Lucky Strikes

by Louis Bayard

  The only trouble was, with all the work around the station, Hiram had to squeeze his lessons into Sunday afternoons. So right round the time that Walnut Ridge’s Christians were dragging themselves back from church, Hiram was climbing into the truck and making his rounds. There was times he was lucky to get back before nightfall.

  Well, it was on one of those Sundays in early August that Ida came.

  The heat was so thick, even the locusts had taken a breather, and every horse was snoozing in the shade of an old elm tree. Even the flies had gone quiet, so the sound, coming in from the east, lodged straight in my ear. A soft sweep, like leaves blowing up from a well. It built and built, without getting much louder, so there weren’t nothing for it but to turn my head.

  And there was Ida Folsom, shuffling down the side of the road.

  Almost not to be recognized from the lady who’d sat next to us at the Park Theatre. This Ida was wearing a dress that looked more like a feed sack. Her legs was bare, her head was bare. Not a speck of jewelry, and that river of hair hanging down every side of her, like a ratty old comforter.

  She must’ve known where she was going ’cause once she got abreast of the gas tanks, she veered straight for the house. Step by step, dragging the gravel as she went.

  “It’s Amelia, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “How do you do? I was…” Her head did a slow turn. “I was wondering if Mr. Watts is at home.”

  “No, ma’am, he is not.”

  The news didn’t seem to hit her one way or another.

  “I can tell him you stopped in,” I said.

  “Would you?”

  She smiled, very sweetly, but didn’t move.

  “Uh, maybe you’d care to wait inside,” I said.

  “I’m fine. Thank you.”

  I looked at her a little harder now. “Miss Ida?”

  “Yes?”

  “I believe you’re bleeding.”

  It was fresh blood, too. Dribbling out from under her soles, caking round her toes and heels. She’d gone and walked Lord knows how many miles without so much as a scrap of leather between her and the road.

  “Oh,” she said.

  It took me no more than a minute or two to find some strips of gauze and an old bottle of hydrogen peroxide.

  “Thank you,” she said.

  And then, before I knew it, she was setting. Right there in the gravel. Mopping the blood off her feet and humming something low and tuneless.

  “Is there anything else I can get you, Miss Ida?”

  “No, thank you.”

  I got Janey to make her some lemonade, and Earle, he fetched an old umbrella of Mama’s to keep the sun off. Ida thanked them both, but nothing on Earth could dispose her to come inside. It was like she had just enough in her to get this far and no farther.

  A little past eight, our truck come rolling down the road. What must Hiram have thought, I sometimes wonder, when his headlights carved out that queer figure setting in the gravel in a sack dress? He shut off the engine and jumped out of the driver’s seat.

  “Ida?”

  “Why, hello,” she said, rising to her feet.

  As he wrapped his arms round her, she made a soft kittenish sound and rested her head on his shoulder. He whispered something in her ear and then led her to the truck, and he’d just about got her into the passenger seat when I heard her say, “How charming they are, Hiram.”

  He peered at us through the beams of the headlights, then bundled himself behind the wheel and drove away.

  He didn’t get back till six o’clock the next morning, but come seven, he was washed and dressed and in his customary place. And that night, he made chop suey again—the “real kind,” he said. (One of his students had paid him in pork shoulder instead of cash.) To look at him, you’d never of figured anything was off. Yet, when I think back on that night, I wonder if that wasn’t the point he began to draw away.

  It ain’t nothing I can prove. Just a feeling I had that some space had opened up behind his eyes. Where we couldn’t go in.

  “Everything okey?” I asked.

  “Why wouldn’t it be?” he said. “Now listen up, pagans, I’m taking a break from elocution next Sunday ’cause I’ve got a new project in mind. And I’ll need all the help I can get.”

  It rained most of that day, but come three o’clock, we brought out Mama’s tool bucket and set down a tarp and got to work. We was still at it two hours later when Chester Gallagher came driving up.

  “Melia,” he said. “A minute, if you’d be so kind.”

  I poured a couple glasses of well water, and the two of us set just out of the sun in the Adirondack chairs in front of the store.

