“You just might be a lot closer to the Lord than you think, pal,” Buzz said, allowing his anger to show for the first time.
Mitchell squeezed the napkin into his palm and looked up, his expression unchanged. “A man has to listen to his wife, I reckon. A wife could tell her husband a thing or two, I suspect,” he said and waited for the words to sink in. “Things he never knew.” He dropped the crushed napkin. “Yes, mistakes have been made—like she said.” Mitchell nodded toward Gale.
For a very long time they were the only five people alive, dark figures standing alone without sound or movement or light, not even hearing their own breathing.
“Then we all understand each other?” Buzz said in a thin voice, sliding the pistol back down into his belt.
Mitchell spoke only to Gale, his voice clothed in darkness. “I think you could say that. Yes, I think everything is clear now.”
Sharon stood like granite, the sleeping boy against her side, her head bowed, her eyes closed.
A pale green light from the gauges and speedometer illuminated the face of the man and his wife. The eyes of both seemed fixed on the white dashes of the centerline in the headlights. Buzz reached for the pistol on the seat, and laid it gently on the dash above the speedometer. Gale turned toward the darkness outside her window.
The outline of vine-choked tobacco barns appeared and disappeared and she thought of a time when she was twelve years old, when a boy from Pharoah, who was fourteen, led her to an abandoned tobacco barn on a night like this one, warm and damp in October. He carried a .22 rifle and a flashlight. The smell of baked earth and pinesap filled the inside of the barn, and small dust clouds rose like smoke when they stepped inside. He showed her where to point the flashlight, where they would likely nest or perch. And she saw at once that the tiny birds were blinded by the flashlight's sharp beam and that the killing was easy. She held the light and he did the shooting. After a time, she reached for the rifle and felt for the first time the ease of its smooth trigger.
“Take down your window,” Buzz said.
“Huh?”
Buzz was rolling his window down. “It's warm out. This may be our last warm night of the year.” He let up on the gas so that her hair didn't blow in her face. He patted the seat where the pistol had been. “Sit here,” he said, “and talk to me.”
Gale turned away from him. In her mind she had been some place she knew well, in a different night, and now she couldn't remember where her thoughts had taken her.
Buzz sighed, then looked from his wife to the road, then back at his wife. “Put on some lipstick and talk to me,” he said, feeling down to the floorboard and lifting her purse. She didn't answer. He reached for the visor above Gale's head and jerked it down with force enough to free its spring-loaded, lighted mirror. “Put on some goddamned lipstick, I said.” She reached into her bag. Buzz glanced over as she glossed her lips, then pushed up the visor. She dropped the lipstick into her bag and turned away from him.
Buzz pressed the gas hard and the car surged into the night. The wind lifted Gale's hair, whipping her cheeks and eyes. A low sound like the lid of a pot coming to boil began to rise as the car gained speed and the white dashes from the horizon became a clean unbroken line. The boiling metal sound intensified as the revolver vibrated against the windshield. As if delivering a jab, Buzz jerked down the visor. Its soft light fell once again on Gale's face. “Look,” he shouted. “Look at those goddamned red lips. I said LOOK!” Gale turned her eyes up into the mirror. Her blonde hair whipped her cheeks, flying left and right in a wild, electric dance, stinging her face. She was all red lips and frantic, blonde hair. The red speedometer arrow neared ninety, and the car began to rise and softly fall, like sleep breathing. Buzz was shouting now over the wind and the revolver, the warm wind of 100 miles an hour blowing the side of his face to distortion, his neck veins thick and blue.
“You want me to beg you for it, don't you?” he screamed. The deep woods were all around them now, like a tunnel or a cave. “You want me to beg you like a dog.”
Someone To Crawl Back To
William Chapel Reynolds and Gale Newcomb
Wallace's drive-in was a beer joint called the Starlite Restaurant. And most nights Wallace and I sat outside under its rusting neon sign and drank and talked about the things that neither of us could say to other people. We'd smoke cigarettes and look up at what was left of the sign and say whatever it was we had to say.
