Joe

by Larry Brown

  He ate a little himself. He made sure his little brother got all he wanted. He rocked him in his lap, mopped the sweat from his forehead with his shirttail, crooned him to sleep. And when he slept, he laid him on the soft grass and turned him on his side.

  One couple kept watching them. An older couple, white haired, with nice clothes and diamond rings. They came closer finally. The man pulled at the crease of his trousers before he sat down. His wife lingered nearby.

  “That’s a beautiful baby you have,” the man said.

  His father turned and frowned. “Hey,” he said.

  The man came forward in a parody of a duckwalk, inching along. He had steelrimmed glasses that flashed and caught the dying sun. They began talking. The woman eased herself down on the grass and smiled and smiled. On a plywood stage a band had formed to play bluegrass, boys and men made up in western shirts and jeans and boots, scarves knotted around their necks. There was a fiddler among them and he stepped up and bent to the microphone, bending his arm and keeping his chin tucked. They started playing.

  He sat in the grass and heard them and watched them and it seemed like everything would be better in his world if they could find one place to stay. He knew even then that they were different, his people, this family that traveled all night sometimes. The sky grew darker and the lights came up and the people sat on the hillsides and watched the bands come up and make their introductions and then take the stage and do their numbers. There were four bands that played that night, and when the last band ended its final set it appeared that something had been arranged.

  He had never ridden in such an automobile. He sat in the back seat of the Lincoln with the girls and his mother, Calvin asleep in his lap. His father was in front, with the man and his wife. There was whiskey. He could smell it. He’d learned the smell of it early. His father and his mother passed the bottle back and forth and she drank heavily, the only time he ever saw her do that. They talked like old friends, his father in his torn overalls and the man and the woman in their nice clothes.

  They drove for miles in the night through strange country, some of it barren, flat, gray as stone. Later there were oaks and beeches and river bottoms, plowed dirt black as night. He slept some. And when he woke they were still talking, still passing the whiskey bottle, but his mother and the girls were asleep. And Calvin. By leaning up over the seat he could see him cupped in the woman’s arms, his bland face and closed eyes a picture he wouldn’t forget. There was a look of radiance on the woman’s face such as he had never seen on the face of anybody. There was joy there, the purest sort of happiness. He could see his little brother’s face blue in the dashlights, the crown of hair around the woman’s head shot through with light. It had been puffed up, made to look thicker than it was. He could see her scalp.

  When he woke again it was to early morning darkness. The woman and the man and Calvin were not with them. There was a Greyhound bus parked at the curb, gouts of smoke curling from the tailpipe. His mother was having some kind of fit. She had her face in her hands, clawing at it, backing away from the car, and his father was talking to her from behind the wheel. Then he got out of the car and took her roughly by the arm and tried to fling her in through the open door, but she caught herself against the frame and pushed back with her arms, saying no in a high chant. His father wrenched her around by one arm and doubled his fist and hit her in the face and she sat down in the seat. He bent over and caught up her legs and put them inside the car. He started to slam the door but she came back out. He kicked her and she flew back, moaned, and fell half over in the floorboard. His father slammed the door on her and walked around and got in. The boy he was then looked out the window, saying nothing, watching the huge trembling bus idling at the curb with the dark figures of sleeping passengers inside. And the car began to slide away. Window by window they left it, the long gray dog emblazoned on the side moving backward, the nose and the outstretched feet, then lamp posts and storefronts and closed shops and sidewalks and finally empty streets, ghostly intersections where red lights slowly blinked and no people stood. He turned around in the seat on his knees and felt of the rich upholstery of the car and felt the quiet power that began to pick up speed and bear them nearly noiselessly through the night. He watched the town grow smaller behind them until it was only a dim blaze of lights at the end of two black lanes of highway marked on each side with a white strip, the dots and dashes ofcenterline emerging ever quicker from beneath the trunk, the red glow of the taillights skimming and a yellow sign receding to a small bright dot.

  The morning was only a few hours old but the whiskey bottle was half empty. He wasn’t weaving badly, and he almost made it to his house. But then he saw the boy going down the road walking, and he pulled over. The boy stood there a moment, looking away with his hands in his pockets, then turned his head to face him with the big purple bruise over an eyelid that was completely closed, the lid stretched tight like the skin of a ripe plum.

  “Get in,” Joe said.

  The boy shook his head. A car came up the road, slowed, and drove between them. The boy stood there looking with one eye across the short distance that separated them.

  “Get in, Gary.”

  He seemed to hold back from taking some final step. Whatever there was in his face was something he hadn’t shown before. But finally he walked across the little asphalt road and stepped down into the ditch briefly and opened the door and got in.

