by Tom Franklin
It was nearing ten o’clock when we passed Hickory Flat, about halfway to Olive Branch.
“How bad did that hurt?” I asked, pointing at his bandage in the side mirror.
“Ashamed to admit I cried some,” Lafayette said. “Was a lot like getting your ear flicked in cold weather, except instead of thumping you with their finger, someone shot you. Still hurts like hell. I ain’t never fallen asleep with my head in a fire ant bed before, but I’d venture a guess that the two was comparable.”
“You mean to do it?”
“Why the shit would I mean to shoot myself in the ear?”
“Meant why’d you have a loaded revolver pointed at your head in the first place?”
Lafayette reached down to get his second beer, popped the cap, and offered it to me. I declined. He shrugged and hooked his fingers on the oh-shit handle above him. “Don’t get me wrong,” he said. “I’d do anything for Erin. She’s my daughter. If she’d requested back then to fillet your pecker with a rusty boning knife or to simply shoot you in the face, I’d’ve obliged her. No questions asked. No offense.” He pulled on the bottle. “So if she wants me to get my sternum cracked open or my side split like the underbelly of a bream or however the hell them doctors plan on fitting that crazy Pentecostal son of a bitch’s lung inside me just so all his hair-legged-and-armpitted, ankle-length-denim-skirt-wearing female disciples can speak in tongues like retards, so be it. But it’s not what I want for myself, and I ain’t about to feign enthusiasm for it.”
“So how was jumping off your roof this morning with a noose around your neck doing what’s best for Erin?” I asked.
“Ain’t what I said.”
“Huh?”
“Ain’t said I’d do what’s best for Erin. Said I’d do what she wanted.” Lafayette stared out the window and took two quick pulls on his beer. Said, “I admit I wasn’t in the most logical of frames of mind this morning.” He held his bottle up to me. “Stayed up last night drinking the other eight of these.”
“Shit,” I said.
“What? Power was off. Didn’t have Sanford and Son reruns to distract me, I guess. Guess at some point I thought it was a good idea. Thought better of it once I got up there on the roof.”
“You would’ve taken that branch down with you anyway,” I said. “I suppose it’s good you ain’t gotten any better at committing suicide.”
“Keeps me entertained at least,” he said.
“How long was you up there this morning?”
“Couple hours. Maybe four. It hit me what extent of a bad idea it was soon as I tossed that key out in the yard.”
I felt pretty shitty for pressing the issue and waited for Lafayette to say something else, but he seemed done with that talk. My beer had gone lukewarm. I finished it and held it between my legs and waited until we’d passed another cleanup crew before rolling down the window. For all the debris we’d passed, it seemed the crews’ efforts at present were futile and they’d caught on to that fact as well. The crews this far north simply removed the fallen timber from the highway into brush piles ten or so feet high instead of fighting to stack each piece in a dump truck. The rush of air through the window was a welcome relief to the silence that’d swelled the cab.
It was twenty minutes after ten when we passed the Holly Springs exit. Thirty, thirty-five minutes from the transplant center. I asked Lafayette to hand me the last beer.
“What?” he said.
I pointed down at the box.
“Roll that window up,” he said. I obliged. He popped the cap and handed the beer to me. On the radio, reports on the storm’s aftermath continued. Some of the more rural areas of the state would be without power for upward of a month. Lafayette turned the volume down.
“Tired of hearing about that damn storm.”
“All right,” I said. Beads of sweat big as ball bearings had formed on his brow. “You all right?”
He fiddled with the heater some, trying to turn it down. I intervened.
“That better?” I asked. “You want, I can roll the window back down.”
Lafayette said, “I ever tell you the story about the time I lost that old bird dog of mine?”
He had on several occasions. About how he and his black lab, J.R., were headed in from the field when a pack of feral pit bulls intercepted them, appearing from the tree line like gray ghosts. How Lafayette couldn’t have taken them all on at the same time by himself, how the lab’s efforts distracted the other bulls long enough for Lafayette to defend himself, first with the over-under, then with the .357 which was easier to load, more efficient. He had to put the lab down right there in the hay patch, not fifty yards from the safety his truck offered. Would end the story each time by showing where a large chunk of his calf was missing from where one of the pits stayed latched onto him even after he mowed the top of its head off point-blank with the over-under.
