Hush Hush

by Steven Barthelme

  “Words don’t sound magic,” Quinn said, standing beside him, looking out at the road.

  “They magic around here,” Lancaster said.

  “What’s the story on this other building?” Quinn said, and nodded toward it. “The detailing shop?”

  “Ain’t no other building,” Lancaster said, and looked out, searching. “You see some other building?”

  “No, I guess not.” Quinn glanced over at the building that wasn’t.

  “You want the job?”

  “Yeah, I guess so.”

  “What do you really do?” Lancaster said.

  “Guess I fix cars.”

  “You guess an awful lot, Shadetree.”

  “That’s for sure,” Quinn said.

  The other man laughed, a quiet shaking laugh in his round cheeks and thick arms. He crossed his arms in front of him and sighed. “I’m going out this evening, do some drinking? Maybe shoot some pool? You’d be welcome to come.”

  “Later,” Quinn said. “Yeah, I want to later. Tonight I got to see a lady. It’s her birthday.”

  “You’re younger than I thought,” Lancaster said. “But that’s okay.”

  “So did I crack something? Is the Olds okay?”

  Lancaster shrugged. “Looks all right to me.”

  “Good.” Quinn laughed. “Hate to have to tell him, Yeah, well, we did the brakes on this pile—but then we cracked both axles.”

  “Wouldn’t have to tell him. He’d already know,” Lancaster said, looking out at the yellow weeds standing high in the fields on the other side of the road. “That’s my car there.” He shook his head, and a smile curled at the corner of his eye. “My car.” He nodded and glanced over toward the back wall. Summer sunlight cut in through the pristine windows above the counter. Five o’clock.

  Quinn slipped his shoes off and reached down to get them.

  Lancaster frowned. “What are you doing, brother? Making yourself to home?”

  “I figure Dix’d like these shoes.” Quinn said, straightening up again, shoes hanging from his fingers. He stopped, looked up. “Stuff some newspaper in there.”

  “Gal is a fashion plate, ain’t she?” Lancaster said, and nodded his big head, agreeing with himself. “Uh huh.”

  The New South:

  Writing the Newsweek Short Story

  The place was full of hicks. They were eating tires, all-terrain, it’s a local delicacy. It tastes like fried chicken. They were short, the ones that weren’t larger than life. Okay, well, so the guy didn’t say, “Kneecaps to a gee-raffe,” exactly. He said, “short,” that the old guy was short, but that wouldn’t have been very colorful and everybody knows there are a lot of colorful folks down South. So when I wrote the piece, I kinda said he said something he didn’t say, exactly. But gee-raffe is what he meant. Somebody did say that once, it’s not like I made it up; I had an English teacher once who said that, Southern guy. There is no such thing as objectivity, I mean we all agree on that, right? He looked like a guy who was thinking, Kneecaps.

  The stuff about the steroid poodle and the pit bull? No, that’s just the way it happened. Pit bull didn’t know what hit him. Little furry fella. Damnedest thing I ever saw. And that short old guy just smiled and spit tobacco juice into his Dixie cup and collected his money, got his poodle, and drove away in that Cadillac. There wasn’t anyone there named “Velvet Skinned Annie” though—I stole that from an Elmore Leonard book I was reading. Damn good book, a Western. They made a movie out of it, with Paul Newman, good movie. Poodle had some abs, I tell you.

  Well, and it was a pretty big poodle, like the size of a python. Well, it could’ve been a python. I couldn’t see too well, I was in the bar, watching on closed-circuit TV, and on the screen all you could see were all those good ole boys in plaid shirts crowded around, hollering and waving bills in the air. This was right after the Rattlesnake Roundup. Tastes just like fried chicken.

  Come to think of it, there was no poodle in the Cadillac, when the old guy left. He was sort of a young old guy. Left town with Velvet Skinned Annie hanging all over him and the “deppity sherff” right on his tail. Come to think of it, it was a Lexus, or a Cherokee, one of those. I’ve never actually been to that bar, but my brother told me about it. I’d’ve had to leave the apartment to go to that bar. Wait a minute, I think the magazine’s calling.

  It wasn’t really a deputy sheriff, it was an ATF agent. Actually … nevermind. Maybe the python was in the trunk. This is where the story gets a little hazy; I had to fill in some blanks. I did interview the PR guy from the state gaming commission and he does have a slot machine on his desk, one of those like you can buy at Circuit City. My brother told me.