The Starlite sign, even now, is the tallest one in the county. It was the pride of Darlington in the early sixties when Wallace's parents built the place, and teenagers from Hartsville and Florence came to the drive-in to hear the music blast from big horn speakers mounted on the roof, and to kiss and make-out in their cars.
The letters on the sign, the ones that hadn't burned out, arched over Wallace and me late at night. The soft blue and red neon colors gave us what light we needed to pour our drinks without spilling, and to light our cigarettes with dignity, and to say what needed to be said. The “i” in STARLITE was dotted by a spraying comet, if you can picture that, and all the letters in RESTAURANT were burned out, except for a couple of A's, a U, and an R. And it was between their soft red and blue light that we drank and talked.
Sometimes when it was really late and I was about to pass out, I'd be aware of myself, almost as if I was outside myself, watching.
I know that sounds crazy, but that's what happens when I know I'm about to go under. I see myself—like at the very end of a movie as the camera slowly pulls back—staring up at the STARLITE AURA with the black night behind it and the real stars way off. I feel myself lifted up. Then I'm gone.
Wallace said he was pretty sure I wouldn't die in Florida.
“Human flesh,” he said softly, “is tougher than lettuce leaves and grapefruit rind.” The smoke from his cigarette drifted above his eyes.
“Shoot, Chapel, you’ll have all summer to save for winter.” He was looking up, talking at the sign. I could see the comet reflected in his eyes.
“Hell, when was the last time you heard of anybody freezing in Florida? Never happens.” He thumped the filter of his cigarette to the side and passed me another beer. “If things get too bad, look up the guy with the bum colony.”
“Look up where?”
“He's famous all over Florida,” Wallace said. “Never wears shoes. All the bums know him.” For a second, his eyes went blank, looking out into nothing, going off. Then he was back.
“Start with tourist places,” he said. “Try the dog tracks.” He offered me a light. “You could probably find a bartending job.” Neither of us said anything. “I'll give you the names of some people,” he said finally. I took a long, hard pull on my cigarette. It wasn't likely anybody on Wallace's list would have an address.
Not that I had much choice about staying. A deputy making the rounds had paid a visit to the drive-in earlier in the afternoon equipped with a bench warrant with my name on it. Over the past six months, I'd run out of money before I'd run out of checks. So just to balance everything out, I'd kept writing until the checks were all gone, too.
Everything was just a matter of time.
“I've got some business to take care of,” I said, looking up at the soft red and blue lights. “I got to get some things worked out before I go.”
“What you got to do is haul your ass out of this town while you still got an ass to haul. You go fooling around, the best thing can happen to you is the sheriff finds you before somebody else does.” I could feel him looking at me, waiting for me to read his expression, but I just looked out at the stars. He tapped his aluminum leg with his empty beer can and waited for me to say something—which was his way of letting me know that acting like I was wasn't working.
After he was shipped home from Vietnam, Wallace settled in Key West. He'd been sent back with one less leg than he'd gone over with, and he didn't want to live here where everybody'd known him when he was whole. He wouldn't have come back to Darlington at all,
he'd said, except that after his parents died there was nobody to see after the Starlite or send him money. The fact is, I learned when Wallace and I had got to be friends enough to talk, that he'd gone so far down in the bottle he was afraid he was going to die. “Be careful what you wish for,” he'd said. He also told me once, and only once—and this when we were about as drunk as we could ever get—that while he was in Florida and drinking at his worst, there had been some trouble and he'd killed another bum, that that was the real reason he'd come back to Darlington.
“What you studying about there, Chapel?” he said. “Looks like you're going off there, Bo.”
“Just thinking about Florida. You know, bikinis and the smell of suntan oil.”
“Right. Well, you can forget about the good-byes to the business you got to take care of. She don't need no more bruises on account of you.”
“Oh, don't say it, Wallace, you want the ring back.”
“You know what I'm saying.” He was leaning in toward me now. I wasn't looking at him. I couldn't.
