“That’s it,” Jack said as they approached, pointing off the side of the road. “Tell me you got a winch that works.”
“I got a winch that works.”
The truck had skidded to a stop just before disturbing the crop rows. The work truck had a winch on the front and the man slowed and stopped, his front end facing the overturned bottom of Jack’s vehicle, the back end of the truck sticking out onto the highway. The two men got out and Jack stood with his hands on his hips. The man held his hands in the pockets of his overalls. They looked at the truck as if it might tell them what happened.
“You ain’t supposed to be driving all messed up,” the man said and he moved to the back end and walked along the trail of sunken earth where the truck had slid on its side.
Jack said just help me get it upright and we can be done. He walked to the winch and lifted the large iron hook and was looking for a release for the cable when he heard the man let out a quick yell.
“What?” Jack called.
“Aw hell no. Hell no,” the man said. He was walking toward the work truck and shaking his head.
“What is it?”
“I got to go.”
“We’re not done.”
“I am. Go look over yonder,” he said and he waved toward the crops.
Jack moved around the end of his overturned truck and he saw the body. Legs bent back and dried blood on the dead man’s face and mouth. Flies buzzing about his head.
Jack dropped to one knee and propped his head onto his balled fist as if thinking or praying or repenting or a little of it all.
The man climbed in the work truck and slammed the door.
“Where you going?
“Away from here.”
“Help me get it turned upright.”
“I ain’t staying here with a dead white boy.”
Jack left the body and hurried over. Put his hands on the hood and said you don’t even have to get out. Just let me hook it up and pull it.
The old man cranked the truck and stared at Jack. “Son of a bitch you got about thirty seconds to get that damn thing hitched and then you pretend like you never seen me,” he said and he pulled a latch under the dashboard. The winch was freed and Jack took the hook and walked over to his truck. He reached up and dropped the hook over the front axle and then made a loop with the cable and then he gave the old man a thumbs up.
There was another click and the winch retracted and the cable pulled straight. The metal groaned as the truck began to tip and then the weight came and it landed flat with a dusty thud.
“Unhook that shit!” the man yelled. Jack eased himself onto the ground and he lay on his back, sliding under the truck and removing the hook and cable. As the cable retracted Jack spotted a folded blue tarp strapped to the truck bed with a bungee cord and he walked over and snatched it just as the man put the truck in reverse and backed onto the highway. The man then shifted into drive and was gone in a clunky instant, tires spinning and hollering something about the dead and the dying and the Lord Jesus Christ.
Jack watched him go. And then he turned and looked at his truck. Dented door. Busted headlight. Spiderweb windshield. Bent tailgate. A dead son of a bitch on the other side. He pulled open the door and climbed in, looking for the money on the floorboard and behind the seat and underneath the seat, expecting his hand to find an envelope. To ease the panic. He found instead brass knuckles and a sock and two empty bottles of Tylenol but no envelope. He slid the brass knuckles into his pocket and then walked two laps around the truck and he walked up and down the side of the road and he crossed the highway and looked on the other side and nothing. He ran over to the burrowed trail where the truck had slid and he got down on his knees, his hands digging and slapping at the rich earth and he began to lose his breath and bite at his lip as there was no treasure to be found. His face twisted in anxiety and pain as he raised his eyes and looked at the body and then bits and pieces of the night came back to him. Leaving the casino. Stopping for gas. And then a stranger somewhere and the body had to be the stranger so he got off his knees and stood over the body and then he noticed an approaching car. He brushed the dirt from his hands. From his pants. Stood at the bent tailgate and believed the body was out of sight on the other side of the truck. But he had to wait to find out. The car came closer. Slowed. Jack nodded and gave a halfwave. Then the driver of the car did the same as the vehicle passed and accelerated.
