“Trip?”
“Yeah.” He turned and leaned his back against the rail post. “Back up north. When you want to go?”
“I don’t care. Whenever you get time.”
“What are you looking for?”
“I don’t rightly know,” she said. “I guess I just want to see if my family’s still there.”
He sipped the last of his coffee and poured out the dregs.
“Can you get ready pretty quick?”
“I reckon I can.”
By noon they were headed back toward Biloxi and the sun was high and bright on the water along the coastal highway. He had the air on low and he was drinking beer and smoking almost constantly. She had on a dress with nothing underneath it. His idea.
He turned at Gulfport and went through the old section of town and halted just short of the railroad tracks for a long train that was rocking heavily through the city with its rusted cars and flatbed trailers that held shiny green tractor motors winched down tight. She’d seen him put the gun under the seat, had seen the nylon bag with the zipper go under there, too, probably some more of the dope and the pipe, she figured. Their clothes were in two suitcases in the back end.
He made good time and seemed to know when to slow down to avoid the troopers that were sometimes hidden in thickets of pine or on the other side of hills. She asked him how he knew and he said he watched the trucks, that if the trucks were passing him it was time to speed up. She saw again country she had seen on the way down and remembered roadside stands filled with watermelons and ripe tomatoes and purple hull peas and saw them again too.
By midafternoon they had left behind the boat lots and seafood shops and the reminders of the environment of those who lived near the sea. They went now through hills of pine trees where the highway was laid out straight for miles ahead and distant points were seen and finally reached and others seen and reached again. They slowed down for small towns along the way. He talked to her and she slid closer to him on the seat and put her hand on his leg.
He stopped in Hattiesburg to get them something to eat and to put more gas in the El Camino and they both went to the bathroom. He bought barbecue sandwiches and hot dogs and chips and another twelve-pack of Miller, a few cans of lemonade for her. They pulled out of the gas station with the food on a big napkin between them.
He kept his foot hard on the gas and they made Jackson after rush hour and swept on through the masses of cars and hotels and signs, him weaving in and out until it made her nervous. But he was a good driver and before long they were leaving the restaurants and tire shops behind. They went past Canton and Vaiden and Winona and she read the green sign that told the miles to Grenada. The sun was walking across the sky above them and she didn’t know if he meant to make it before dark all the way out there. But he did. He turned off I-55 at the Coffeeville exit and pushed the El Camino hard even on this two-lane road. All the cops seemed to have left the country. He went past the turnoff to Coffeeville without slowing and skirted Water Valley and followed the hills and curves up into Lafayette County and stopped at the stop sign at the junction of 7 and 9. From there on she had to direct him, north toward Oxford, then off onto a badly patched and bumpy secondary road, past a roadside sawmill and trailers perched on bladed hillsides. She had him take another right just before the sun started going down and she told him to hurry. He did. In a long bottom where cotton was planted on both sides of the road he pushed it up to ninety and then eased off as they went over the hills where old farmhouses stood, the yards now filled with rotting round bales of hay, past stunted cows in muddy pens, past acres of scrub oak and pine and on across to another highway and another stop sign. She told him to hang a right, that they were getting close now. They went five more miles and he slowed for a thirty-five miles an hour zone, a church, a community center and baseball field. A hundred yards past that she told him to turn right again and he drove a little slower now. He asked for another beer and she got him one. It was all hills now until they leveled out in a long bottom where cotton stretched almost as far as the eye could see. At a line of trees she told him to slow down and he turned right across from the church where she had eaten that first night.
“You didn’t say it was a dirt road,” he said.
“It ain’t far.”
“At least it ain’t muddy.”
She nodded and chewed at her bottom lip, then reached back and got a beer for herself. He muttered when he had to slow to a crawl to cross one of the wooden bridges. She was watching anxiously ahead for the field road. They were in a creek bottom and she knew they had to get up on the next hill. He slowed to cross another bridge and he looked down into the shallow water as he passed over it.
“Who in the hell lives back in here?” he said.
“Nobody but them. Nobody but us that I knew of.”
“Is there a store around here anywhere?”
“On up the road.”
“What’d you do when you needed something from the store?”
“Walked.”
He was quiet then. He rolled his window down and hung his arm out. The gravel rattled against the underside of the Chevy and crunched under the tires. She told him to slow down.
“Shit, I’m already slowed down.”
“There it is!” she said, pointing. “Pull in there.”
Standing where it had not stood before was a new steel gate, a chain hooked around a new creosoted post. He pulled up to the gate and stopped, then turned to her.
“Whose land’s this?”
“I don’t know.”
“Is it posted?”
“What’s that?”
“It means no trespassing. I don’t want somebody jumping my ass about going onto posted land.”
“I don’t know if it’s posted or not,” she said.
He looked down the road and reached for the gearshift.
“I’m gonna back down there to that wide spot in the road.”
