And now, as Willie winds it down and Garrett and Sandy dance over close to bump hips with us and laugh, Glenda lifts her face back from my chest and I see her dark eyes are drowning, and still she manages a smile. "I was thinking about your daddy catching us in the shower," I tell her.
She takes my hand and we stand there awhile, waiting for the next record to play. "I was thinking about Mr. Byrd," she says. "Sandy says they had to hunt with dogs for the missing pieces. Spent half a day drawing spray-paint circles on the ground where they found his dentures or keys, a hand with a ring still on its finger—like that. Can you imagine?"
"I can't," I say, sliding her into the first three steps of a waltz. I mean to say something else, but instead a hard little fist of muscles starts clinching down low in my back, and I'm listening to the whisk of our boots on the dance floor and holding my wife a little too tight for good dancing, and all I can think about is those dogs on the side of the highway, about how the one on top took the trouble to lick clean his little woman's wound, about how even animals find ways to be kind.
I loosen my grip on Glenda's hand and lead her into a spin. Her pigtails whip the air and the hem of her dress parachutes out and she lets loose of a little squeal. I reel her back in, stepping long on the hard note of the waltz as I pull her in tight. She slips her fingers into the back pocket of my jeans, and I'm about to tell her about the dogs, about how Garrett called their position human style, but that's when the music stops, and so do we.
We stop and turn and Stu Slyder is standing by the jukebox with the electrical cord in his hands. He's turning up the television set over the bar with the remote control. Up there on the screen is the slick-haired man I saw earlier pressing creased money into Stu's hand, and he's standing now in front of Slyder's, his lips curled up in such a way that folks in living rooms all over God's creation will know that it pains him just to be here, to be standing amidst our kind. This whole town stinks something fierce, he might as well be saying.
"Turn that mess off," Garrett hollers, but Stu's not having any of it.
"Fixing to be Candid Camera," he says, "so y'all be on your best behavior."
On the television, the reporter is gesturing wildly, talking about the town and the men who'd spent many of their adult years in prison. "For all we know, the murder could have been planned in this very bar," he tells us. "This is where the suspects were arrested. Just out back of where I stand right now, in the parking lot, police tell us that the blood-spattered chain they allegedly used to drag the victim to his death was recovered from the bed of the suspects' truck."
Glenda steps close behind me, reaching her arms around my waist. Stu Slyder is taking baby steps toward the television set, beaming at this windfall of publicity. The bar, loud and alive with talk and music a minute ago, is now taken with the kind of quiet you mostly hear in churches or hospitals.
"Channel Three News has since learned that the blood found on the chain and on one of the suspect's shoes matches the type of the victim, James Byrd Jr., and we have reports that other members of the upstart Aryan group have been known to frequent this establishment."
"What a bunch of horse shit," Garrett says.
Then the reporter opens the door and we begin to see ourselves on the television screen. I stand there stunned, my toes gone numb in my boots while the camera pans around the room and there I am, wide eyes rimmed in red, my work shirt faded and frayed near the embroidered nametag. Glenda's visible only as arms wrapped around my waist, and then we're gone, off screen, just like that, and I see what the reporter wants the world to see, a table full of hulking, hard-looking men with shaved heads and lit cigarettes, dominoes standing in rows before them. Tricky and Nelson and the Hooper twins, they sit there fixed in the lights of the camera while this reporter talks about the Aryan Nation and the KKK and skinheads, and when Glenda pushes me out of her way and stomps over to the camera, for a moment I watch her, the real her, and then I turn back to the television and see her there, her pigtails bobbing behind her as she spits at the reporter and swings around to point a finger at the cameraman, and at me—at all of us glued to the screen.
"They ain't skinheads, you asshole!" she screams. I'm right there, not ten feet from her, but what I feel instead of pride or love or some impulse to protect her is an acid-hot drip in my guts, a kind of embarrassment you feel for people you don't know when they come unglued on afternoon talk shows. "That's my daddy," Glenda says, and then she's flailing away at the camera and Tricky is up in a hurry, wrapping her in his big sunburned arms, and I just stand there, the only one left watching the screen, marveling at the television version of my life.
It's not until Stu Slyder steps in that I snap out of it. He's up there onscreen, his fat blue tongue visible through the gap in his teeth as he moves between the camera crew and Glenda, as he stutters and sputters and rants about the First Amendment and then—never mind that Tricky's got her in his arms, never mind that it's all under control—then the fat bastard leans in with two rigid fingers and thumps Glenda up high on the chest, just below the tender skin of her neck, and that's all it takes.
I haven't hit anyone since high school, haven't been hit since my father one time backhanded me in the jaw for getting smart with him about something I can't even remember anymore. But tonight it comes so natural I would swear it's something you're born with, the backward snap of the elbow, the instinctive grip of the other man's collar. The spill of adrenaline into your veins when you make blood spray from another man's nose. My knuckles crack with the impact, and the sound of it is sharp as the fireside pop of hickory kindling, only louder. His head, it snaps back and I jump him, slamming him to the floor. He's on his back, pinned down with that ridiculous flap of comb-over hair dangling around his ear, and I keep throwing punches, knocking his big head against the hardwoods with each blow until his eyes glaze over with a bloodshot brand of fear I've never seen before.