“I’m a little blurry on the particulars, tell you the truth, Lafayette.”
“Was going to make you listen anyway,” he said. He hung his arm on the oh-shit handle above him and commenced his detailed account. “Not thirty yards from us I remember J.R. and see him fighting the good fight but just getting tore at by about half the pack. Four of ’em had abandoned the crowd around J.R. and was headed my way. I popped off one of them with the over-under and abandoned it for the .357 because the over-under’s too slow, too bulky. Get three of the cocksuckers before the other one runs off. Then I hobble toward J.R. but only make it a few yards because of the pit that’s jaws’re still attached on my leg like some badass tick. I shoot the two pits around J.R. but can barely see him for the pit on top of him. Looks like it’s already dug into J.R.’s throat, only a matter of time. So I put a bead on the pit.
“But let’s just say,” Lafayette went on, tapping his middle finger on the dash twice for dramatic effect, “let’s just imagine for a moment it only looked like that pit got ahold of J.R.’s throat, and just as I feel the trigger in the bend of my finger, that J.R., in some impressive maneuver and demonstration of resiliency, somehow manages his mouth around that pit’s fat face and the pit rolls over to break free and it’s my round that goes right into J.R. So that it’s me who kills my dog out of no necessity whatsoever.” He paused and looked for me to answer.
I said, “It’d change the whole dynamic of the story, I guess, Lafayette.”
“About would, yes,” Lafayette said.
Out of the corner of my eye I saw him drape back his denim jacket to make for the handkerchief again. Then I directed my attention back to the road. When my eyes drifted toward Lafayette again, I saw a black semiautomatic pistol resting on his leg. Had never known Lafayette to own the pistol—just the revolver and shotguns, hunting rifles. Knew he couldn’t’ve bought the pistol anywhere legally.
“Why the hell did you bring a gun with you, Lafayette?”
Before he could answer, he suffered another violent coughing episode, this time before he could reach the handkerchief. Traces of blood and phlegm sprayed on the glove compartment. Lafayette’s beer tipped over onto the floorboard. In his fit I grabbed the gun away from him. He didn’t fight me for it. He took out his handkerchief and wiped the dash.
“Shit. Sorry about that,” he said.
I felt the heft of the gun in my hand. “Why the hell did you bring a gun with you this morning?” I asked again.
When he was finished smearing his muck off the dash, he dropped the handkerchief into the empty beer carton, deposited the bottle he’d knocked onto the floorboard in the carton as well.
“Don’t know anymore,” Lafayette said and moved the carton to the backseat. He closed his eyes and leaned into the headrest. “Don’t know. Had my .357 on me as always, Topher.” He pointed at the gun in my left hand. I could tell he was fighting back tears his chest was trying to convulse out of him. “So that white-trash piece of shit was holding that gun on her instead. Didn’t know there was another man in the house, so when his Negro buddy saw me, sumbitch regis
tered his friend’s surprise, moved just as I pulled the trigger.”
Ahead of us an exit sign bounced like a green buoy in the waves of cool air thawing off the highway. I took the exit, turned right on Hacks Cross Road. Power still hadn’t been restored. Truck stops sat squat and dead and empty. The only life, some smoke pillaring from the side of one of the stores. I pulled around. It was 10:45 and we were only ten minutes away from the transplant center. Olive Branch was the next exit down 78. But the beer in my empty stomach reminded me how I hadn’t eaten anything yet that morning. I felt claustrophobic.
A red horse-trailer was parked back behind the truck stop. A gas generator growled power into the trailer, MALONE’S CATFISH AND OTHER FINGER LICKIN GOOD STUFF painted on the side of the truck. Only a few customers were standing in line. I pulled back around the building and parked in a space facing the large panes of glass at the front of the store. The tires nudged the curb. A pay phone stood just beyond the truck grill.
“Shouldn’t’ve told you that,” Lafayette said, then opened his eyes. “Don’t tell Erin.”
“Of course.”
“We there?”
“Sit tight,” I said. “Got to get some food in me. You want something?”
“Probably shouldn’t eat before surgery.”
“But you can drink beer?”