“Hell,” I said, “I've decided you're giving up this old beer joint and going with me to Florida. We'll start something there.”
“We'll start something all right.” Wallace was kind of bearing down on me now. “If you don't get your ass outta here tonight, Chapel, somebody's liable to cut you into pieces so little even Florida gators wouldn't have you. You hear me?”
“I just got some things to do,” I said. “Then we'll be gone.” I could feel Wallace looking at me.
The thing about a real friend is that when you lie to them they know it and you know it, and sometimes that's a way to say things in the most truthful way. I promised Wallace that I'd have his pickup back to him at the Starlite by the time the cleaning crew was done, around four in the morning. I told him that I had a few things to take care of, that I had to pack my bags, that I wouldn’t see Gale. And he knew of course I was lying.
“Here,” he said, handing me two twenties and nodding toward his pickup, “I think it's empty.” I took the money and his keys. Wallace was looking up at the red and blue sign, or out beyond it, holding his beer up to it like a champagne toast when I drove away.
The tank was full. I broke one of the twenties at the Sav-Way for a six-pack, drove country roads from Stoney Creek to Pharaoh and back to Darlington again, thinking the whole time about how to tell Gale I was leaving. It wasn’t going to be easy. There was no way I could take her with me. Things had gotten to that point. But then things hadn't gotten to the point where I could leave without her, either. That was where I was. There was no future with her, none without her.
I tossed my empty can out the window and felt for a cold one. When I glanced up at the stars, I thought of Gale's eyes. I could see the way her eyes crinkled when she smiled, could hear her voice when we'd sing to the radio together, and then I remembered a story she told me when we were so much in love we didn't care about anything else. This is it. She said this to me last Christmas Eve. She had married Buzz, she said, because she'd given up on ever really loving anybody. For years she'd had conversations with God about why He had never sent her the right man, and finally, after she'd gotten no sign from above, she'd married him. She started crying with the saddest eyes I've ever seen, funeral eyes. I remember it like it was yesterday, those eyes. I had a car then. We were parked at the K-mart, right next to the side of the building, out of sight. It was raining hard, and we sat quietly with the headlights off and the engine running, and for a minute or two she stopped crying. When it started up again, she turned away from me, crying so hard her words lurched out like a little girl's, and she caught her breath and choked out that she had failed God, and Buzz, and me, too, because she had not waited for me to come. She had not waited like she should have, she said. If she just had another chance, she said. If she could just undo everything, she said. Now if you have ever loved and been loved by a woman like that, you don't just skip town. You can't live with yourself if you do.
“Do you know what time it is, Chapel?” She'd answered on the fourth ring. I could tell she'd been sleeping.
“I've got to go. I'm going tonight, baby.” There was a long empty time. I was standing at the pay phone outside the Food Lion. The place looked twice as big with nobody inside and the lights way down.
“Gale?” I said finally. There was another long empty time, then a heavy, hurting sigh on the other end. “You know I love you,” I said. “Don't you?”
“Make me a promise, if you really do love me, Chapel,” she said. “I don't care what it is, Chapel, just make me one, okay? Tell me that you're never gonna see me again. It don't matter what you say. It don't. All that matters is that it is a true promise, you know, something that can't be broken without consequences. Something you have to pay for if you lie, Chapel. Something that's not a lie.”
“I'm coming to pick you up,” I heard myself say. “We're going to
Florida. Tonight.”
***
I had several hours to kill. Buzz would be in from his UPS Charlotte run around two. He'd be asleep by three. She'd have her suitcase packed and hid in the front closet. She said she had to leave Buzz a note. And so I made her promise she wouldn't give him a hint that we were going to Florida. Then she'd walk to the end of the dirt road with her suitcase and meet me at the highway. She waited for me to promise I'd be there at the highway by 3:45, said she loved me in a voice that made my heart stop, and then hung up the phone.