  “Look here.”

  The boy turned and showed it to him. It looked even worse up close.

  “Your daddy’s left-handed, I see,” he said, and the boy drew back before he could touch him and eased back against the seat. He looked like a joke but he wasn’t a joke.

  “How you know he did it?” he said.

  “Who else would? Where’s your truck?”

  The boy said nothing. Joe looked up in the rearview mirror and saw something coming and sat there until it went past. Then he pulled out.

  “I should have done give you a boxing lesson.”

  “I don’t need no boxing lesson. I’m gonna bust his damn head open is what I’m gonna do.”

  “That might cure it. I ain’t going to ask you if it hurts. Why don’t we stop by the house and get some ice for it? It might take some of the swelling down.”

  “I had some cold water on it. I don’t guess it done no good.”

  “Ice is about the only thing that’ll help it. It’s probably too late to help it much.”

  “Where you been?” the boy said. “You all dressed up.”

  “I been over at Tupelo. I just got in a while ago. Here, take you a drink of this whiskey. That’ll make your head feel better. It always does mine.”

  The boy picked it up and twisted the top off slowly, tilted the neck toward his nose and sniffed and moved it to his mouth all in one motion, taking just a tiny sip, then another, then he took a full swallow while Joe watched him and drove at the same time. He didn’t make that bad a face.

  “Get you a Coke out of the floor there. I put two quarters in a Coke machine at a gas station in Pontotoc a while ago and three of them son of a bitches come out.”

  The boy reached for one of the cans in the floor and held the bottle up.

  “You done drank all this this morning?”

  “Yeah. I started early today. Listen, you got any idea where your truck might be? When did he get in it?”

  “Early this morning. I was asleep and heard him crank it up.”

  “You didn’t hide the keys?”

  “Naw. I didn’t think to.”

  Joe slowed the truck as they came within sight of his house, and he reached and got the whiskey. He put on his blinker and pulled into his driveway and parked the truck. The dog watched from under the house. Joe lifted the whiskey and pulled hard on it, took it down, and turned to face the boy for a moment.

  “You want another drink?”

  “Might as well,” he said. They sat there in the truck with the sun steadily climbing.
“I don’t guess it matters what time of day you drink, does it?”

  Joe gave him a little wave of his hand.

  “It don’t to me. I reckon one time’s good as another.”

  The boy opened the Coke and took a drink of the whiskey, then turned up the Coke. He did that twice.

  “Damn, you need to quit hanging around me, boy. Give me that bottle back.”

  He was grinning when he said it. He nearly tousled the boy’s hair, but turned instead and looked at the house. It looked like they might as well go find the old man and see if they could untangle things.

  “I reckon he’s got Dorothy with him.”

  “Who’s Dorothy?”

  “That’s my little sister. The one that can’t talk.”

  “Can’t talk?”

  “Won’t. She used to would. She just quit one day and ain’t never said another word.”

  “You shittin me.”

  “Naw.”

  “How old’s Dorothy?”

  “I don’t know. I guess about twelve or thirteen.”

  “He ever took her off before?”

  “Not that I know of.”

  A dark thought moved in his mind and he looked at the boy carefully. He put the top back on the whiskey.

  “Tell you what,” he said. “I’ll run in here and grab some ice and a towel. You had anything to eat?”

  “I don’t want nothing to eat.”

  “All right. Just hold on and we’ll ride down the road and see if we can see your truck anywhere, okay?”

  “What if we find it?”

  “I hope we do,” he said, and got out. He lit a cigarette, said something to the dog, and went on in. He was back out in a few minutes with a towel and some ice. The boy watched him while he laid the towel out on the seat and started cracking the ice in the tray, not saying anything else.

  When they backed out into the road, Gary had a large wad of towel pressed against his eye. Joe drank some more of the whiskey and then ran one hand through his hair. Part of his shirttail was hanging out of his pants and the truck was low on gas.

  “I come by other day and I didn’t see your truck,” the boy said. “I was gonna see about that title or whatever.”

  Joe was mostly looking out the window while he was driving. Somebody was building an addition on Jim Sharp’s house and a concrete truck was backed up against the house, the huge cylinder turning, men working in high rubber boots.

  “Yeah,” he said absently. “Yeah, we got to get that fixed up one of these days.”

  He turned off onto the first gravel road and reached for the whiskey again.

  “You ought to just move in with me is what you ought to do,” he said. “Hell. At least you wouldn’t have to worry about him stealing your goddamn truck.”

  He took a drink and passed the whiskey back to the boy. The road was dry but spotted here and there with mud holes and he splashed through most of them. The cows stood back from the road like statues as they passed. The sun was bright, the pastures laden with dew shining in the early morning light. Bobwhites dusted themselves in the road before running single file into the weeds.

