Lucky Strikes

by Louis Bayard

  “You want a smoke?” I asked.

  “No. Thank you.”

  We was silent again.

  “It ain’t that I don’t like you,” I said. “It’s just—”

  “You thought I didn’t like you. And here we are.”

  She took up her knitting for real now. Her face, I noticed, had a clean hard line, and I could suddenly picture her in that very same chair ten, twenty years on—her skin looser, her eyes deader. Another lonely married woman to add to the list.

  “Chester’s devoted to you,” I blurted.

  “Oh,” she said.

  Another breeze come in, stronger than the last. We both cut our eyes toward the window, though there weren’t much to see except a little alley of moonlight.

  “I’ve been meaning to tell you,” she said. “I like your sign.”

  Chapter

  TWENTY-FOUR

  I slept deep that night. Dreaming on what, I can’t tell you. All I recall is the shock of coming out of shadows and into edges.

  It was a sound that did it. A short, sharp crack of thunder.

  I jerked my head toward it, and then I heard Gus barking up a fury and Hiram shouting in from the front porch.

  “Get down!”

  I’m already down, I thought, but my arms, without my telling them, had gone and wrapped round Earle. We laid there, the two of us, in that pure darkness, not even knowing what was on the other side. Then come another crack of thunder. Even shorter and sharper than the last.

  From somewhere far off, I heard an engine gunning into the night. And out of the near darkness, something now was stirring. I could see shapes heaving out of the black—an elbow—a shoulder—vanishing as soon as they showed themselves.

  “Sweet Jesus,” whispered Earle.

  Then, just like that, come a fall of red hair.

  It was Janey. A candle clutched in both hands … her bed-stiff legs tottering toward us and then stopping.

  “Glass,” she said.

  I had some notion, I guess, of pulling her to safety, but when I lunged for her, something cruel drove itself into the sole of my foot. The word come back to me then. Glass.

  Sure enough, in the candlelight, I found little winking jewels—one of them wedged good and hard in my foot.

  Then I swung the candle toward the window. Ain’t no brick had done that. No, sir, if you had to go and get your front window busted, you’d have wanted a hole just like this. Clean and small and round, with just a little web of cracks fanning out each way.

  “That’s just plain rude,” whispered Janey.

  The first shell never made it into the house. Passed through the drainpipe and lodged in a hunk of cinder block. The second had one hell of a ride before it was done. Went through the window, passed right over the bed where me and Earle was laying, banged off the coal stove, bounced off Mama’s framed rotogravure of President Roosevelt (making another mess of glass), then dived through the braids of our kitchen rug and come to its final resting place about half an inch into our floorboards.

  Hiram tweezed it out with a pair of pliers. “By gods,” he said. “This one had somebody’s name on it.”

  His voice was dry and low, but when Sheriff Motherwell come creaking up the porch steps, Hiram was waiting at the door.

  “These children could’ve been killed. You know that, don’t you? You know that.”

  The sheriff looked a touch queasy. Every three or four words, he’d have to stop talking and put his hand on his belly, appease it like it was some jealous wife.

  “We’ll be glad to look into it,” he said.

  “Look into it?” said Hiram.

  “Not sure what else you want me to do. Did y’all see the shooter?”

  “It was pitch-black.…”

  “Then how do y’all know it was Harley Blevins?”

  There was a rush of quiet.

  “I don’t believe we said who it was,” said Hiram. “I don’t believe we once used Harley Blevins’s name.”

  The sheriff put his hands back on his belly. A tiny belch come fluttering out.

  “Melia,” he said. “How ’bout you and me talk outside?”

  I closed the door after us.

  “Listen up,” he said. “I’m gonna tender this suggestion but the once. Whoever’s doing this…”

  “Sheriff, you and me both—”

  “Whoever’s doing this, you need to go make your peace with him.” He rested his beefy hands on the porch rail. “You’re the only one can.”

  Chapter

  TWENTY-FIVE

  Next morning, I did everything like I always did. Ate breakfast. Drunk my two cups of joe. Put on my uniform. Helped Earle pump gas. Joked with Warner and Dutch and Elmer. Then, once I’d waved all the truckers down the road, I went and moseyed over to the truck.