Then he kicks his legs hard and throws all his weight to one side and I'm caught for a moment off-balance, reaching down to catch myself when he throws himself forward, slamming his forehead into my mouth, and I don't know if the cameras are still rolling or not, don't know if Glenda is burrowing her face into Tricky's chest or staring down at me with the same kind of unease I'd felt for her not a minute before. All I know is that my eyes are awash with hot white light, and that I've got blood in my mouth for the second time in a single day, and that mine tastes sharply of iron, and that Garrett is leaning down and hoisting me up by my belt, saying, Holy shit, hoss, that was a serious big can of whup-ass, and that when my vision comes back the first thing I see is the reporter with his microphone at his side and his eyes on the floor, probably praying I'm done swinging for the night.
Then we're making a break for it, shuffling past the pay phone for the back door, getting the hell out of there. In the parking lot, the moon is throwing light off the chrome of the pipe fitters' Harleys as they kick them to life. Garrett's laughing hard, howling into the night, asking, When did you get to be such a shit kicker? as he loads Sandy into his truck and cranks it up. Glenda shoots me a long and blinking and altogether confused look, a look you might give your husband if, say, you caught him jerking off in the shower, then she climbs up into the driver's seat of my truck and slams the door. I circle around to the passenger side, breathing in the exhaust of all these loud engines, and before I get in I spit a fat wad of blood into the parking lot gravel, and there, at my feet, half a tooth floats yellow and broken in a thick pool of red.
In the truck, I don't know what to expect. A stern talking-to, maybe. A ride home and a night spent alone in bed while Glenda walks the halls talking quietly into the telephone. Instead, there's an unexpectedly cool swirl of air pouring in through the windows and, outside, a drift of clouds running up on the moon. There's the hum of tires on concrete and the rumble of the engine through residential back roads to the outskirts of town, where Glenda steers over an old logging bridge and puts the headlights on bright and slows
to a crawl, centering the truck on the dirt road while we bounce in and out of ruts and over roots and the chassis squeaks and shimmies. "Not afraid of ghosts," Glenda says, "are you, sugar?"
I inhale and the night air saws away at the exposed nerves of my tooth. Tree branches lean in to brush the truck's front quarter panels. Glenda, she keeps on driving.
"Don't know," I say. "Never met one."
A mile or so up, the road is roped off with yellow police tape. Glenda kills the engine and grabs the flashlight from beneath the seat. "Night like tonight," she says, "can't get any weirder, I'm thinking."
I climb down from the truck and duck under the tape, following my wife as she pans the flashlight beam from one side of the road to the other. All around us there's the clatter of falling branches and the hissing of the breeze and the frogs speaking up from the trees. The road falls off on each side into ditches littered with weeds and debris, and I begin to wonder just how the hell you can drive a man into these woods and drag him from your truck, how you can cave his head in with the heel of your boot and then hold him down, your knee on the back of his neck, while your buddies hitch chains to his ankles. I'm wondering how you can stand over him—no matter what damn color he is, no matter what you believe—smoking a cigarette until he comes to and you see the fear widening in his eyes. I'm trying to imagine how it might have played out, how it all might have looked, but what I see instead are Stu Slyder's bloodshot eyes, and now I'm wondering just what the hell I'd been thinking back at the bar.
Up ahead, Glenda stops and squats over a red ring painted onto the hard-cooked dirt. "Dear God," she says, shining the light up the road. "Look at them all."
And there, by God, they are: dozens of them, some big enough to outline a trash can lid, others so small you could cover them with a coffee cup, and no pattern or order to them whatsoever. We walk up the road and Glenda bounces the light around from red circle to red circle, and the moon stays back behind the clouds, and the forest seems rightfully alive and loud. And they just go on forever. I'm thinking you could pull me apart however you pleased, and no matter how you tried you'd never end up with enough pieces to fill these rings. I'm thinking there's a lesson in that, a lesson I might could stand to learn, something about how there's always more to you than what you might think, but then Glenda bends down and traces a finger around one of the red circles and it's all I can do to stand there and watch her.
"He could whistle like you wouldn't believe," she says, "a not-a-care-in-the-world kind of whistle, the same way Daddy used to." She looks back at me with an arm outstretched, and when I go to her there's nothing left but to get down on my knees there beside her in the dirt and watch while she flattens out her hand and rubs this circle of paint into the earth. "Just whistling like that," she says, wiping her hand on my jeans, "ought to be enough to keep you alive."
On the walk back, Glenda turns the flashlight off. I freeze and look around long enough to see that I can't see a thing, so I bring her in tight, and I hold her there in the darkness, and when she leans her head back from me I get ready to walk. But then her lips are on me, and they're open, and my mouth is all of a sudden so full of her that it's like I'm being kissed all at once by everyone in my life who ever loved me in the least.
