larry Brown

  He went on up the road and threw the beer can into a ditch and got another one and smoked a cigarette. He hadn’t been up around the old place where they lived in a long time, but there had been a time when seven coveys of birds could be stalked and shot at, a long time ago when he had good dogs, when the kids were little, before most of his troubles. There were Saturday afternoons when he could put the two dogs in the trunk and take his automatic and walk the fields in the stiff winter breeze and be one with the dogs, his eye steady on the barrel, the birds exploding from the cover on their dynamite wings, the brace, the shock of the shot, the birds dropping neatly, folding, the dogs already starting to move toward them. A long time ago, days he’d almost forgotten about. The house was in bad shape even then, the logs sagging in the middle and the vines climbing up their sides. It had been deserted for who knew how many years and was probably older than anybody he knew or had ever known. He couldn’t imagine them living in it.

  He thought about the boy’s daddy taking the boy’s money. A sorry motherfucker indeed.

  He turned around in a churchyard and drove back down the road and turned the radio off. Wade was still going down the road when he pulled up beside him and stopped. The door opened immediately and he got in and placed his feet around the cooler and reached in nearly instantly and got himself a beer.

  “Help yourself,” Joe told him.

  “Goddamn, I thought nobody never would stop.”

  “I tried to while ago and you just walked on past me. What are you doing out walking?”

  “Well, I been flyin but my arms got tired. Damn that beer’s good and cold. Can you take me home?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know if I can get up in there or not.”

  “Aw yeah, you can get up in there. Willie and them brought me home the other night.”

  “Willie?”

  “Yeah. Willie and Flo. Aw, the sumbitches had been drunk, up at Memphis. Went up there and they had a bunch of money and they got off with some of them old stripper girls and went to this hotel in West Memphis, Willie said this old girl’d been rubbing his dick and everything so he said what the hell I’ll fuck this son of a bitch, she went over there in the bathroom to do something and he passed out watching the television, come to she was going out the door, well, he jumped out of the bed and run grabbed her, had all her clothes on. Well, naturally she kicked him in the balls first thing and he grabbed her leg going out the door and she started in kicking him, him laying there hollering you motherfucker and then she started slugging him with her damn purse in the head and liked to knocked him out again, so he grabbed her goddamn pants and pulled em off and said she took off out across the parking lot in her panties and he said she had a fine ass. Well, there was another son of a bitch in there he said done fucked and sucked everything in sight and she was passed out in the bed. Well, he said the old girl with his money was trying to get into a car out there and leave and his balls was about to kill him, so he runs out butt naked and she’s cutting the top out of a convertible with a fingernail file and he just knocks the cold shit out of her with his fist and grabs her purse. The damn cops get there and one of em sticks a goddamn pistol right in his ear and says I’d love to see you breathe, and them cocksuckers take em to jail and it costs em twenty-four hundred dollars and he didn’t even get a blowjob. I may go up there with em next weekend.”

  He turned his beer up and drained it with his throat pumping and rolled the window down and threw the can and puked down the outside of the door and rolled the window back up and got another beer. He opened it and started drinking it.

  “Where you been?” Joe said.

  “Over at some niggers’. They wouldn’t give me no pussy. Black motherfuckin son of a bitches. Damn dog bit me.”

  He reached down and pulled up the leg of his overalls and examined a wound there and let it fall back down over his wet shoes. Joe could smell him, an odor of old sweat and puke and garbage. He turned the vent so that fresh air would blow in.

  “Y’all still living up yonder where you were?”

  “Yeah. We got it fixed up pretty good now. I won some money and bought some furniture. One of my girls run off, I reckon.”

  “One of your girls? How many girls you got?”

  “I had about five at one time. I had three boys. Two of em’s dead.”

  He never had heard the boy mention that. Or five sisters either. He guessed there were a lot of things about him he didn’t know. Never would know. And might be better off not knowing.

  “Aw, goddamn, she had to smartmouth everything I said. I got in a goddamn fistfight with her a while back. She stole some money from her mama and I tried to whip her ass and she picked up a goddamn board there bout long as your leg and hit me with it. I told her to get her ass out and she left. I don’t know where she’s at. Don’t care, neither.”

  “How old’s she?”

  “Hell, I don’t know. Seventeen or eighteen, I guess. You ain’t got a bottle of schnapps in that cooler nowhere, have you?”

  “Naw.”

  He was surprised that the old man had cigarettes, but he did, and his own lighter, and there was a bottle of something in a paper sack in his hip pocket, resting against the seat. They drove down through the bottom, and past the fields, and the cows stood behind fences or lay scattered over the pastureland in dark forms like black boulders against the emerald grass. He ran over a couple of snakes, lining the left front tire up with their heads and hearing the little pops when their heads exploded. Frantically writhing loops lashing the warm asphalt, left behind unseen in his wake.