  “You going to tell me what you’re building out there?” Chester asked.

  “Well, it’s a—it’s a porte cochere.”

  “I’m not even sure what that is.”

  “Geez, Chester, it’s one of them—porchy things. I mean, you put it over a stretch of sidewalk or road, and it damn well covers it.”

  “But why?”

  “Why? Well, say it’s raining, and some folks drive on up. They can pull up under that there porte cochere and stay dry all the way to the store and back. It takes a load off folks’ minds is what it does.”

  “Does it now?”

  “Why, sure.”

  Chester sipped his water slow, like it was new whiskey.

  “Two days ago, I had a most pleasant conversation with Miss Wand of juvenile court.”

  “Can’t rightly see how that would’ve been pleasant.”

  “Oh, hold on. I meant unpleasant.” He give his glass a light swirl. “It seems they’ve uncovered your birth certificate. The original.”

  I stared down at my ankles. Watched them cross and uncross.

  “Well, so what? Who cares?”

  “Just to be clear, Melia, the Warren County Juvenile Court now has two birth certificates in their possession. One claims that Hiram’s your father, the other claims nobody is. Our good civil servants will likely conclude that one of those documents is a forgery. Experience and plain old common sense will tell them it’s the one that appeared out of thin air.”

  “Experience and sense. They ain’t proof.”

  “How about we call it a headache and leave it there?”

  “I can take headache. I can take it for … six years and four months. What do you think, Chester? Can we hold out till I’m twenty-one?”

  He tipped his head to one side, half shut his eyes. “I think we’ll be in court before this year is out. And if I still have a law license by this time next year, I’ll be politely surprised.”

  “We can get through this, Chester.”

  “I don’t see that we have any other choice.”

  Off in the distance, Earle was sawing off the end of a two-by-four, and Janey was pounding a nail into submission, and Hiram was wandering between them, bending now and then to pass on words of instruction.

  “Maybe there’s another way out of this,” I said. “Supposing we make Hiram an honest-to-God daddy.”

  “Whoa, now.”

  “I mean, we been calling him that long enough, it’s kinda starting to stick.”

  “You mean have him adopt you? All three of you?”

  “Well, why the hell not? Wouldn’t that keep the dogs off us?”

  He looked at me. “So you’re thinking Hiram’s here to stay.”

  “Don’t it look like it?”

  Chester raised his glass to his lips, took a tiny sip, and set the glass back down on his thigh.

  “The judge would have to sign off,” he said.

  “Well, that’s where you come in.”

  “It’s not that simple, Melia. They’d have to ask questions. Conduct an investigation.”

  “What for?”

  “To make sure he’d be a fit guardian.” Chester paused just a fraction of a second. “And to see if he was guilty of any criminal activity.”

  I stared at him so h
ard he actually wiped his brow.

  “You know something I don’t?” I asked.

  “I don’t know anything. Neither do you.”

  I frowned, stretched out my legs. “When you say activity, you mean like what? Like being a vagrant or something?”

  “Trespassing. Assault and battery. Theft. Uh, fraud.”

  We was quiet.

  “It’s the kind of thing they’d look into,” said Chester.

  But he sold hats to ladies in San Francisco. And made up ads for J. Walter Thompson. And met Clark Gable and learned how to cook from Yan Sing and …

  And was any of it true? When it come right down to it, what the hell did I know about Mr. Hiram Watts?

  All I could say for sure was that, a couple months ago, he’d been a bum. No different from any of the millions of others riding the rails and roads. He might’ve been living that way for years, and if that were so, then what had he needed to do to stay alive? How many scrapes did he fight his way out of? How many jail cells did he see the inside of?

  And how much of any of that did I really care to know? It was like Mama used to say: If’n you don’t like the sight of worms, you’d best not turn over any rocks.

  So I set there a while longer, watching Hiram and Janey and Earle bang that porte cochere into shape.

  “Know what, Chester? Forget I spoke.”