  I interviewed the guy by telephone. He did say the thing about giving a “rat’s ass,” that’s verbatim—“Son, I don’t give a redneck rat’s ass whether some snake tore the peewaddle out of some moongoose.” He didn’t say “Son,” I polished a little. I hadn’t told him it was a mongoose, I had said “mongrel,” but nobody pays attention nowadays. “Peewaddle” is a word my daughter got at that Catholic school, isn’t it great?

  If I had a brother, I’d name him Mozart. Mozart P. Concerto, that’s my real last name, Concerto. We’re Italian. It wasn’t a mongoose—or a “moongoose!” God damn these people are colorful—it was more of a mouse-type creature. The magazine sent me to check on the pandas, how they were doing, one of them’s been sick, it was some kind of Red Chinese thing, and while I was waiting for the curator I wandered into the reptile house, and a bunch of the staff—they were Pakistanis mostly, sounded like the BBC in there—were hanging around while they fed some of the snakes.

  They were wearing plaid shirts, though. Except one had on this gorgeous topcoat. It was a big mother, bull snake or something. I was on deadline, and under a wee bit of pressure; the goddamn magazine hadn’t used anything of mine in eleven years. I started thinking, What if I maybe just ooonch this a little. I have never, ever, done anything like this before, understand. Maybe this little ole mouse is a dog, some kind of colorful, Southern dog … You’re under a certain pressure to come up with startling or fresh ideas, you know, a vision thing. May sound simple, but it isn’t. Trick is to make sure they look exactly like the old ideas.

  Anyway, the Pakistani, the guy with the topcoat, comes over, this really elegant guy, he sounds like Alec Guinness in Lawrence of Arabia, and he says, “How are you?” and “Why are you here?” and I say, “I’m a writer,” and damned if he isn’t a writer, too. He’s from South Pakistan. Published fourteen novels. He says, “You are not writing now,” and I’m getting depressed, and I say, “Why bother?” He smoothes his big gray topcoat, gazes out over the desert, shrugs, and says, “Because life is borink.” At the end, the warden comes in and … Oh, skip it. Just ask my brother. That’s exactly how it happened, only twenty years ago and the Pakistani was my English teacher and I ran into him in the hall in Parchman Hall.

  And we all squeezed into his pickup truck hollerin’ and cussin’ and wavin’ our drumsticks and our sweet cool cans of Dixie beer, shootin’ our guns and corruptin’ public officials and spittin’, just acres of spittin’. That’ll work.

  Claire

  Bailey Long had borrowed five hundred dollars from Claire the month before and so the day he came back to borrow another thousand he was a little touchy. He was standing around in her big white apartment with the dusty hardwood floor looking at what she called “Jersey DNA”—a hunk of chrome in a spiral she had found beside a highway.

  “Look,” he said, “if you don’t want to lend it to me don’t lend it to me. Don’t do things you don’t want to do.” He always tried to give some advice while he was sponging, to maintain the advantage he had once had over her.

  Claire was sitting at a table by a window, watching him. “Well,” she said, “I’m sorry, Bailey, but I just don’t have it. I can give you three hundred. But I’ll need it all back, say a week? When do you figure to get it back?”

  Bailey nodded,
casually, trying to affect an air of not caring, taking little fractional steps toward the door of her apartment, fidgeting as if he had business, some place to go. He was a small man, but well-built and good-looking, or had been before he’d gotten middle-aged, which is what he looked now. “Nevermind,” he said. “I didn’t know you were tapped.”

  “Don’t be silly,” she said, and took a pen from a can of pens on the bright windowsill. The can had once held some kind of fancy fruit from Poland or someplace and the label was striking, green, blue, black. Claire had always found things like that, nice things that Bailey overlooked, didn’t notice, couldn’t see, on his way to some obvious choice, some thing he had read about in a magazine. Her unerring eye, the ease of it, had always been mysterious to him. She shrugged and settled at the long oval table off the kitchen to write out a check. “You need the money. I have the money.”

