by Larry Brown
“Wow, Scotty,” she said. “I could drink about ten of these babies.”
“Yeah, but you’d be on your ass,” Scotty said. “Shit’s dynamite.”
“I feel like a little dynamite tonight,” she said, and bent to slurp at her straw. He watched her for a moment. Then he grinned.
“Well hell,” he told her. “Rip it up, girl. If you want to party, you come to the right place.”
“Don’t get too far away,” she said. And she turned her eyes back toward the man with the nub. Who was looking at her.
22
It was quiet at Gigi’s Angels. There were only a few drunks nodding at the bar. All the girls were temporarily off the stage since business had been bad and Moe couldn’t afford to pay them around the clock. Anjalee’s business had been zero. All the firefighters had gone home. It turned out they were spending all their money on Christmas presents. Was she even going to get her mother anything?
She let herself back behind the bar and got a cup of coffee and tilted some bourbon into it, then went back around and got her cigarettes from her purse and lit one. A horn blew outside and one of the drunks stirred and got off his stool, stumbling some, and went toward the door. The horn blew again and the guy paused to get his coat off a rack near the cigarette machine. He went on out and the door slammed after him. Anjalee sipped her coffee. Frankie hadn’t called, and she couldn’t call him. He’d always been funny about his phone number, never would give it to her, told her it wasn’t that kind of relationship. It was beginning to look like it wasn’t any kind of relationship at all. He’d probably found somebody else. She’d been halfway expecting that for a while, so it wouldn’t be any surprise. If that was true, she wouldn’t be getting any more money from him. She thought about that sailor wanting to marry her. He was a nice guy. She should have said yes.
She missed her apartment so badly she didn’t know what to do, but there was no way she could go back there. Even if she hadn’t killed Miss Barbee, she had certainly fucked her up enough to get sent to jail. All her clothes, her shoes. A couple of sweaters she might need in this weather. All her art supplies. She wondered what would become of her things. She guessed when her rent got overdue the landlord would come up and unlock her apartment and haul her stuff out and give it to somebody, maybe the Salvation Army. Then, on second thought, she figured the cheap prick would sell it all and keep the money. He never would come up and fix her leaky sink that was still leaking. Or light her pilot light. Had to call Memphis Light Gas & Water to come over and do that. Cheap prick.
After a while she got up and skipped the coffee and just got more bourbon. She smoked another cigarette and munched a few peanuts left in a bowl. She was hungry. Already she was getting nervous about walking around in daylight. It wasn’t going to be any way to live. But without any money, she couldn’t even go home.
One of the remaining drunks raised his head and said something unintelligible, then dropped his face down on the bar.
And then through the door came Lenny. He saw her immediately and she turned toward him. She liked him because he didn’t give her the creeps like some of Frankie’s asshole buddies. He wasn’t one of those guys who wouldn’t look you in the eye or was always playing around with his dick inside his pants. She’d had a few drinks with him in a bar he and Frankie had been in one night. He’d been nice to her and told her that her dress was pretty. Back when Frankie was giving her enough money to buy some good clothes. Like when she’d gotten that black leather coat that was still upstairs. She needed to go up and get it.
“Well hello, beautiful,” he said, once he’d stopped beside her.
“Hi, Lenny.”
“You want to date me tonight?” he said, didn’t sound like he was kidding.
She looked him up and down. It didn’t sound like a bad idea.
“I don’t know. Have you seen Frankie?”
He coughed briefly into his fist before he answered.
“I think Frankie’s probably out of town, honey.”
That seemed odd. Frankie hadn’t said a word about going out of town. He reached out and touched her arm, then leaned on the bar.
“I was going to buy you a drink, but you’ve got one,” he said. He looked around. “What do you have to do to get some service around here?”
“I guess Moe’s in the back.”
“Can you call him?”
“Call him?”
“Yeah.”
She looked at him. He had on a good suit that fit him well. And his shoes were actually some nice cowboy boots. They looked like Tony Lamas. They had a cool green-lizard toe. That damn Frankie. What did he mean going out of town and not telling her?
“I can pour you something,” she said. “What you want?”
“I want a vodka martini, very dry.”
She shook her head. He was easy on her eyes.
“I don’t know how to make one of those.”
“Maybe you should learn.”
Well, maybe she should. Maybe he had plenty of money, like Frankie. If he was in the same business as Frankie, he probably did. She smiled at him.
“Or we could always go somewhere they know how to make one,” he said.
“I know a good place,” she told him.
23
The little dog got stranded on the roof, looking down to trees in the yard, cars with their lights passing on the street in the mushy squishing snow, a moon sky smoked gray by fast-moving clouds. The stopped-up rain gutters held plenty of water and melting snow and he stood there slanted downhill drinking from one for a long time.