  Chapter

  NINETEEN

  Now, I can’t say for sure if it was on account of Hiram, but by the end of the summer, Brenda’s Oasis was starting to do a little bit of okay. Oh, we was still up to our assholes in debt, but for the first time ever, the ground was rising beneath us.

  Bills was getting paid, debts whittled … hope planted. I could see it in Earle’s step, when he went sprinting out to greet a car. I could see it in our customers. Drivers who, in days of old, would’ve hurried past us without a second look—they was stopping now. Saying things like “How you?” and “Nice day overhead” and “Living good as common.” They was greens peddlers and hog farmers and shoe-store clerks. Firemen and laundresses. Schoolteachers. Drill instructors.

  They come every hour of every day, in every manner of jalopy and wagon and coupe. So many of ’em, at times I couldn’t keep their faces straight. But Hiram could. Their names, too. Jobs and hobbies. Every vanity and earthly desire.

  “Farmer Stokes! Got a new shipment of Prince William snuff just for you.… Say now, Floyd, how’d the missus like those glacé cherries I sent you home with?… Why, as I live and breathe, it’s Ella Preston! Got your Schweppes Lemon Squash waiting for you at the bottom of the icebox. Colder than a polar bear … Why, Mrs. Grubbs, there’s some fresh strawberries on sale, and it just so happens they remind me of your complexion, that’s no lie.…”

  Frances Bean got to be quite the regular. So did Mrs. Hicks and Mrs. McGuilkin. Basil Buckner said Hiram’s coffee couldn’t be beat this side of the Shenandoah, and every time Minnie-Cora Harper started seeing a new feller, first thing she’d do was bring him round for Hiram to look over.

  “Well, this one looks most promising,” he’d tell her. “Boy’s got a good head on his shoulders. And Lord, is he smitten!”

  Now, at the risk of bragging on myself, it wasn’t all Hiram keeping us afloat. One morning, we got a visit from the mayor of Walnut Ridge. Big red-throated gingery feller, ready to tear out the few wisps of hair he had.

  “My damn brakes won’t quit squeaking!”

  All it took me was five minutes with castor oil and an old paintbrush, and those brakes was quiet as a queen’s fart. Mayor shook his head and said, “Young lady, you live up to your reputation.”

  From then on, he was a regular, and I knew our luck had turned for real when Pastor Goolsby did us the favor of stopping in.

  “Melia,” he said, “my engine keeps shutting off when I least expect it. I’m in mortal peril every second.”

  “Is it shutting off quick or slow?” I asked.

  “Quick.”

  “What’d the other mechanics say?”

  “The other—”

  “Harley Blevins’s boys.”

  His cheeks colored. “They kept telling me it was jammed. Bled me for a new gear key, but it didn’t change a thing.”

  I was back a half hour later.

  “Engine was jammed,” I said. “But it weren’t no gear key, it was the connecting rod bearer.”

  “You sure on that?”

  “Tell you what—you drive it around a few days. If it shuts itself off even once, you don’t owe me a red cent.”

  Well, next week, who should come driving in but the good pastor?

  “Melia Hoyle,” he said, “the Lord must be working through you.”

  “That’ll be three dollars and seventy-five cents.”

  From then on, Pastor Goolsby was a regular, too.

  *

  So against any betting man’s odds, Brenda’s Oasis was hanging on.

  Business had got to the point that Hiram and me could talk about staying open an hour later. Hiring extra help in the fall when Janey and Earle went back to school. Buying us a tow truck.

  We could talk about plate-glass windows.

  And maybe it was the wishing that finally brought Harley Blevins out of hiding.

  He started small at first. Trash cans turned over. Gas nozzles left dangling. Shaving cream on the windshield of our truck.

  Then it started to build. Newspaper stuffed in the men’s toilet. Chewing gum wadded into the coin slot of our pay phone. An old rocker swiped off the front porch of our house.

  Then one of our gas hoses was slashed—slashed so fine we didn’t even know it’d happened till the gas was flowing.

  Hiram insisted on calling in the police, but the deputy who come by just lowered his chin to his chest and said, “I don’t rightly see what we can do for y’all.”