Instead he cut the wheel sharply and backed almost into the ditch, then turned the wheel the other way and got it turned around and eased down the hill and pulled it in next to a clean little pea patch that somebody had tended well and parked it there. Without saying anything about it he got the pistol from under the seat. It was in a smooth black holster and he slipped it into the waistband of his pants in back and pulled the shirt over it, drained the beer in his hand and pitched it into the weeds. He got a fresh one and held her hand walking up the road back to the gate. It wasn’t locked, only the chain looped around the post and one link hooked past the head of a twenty-penny nail. He got her to hold his beer while he removed the chain and opened the gate for her and then closed it back behind them and refastened the chain. He reached for his beer.
The dust along the fields of young beans was fine and pale gray, gentle explosions puffing beneath their feet as they walked. She stopped once and took her sandals off to feel the soft dirt on her toes. The sun was down now and the evening air had darkened. They flushed small flocks of doves from the bordering pines and they went singing and weaving low across the fields on their pointed wings to vanish into the deep green foliage on the other side. Frogs cheered from the trees and the crickets started up. As she had heard a million times.
“Almost dark,” he said.
“It ain’t much further. We got some light left.”
And so they had. Now they were at the path, but a line of wreckage had swept around it, bulldozed stumps and raw torn earth, lumps of blue clay and red dirt balled up on the dozer tracks. On up a ways the dozer’s path cut across their own. As if somebody had wanted to make a new road in here. They went across the rough ground and walked on the old path again, and now she could see up ahead a wide clearing where only a narrow one had been before.
Maybe he sensed some apprehension on her part because he walked slower and let her go on ahead.
She stopped to put her sandals back on and looked back at him once. He lifted his beer can, said, “I’m coming.” She walked on ahead and stopped
. It was only by looking at a big cedar tree that had stood at the rear of the house that she knew she was in the right place. But there was nothing left of the house, only a chewed patch of ground, a few shattered stumps.
“What is it?” he said, when he stopped beside her. He’d seen the look on her face: disbelief and maybe even fear.
“It’s gone,” she said.
THE SINK WAS full of dirty dishes from where he’d cooked Loretta’s breakfast but he didn’t try to mess with them. Maybe he’d have to get some rubber gloves after all.
The damn house was getting kind of dirty too. Some of his clothes were lying around and the kitchen floor needed sweeping. Sitting in front of the television with a glass of ice water he was about bored out of his head. Nothing on but a bunch of baseball games and he didn’t know one team from another. He liked the boxing. He was a big fan of Roberto Duran’s.
Loretta had been gone for about an hour. But he looked for her to be back sometime without any doubt. And probably without any warning. He’d looked at her ass while it was walking her back to her car and had some definitely dirty thoughts. What if she caught him drunk?
He took a long nap in his own bed on mussed covers. He could smell Loretta’s perfume on the pillow and it made him dream of Fay and being inside her as if it were real and then he was coming and could feel the hot spurts on his belly but could not wake from his dream either and slept on and had fragments of others, one where somebody shot him, and when he did wake it was with clammy underwear and a vague feeling almost like he’d been on a drunk.
He stripped and showered, holding his hands out from the spray. He looked at his body and saw again that he was growing old. There wasn’t any way he could soap himself up so he just let the water wash over him for a while and did with that.
He dressed in clean clothes from the closet after his shave, bits of tissue paper on his nicked chin. It wasn’t dark when he went out the door but the sun had gone down some minutes before.
And he almost didn’t go back in to catch the phone. He’d turned the answering machine off, and it was ringing in there, and he knew it might be trouble, but then another part of him wanted to face it and if there was punishment take it, only get it to where he could go and find her and bring her back home. That was all.
It was them. They wanted him over in David Hall’s office in Bates-ville. They wanted to know if he could be there in thirty minutes. He said he could.
SHE’D BEEN MOSTLY silent on the ride into town and now that full dark had come, her face was softly lit by the glow of the dash lights. He had put a Patsy Cline tape in and after a few songs had played, he’d asked her if she liked that, and she’d nodded and said a quiet Yes. He had his window down and he rested his elbow on top of the door, glancing up at the rearview mirror once in a while, sipping yet another beer.
“Is there someplace in Oxford we can get some decent food?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t know much about Oxford.”
He dimmed his lights for an oncoming car and then put them back on bright when the car had passed.
“I thought you said you lived up around here.”
“I didn’t live in Oxford.”
He drove in silence for a minute. He guessed she was bummed out. From what little he knew about her family it looked to him like she ought to been saying good riddance. Living out in the fucking woods like that. Ticks and bugs. On a damn dirt road. He glanced over at her but she didn’t turn her face to him, just kept sitting like she had been, with her legs pulled up under her and her head leaned up against the window glass.
“Is that door locked?”
“Yeah. It’s locked.”
“I wouldn’t want you falling out or nothing. I knew a guy that happened to one time. Him and another guy was going down the road about forty and he was leaned up against the door and fell out.”
He waited for her to ask him what had happened, but she didn’t.
“Don’t you want to know what happened to him?”
“What happened to him?”