He returned to the body and fought the pain in his back as he lifted and dropped it on the edge of the tarp. He rolled the body in the tarp and then he scooped his arms under and tossed it in the truck bed and then climbed in with it. He worked the end of the tarp down until he saw the top of the head and then he worked it lower and he stared at Skelly’s face. Right cheekbone crushed. A crooked jaw. The sight of the face didn’t help at all. Jack closed his eyes and searched the black spot in his mind. His face in a grimace of frustration and pressing his fingers against his forehead as if trying to force his thoughts into giving him answers. He heard the jingles and bells of the slot machines and he heard old men laughing but he could see no faces and find no names.
He opened his eyes. Grabbed the back of the neck to hold the body still while he worked the tarp over the head and that’s when he felt the brand. He shoved the body on its side and there was the rubbery flesh of the dollar sign. On the back of the neck. The mark of Big Momma Sweet to scar those who owed and to remind them of who they owed it to.
Jack sat down. Touched the tender spot on his forehead. And then he lay down in the truck bed next to the corpse. They are everywhere, he thought. She has them everywhere. And whoever this is knows what happened to the money but he can’t tell me. All that matters is it’s gone. It won’t mean nothing to her for you to blame a dead man, especially one of her own. And she’ll brand you. Right before she kills you. Just for fun. He stared up at the awakening sky. At the soft brushes of clouds moving slowly in the first light and then he draped his arm across his eyes and he imagined his own burning flesh as they held him down and made him take it.
7
SHE BELIEVED SHE COULD HAVE ANYTHING SHE WANTED. BUT she didn’t know what she wanted so she had lived her young adult life guided by her own church of coincidence and she faithfully followed its direction without the necessity of reason or justification, like a fallen leaf trusting its flight to the shifts of a mighty wind.
She traced the beginnings of her doctrine to the simple butterfly tattoo she had gotten on the inside of her wrist on her nineteenth birthday. Black antennas curved like candy canes and the wings colored in crimson and yellow. A butterfly because she had begun to feel her own transformation. Leaving the small apartment she and her mother shared, the bitterness that lived on the edge of each word her mother spoke having become like some stone necklace that held her closer to the ground. Allowing her raven hair to grow from the short cut she had worn through childhood and her teenage years, the black falling down her neck and touching her shoulders and she began to keep it highlighted with streaks of purple or pink or blue. Becoming more aware of her own body. Her legs long and her thighs and calves firm. The curve in the arch of her back when she noticed her own shadow. The soft nape of her neck and her breasts hard and round and the attention the eyes gave her when she walked into anywhere. She worked at a pet store during the day and she waited tables at night and scraped together enough to have her own two-room apartment on the south side of Memphis. Milk crates and empty boxes for furniture. A sleeping bag for a bed. But it was hers. And the only voice she had to listen to was her own.
All of her extra money went to the tattoos. She added more butterflies, a string reaching from her wrist and up her forearm in the pattern of a lazy S and she could never decide if it looked like they were coming or going. Then she moved in with a tattoo shop owner who was a sharp and talented artist and the more he believed that she loved him the more free ink he gave. A litter of stars across the top of each hand. A crown of thorns circling her elbow
. Up and down her calves and around her knees wrapped serpents and vines and then she chose clouds and crosses and birds on her thighs as if to offer escape from the venom and thorns twisting below. She loved his work but did not love him as much so when he walked in the door on a spring afternoon and proudly displayed her name tattooed down the side of his neck, she panicked. The suggestion of permanence beyond what she had either considered or desired. For weeks she avoided the question of when she might return the same artful gesture and she instead added a sleek hot rod across the small of her back. A woman driving with a thick mane of black and purple hair flapping in the wind. Then she added the wings to her shoulder blades and to the tops of her feet, believing the symbols of flight and movement may give him the notion that she wasn’t going to be there much longer. But it didn’t and he kept asking. Where will you put my name? She could not make herself tell him I can’t do it. So instead she left a note on the table that said what she hoped was a soft goodbye.