  “Your boy’s a good worker,” he said, finally.

  “He’ll probably grow up to be a smartass, too. That’s the hardest fuckin work I ever done in my life.”

  “Give me one of them beers out of there,” Joe said. “How many’s in there?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. He had his hand down in the cooler sloshing around. “How bout turning on the light?”

  Joe reached up and turned the cab light on. The old man had a long scabbed cut down his jaw. Blood was caked on his chin. One sleeve of his shirt was torn nearly off.

  “They’s five or six in here, feels like.”

  “Well, hand me one.”

  The old man passed it over and put the top back on the cooler and reached for the bottle in his pocket. He opened it and Joe turned off the light and watched him out the corner of his eye turn the bottle up and pull steadily on it for a few seconds. He pulled it down and he heard his lungs rattle.

  “Gadammmmmmmmmm,” he said.

  “What are you drinking?”

  “Damn if I know what it is. I thought it was schnapps when I bought it.”

  “Let me see it.”

  “I don’t know what it is.”

  “Let me look at it.”

  He turned the light on again and the old man handed him the bottle. He looked at the label. It was a pint of Ron Rico 151.

  “Goddamn,” he said, and handed it back. “You could take a match and set that shit on fire.”

  “I believe you could.”

  He decided to drive down by the dirt road and see how far up it he could get. It was fairly dry now but he knew he’d never make it all the way. He turned off the highway and eased up the gravel road. The gravel was sparse and the fences were in bad shape. Small flash floods had swept over the road and it was rutted and washboarded. He hated to have his new truck on it. He went across a battered wooden bridge, and it creaked and moaned as he eased the weight of the truck over it. He looked down into the dark water where reptiles and amphibians lay unseen and where the coons walked and fed and listened for the hounds and lived their nocturnal lives.

  “I heard that boy was going to buy that old truck off you,” the old man said.

  Joe glanced at him.

  “Yeah. I reckon he is. I meant to get him today and help me bring it home but I never did get around to it.”

  “Where’s it at?”

  “Up at Oxfor
d. Out there at Rebel.”

  “You gonna finance it for him?”

  “He said he had the cash.”

  The old man was silent for a moment. A possum froze by the weeds and then trotted across the gravel with its tail high and went into a ditch and disappeared.

  “I doubt if he’s got enough money to buy a truck.”

  “He made plenty this spring. I think he saved a good bit. He supported your ass, didn’t he?”

  “I don’t owe him shit!” the old man said, and Joe stopped the truck.

  “What you stopping for? It’s still a ways up there.”

  “This is far as I’m going. I’m turning around right here.”

  “Hell. Take me on up the road. I don’t want to walk.”

  “Tough shit,” Joe told him. He put it up in parking gear and looked at him. “That boy saved his money for a couple of months to buy that old truck. And let me tell you something. It’s his. I could give a shit whether he pays me the money or not. I piss away that much gambling in one night. But he wants that truck. And if I find out something’s happened to his money, I’m going to whip whoever’s ass had something to do with it. Now get out. Before I knock your ass out.”

  The old man was silent. He opened the door and got out and shut it. He walked to the front of the truck and stood illuminated in the headlights, blinking like some huge grounded owl. He went on up the gravel road drinking the beer, stopping to look back once in a while, the wet legs of his overalls flopping around his legs. Joe watched him through the windshield, fading back into the darkness he had come out of, walking along with his head down like some draft animal strapped into a lifetime of hard work with no choice but to keep walking a row. The new truck hummed with precision, the clean dashboard, the bright dials and gauges. The wind lifted and moved a few strands of Joe’s hair. He kept sitting there.

  “You sorry son of a bitch,” he said.

  There was a dim light showing inside Henry’s house and one vehicle was parked in the yard, an old Pontiac Tempest. The cotton around the house was small and stunted and the whole place looked as though it had settled into an era of decay. He pushed the headlights off and sat with the parking lights on for several minutes but nobody came to the door. He was a little drunker now and he wanted to gamble. Most of the beer was gone but there was some whiskey under the seat. He lit a cigarette and pushed off the parking lights and killed the engine. Henry didn’t have a dog. With the house so close to the road, his dogs kept getting run over. He got out and went across the yard and mounted the steps and knocked lightly on the door. No sound came from within, only the soft murmur of a radio playing. He opened the screen door and stuck his head in.

  “Henry. Hey, Henry.”

  No answer. All asleep?