  “How ’bout you tell your boy Harley there to—”

  But Hiram was already cutting me off. “Maybe you could swing a cruiser by every hour or so. Just to let them know they’re being watched.”

  “Can’t promise every hour. We got a heap of ground to cover, Mr. Watts.”

  “Whenever you can, then.”

  The next couple nights was quiet. Then, Saturday morning, I come out to find the door to the service bay jimmied open, and ten new whitewall tires laying all over the ground. Each and every one of them slashed.

  “Looks like we’ve got ten new tire swings,” said Hiram.

  “At sixty bucks a swing,” I said, hocking spit on the ground.

  That afternoon, Hiram drove into Front Royal to buy a heavy-duty padlock and a length of chain. While he was gone, Harley Blevins come driving on by in his butternut Chevy Eagle. Slowed the car to a halt, then pushed his head out the open window and looked at me straight on. Tipped his hat and drove away.

  That night, over dinner, Earle said, “Ain’t none of this’d happen if we had us a dog.”

  “Oh, don’t start,” I said. “Dog’s just one more mouth to feed.”

  “It’d earn its food ten times over,” said Hiram, “if it saved us the cost of new whitewalls.”

  “Well, maybe if everybody here didn’t sleep like the dead, we wouldn’t need us a watchdog.”

  “It’s a wonder we sleep at all,” said Janey, “you snoring like an alligator.”

  “I’d sooner have an alligator than a mangy old fleabag.”

  Looking back on it, I should’ve just fessed up. Me and dogs’d never really taken to each other. I weren’t feared of them, exactly, I just didn’t cotton to ’em, and I took it kinda amiss when they come at me with their nose or tongue. If the universe could’ve brought me a dog I didn’t have to wipe off me ten times a day, I’d have given it a thought.

  “Never mind the pooch,” I said. “I’m gonna take care of this problem by myself. You wait and see.”

  Well, that very Sunday, we put up the porte cochere. I’d figured it for a five-hour job, but Hiram had everything measured so careful, it went up lik
e incense. The posts, the roof, the arches … all sliding into place so sweet, you’d think they’d been searching for each other all their lives.

  ’Course Hiram kept fussing. Repainted some of the trim and checked the angle of the gutters and taped the joints and beveled the molding. But from the second we pushed it toward the sky, that porte cochere was one of the finest works I’d ever set eyes on. Every so often Hiram would step back and let his face go slack with wonder.

  I thought, Harley Blevins is gonna take this, too.

  Hiram went to bed early that night, and Janey and Earle, they wasn’t far behind. Me, I got a pillow and a blanket and went outside and laid down on the porch swing. Brought the Rayovac flashlight with me, plus an old police whistle.

  I laid there a long time, squinting into the darkness. After two or three hours, my eyes got so tired, all the stars took to wheeling like fireflies. Had to roll down my lids to make it stop, and I guess I must’ve closed them too hard ’cause I went right off. Woke up with a wheeze and a cough right at the pitch of dawn.

  The sun was just starting to dribble down, and off in the distance, some cows was grousing, and a mockingbird was getting sassy. I tiptoed out toward the porte cochere, flashing my Rayovac, but the daylight was already swallowing it, so I set it on the ground and kept walking till I was standing under the porte cochere.

  Still here, I thought, leaning my hand against one of the columns.

  Only the hand wouldn’t pull away right off. I looked down at my palm and saw a strange smear of black. Dipped my finger in it and raised it to my mouth.

  Tar.

  From there, all I had to do was take three steps back to see the tar was everywhere. Every column, every arch, every molding. Staining every last stretch of white.

  And there, on the column just beneath the Brenda’s Oasis sign, a message.

  BRENDA = SLUUT

  To this day, I can’t rightly say if they spelled the word wrong or just meant to drag it out a little. Sluuuuut. Or else it was too dark to see what they were doing.

  The police whistle was still wrapped round my neck on a chain. I raised it to my mouth, but no air would come out. I believe it was still hanging off my lower lip when Hiram come walking toward me. He told me later that, as he folded his arms round me, I kept saying the same thing.