“Just a little something to snack on then. A biscuit, pack of Nabs. Whatever they got.”
Two ladies were working the truck. The black one manned the register and the other one, a Mexican, held a pair of tongs over matching beige Crock-Pots. Both women were wearing hairnets. Not so much the smell of frying catfish wafted from the truck as chorizo and what I recognized as tamales. The first man in line paid and carried away a Styrofoam box. Two customers remained in front of me. The next customer ordered. The Mexican lady with the tongs waited for her coworker to indicate which Crock-Pot. The black lady pointed with three fingers at the one on the right. Aluminum foil draped from the Crock-Pot. The Mexican lifted the lid and produced as many tamales.
Perhaps the pay phone actually worked, fed from lines below the ground, immune to the storm. What would I tell Erin then? That the best possible result today would be the operation going just about textbook and Lafayette living out the five years his new lung might afford him at a retirement home, all while the guilt over having shot Betty continuing to consume him much less quietly than the sarcoidosis had or ever would. Blame laid as much with me for how far this had gone. I ignored what Erin could not see with Lafayette’s first suicide attempt because I still and always would love her enough to harbor some hope of a past revisited despite what all another man, who had not just broken his wife’s heart but had gored it with a bullet, would be wrung through.
My reflection caught in the rear glass window of the quick stop. I needed some time I didn’t have to figure this out. I focused past my reflection and examined the inside of the vacant store. All the usual suspects of quick-stop merchandise were present: junk food and beer, videocassettes and country music and gospel and gospel-country music cassette tapes and CDs. CB radios and wiring, exaggerated antennas and bracket mountings. Several cheap brands of fishing poles hung on the wall.
To hell with the phone. Better I didn’t find out if it worked.
* * *
Back behind the wheel I told Lafayette we had some time to kill, that the black lady at the food truck said the store owner’s catfish pond was nearby, a place we could cast a few quick lines in while we ate the tamales. They were selling hot dogs from the other Crock-Pot and I’d bought an opened pack of raw ones to hook on our cheap lines from the quick stop. A couple of miles down the frontage street I made a left onto a narrower gravel road, maneuvered the truck like the lady said her old man sometimes did around the padlocked gate that did not stretch across the entire width of the path, wasn’t met on either side by fencing. Branches slapped and scratched the side panels of the truck.
The path yawned into a cove and a man-made lake of about fifteen square acres sprawled out before us. At the far end two tractors held between them a seine which would drag the length of the lake during harvest. A wire-netted hopper waited at the other end of the lake to lift from the water the catfish caught between the seine and the bank. I parked. Tall pines untouched by the storm darted from the ground around the rectangular perimeter of the lake like the makeshift walls of a medieval keep. There was some cloud cover and from the truck the water looked murky. Lafayette tried opening the door of the truck while balancing the hot dogs on top of the box of tamales in his lap.
“Don’t worry about all of that,” I said, reaching for the food. “I can get it.”
“I ain’t completely helpless yet.” He swung open the door and stepped down and the opened pack of hot dogs slipped off the Styrofoam and landed in the grass. Two of the hot dogs rolled from the plastic. Bits of dirt clung to them. “You can get them,” he said.
We walked to the far end of the floating pier that would retract onto the bank during harvest. Lafayette’s breathing was labored and he set the tamales and his pole on the dock, propped himself up on his knees, and wheezed. When he could manage his respiration he sat down on the pier. I handed him my pocketknife. He cut up one of the hot dogs against the pier and baited his hook. Cast out into the lake. His arm jerked the rod in his hand, the other reeled the slack out of the line. I offered him another tamale.
“Can’t say I’ve had any of these before,” he said.
I told him the first time I’d ever tried them was when Manny, a coworker when I was a produce clerk at the Jitney Jungle, offered me one from his lunch box left over from dinner the evening before.
“They ain’t bad.” Lafayette licked tomatillo salsa from his fingers. “You know? A little different but taste good. You still got that Ruger on you?”
I slipped the gun out of my pants, wanted to tell him I didn’t feel comfortable with him having a loaded gun, but he’d been through enough. “Long as you ain’t fixing to shoot me or you with it.”