  “Where are you headed?” called Hiram.

  I could see, just behind him, the slumbering form of Gus, one ear sticking up like a radio tower.

  “Gotta go see Chester,” I said. “Some paperwork or other. Be back in an hour.”

  Not a flicker on his bony face.

  “An hour’s about all we can spare you,” he said.

  “Oh, what? Like I’m gonna let you and Earle get near one of them engines? I got standards to uphold.”

  I shut the door. Put the key into the ignition and tried to turn.

  I didn’t have to do this.

  I could get out of this truck right now. Tell Hiram I got the wrong date. Head back to the garage, forget all about it.

  And wait to see what Harley Blevins does next?

  As I drove off, Gus’s black-rimmed eyes was following me the whole way.

  When a feller gets too big for Walnut Ridge, what does he do? He sells his little A-frame on First Street and he heads north for the hills, where he can look down on what he used to be.

  It weren’t in Harley Blevins’s makeup to buy some old plantation house. No, he had to go and build his own. Not so big as the real thing—just a couple stories—but it sure acted big with its veranda and its five columns. Marble fountain and pissing Cupids. The whole place as white as angels’ wings, except for the shutters, which was ocher and cobalt blue. Standard Oil colors.

  It wouldn’t have surprised me none if some old darkie servant had answered the big brass knocker, but the woman who drug the door open was fair and freckled, well along in years, with arms that looked even plumper in their leg-of-mutton sleeves and curly bottle-blond hair that the August heat had done evil things to. Even now, she had her hand somewhere in its tangles, trying to sort things out.

  “Morning, Mrs. Blevins. My name is—”

  “I know who you are.”

  We looked at each other a good long time.

  “Is Mr. Blevins around?”

  “I believe he is.”

  “Would it be okay if I spoke to him?”

  She cast her eyes down at her own feet. She was wearing red mules with ostrich feathers.

  “Come in,” she said helplessly.

  The foyer had a chandelier so low, I had to duck to get under it.

  “Bohemian crystal,” said Mrs. Harley Blevins.

  “That so?”

  “The floorboards are Virginia pine.” She started toward the back of the house, her mules dragging after her. “That tapestry is in the Aubusson style. You might also notice the china doorknobs. They’re straight from Dresden. This here spiral staircase was custom designed by noted local architect Howard Baybury.”

  On and on she went, like the world’s most bored-ass tour guide.

  “The desk is made of red oak. It’s called a secretary desk, and it’s got itself a roll top, see? Now over here, be sure to notice the pocket doors. So called because they slide into the wall like they’re sliding into somebody’s pocket.…”

  “Hey, Mrs. Blevins, I’m real sorry. I gotta get back to the station soon.”

  Her eyes swung back down to her shoes. Then she crooked her thumb toward the back of the house. “Past the
kitchen and to your right,” she said faintly.

  “Thank you.”

  When I looked back, she was still there. Her thumb hovering in the air.

  “Well, now,” said Harley Blevins, rising up from his leather chair. “What a surprise. Lord, now, get yourself a seat. No, no, not that one, take the wing chair. More comfy on the old can, know what I mean?”

  It weren’t even a proper office, you must know. More like a sunroom, only with heavy drapes thrown up where all the light would’ve been and, instead of rattan and wicker, leather and chintz and a desk half the size of the room.

  And on every wall, framed photos. Pretty much the same picture. Harley Blevins standing in front of some service station, shaking hands with some Standard Oil goon. The same smile, the same vulcanized-rubber bow tie, the same seersucker suit, the same straw boater, the same peppermint-stripe shirts. You could’ve cut and pasted him from one frame to the next, and no one’d have been the wiser.

  And here he sat now, in the very same clothes, his hands joined at the back of his head, his patent-leather shoes (shiny as the day they was born) propped on the edge of his desk.

  “How many windows you planning to shoot out before you’re done?” I asked.