Back at the truck, Glenda throws a quilt down in the bed and we undress each other there in the dark before climbing in. It's habit, something I'm so accustomed to that I don't question it until we're wrapped up together with the quilt over our heads, until she pulls one of my legs up between her own and I can feel her there, the soft and swollen wetness of her. Her breath pushes hot against my chest and my tooth is screaming, a sharp pain that burrows down through the meat of my gums and into my jaw, and I want like hell here to tell Glenda that we don't have to do this, that we can just lie here awhile and go to the house, that I understand what just happened out on this road. Truth is, though, that I can't put it into words, not just yet, and all I know is that her skin is so soft it pains me to even think about letting her go, and her breathing is steady and slow, the breath of the deeply dreaming, and I'm thinking she might sleep through the night for the first time all week. Still I can sense that she's waiting, waiting for me to say something, so I tell her the first thing that comes to my muddied mind. "Garrett and me," I tell her. "We saw a couple dogs today. Up on Route 96. Doing it missionary."
She rolls back, pulling me up onto her. She presses her mouth against my cheek and I can feel her smiling there in the dark. She whispers, "You did not," and slips me inside.
I close my eyes, swallowing hard as I push myself into her. "Did too," I say, and then we're wrapped up in warmth, wrapped up in each other and in the sounds of the forest around us, the wind and the trees and the insects almost mechanically loud, like they've been working all night to find the right riff, and with a little work I hear them not as a whole but as single instruments, the same way you can when you focus in to find the bass line as you step onto the dance floor, so your feet know whether to polka or two-step or waltz. Except something's not right. Here I am, a man making slow love to his wife in the back of a pickup truck not half a mile from where another man was just this week murdered, and the forest has something too deep to its melody, something too low-down and rumbling. Despite the quilt over our heads, it's all of a sudden a slightly brighter night, and I'm sure, right up until the voice bounces around in the trees, that the moon's found its way out of the clouds.
But then it comes, my name called out like it's a question all in itself, and for the second time tonight I'm thinking about how Tricky caught us in the shower, only this time I'm not remembering it so fondly. This time I'm feeling again the hot flush of my ears and the nervous twitching in Glenda's hips, the way time stops for just a sliver of a second when two grown people who love each other freeze in the middle of their most private moment and hope like hell they're both hearing things. It's settling into me the way grit can settle into a man's skin that headlights don't feel the same as moonlight, and then I hear it again.
"Hey, bud," Garrett says. "You in there?"
I duck out from the covers, throwing the quilt over Glenda, and when she pokes her head out her pigtails are frazzled with static. She looks like a schoolgirl who's been caught by her daddy doing back-seat, midnight things, and I feel something warm and altogether newly formed ballooning wide in my chest. "Nice timing," I say, and Garrett comes over, his truck's headlights throwing his long shadow over us as he walks our way scratching a toothpick around in his sideburns.
"Hell, you two," he says, "ain't enough ever enough?"
Glenda smiles without showing teeth, and I can tell she's not embarrassed. I can tell she's flattered, flattered to be young and wild and lovely enough yet to make even the likes of Garrett shake his head with envy.
Now the moon really does come skulking out from the clouds, and when my tooth throbs I realize I'm smiling. Glenda's toes are curling around in my leg hairs, telling a little joke of their own, and when I look over, her lips are pressed into a girlish grin and it's clear that she's more than happy to let me do the talking.
When I look back at Garrett he's shuffling his boots in the dirt. His eyes shift quick from Glenda to the ground.
"Out looking for more dogs to gawk at?" I ask.
"I wish," he says.
"What, then? They looking for me back in town?"
"They are," he says, and then he turns to Glenda. "They already came by our place. Sandy said you had some wild idea about coming out here and having a look."
"She's got lots of wild ideas," I tell him, but Garrett just rolls his eyes and keeps talking. Old Stu's hot, he's saying, wanting to press charges, wanting some payback. "I dropped Sandy at the police station on the way. She thinks maybe she can talk Sheriff Duecker into cutting you some slack, but all the same I wanted to warn you. You'd be in a fast river of shit if they found you out here."
"They bothered Tricky and them yet?"
"I doubt it. They tore off toward the highway
when we ditched the bar. They're probably bellied up to another game of forty-two down in Kirbyville by now."
"Well, hell," I tell him, standing up in the bed of the truck. "I better get on into town then and turn myself in before they get back. Last thing Tricky needs is to come home to cops at his door and people talking all over town about his son-in-law the fugitive."
Glenda leans back against the cab and shakes her head. Her eyes water and sparkle in such a way that I know she's trying hard not to laugh. "I don't guess they'll need to frisk you," she says, and I look down at myself, a man with flecks of sawdust in his chest hair, a man wearing nothing but moonlight and pale skin and not-so-white socks. A man I don't yet fully recognize.
"I hate to do it, Glenda," Garrett says, "but I'm going to turn my back now so you can get dressed." And then he does. He turns and walks away and waits with his back turned, leaning on the door of his truck while Glenda fishes around in the quilts and hands me my jeans. I stand there awhile before putting them on, and I wink at my wife, and I look out into the forest where the crickets and frogs are still carrying on.
Men in the Making Page 12