He cast the line again. “Would you believe they broke in with only one bullet in that gun?” He swiped a finger across the bandage on his ear. “Used it to pull this here van Gogh what’s-his-face.”
I broke the breech of the gun, ejected the clip. The chamber and clip were empty so I handed the gun to him. He looked at the unloaded Ruger and tossed it off into the water. Then my father-in-law cast once again, the line clicking as it unreeled and stretched fifteen, twenty feet from us. “Way the wind’s moving this water, kind of looks like we’ve launched out from land,” he said. “Always appreciated that particular illusion.”
I said I had as well and bit into another tamale. I was killing time, was aware of as much, waiting there for Lafayette to give the word to head out or, if he never did, for some explanation why to arrive at me.
Sometime later, most of the hot dogs gone and nothing to show for them, I joked that it was too bad we didn’t have the organ with us. That if we planned to stick around out here, we could’ve changed our strategy some. Maybe have given his lung a go.
JERRY LEWIS
by Jack Pendarvis
Yoknapatawpha County
An open box of doughnuts on the coffee table. Little bullets lined up in a pretty little row. The girl working on the chamber of a revolver with a little tool like a Q-tip expressly designed for the purpose. Her yellow hair hanging in her eyes.
Girl with a half-fastened holster, like a male gangster in a movie.
Girl in a sleeveless corrugated T, low-scooped neck, like a male gangster in a movie.
Girl in striped boxers, like a male gangster in a movie.
She looked up.
Humphries jerked back his head, away from the dirty window into which he had accidentally peeped.
What was he supposed to do now? Something?
She opened the door.
“Hi,” said Humphries. “I’m looking for a cat.” His eyes went to the empty holster. “Are you a policeman?” he blurted.<
br />
“What gave me away, the doughnuts?”
“What doughnuts?”
She laughed like a sexy crow. The way she talked was also like a sexy crow, one of those crows that can talk. But sexy. Her teeth were so white they were almost blue. They looked like happy ghosts. She said, “Have you ever seen the movie Hardly Working?”
“I don’t think so. What’s it about?”
“Jerry Lewis is on a job interview at the post office. He’s really hungry. He hasn’t eaten for days. So while the guy’s trying to interview him, all he can see is this box of doughnuts on the desk. He’s not listening at all. The guy finally asks him, Do you want a doughnut? And Jerry goes, Where ARE DEY? Just like that. Where ARE DEY?” She laughed some more.
Humphries made himself laugh. He was nervous because where was the gun? In the dewy small of her back, tucked in the waistband of her boxers? He had seen something like that in a movie.
“I’m not a cop,” said the woman.
“My wife’s cat is missing,” said Humphries. “He’s orange? Sometimes I see a black cat on this porch, sitting on this thing.” He pointed to the rusted glider, its filthy vinyl cushions illustrated—defiled—with big blotchy flowers. “I don’t know, I felt my wife’s cat might have sought out the company of another cat? He’s not used to being outside and she’s very worried, understandably. We recently moved here to Mississippi from Vermont, which is generally considered a more civilized state, no offense, and my wife is understandably concerned that there might be some barefoot children who have reverted to some kind of savagery and walk around trying to shoot little cats with a bow and arrow.”
“I’m from Chicago, dude. I don’t give a shit. Want to know what I would have told you if you hadn’t seen the gun? My cover story is that I’m looking for a place to live out in the sticks because I want to have a baby. I’m thirty-nine. If I wait any longer, there’s some danger involved for the baby. I mean, there’s a pretty good chance of something going wrong chromosomally, am I right? Where am I going to bring up the baby I want to have? Chicago? All the neighborhoods are getting too expensive, even the bad neighborhoods. There was a torso on a mattress. Where we lived. In the alley below our apartment. They found a headless torso on a mattress. And the place was still too expensive for us. Is that where I’m going to raise a kid? Like, Look out the window, there’s a torso on a mattress. Like, Mommy, what’s a torso? And we can’t even afford that. Like, Sorry, lady, the torso on the mattress is extra. Jocko had some prospects down here—my cover-story husband who doesn’t actually exist, that’s Jocko—so here we are, anyway. He wants to do voice-overs. He wants to be a voice-over guy, my made-up husband does. He can do that from anywhere. He just needs a good microphone and a special phone line.”