  Claire was more beautiful now than she had been in college and in college she had always drawn a crowd. Stop a clock, Bailey thought. Her hair was shorter now and she was given to skirts and loose cream-colored silk blouses instead of Tshirts and jeans but age had made her thin face and her gaudy brown eyes more heart-stopping than they had been, and she wasn’t foolish any longer, the way she had had to be foolish to carry on an eleven year love affair with Bailey, living in trashy apartments and making her own clothes and surviving on cheese sandwiches, rice cakes in picante sauce, and beer. Sometimes she seemed like the only thing that had ever happened to him in his whole life.

  “Here you go,” she said, tearing out the check. “I’d like you to come back tomorrow night, for dinner. I want you to meet my intended. I want to hurt your feelings.” She smiled broadly and closed the big checkbook. “How is the store? You a vice president yet?” She stood up and swung her long skirt around her legs as she turned to hand Bailey the check. “Dinner, tomorrow.”

  “Don’t you want to know what I need the money for?”

  “Blackjack?” she said, and smiled. “Isn’t it? He’s just like you. His name is Dave. You’ll hate him.”

  “Dave? I hate him already. Isn’t this like stuff people do in movies?”

  Her expression went hard. “Exactly. Yes, exactly like that, jerk. But it’s the price of your loan.” She pointed at the check. “Okay, sweetie? Tomorrow, around eight.”

  Bailey nodded, leaving. After he had cashed the check, what could she do about it? He’d be all right with this, a little something scrounged off credit cards, maybe a few hundred on the line of credit at the casino, although that made him nervous. They weren’t the kind of people you wanted to write bad checks to, really. Start with this, maybe get on a roll, he thought.

  When he got to the parking lot in front of the apartments, he saw something move inside his car as he approached it, and his heart started to race. When he got to the car and looked in, a cat, black with blue eyes, was lying on the back seat. What the hell? he thought, and looked around. The parking lot was almost empty. Trees shivered lightly in a gentle wind. He pulled open the rear passenger door. “C’mon,” he said. “Get out, stupid.”

  The black cat, emaciated and hostile looking, sat staring at him, curled on the back seat like a furry black shrimp. Bad luck, Bailey thought.

  “C’mon. Get out of the car. C’mon, kitty. I don’t know who put you in here, but time to get out.” The cat watched him. Bailey reached carefully in over its head and took hold of the scruff of the neck and lifted the cat out of the seat. “Jesus,” he said. “You’re just bones. You haven’t eaten in a month. Easy now.” When he carried it to the grass, it curled its back legs up like a kitten. He set it down on the lawn and then stepped backward, away. “Go on,” he said, but the cat didn’t move, lying the way Bailey had deposited it, head up and tail hidden under its body. It let out a sharp, sudden yowl that sounded like it had just remembered something, an afterthought, and then it blinked.

  “Okay,” Bailey said. “Just a second.”

  He shut the back door of the car and opened the front one, reached in and shook a chocolate bar and a crumpled bag of Cheetos out of a brown paper bag onto the seat. He opened the chocolate bar, broke off a brown corner, and took it to the cat. The cat looked, looked away. “Try it. Here, watch,” he said, and took a bite from the bar himself. He nudged the broken off piece closer to the cat, which recoiled slightly, and the chocolate slipped down between blades of grass.

  “Twit,” Bailey said, and walked back over to his car, finishing the candy bar, glancing back a couple of times. He sighed, and reached in for the Cheetos and uncrumpled the bag. Caught in the bottom were a few scraps of Cheetos, which Bailey emptied onto his palm. He walked back over. The cat yowled again. An old man in wool pants and a brown shirt had come out of his apartment and stood watching them from fifteen feet away.

  “Your cat?” Bailey said.

  “I like dogs,” the old man said. “That looks sick.”

  Bailey crouched down and opened his hand. The cat jerked forward and cleaned all three Cheetos in one bite. “Hey,” Bailey said, and pulled his hand back as the cat tried to lick orange dust from his palm.

  “You better get rid of it,” the old man standing on his doorstep said. “No pets here.”

  “It’s not mine,” Bailey said. He glanced back down the walkway, hoping Claire would come out of her apartment and neutralize this old man somehow.

  “You’re feeding it,” the man said. “Just put it back in your car, boy. Take it to the S.P.C.A., they know what to do with trash animals. Go on.”

  “Why don’t you shut the hell up?” Bailey said. When he looked back down, the cat had slipped away underneath his car. “God damn it.”