A spooky feeling came over me as soon as I hung up and started back to the truck, like I was being watched. I turned around and looked up. The dark grocery store lion was right over my head. It was a giant, like something at the pyramids. Some signs aren’t meant to be seen so close up and without light. I just stood there, studying it. It didn't look like a lion at all. What it looked like was a big dog, with a .45 stuck in his mouth.
The radio was up loud. I looked down at the speedometer resting on 70, then over at the last two beers. I didn’t want to get too drunk, so I spaced them out by time. I gave them twenty minutes each. That's how long it would take me to hit I-95 at Dillon and drive the twenty miles north to the Risqué Cafe, a titty bar with video poker machines on the interstate, exactly half way between New York and Florida. Wallace and I had gone there when the place first opened. I remember Wallace pointing out the license plates from all over America, which is why I wanted to be there, in another county, surrounded by people going and coming, where nobody knew me.
I opened the next-to-last beer, and by the time I was nearly done with it I was thinking of Gale. Suddenly, I was lifted up. Rounding a long, graceful curve in the darkness, I felt a warm breeze, the kind you feel at some time every spring, one that announces to you, this is it, no more surprising cold spells, no turning back now. It is the first breeze of summer, and you feel it, and come, in that instant, to know it surely, and a certain feeling goes through you. Like a flash, that good feeling mingled with what I was feeling for Gale, and I knew everything was going to be all right. Everything was going to be different.
The lot outside the Risqué Cafe was half empty, cars and trucks from all over were parked like dogs who'd just found a spot and dropped down. I pulled to the back corner, right next to the building where it was darkest, shut off the lights and the engine. A steady thumping from the music inside rattled a beer can somebody'd left on a window ledge above where I sat in Wallace's pickup. I put the twenty under the floor mat so I wouldn't be tempted and counted what was left, a ten, four ones and some change. I felt around under the seat and found enough silver to give me fifteen to carry in. The twenty under the mat would buy us a tank of gas, which, with what was left in the tank, would get Gale and me over the Florida line.
I'm a pretty good poker player. The key is to know when to quit. And to learn every way there is to cheat, and when to cheat and when not to. After Wallace and I first got to be friends, we'd go down to Myrtle Beach and find a game with some insurance-selling golfers. We never let on that we knew one
another. We'd drink and lose some money, and let the insurance guys think we were stupid rednecks. You can guess the rest. Our plan was that if anybody caught us cheating, I'd pull out my knife and go for Wallace. You should have seen their eyes big as hubcaps when I'd dive for Wallace and the knife'd strike the aluminum leg.
My plan now was not to drink, but to watch the poker machines for a while, to wait for one that had been fed a good bit, then to take it first chance I got. I'd play three five-dollar hands, and see what happened. I couldn't see that it would make much difference if I lost, not in the long run.
And if I won, it could make a hell of a difference. If I lost, I'd move around the bar, watch the titty dancing until the waitress took my two-drink-minimum order, then I'd stroll out while she went to the bar. I had some time to kill. I'd sober up some before I picked up Gale.
As soon as I walked in, the music stopped. The bar was right up front, and the poker machines were on my left against the wall. The empty bar, which seated maybe ten, was lit only by red and blue neon beer signs. Individual lamps hung over each of the poker machines so that the bartender could keep an eye on them.
The players, who sat hunched over in the little tent lights, looked like they were praying in the Light of God. I couldn't see the stage in the other room, just the faces of the men there, all covered in red light. The loud music started again, and the wall that separated the bar from the rest vibrated with every drumbeat.
“What can I get you?” The bartender was talking to me but looking over at one of the machines.
“Draft,” I said. He reached for a mug without ever taking his eyes from the machines. I laid two-fifty on the bar. Two beers and two five-dollar hands, I thought. I couldn't see how it would make much difference, not in the long run. Besides, I was thirsty all of a sudden. I picked up the beer and turned to watch the players. The bartender sort of hovered over me, thinking, I guess, that I was going to leave him a tip. When he saw I wasn't, he raked the money into his palm and left me alone.
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