“Hell. It skinned about all the hide off his ass.”
“Looks like it woulda killed him.”
“Looks like it, don’t it?”
The road was newly overlaid and curvy and the sides of it were lined with trees, sometimes gullies filled with kudzu.
He leaned over and touched her hand, then straightened up as he met another car that made a bad noise as it went past him.
“Why don’t you lighten up?” he said.
“Lighten up.” She looked down and crossed her arms in her lap and held her elbows.
He guessed she’d just have to work it out on her own. He was willing to talk if she wanted to. But he wasn’t going to force her. Sometimes she talked about them and sometimes she didn’t.
“Well,” he said. “I don’t guess you know of where a hotel might be, do you?”
“Not right off. We could drive around and look I guess.”
“They ought to have a Ramada or something. We can find us someplace to eat. Ask the desk clerk if nothing else. They always know where everything’s at.”
She nodded but didn’t say anything.
“Is it just cause they’re gone? Is that what you’re so upset about?”
“It’s that, too,” she said. “But I don’t know where they went to. They could be anywhere.”
“What about you, wild child? Hell, you left.”
“I had to.”
“It was that bad?”
“Yeah. It was that bad.”
He kept driving and sipping at his beer. He liked these country roads like this. Some people had ponds out behind their houses or green pastures holding Holstein calves. He was glad to be away from the coast for a few days. It was a nice change. Gigi was gone but he wouldn’t miss her. Even after all the time they had spent together he had barely known her. He’d never liked the way other men had looked at her or how she had welcomed it. There had been some good weekends with her in New Orleans over the last year. But she couldn’t settle with one man. And for her there was no future in what she did, never had been. She would just go through a whole lot of men and then one day she’d be old.
He remembered her being shaken by a painting on the wall of the Saturn Bar in New Orleans, an oil of the devil rafting a whore down to hell through an ocean of flame, her hair on fire. She’d gotten drunk and cried and then had gotten even drunker and puked, moaning about how she didn’t want to wind up down there. He’d told her she’d better change her line of work, then.
He finished the beer he was drinking and gave the can an overhead toss across the roof of the El Camino. It made a slight clink on a speed limit sign. Fay came out of her ball against the door. She rubbed at her face and then slid over in the seat closer to him.
“You want another beer?” she said.
“I don’t know. How close are we to town?”
“Probly ten minutes or so.”
“Hell, I’ll just wait,” he said. “I need to piss like a racehorse right now. What you want for supper?”
“It don’t matter to me. Anything’s fine with me.”
“You tired?”
“Yeah. Pretty much. I think I’m sleepin more these days. I guess it’s cause I’m pregnant. I never did need a whole lot of sleep before.”
“You’re just tired,” he said, glancing at her. “We’ve been going a whole lot here lately. You can get a good night’s sleep and we’ll head back tomorrow. Okay?”
She didn’t answer at first, just looked out through the windshield and twisted some strands of her hair through her fingers.
“What is it?” he said.
“Nothin.”
That was the way they were sometimes. You knew damn good and well they had something on their mind but they wouldn’t just come right out and say what it was. You had to dig it out of them. You had to show concern. Maybe she wanted him to hang around and help her look for her family. What the hell did all that feel like t
o her?
“What is it?” he said again.
“You’d think it was silly.”
“I might not. Why don’t you tell me what it is?”
She squeezed up close to him. He could feel one of those big titties pressed up against his arm like a puppydog’s nose. That was another thing women did, mashed one of their titties up against you, some of them, anyway, even if they didn’t know you that well. It was nice of them.
“I don’t know,” she said. “I just wondered if we maybe drove around some tomorrow if we might see some of em somewhere. Maybe goin down the road or somethin. Seems like that’s all we used to do.”
He thought it over for a minute. It would be a waste of time for sure, but he reckoned there was really nothing pressing that he had to get back to in Biloxi or Pass Christian. He’d already left a message on the answering machine at Arlene’s house that would tell people that they weren’t booking any guests for a few days. Cully didn’t know where he was but Cully didn’t have to know where he was every damn minute either.
It might be good to show her that he wanted to help her if she needed him to. They all needed something. And once you found out what that thing was it was easier to keep them happy. Then if you kept them happy maybe they wouldn’t bitch and raise hell about a bunch of old shit that wasn’t even important. She hadn’t been that way at all. She didn’t ask for much and this was a small favor. And what was he going to do when he got back but just go right back to the club and drink some more and watch for fights to start and somebody to throw out? They could stay gone a while longer.
In a long stretch of straight road they went around a pickup with its flashers going for a tall Massey-Ferguson that was hauling a hay baler along at about twenty. He could see the dark image of somebody up in the glassed-in cab and he could see the cleated tires turning in a blur. The farmer driving it waved and Aaron put up a hand and waved back and then sped into the next curve and the tractor and the pickup trailing it were lost from sight. He glanced at her and saw the swell of her breasts against the thin cloth of the dress. This one was worth keeping happy. Another day was only one more day.