  A blond boy standing on the other side of Bailey’s car waved to the old man. “Hey, Mr. Keys, what’s going on? Is there a problem?” He looked across at Bailey.

  Bailey knelt beside his car. “Shh, go away, I’m stealing a car.” He reached under and pulled the cat out.

  “This man’s trying to ditch his cat here,” the old man said.

  “Yeah, but Mr. Magoo here caught me,” Bailey said, again holding the squirming cat by the scruff of the neck.

  “You’re kind of sarcastic?” the boy said, coming around the car. He was fair, muscular, wearing an expensive T-shirt and tailored khaki shorts. A weird, hairless looking gray dog walked up as the boy stopped halfway between Bailey and the old man.

  The dog sat on its haunches for a millisecond before it saw the cat which had already shaken loose from Bailey’s grip. The cat landed upright, looked hastily right and left, and then disappeared backward under the car again while the dog hit the open passenger’s door and fell, bounced up again. The dog was snarling, its long fetishy muzzle reaching under the car. “Get this damn dog,” Bailey yelled, kicking at it.

  “Hey,” the boy said. “He won’t hurt him.” He and the old man were walking over.

  “He’ll scare the poor little fucker to death, Kato, what’re you talking about,” Bailey said. He affected a mocking, childish voice: “He won’t hurt him.”

  The dog jumped back, yelling, a weird twisting cry that began in a growl and then raced into something higher pitched and plaintive. It backed away from the side of the car, looking confused, blood all over its face.

  The boy was beside it, kneeling down to it, checking the dog’s eyes, talking, soothing it with his voice. He looked up at Bailey. “I’ve got a Magnum in my car,” he said. “You better get that fucking cat out of here, cause I’m gonna kill it.” The dog started growling again.

  “None of that,” the old man said, frightened. “None of that now, Davey. You’re not supposed to have that dog, you know? I haven’t said anything, but—”

  “Go inside, Mr. Keys,” the boy said, his hand in the dog’s collar, restraining it.

  “All right,” Bailey said. He slammed the passenger door shut and started around the car, then stopped and made a slow sweeping motion with his hand. “All right. Just get the dog away.”

  The cat, under th
e far side of the car, lay limp on the blacktop, fast breaths heaving in its gaunt sides, you could see its lungs. Bailey dragged it out as gently as he could, opened the car door and set the cat on the back seat. “Way to go,” he whispered, getting into the car.

  The blond boy shook his head and sneered. Bailey let the car roll backward out of the parking lot and drove away, thinking he would drop the cat on the next corner, and the next, and the next. But he didn’t; he took it home and locked it in his extra bathroom, with an ancient can of tuna fish and a plastic dishpan full of newspaper as a litter box.

  • • •

  The next day Bailey called in sick at work and went back to sleep until late afternoon. After a shower, he cashed Claire’s check at her bank and went by an ATM to squeeze what he could from seven credit cards, then got a soft drink at a drive-through and rolled out of town, headed for the coast casinos with a little over five hundred dollars. He had won sometimes, it wasn’t always losing, but even quitting while you were ahead took a discipline that he couldn’t seem to maintain once he got inside the places.

  Don’t eat ice, Bailey told himself, chewing. His teeth were cracked already, lines running up and down every one he looked at when he leaned in close to a mirror, which he did on occasion. It meant you were orally fixated, too, which meant something—you wanted to suck a tit, you were childish, or something. Got that right, Bailey thought. But a quarter of the population smokes cigarettes, which means the same thing supposedly, so it’s not so bad, being childish. If you weren’t oral, you were anal, was that any better? No way.

  He tilted his cup up for more ice. No way, he thought. He had been in the car an hour now, and had another hour’s ride. Twilight was rising up ahead of him, orange and dark, reminding him of a place he and Claire had had once, a tiny apartment on one side of a lake with hills on the other side. The apartment had a balcony where they’d sit and watch the sun set behind the hills. One afternoon she said, I bet there’s a pile of big orange suns lying around over there somewhere.

  Bailey laughed, raised his cup. He would stop in Gulfport, eat a comp steak at that fancy restaurant, then drive down the beach highway to Biloxi. He liked the dealers better there. Maybe I’ll make a couple grand and return her money the very next day, he thought. Here, baby, I appreciate the loan. In fact I’m buying you dinner. Bring what’s his name.