She left but she didn’t have a plan. Only knew she wasn’t going to wait tables any longer. Wasn’t going back to a sleeping bag on the floor. Her two-door Toyota crammed full of clothes and a bedspread and pillow and a couple of boxes and she drove around Memphis all day with her windows down, looking and listening for an answer. Past the old neighborhoods surrounding Rhodes College and the hip streets lining the university. Graceland and the tour buses. The corporate stretches of hotels and restaurants and big stores that joined Memphis and Germantown. And in her crossing the city she noticed the strip club billboards. Noticed the clean white skin of the women who posed with their hands on their hips and their chests stuck out and she thought there was no way they didn’t just bore the hell out of the men who paid to sit and watch. What they need is an attraction, she thought. Something to admire. Something to examine. Something that will make their eyes look in places they aren’t accustomed to looking. What they need is me.
She bought a quart of beer and drove to the river. Parked and sat on the hood of the car and watched the muddy water and the strip of clouds that hung in the west in the late day sun. Maybe it made sense, she thought. Maybe it didn’t. A drop of sweat dripped from the bottle and landed on her leg and ran down the inside of her thigh. A steamboat horn echoed across the river and she lifted her eyes and across the horizon the clouds were flushed in pink and lavender and the sky grabbed her and said you are like me. You are your own beautiful thing. She set the quart bottle on the ground and then she dug a bikini top out of the backseat. Slipped off her shirt and bra and tied on the top. Rolled her shorts higher and pushed them down some on her hips. She wanted to show all the ink-covered curves when she walked in and said I’m available. Your masterpiece is here.
She left the river and the next billboard she saw was for the Stallion. On the east side of Memphis and out by the airport. Miles and miles of giving up. Empty strip malls with plywood covering the windows and check cashing stores and liquor stores. Rental furniture and pawnshops and discount tobacco and used cars. Every now and then a tamale stand. Stragglers pushing shopping carts filled with aluminum cans and hubcaps. Standing tall among the rabble was the pink sign with the horse reared on its hind legs and THE STALLION written beneath in broad black letters. The marquee below the pink sign advertised half price drinks and then at the bottom of the marquee it read DANCERS WANTED.
Annette pulled into the parking lot and parked between a Corvette and a BMW. Both vehicles slick clean and with tinted windows. Standing on each side of the front door were short and stout men wearing tight pink shirts that gripped their chests and biceps. Annette got out and walked across the parking lot as college boys piled out of a pickup and one whistled at her and another shouted I thought the show was inside. When she climbed the steps to the front door the men in pink held open the doors for her and she strutted past with a sultry smile, certain of the sexual aura of her tattooed glory.
She liked the money and the attention. Her own image on the billboard. Those who came specifically to see her. The regulars who sat in the same seats on the same nights of the week and who gave her fives and tens and twenties and on the nights when the alcohol told them they had a chance they gave hundreds. The apartment with furniture and the clothes and the power she held as she moved and provided them with the unique and artful display of the flesh.
What she did not like was living her life in the dark. The dark of the showroom and the dark of night when she arrived and when she left. The dark faces that told her what they thought she wanted to hear with dark voices and dark hands sliding closer to her dark body. Never eating a breakfast because she slept through the days and woke in the late afternoon to find that things had happened in the world while she danced or dreamed. The weather had shifted or a movie she wanted to see had come and gone from the theater or there had been an alert for a missing child and the child had been found. The world continued to spin while they gawked at her from cushioned chairs.
Two years walked past and toward the end of her Stallion days she would stand on the balcony of her apartment as the day disappeared and look across the pool of the apartment complex. The last orange light against the vinyl siding of the apartment buildings reminding her of the day at the river when she chose this life. The pool water flat and still in the twilight and then she would try and leave her melancholy there with the terra cotta pot filled with her cigarette butts and bottle caps. Go into the bedroom and take off her clothes and stare at herself in the mirror on the bathroom door. Then she would shower and eat something and by then it was night.