  “I’m afraid I don’t know what you’re alludin’ to. I was fast asleep all night, and I sleep sound, girl.”

  “One of your relations, then.”

  A smile played at the corner of his mouth. “Are you adverting to poor ol’ Dudley? I got news for you, he ain’t got the stomach for certain jobs.”

  I give a little nod.

  “That thing you wrote ’bout Mama was low. Even for you.”

  “And once more, Melia, I must insist I was asleep when that—”

  “Thing is, if Mama really had been a slut, you wouldn’t be hating on her now. No, sir, if she’d have sat with you in the backseat of your Chevy Eagle—like you was always asking her to—I bet you’d be calling her a Christian woman.”

  He got out of his seat real slow. Walked round to the other side of his desk and laid one of his hands on my knee.

  “Still got room in that backseat,” he said.

  If I hadn’t seen his eyeballs flick, I’d of never known there was someone behind me. I swung my head round and found Mrs. Harley Blevins standing in the doorway with a tray. Two glasses and a pitcher of lemonade, with six lemon slices floating on top.

  “Figured y’all might be parched,” she said in a tight voice.

  “You know what I’m parched for?” her husband said. “Some goddamned privacy. If it’s all the same to you.”

  She stooped and set the tray on the floor.

  “Hey!” Harley called after her. “Miss Elephant Ears? Why don’t you shut that damn door after you? Let the grown-ups talk a little.”

  That door closed like a whisper. I peeled his fingers off my knee, one by one.

  “Lemonade,” he muttered. “Christ.”

  He walked to his liquor cabinet and pulled out a bottle of Bell’s Royal Reserve. Poured about two inches into a cut-glass tumbler.

  “You tell me this, Melia. If your mama weren’t a little hot in the pants, how’d she convince Old Man Congreve to sell her that gas station in the first place?”

  Very slowly, I poured myself a glass of lemonade.

  “She listened,” I said.

  “Like hell.”

  I took a long swig, passed a palm over my mouth. “God’s truth, Mama didn’t have nary a design on that place. We was just driving on through—on the way to trout fishing—and coming down Route Fifty-Five, we see this sad ol’ gas station. Sad ol’ coot sitting in front, looking like he was serving forty years in Sing Sing. Our tank was three-quarters full, but Mama didn’t care, she pulled right on over, asked him to fill it up. And being how she was, she couldn’t help but talk the feller up. Turned out he had a daughter in Blacksburg, you know that?”

  “Can’t say as I did.”

  “His dearest wish was to spend his final years with that there daughter. Only problem was, he couldn’t afford to move lest he sold the station, and the place was in such bad shape nobody wanted to buy it. ’Cept for … oh, how’d he put it?… some crawly old varmint.”

  Harley Blevins saluted me with his glass.

  “Well,” I said, “that’s when the idea first come over Mama. The way she figured it, me and her was good at fixing cars. She had some money left over from her aunt Dot. No kinfolk to tie her down in Cumberland. So why the hell not?” I finished off the lemonade in three more gulps. “Deal was done in ten minutes, and all it took was listening to some lonesome old cuss by the side of the road.”

  Harley Blevins give his whiskey a twirl. “That is an inspiring tale, Miss Melia. You wanna know what I was doing at your age?”

  “Something evil.”

  “You’re right about that. I was three miles under God’s earth. Digging coal for eighty cents a day in the Mill Creek seam.”

  “Just like Dudley’s daddy.”

  “He tell you ’bout that, huh? Well, the difference between me and my brother was he couldn’t see himself no place else and I could. Some days that was all I could see. Else. So, soon as I turned sixteen, I hit the road. No prospects, not even two pennies to rub together. Just an itch to be gone.

  “Oh, you can bet I took just about any job I could find. But the whole time I was—I was trying to see through, know what I mean? Which way was the world tending? Sometimes I’d just stop whatever it was I was doing and look around. Waiting for a sign.

