As usual, they made love, then finished the coffee, ordered a fresh pot, tipped the wrangler, then made love again before her morning nap.
While Mona Sue slept, usually Benbow would drink the rest of the coffee as he read the day-old Meriwether newspaper, then slip into his sweats and running shoes, and jog down the switchbacks to the lodge to laze in the hot waters of the pools. He loved it there, floating in the water that seemed heavier than normal, thicker but cleaner, clearer. He almost felt whole there, cleansed and healthy and warm, taking the waters like some rich foreign prince, fleeing his failed life.
Occasionally, Benbow wished Mona Sue would interrupt her naps to join him, but she always said it might hurt the baby and she was already plenty hot with her natural fevers. As the weeks passed, Benbow learned to treasure his time alone in the hot pool and stopped asking her.
So their days wound away routinely, spooling like silk ribbons through their fingers, as placid as the deeply still waters of the pool.
But this noon, exhausted from the run and the worry, the lack of sleep and food, Benbow slipped effortlessly into the heated gravity of Mona Sue’s sleeping body and slept, only to wake suddenly, sweating in spite of the chill, when the air conditioner was switched off.
R. L. Dark stood at the foot of their bed. Grinning. The old man stretched his crinkled neck, sniffing the air like an ancient snapping turtle, testing the air for food or fun, since he had no natural enemies except for teenage boys with .22s. R. L. had dressed for the occasion. He wore a new Carhart tin coat and clean bib overalls with the old Webley .455 revolver hanging on a string from his neck and bagging the bib pocket.
Two good ol’ boys flanked him, one bald and the other wildly hirsute, both huge and dressed in Kmart flannel plaid. The bald one held up a small ball-peen hammer like a trophy. They weren’t grinning. A skinny man in a baggy white suit shifted from foot to foot behind them, smiling weakly like a gun-shy pointer pup.
“Well, piss on the fire, boys, and call the dogs,” R. L. Dark said, hustling the extra .455 rounds in his pocket as if they were his withered privates, “this hunt’s done.” The old man’s cackle sounded like the sunrise cry of a cannibalistic rooster. “Son, they say you coulda been some kinda football coach, and I know you’re one hell of a poker player, but I’d a never thought you’d come to this sorry end —a simple-minded thief and a chickenfuckin’ wife stealer.” Then R. L. brayed like one of the old plow mules he kept in the muddy bottoms of the White. “But you can run right smart, son. Gotta say that. Sly as an old boar coon. We might still be a-lookin if’n Baby Doll there ain’t a called her mama. Collect. To brag ‘bout the baby.”
Jesus, Benbow thought. Her mother. A toothless woman, now shaped like a potato dumpling, topped with greasy hair, seasoned with moles.
Mona Sue woke, rubbing her eyes like a child, murmuring, “How you been, Daddy Honey?”
And Benbow knew he faced a death even harder than his unlucky life, knew even before the monster on the right popped him behind the ear with the ball-peen hammer and jerked his stunned body out of bed as if he were a child and handed him to his partner, who wrapped him in a full nelson. The bald one flipped the hammer and rapped his nuts smartly with it, then flipped it again and began breaking the small bones of Benbow’s right foot with the round knob of the hammerhead.
Before Benbow fainted, harsh laughter raked his throat. Maybe this was the break he had been waiting for all his life.
~ * ~
Actually, it had all been Little R. L.’s fault. Sort of. Benbow had spotted the hulking bowlegged kid with the tiny ears and the thick neck three years earlier, when the downward spiral of his football coaching career had led him to Alabamphilia, a small town on the edge of the Ozarks, a town without hope or dignity or even any convincing religious fervor, a town that smelled of chicken guts, hog manure, and rampant incest, which seemed to be the three main industries.
Benbow first saw Little R. L. in a pickup touch-football game played on the hardscrabble playground, and knew from the first moment that the boy had the quick grace of a deer, combined with the strength of a wild boar. This kid was one of the best natural running backs he’d ever seen. Benbow also found out just as quickly that Little R. L. was one of the redheaded Dark boys, and the Dark boys didn’t play football.