She did not know her last night at the Stallion was going to be her last night when she arrived. She did not know it as she walked into the dressing room and talked to the other girls. Did not know it as she put on her makeup and sprayed glitter in her hair and rubbed lotion all over her body. Did not know it as she pulled on her costume with gold wings and a gold sequin mask and then sat smoking a cigarette and waiting on her turn and did not know it when she stepped behind the curtain and listened to her name being announced and then heard the applause and the music. Did not know it as the smoke machine and laser lights created her entrance and she stepped high onto the stage and down the runway and made her first slow turn to show them every side of what they were about to get.
She knew it when she reached for the pole and the spotlight caught the original butterfly on her wrist. Surrounded now by so many more tattoos she had forgotten it but in that brief flash she missed the daylight and she missed the woman who had gritted her teeth as the needle gun buzzed and she bled and watched the butterfly become a part of her as she reveled in the act of transformation. She kept her eyes on the butterfly and the trail of others that followed as she swung around the pole but she decided she wasn’t going to give it to them anymore.
She let go of the pole. Walked to the edge of the stage. She took off the mask and tossed it into the crowd. Reached behind her neck and unclipped the clasp that held the wings and they dropped from her arms and to the floor. She stood and stared out at the shadowy figures and the smoke that hung above their heads and the music played and when she didn’t move a voice called out for her to get on with it.
She turned her head to the voice and said what are you looking at? Then she moved her eyes from one side of the crowd to the other and asked them all the same question. Louder each time. What are you looking at?
Some yelled back and some booed. The DJ cut the music.
She held out her arms and asked again and this time they all could hear. Those in the seats next to the stage and those in the seats in the rear and those sitting at the bar and the waitresses and bartenders and the girl taking the cover charge and the thick men in the tense pink shirts.
“What the hell are you looking at?” she yelled.
She dropped her arms and as the frustrated crowd groaned and insulted she stripped out of her costume and stepped out of the heels. She left it all right there and she walked naked across the stage. Through the curtain. Into the dressing ro
om. She pulled on a robe and grabbed her keys and purse and was out the back door.
8
THE OUTLAW CARNIVAL WAS JUST THAT. THE WORKERS MOSTLY ex-cons or parole jumpers or hiding from alimony but that didn’t bother Baron because he had been into a little of it all himself in his sixty years. He hired them and let them drive his trucks and trailers. Let them run the carnival games and rides and he paid them every Friday and he had only two rules. Be where you’re supposed to be when I tell you to be there and if you get busted don’t call me. He hired them but he didn’t trust them and he damn sure wasn’t going to walk around with twelve thousand dollars cash.
Baron had led the trail of vehicles to the outskirts of Clarksdale after leaving the wrecked truck and the body and the caravan pulled into a mobile home park an hour before dawn. A shirtless man wearing jeans and suspenders came out of a trailer at the park entrance. He announced himself as the manager and asked what the hell they thought they were doing. Baron held out a hundred dollar bill and said we’re looking for a place to hunker down for a day and get some rest and the man pulled at his suspenders. Took the money. Said go all the way to the end of the road where won’t nobody see you and complain. You wouldn’t believe the shit I have to hear about. Damn dog barks and they come running.
The caravan moved through the mobile home park with its usual array of rattles and chugs and at the far end came upon several empty lots next to one another. Baron parked the Suburban and directed traffic and by the time the sun came up the caravan was parked in neat rows and sleeping.
But he did not sleep. Not with what he had seen and what he had done. Not with the envelope hidden beneath the mattress he slept on in the rear of the Suburban and as he sat in a lawn chair and smoked cigarette after cigarette he wondered about the money and its origins. The envelope had a casino logo but he had seen the pills and whiskey bottles. He had seen the bulging eyes and sunken jaw of the dead man. And he knew he was in the middle of nowhere in Mississippi where nobody carried that kind of cash unless there was a damn good reason and he tried to think of the best way to both get rid of it and keep it.
The Fighter Page 4