  “Well, one day I was hitching me a ride out of Harrisonburg when this old Pierce-Arrow come flying past me. Didn’t stop, of course, the Pierce-Arrows never did, but I stood there thinking, Harley, what does this world get more and more of each passing day? Why, automobiles, that’s what. And what’s gonna make those beauties run to the end of time? Petroleum. Whoever can get ahold of that—front or back end—they’s gonna have dollar bills coming out their assholes.”

  He set his glass on his leather desk pad.

  “Well, I found me a station right off. It was this little ol’ gas shanty over in Cedarville. Real shithole, just tar paper on some metal sheeting. Nozzles half coming off the pumps. It was a good location, though, right off Winchester Pike, and I knew, with a little fixing up, I could make the place fly. Trouble was I didn’t have no damned capital. But there was a feller in town who did. Funeral director, if you can credit it, and he had himself a daughter. ’Course she weren’t too pretty—nor bright—but she sure was sweet on me.”

  His hand curled round his glass, lifted it back to his lips.

  “Now, I don’t mind confessing it, Melia. In those days, I was a sinner. A heathenish wretch. But I got down on my knees and I said, ‘Tell you what, Lord. You get this girl to marry me, you get her old man to lay out the bucks for this here station, you make all that happen for ol’ Harley, and I’ll pay you back, I swear.’

  “I was a man of my word, too. First year I turned a profit, I give back one-tenth to the church. Every time I bought another station, I put another chunk in the collection plate. And when the men in wool suits and neckties come from Standard Oil…” With a light smile, his eyes danced toward the photos on the wall. “Yes, ma’am, when they come a-calling, asking if I wanted me a wool suit and necktie of my own—why, that very next day, I put in another chunk. ’Cause the thing about God, Melia? He’s a man of business. You honor your end, He honors His.”

  He cinched up his lips.

  “And then you and your mama come along. Couldn’t hardly believe my eyes when I first laid eyes on you. Little bitty things mixing it up with truck drivers. When y’all put up that grave marker for a sign, I swear I near bust a gut laughing. I said to myself, Harley, you just hold out for a year, they’ll be blowing out of here like cottonwood puffs. But y’all hung on. Spite of everything.

  “Oh, I know I should be the first to congratulate you, Melia—no, I should—but you just stick in my craw. You do. See, me and God had us a working relati
onship, and you got in the middle of it. You stole my customers. You made me look like a fool in my own town. You even turned my nephew against me.”

  “That’s news to me,” I said.

  “And you wanna know the worst part?” He was smiling now, but just with his lips. “You even made me question my faith. ‘Cause when the Lord ain’t living up to His end of the deal no more, a churchgoing man starts to wonder. He does.”

  “Maybe God weren’t never on your side in the first place,” I said. “Maybe he ain’t on nobody’s.”

  “Now that is a sinful thing to say, Melia Hoyle. It is sinful, and it is mistaken, ’cause what I concluded? All this,” he said, sketching a circle round me, “this is just the Lord’s way of testing me. He knew things was coming too easy for me. I was getting a little … ha!” He grabbed some flesh round his belt. “A little prosperous, yeah! A little soft, needed me some hardening up. That’s why the Lord brung you into my life.”

  He brought his glass to his lips, realized there was nothing left in it, set it back down.

  “I’ll give you ten thousand dollars,” he said. “For the station and the store and that thing you call a house. That’s more than anyone else in God’s creation’d give you.”

  I closed my eyes.

  “Think what you could do with that money, Melia. You could quit busting your ass eighteen hours a day. Send Earle to college. Put Janey in some pretty dresses.” A light pause. “As for that so-called daddy of yours, you could set him up with all the hooch he can handle. Buy him his own distillery, why don’t you?”

  “He don’t drink.”

  “My error.”

  I unshut my eyes. Harley Blevins was staring straight at me.

  “You hold on to that there station, Melia, it’ll bury you. You let go, you walk away the richest girl in the Blue Ridge. What’s it gonna be?”

  I stared at the glass in my hand. Then I set it on Harley Blevins’s mahogany desk. Watched the ring of sweat well up from underneath.

  “It’s no,” I said. “It’s even more no than the last time you asked.”

  He set there a long time. “How come you always do just what I expect you to?” he said.