He went back to the window to try and get back in where it was warm, but it was too high above him now, the roof too steep to let him make a decent jump. He’d been lucky not to roll his little butt right off the gutters when he’d first jumped through the hole left by the loose pane he’d pushed out with his head.
The roof was wide and long and had peaks in it. The little dog could get around on it pretty good and he spent some time checking most of it out, only thing, there wasn’t much of a place to lie down where it wasn’t slanted, and maybe for that reason he wasn’t able to get any sleep. What he did was drape his belly over the ridgeline, half in front, half in back, and try to sleep that way, but it must not have been very comfortable for him, might have even hurt his little pooched-out belly, because he kept getting up. It was cold, and the wind was blowing, and he never did go to sleep, even though he seemed to try more than once to achieve that natural dog state.
Most of the night passed with him watching it. Lights below that shone on the yard went off. The traffic slowed and almost stopped. A siren sounded far off and died. The small town quieted, as if the dark had brought some angel of peace with folded wings into the streets to smoke cigarettes and hang out at deserted corners for the duration of a single freezing night. There was only the hum of semis in the fog out on the interstate to cut through the silence, and he, a solitary little dog, didn’t know what they were.
Near daylight, shaking with cold, he whined beneath the window. There was nothing out there for him to eat. The man he liked wasn’t around anywhere that he could see. He couldn’t smell him either. So he went down to the very edge of the roof, ran back and forth a few times, taxiing, looking down and whining, and then he jumped, his ears lifted out from the sides of his head like the fragile wings of birds, into the darkness that swallowed him.
24
When Miss Muffett woke up, she didn’t know where she was. It wasn’t completely dark, but on the other hand, she couldn’t see anything very clearly. Somebody was next to her, but she didn’t know who it was. Then she figured out that she was in the back seat of a car. Was it her car? She couldn’t tell. It was getting to be daylight. This was very different from waking up alone in her own bed, as she did a lot of mornings in her mostly lonesome life. She’d wanted love for so long that it was just an old achy pain now. Somewhere along the line she’d settled for simple fucking.
She reached out her h
and to feel what was around her. She felt what felt like somebody’s hairy leg. The leg had a laced-up boot on it. Her neck was hurting.
“Who is it?” she said.
“Huh?” a sleepy voice said.
“I said ‘Who is it?’” she said.
“Aw, you know who it is,” the voice said, and then after a moment of silence some light snoring started up, air flowing over soft tissues, an open mouth. Her leg was off and she found it on the floorboard. Her underwear was off and she found it on the floorboard. It turned out that she was lying half on top of this person and she had to move around on the seat to get herself situated enough to get her underwear on and once she did, she pulled her leg up from the floor and strapped it on and pulled down her dress. She looked down at her chest. Her bra was all twisted around and her dress was open on top. She looked at her boobs. They had suck marks on them, of all things, vague blue-and-red bruises around her nipples.
It looked like she might have had a great time but she wished she could remember more of it. One of the things she could remember was talking and laughing in the bar with those nice people who had kept buying her those really good drinks. Somebody had gone out for sandwiches at one point and brought them back in and she remembered pigging out on a salami-bologna-cheese hoagie with sliced tomatoes and peppers and oil, so maybe she’d been passed out at some point. She remembered dancing with the tall dog man with the brown hair beside the rainbow of lights coming out of the jukebox. She remembered the way his nub had felt against the small of her back. His name, she remembered, was Faisel, and he was a logger. He’d blown his hand off, when he was sixteen, trying to demonstrate the recoiling barrel on a Remington Sportsman 48 twelve-gauge shotgun. The dog, Amos, belonged to his ex-wife, Camelopardalis, whom he had described as a failed and bitter poetess, but he still had to take care of it sometimes when she was on her Mary Kay route. She’d already won a pink Cadillac. Faisel had said it was the ugliest fucking thing he’d ever seen. He’d also said his friends called him Nub.
Now that she was waking up a bit, she could remember a few more things. She remembered driving around in the country in her car with Faisel at the wheel, Amos in the back. They’d tried to drop him off at Camelopardalis’s place in Michigan City, since she was supposed to be back, but there was a note on the door saying that she’d gone out for ribs at Horn Lake with some of her friends and that she’d be back in a few hours, and asked Faisel, in the note, to keep Amos overnight for her, which hadn’t made him happy. He’d been for leaving Amos tied to the doorknob with the leash, but Miss Muffett had talked him out of it, saying that somebody would probably come along and steal him since he was a hound and it was hunting season. She also remembered during the course of the evening confessing her own little dog problems to Faisel, but she couldn’t remember what he’d said, and that was in another bar, someplace he took her to, a roadhouse, she couldn’t remember where it was, only that some people were on a stage in leotards and vests and big pants and blond dreadlocks playing tuba music like none she’d ever heard, stuff that was oomping and bumping and rumbling. She didn’t know where the dog was now. Didn’t really give a shit, either. Seemed like they might have dropped him off somewhere.