  “Move in with you?”

  “Hell yeah. You could find something to do this summer. Shit, paint houses or something. I know you could find you a job. You could probably get on a crew and do some carpenter work or something. It’s lots of stuff to do, you just got to get out and find it.”

  “What would I do about them?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well. I’d kind of hate to just go off and leave em.”

  “Why? What in the fuck have they ever done for you?”

  “I just kind of hate to go off and leave em.”

  “Stay with em, then.”

  They went across the first bridge and it rattled underneath the truck as they rolled over it. He could see the old GMC from there, parked beneath the oaks that shaded the next bridge. The other truck was parked beside it, the white Ford, but he already knew what they would find. He slowed the truck. The sun was climbing higher. He thought about the old cons in the pen who would take the young and pretty boys down and how they would muffle their screams while they raped them. How everyone turned their heads and looked away because it didn’t concern them and it wasn’t them.

  “Listen. If anything starts happening, you get your little ass out of the way. You hear?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean get out of the goddamn way. Put the cap on that whiskey.”

  A man was leaning against the fender of Willie Russell’s truck. He’d seen him before, but he didn’t know his name. He hung around the Dumpsters sometimes, driving a wrecked car full of feral children.

  “Stay in the truck,” he said, and stopped and reached under the seat for the pistol. He saw Wade stand up quickly and walk across the road and climb with a wild and pawing energy the brier-infested opposite bank, look back once and pile headlong over the fence to vanish in the tangled growth there. When he had the gun in his hand, he stomped on the gas and sped across the bridge and slammed on the brakes, and was out the door with the pistol almost before the truck had stopped moving. The man on the fender started backing away with his hands out in front of him, then he turned and started running. Joe let him go.

  When he stepped around the end of the GMC and looked inside and saw what was back there, saw the blood on the little girl’s legs, he backed up a step and waited. She was putting her clothes back on. Russell was fastening his pants and trying to talk to him. Joe didn’t answer him. Gary had gotten out and was suddenly standing beside him, looking in.

  “Dorothy,” he said, the only word he said.

  “Get her out, Gary. Get her out and get her in my truck and you go home.”

  She pulled her dress down and quickly got off the cot, and slid out over the top of the tailgate. Gary took her hand and led her away. She wasn’t crying. She wasn’t making any noise at all. Gary put her in the truck and went around and got behind the wheel, and Joe looked at him for a moment. Their eyes met for the last time and then the boy looked down at the gearshift. After a few seconds he pulled the lever down and took his foot off the brake and they went rolling past. Joe realized too late they’d taken his whiskey. The truck went on down the road and when the sound of it finally faded away, he walked close with the little gun out in front of him and pushed the safety off with his thumb. It made a tiny click and Russell closed his eyes and covered those eyes with his hands. Waiting. Joe started to tell him a few things first, then decided there was no need of that.

  EPILOGUE

  That winter the trees stood nearly barren of their leaves and the cold seemed to settle into the old log house deep in the woods. The old woman felt it seep into her bones. Each morning the floors seemed colder, each day it was harder to crank the truck. The boy piled wood for colder days to come. At odd times of the day they’d hear the faint honking, and they’d hurry out into the yard to see overhead, and far beyond the range of men’s guns the geese spread out over the sky in a distant brotherhood, the birds screaming to each other in happy voices for the bad weather they were leaving behind, the southlands always ahead of their wings, warm marshes and green plants beckoning them to their ancient primeval nesting lands.

  They’d stand looking up until the geese diminished and fled crying out over the heavens and away into the smoking clouds, their voices dying slowly, one last note the only sound and proof of their passing, that and the final wink of motion that swallowed them up into the sky and the earth that met it and the pine trees always green and constant against the great blue wildness that lay forever beyond.

  Additional Books by Larry Brown

  Available from Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill

  FAY

  “Brown’s magic is to make the reader wonder at this plucky heroine, then care about and finally root for her as she winds toward the novel’s gripping conclusion. Spellbinding.” —People magazine

  In this taut, seductive novel, se
venteen-year-old femme fatale Fay Jones hitchhikes her way down Mississippi Highway 55, with just the clothes on her back, two dollars, and a pack of cigarettes, and leaves bodies and broken hearts in her wake.

  Hardcover edition: ISBN 1-56512-168-6

  * * *

  FACING THE MUSIC

  “Ten raw and strictly 100-proof stories make up one of the more exciting debuts of recent memory—fiction that’s gritty and genuine, and funny in a hard-luck way.” —Kirkus Reviews

  These ten stories confront, head-on, the dark side of the human condition.