Daddy R. L. thought football was a silly game, a notion with which Benbow agreed, and too much like work not to draw wages, with which once again Benbow agreed, and if’n his boys were going to work for free, they were damn well going to work for him and his hog operation, not some dirt-poor pissant washed-up football bum. Benbow had to agree with that, too, right to R. L.’s face, had to eat the old man’s shit to get to the kid. Because this kid could be Benbow’s ticket out of this Ozark hell, and he intended to have him. This was the one break Benbow needed to save his life. Once again.
~ * ~
It had always been that way for Benbow, needing that one break that never seemed to come. During his senior year at the small high school in western Nebraska, after three and a half years of mostly journeyman work as a blocking back in a pass-crazy offense, Benbow’s mother had worked double shifts at the truck-stop café — his dad had been dead so long nobody really remembered him — so they could afford to put together a videotape of his best efforts as a running back and pass receiver to send down to the university coaches in Lincoln. Once they had agreed to send a scout up for one game, Benbow had badgered his high school coach into a promise to let him carry the ball at least twenty times that night.
But the weather screwed him. On what should have been a lovely early October Friday night, a storm raced in from Canada, days early, and its icy wind blew Benbow’s break right out of the water. Before the game it rained two hard inches, then the field froze. During the first half it rained again, then hailed, and at the end of the second quarter it became a blinding snow squall.
Benbow had gained sixty yards, sure, but none of it pretty. And at halftime the Nebraska scout came by to apologize but if he was to get home in this weather, he had to start now. The lumpy old man invited Benbow to try a walk-on. Right, Benbow thought. Without a scholarship, he didn’t have the money to register for fall semester. Damn, Benbow thought as he kicked the water cooler, and damn it to hell, he thought as his big toe shattered and his senior season ended.
So he played football for some pissant Christian college in the Dakotas where he didn’t bother to take a degree. With his fused toe, he had lost a step in the open field and his cuts lost their precision, so he haunted the weight room, forced thick muscle over his running back’s body, and made himself into a solid if small fullback, but good enough to wrangle an invitation to one of the postseason senior bowl games. Then the first-string fullback, who was sure to be drafted by the pros, strained his knee in practice and refused to play. Oh, God, Benbow thought, another break.
But God foxed this one. The backfield coach was a born-again fundamentalist named Culpepper, and once he caught Benbow neither bowing his head nor even bothering to close his eyes during a lengthy team prayer, the coach became determined to convert the boy. Benbow played along, choking on his anger at the self-righteous bastard until his stomach cramped, swallowing the anger until he was throwing up three times a day, twice during practice and once before lights-out. By game day he’d lost twelve pounds and feared he wouldn’t have the strength to play.
But he did. He had a first half to praise the football gods, if not the Christian one: two rushing touchdowns, one three yards dragging a linebacker and a corner, the other thirty-nine yards of fluid grace and power; and one receiving, twenty-two yards. But the quarterback had missed the handoff at the end of the first half, jammed the ball against Benbow’s hip, and a blitzing linebacker picked it out of the air, then scored.
In the locker room at halftime, Culpepper was all over him like stink on shit. Pride goeth before a fall! he shouted. We’re never as tall as we are on our knees before Jesus! And all the other soft-brain clichés. Ben
bow’s stomach knotted like a rawhide rope, then rebelled. Benbow caught that bit of vomit and swallowed it. But the second wave was too much. He turned and puked into a nearby sink. Culpepper went mad. Accused him of being out of shape, of drinking, smoking, and fornicating. When Benbow denied the charges, Culpepper added another, screamed Prevaricator! his foamy spittle flying into Benbow’s face. And that was that.