  He stepped into the hall and opened the door on the right. The room was dark and unoccupied. The door on the left was closed and he knocked gently before he opened it. A wan blue light from a silent television screen filled with snow cast the room in a shadowy glow, a vague inconsistent light where sleeping figures sprawled. There was an old army cot against one wall and Henry was piled up in it naked but for his underwear, his arm over his face. Stacy was in a battered recliner with a quilt thrown over him, his head back, eyes closed, mouth wide open. And George, the blind brother, sat in a straightback wooden chair with the 9MM in his hand and a dead woman at his feet, whose blood had come out of her body and made a dark rug on the floor around her. He held the pistol in one hand and a glass of something in the other. His hair was white, shaggy, disordered. The radio played country tunes softly.

  He said one word: “Joe?”

  But his visitor had no wish to be verified, and he did not answer. He let himself out as quietly as he had let himself in and got back in his truck and drove home through the black night, into oak hollows, past standing deer with eyes like bright green jewels, who raised their ears and stared as he passed by them and beyond.

  There was a knock on the door the next morning and it took him a moment to realize and remember what he had seen, the milky blue opaque eyes dead and lifeless and unblinking and the woman undeniably dead, too, so still, so quiet.

  He lay in the bed with the sheets twisted over him and stared at the ceiling until the knock came again. He looked at his watch and saw that it was nearly seven. Probably the boy.

  His pants were lying on the floor and he got up and yelled that he was coming, then stepped into them and found his cigarettes and lit one and went up the hall to the kitchen and crossed to the door with just a little irritation toward the boy for waking him up so early. He unlocked it and swung it open and there stood Charlotte in her uniform, the dog fawning over her like a puppy.

  “Well,” he said. “Surprise, surprise.”

  She looked up at him and smiled that little smile. Then she stopped smiling.

  “I ain’t coming in if there’s a woman here,” she said. He stepped back from the door.

  “Come on in. Ain’t nobody here but me and the dog.”

  She came in and he closed the door behind her, wishing he’d combed his hair, and wanting the house to be a little cleaner. He saw her looking at the mess, clothes piled up, dirty socks on the floor. His muddy boots sitting in the kitchen, empty cans on the table.

  “I didn’t know if he’d remember me,” she said.

  “Shit. Him? Get you a chair and sit down. Let me go comb my hair. Why don’t you make us some coffee? It’s up there in the cabinet. I’ll be right back.”

  “Okay. I can’t stay but a little bit.”

  He went back to his bedroom and put on some clean blue jeans and a white shirt that he buttoned halfway up. He combed his hair and brushed his lower teeth and his denture, her asking him things, saying yeah or naw until he finished. When he went back into the living room she was sitting on the couch and she had folded some of the clothes.

  “Don’t worry about that stuff,” he said. “I’ll get it later. You put the water on?”

  “Yeah.”

  He busied himself picking up cans on the table, pouring what was left in some of them down the drain, putting the cans in the overflowing garbage can inside the broom closet. He looked at her and she looked awfully good to him. She’d fixed her hair differently, and she’d gained a little weight.

  “You look good, baby,” he said.

  “You don’t.”

  “Well hell, I just woke up. What’s the occasion?” She looked down at her fingers and moved a little ring with a red stone in it. She looked back up and she looked uncomfortable.

  “I just wondered were you going to see the baby. He’s been home for a couple of weeks now. Theresa would like for you to come see him.” She waited a moment. “And I’d like for you to come see him. If you want to. I think he looks like you.”

  Years ago she would have broken and started crying. But that vulnerability in her eyes was gone now, all that cheerful hope. She was forty-seven now.

  “I forgot your birthday,” he said, and got down two cups from the cabinet, set out the sugar, got milk from the icebox.

  “I don’t want no coffee, Joe. I’ve got to get on to work anyway.”

  He got the coffee pot and poured two cups of water and then looked over his shoulder at her.

  “Hell, you don’t have to go to work till nine, do you? You got time to drink a cup of coffee I know.”

  He fixed it for her and carried it to her and retreated back to the kitchen table so that there was at least a barrier of distance between them. He didn’t know what kind of thoughts she had about him now.

  “Thanks,” she said. She pulled out her cigarettes and he got up and got her an ashtray.

  “I thought you quit,” he said.

  “I’ve cut way down. I don’t know if I could quit completely. Working up there helps. We can’t smoke inside the building any more. I don’t smoke but five or six a day. I feel a lot better.”

  “You gained a little weight.”

  “A little.”

  “It l
ooks good on you.”

  She didn’t answer. For a while they sat in uneasy silence.

  “I shouldn’t have come over,” she said. “I didn’t call first. I didn’t see no other vehicle outside. When did you get that new truck?”

  “Yesterday.”

  “I like it.”