Her head was hurting. Felt like it was about to pop. Then: Oh crap. The little dog was still home by himself. He might have been forced to poop in Mr. Hamburger’s study.
She tried to sit up. It was hard to. It was her car, all right, but when she looked around, she didn’t recognize the place where the car was sitting. There was some mud spattered up on the windows, and the windshield was streaked with muddy arcs. Out beyond the windshield, she could just make out the bleary forms of some rundown steel buildings with weak lights and some junked heavy equipment, dozers, cranes, yellow backhoes with flat tires.
“I’ve got to go,” she said, and began trying to extricate herself. It was indeed Faisel’s sleeping face she looked down on. She kicked him suddenly.
“Get up!” she said, and started crawling between the front seats. She could see the keys hanging from the ignition.
“And get your clothes on,” she said. His pants were halfway up his legs, but he had his underwear on. She wondered how they’d managed it. If they’d managed it.
Once she got in the driver’s seat, she reached out and grabbed his leg and shook it.
“Hey! Faisel! You’ve got to wake up! We’ve got to go!”
He moaned and stirred and yawned and rubbed his chin with his nub. She cranked the car.
“What time is it?” he said.
“Time for me to get my ass back to Como.”
“Can you hold it just a minute while I get my clothes on?”
“What happened to my windshield?” she said.
He sat up in the back seat and started arranging his pants. He had to scoot up and then down, tugging at them with his hand and his nub. He’d slept on his balled-up coat for a pillow and his hair was messed up pretty bad. She pushed the wiper button and the wipers came on, but no stream of water actually sprayed out, just a few impotent spurts.
“Oh crap,” she said. “Have you got a handkerchief?”
“A what?”
“Handkerchief. Look at this. What’d you drive us through?”
“Me?” Faisel said, trying to get into his coat. “Shit fire, you’s the one drivin’. You said you’s takin’ me on the scenic tour. Don’t you remember?”
“No,” Miss Muffett said. And she didn’t. Not shit.
He handed her a huge red bandanna and she got out and rubbed at the windshield with it but it didn’t do a whole lot of good. Finally she had to concentrate on just wiping a hole in the middle so she could see well enough to drive. She tossed him the muddy bandanna when she got back in and then she put her seat belt on. She turned her headlights on.
“You want to get in the front?”
“I might as well,” he said. He opened the back door and got out and closed it and walked around in front of the hood, and Miss Muffett studied him as he went across. She wished she could remember if it had been any fun or not.
Once he was seated, she told him to put his seat belt on and he did. She pulled the car down in D and started looking for a place to turn it around. Faisel lit a cigarette and cracked the window and she eased off into the unknown.
“Where are we?” she said.
“On the scenic tour.”
She drove slowly, looking around. It dawned on her gradually that they were in an enormous junkyard with gravel roads in between the wrecks. Rusted hulks of machinery lined the drive she was on, some of them towering up thirty feet or more. Cars were stacked on top of each other. In the middle of it was an enormous drive-in movie screen all gray and tall. Faisel pointed to it.
“They shot a movie up here last year and built that thing and just left it. It’s a movie prop. It ain’t real.”
“It looks real.”
“I know it does. This is where we parked so we could…you know.”
“Well, where is it?”
“Holly Springs.”
And it turned out it was. It took her about two hours to get back because she had to take him to the bar and his truck, and then she had to get gas, and something to eat, and some BCs and some orange juice, and there was a bunch of white dog hair all over the back seat, and she had to stop at a coin car wash and suck all that out with a hose, crawling around on the back seat on her plastic leg. She didn’t like for her car to get all messed up.
25
Arthur slept late. He got up with his hair mussed and had to comb it. Eric was still snoring it off under the comforter. Jada Pinkett was asleep. The kitten was arched in the corner, its hair standing up, and it spat and slashed twice at him when he got close to the cage. He wondered how they were going to let it take a shit without some dirt in there.
He’d spent the rest of the night in a chair in the living room with a rug thrown over him. It was the only thing he’d been able to find. He went in there and put the rug back down on t
he floor and straightened it out with his foot. He could hear what sounded like a fire-truck siren going somewhere, maybe down Southern. They had a station up there. It faded away.
Upstairs he peeked through the bedroom door and saw Helen sleeping. Hungover again probably. It looked like she’d get tired of it.
Back in the kitchen, he started coffee and went out front to get the paper. He didn’t bang the door when he closed it.
The paper wasn’t on the doorstep. The asshole paper kid had thrown it out on the walk leading up to the step again, and it was lying right on top of some snow. The walk was kind of icy. And he had his house shoes on. Now he’d have to go back in and get his galoshes, or just forget about the paper. He hated to go to all that trouble. But he really wanted to read the paper. It would be something to occupy his mind and not let it dwell on what had happened again last night. It was starting to get embarrassing.