Culpepper lost an eye from the single punch and nearly died during the operation to rebuild his cheekbone. Everybody said Benbow was lucky not to do time, like his father, who had killed a corrupt weighmaster down in Texas with his tire thumper, and was then killed himself by a bad Houston drug dealer down in the Ellis Unit at Huntsville when Benbow was six. Benbow was lucky, he guessed, but marked “Uncoachable” by the pro scouts and denied tryouts all over the league. Benbow played three years in Canada, then destroyed his knee in a bar fight with a Chinese guy in Vancouver. Then he was out of the game. Forever.
Benbow drifted west, fighting fires in the summers and dealing poker in the winter, taking the occasional college classes until he finally finished a PE teaching degree at Northern Montana and garnered an assistant coach’s job at a small town in the Sweetgrass Hills, where he discovered he had an unsuspected gift for coaching, as he did for poker: a quick mind and no fear. A gift, once discovered, that became an addiction to the hard work, long hours, loving the game, and paying the price to win.
Head coach in three years, then two state championships, and a move to a larger school in Washington State. Where his mother came to live with him. Or die with him, as it were. The doctors said it was her heart, but Benbow knew that she died of truck-stop food, cheap whiskey, and long-haul drivers whose souls were as full of stale air as their tires.
But he coached a state championship team the next year and was considering offers from a football power down in northern California when he was struck down by a scandalous lawsuit. His second-string quarterback had become convinced that Benbow was sleeping with his mother, which of course he was. When the kid attacked Benbow at practice with his helmet, Benbow had to hit the kid to keep him off. He knew this part of his life was over when he saw the kid’s eye dangling out of its socket on the grayish pink string of the optic nerve.
Downhill, as they say, from there. Drinking and fighting as often as coaching, low-rent poker games and married women, usually married to school-board members or dumb-shit administrators. Downhill all the way to Alabamphilia.
~ * ~
Benbow came back to this new world propped in a heap on the couch in the cottage’s living room, with a dull ache behind his ear and a thousand sharp pains in his foot, which was propped in a white cast on the coffee table, the fresh cast the size of a watermelon. Benbow didn’t have to ask what purpose it served. The skinny man sat beside him, a syringe in hand. Across the room, R. L.’s bulk stood black against a fiery sunset, Mona Sue sitting curled in a chair in his shadow, slowly filing her nails. Through the window, Benbow could see the Kmart twins walking slow guard tours back and forth across the deck.
“He’s comin’ out of it, Mr. Dark,” the old man said, his voice as sharp as his pale nose.
“Well, give him another dose, Doc,” R. L. said without turning. “We don’t want that boy a-hurtin none. Not yet.”
Benbow didn’t understand what R. L. meant as the doctor stirred beside him, releasing a thin, dry stench like a limestone cavern or an open grave. Benbow had heard that death supposedly hurt no more than having a tooth pulled, and he wondered who had brought back that bit of information as the doctor hit him in the shoulder with a blunt needle, then he slipped uneasily into an enforced sleep like a small death.
When he woke again, Benbow found little changed but the light. Mona Sue still curled in her chair, sleeping now, below her husband’s hulk against the full dark sky. The doctor slept, too, leaning the fragile bones of his skull against Benbow’s sore arm. And Benbow’s leg was also asleep, locked in position by the giant cast resting on the coffee table. He sat very still for as long as he could, waiting for his mind to clear, willing his dead leg to awaken, and wondering why he wasn’t dead, too.
“Don’t be gettin’ no ideas, son,” R. L. said without turning.
Of all the things Benbow had hated during the long Sundays shoveling pig shit or dealing cards for R. L. Dark —that was the trade he and the old man had made for Little R. L.’s football services — he hated the bastard calling him “son.”
“I’m not your son, you fucking old bastard.”
R. L. ignored him, didn’t even bother to turn. “How hot’s that there water?” he asked calmly as the doctor stirred.
Benbow answered without thinking. “Somewhere between 98 and 102. Why?”
“How ‘bout half a dose, Doc?” R. L. said, turning now. “And see ‘bout makin’ that boy’s cast waterproof. I’m thinkin’ that hot water might take the edge off my rheumatism and I for sure want the coach there to keep me company...”
Once again Benbow found the warm, lazy path back to the darkness at the center of his life, half listening to the old man and Mona Sue squabble over the air conditioner.
~ * ~
After word of his bargain with R. L. Dark for the gridiron services of his baby son spread throughout every tuck and hollow of the county, Benbow could no longer stop after practice for even a single quiet beer at any one of the rank honky-tonks that surrounded the dry town without hearing snickers as he left. It seemed that whatever he might have gained in sympathy, he surely lost in respect. And the old man treated him worse than a farting joke.
On the Saturdays that first fall, when Benbow began his days exchanging his manual labor for Little R. L.’s rushing talents, the old man dogged him all around the hog farm on a small John Deere tractor, endlessly pointing out Benbow’s total ignorance of the details of trading baton for bread and his general inability to perform hard work, complaining at great length, then cackling wildly and jacking the throttle on the tractor as if this was the funniest thing he’d ever seen. Even knowing that Little R. L. was lying on the couch in front of the television and soothing his sore muscles with a pint jar of shine couldn’t make Ben-how even begin to resent his bargain, and he never even bothered to look at the old man, knowing that this was his only escape.
Sundays, though, the old man left him alone. Sunday was Poker Day. Land-rich farmers, sly country lawyers with sharp eyes and soft hands, and small-town bankers with the souls of slave traders came from as far away as West Memphis, St. Louis, and Fort Smith to gather in R. L.’s double-wide for a table stakes hold ‘em game, a game famous in at least four states, and occasionally in northern Mexico.
On the sabbath he was on his own, except for the surly, lurking presence of Little R. L., who seemed to blame his coach for every ache and pain, and the jittery passage of a slim, petulant teenage girl who slopped past him across the muddy farmyard in a shapeless feed-sack dress and oversized rubber boots, trailing odd, throaty laughter, the same laughter she had when one of the sows decided to dine on her litter. Benbow should have listened.
But these seemed minor difficulties when balanced against the fact that Little R. L. gained nearly a hundred yards a game his freshman year.
The next fall, the shit-shoveling and the old man’s attitude seemed easier to bear. Then when Benbow casually let slip that he had once dealt and played poker professionally, R. L.’s watery blue eyes suddenly glistened with greed, and the Sunday portion of Benbow’s bargain became both easier and more complicated. Not that the old man needed him to cheat. R. L. Dark always won. The only times the old man signaled him to deal seconds was to give hands to his competitors to keep them in the game so the old man could skin them even deeper.
The brutal and dangerous monotony of Benbow’s life continued, controlled and hopeful until the fall of Little R. L.’s junior year, when everything came apart. Then back together with a terrible rush. A break, a dislocation, and a connection.
On the Saturday afternoon after Little R
. L. broke the state rushing record the night before, the teenage girl stopped chuckling long enough to ask a question. “How long you have to go to college, Coach, to figure out how to scoot pig shit off concrete with a fire hose?”
When she laughed, Benbow finally asked, “Who the fuck are you, honey?”
“Mrs. R. L. Dark, Senior,” she replied, the perfect arch of her nose in the air, “that’s who.” And Benbow looked at her for the first time, watched the thrust of her hard, marvelous body naked beneath the thin fabric of her cheap dress.
Then Benbow tried to make conversation with Mona Sue, made the mistake of asking Mona Sue why she wore rubber boots. “Hookworms,” she said, pointing at his sockless feet in old Nikes. Jesus, he thought. Then Jesus wept that night as he watched the white worms slither through his dark, bloody stool. Now he knew what the old man had been laughing about.
On Sunday a rich Mexican rancher tried to cover one of R. L.’s raises with a Rolex, then the old man insisted on buying the fifteen-thousand-dollar watch with five K cash, and when he opened the small safe set in the floor of the trailers kitchen, Benbow glimpsed the huge pile of banded stacks of one-hundred-dollar bills that filled the safe.
The Best American Noir of the Century Page 53