When we finished putting minnows on our hooks and stopped trying to catch fish, it was the fisherman’s custom to pour the surviving minnows out of the bucket and into the river. I was about to do that when Davis came over and took hold of the handle of the foam bucket, pulled it from me, and poured the minnows on the ground, and then with a kind of savage delight, he stomped the little fish into the mud. I suppose it sounds odd to be sad about fish I would have put on my hook had the day not ran out and the fish been biting, but it always seemed to me that if you weren’t going to use something for bait to catch something to eat, then you let it go. That was the way Dad did it and everyone I knew that fished.
But Davis didn’t see it that way. He was laughing while he did it, his eyes wide and wet-looking. He even tossed the foam bucket up and kicked it into the river like a football.
“Why the hell did you do that?” I said.
“I don’t know,” he said. “Fuck those minnows.”
In that instant when he looked at me and his eyes latched on mine, I think he knew what I knew right then. We were done. Our friendship was over. I suppose it wasn’t that one thing that ended it, but it was the one thing that capped it. I picked up my pole and started walking back to the car, and he carried his and we walked in silence up the trail through the woods and on out to where there were fewer trees.
There was a black car parked where the land rose up, and when we got there we saw two men, and then we could see there was another car, a white one, a little farther up on the hill. The men were standing out by the black car and there was a woman in the backseat and she sat there quietly with the windows open and the daylight fading. She was crying.
The men were hard looking, a little fat, and both had their hair heavily greased with hair oil; they looked a lot alike.
I said to the men, “Is she alright?”
“She’s fine,” one of them said. “Go on and mind your own business.”
“I didn’t mean nothing, mister,” I said.
“Sure you didn’t. It’s okay. Just go on now.”
I stopped and kept looking, feeling uncomfortable about the whole thing, but Davis said, “Come on, man. Let’s go.”
The woman turned and looked at us. She was dark-haired and pretty and her face was streaked with eye make-up and her lips trembled.
“Go on now,” said the man again.
We went on up the hill and to my car which was farther up than the white car. It was parked off the path and under some trees near the long bridge that went over the Sabine. The men probably hadn’t seen it. We had come there with our fishing poles stuck out the right back window and down by the sides of the passenger seat in the front, but when we got ready to go, we decided to toss the poles. They had lines and sinkers and hooks on them, and we had forgotten a small, plastic box of fishing gear down by the river. I thought about going back to get it, but knew I would have to pass by the car again, and the idea of it bothered me, so we just left everything.
“You think that woman’s alright?” I said.
“They’re out here fucking, Hap. Don’t you know a damn thing?”
“Two of them?”
“Could have been ten of them, and they would still be out here fucking. She probably wanted it and then she got it and she didn’t want it anymore. She might be making some money.”
“I don’t know,” I said.
“You go on back down there you want, but I’m staying up here. It’s just some woman that changed her mind too late. If it was me and I brought her all the way out here and she was okay with it and then changed her mind, she’d be in trouble, because if she got me this far with the idea of doing it, and she didn’t, well, she’s going to do it.”
I thought about that, and there was no reason for me to think of it any other way than how Davis said about the men, though I didn’t like what he said he’d do if it had been him and the woman didn’t want to do what he wanted. We got in the car and I drove us out of there.
I dropped Davis off at his house, and though I saw him in school from time to time, we only spoke in a passing manner, and never went anywhere together again, and when I was in a place where he was I was uncomfortable.
I didn’t think any more about the car and the men and the woman until some ten years later when I was home visiting my parents, and in the little town paper was an article about how an old black car had been fished out of the Sabine River the day before, and there was what was left of a body, bone fragments and a skull, in the car and no one knew who it was.
I didn’t know her name. But I knew who it was.
5.
Short Night
In Marvel Creek, in search of another ice cream cone, I drove us out to the Dairy Queen where I used to go, where all us kids used to go, not to eat, but just to have something to do. It was gone. There was a ragged used car lot there now.
“It’s gone,” I said.
“Just think,” Leonard said, “those used cars are leaking oil right where you used to eat burgers.”
“I guess it wasn’t any kind of shrine,” I said. “But it hurts that it’s gone. Come back, I sort of think it ought to be there, but it isn’t.”
“You don’t need another ice cream anyway.”
I turned alongside where the Dairy Queen use to be and drove a back road. Once upon a time it had been nothing more than a black top and there weren’t all the houses then. There were woods and there was swamp, and then you came to the river. The river was still there, but there were houses all along the shore. Most of the trees were gone. Where once their roots went deep concrete covered the earth in shallow slabs. It was hard to realize that the place had been so thick with trees at one time that it was always in shadow, and the mosquitoes were thick in the summer time. You could go down there and hide out, or die, and never be found, and someone standing right next to you might not see you if you didn’t want to be seen. Now, you had no place to hide.
“There used to be a place out here, above where we are now, where there used to be a hill with trees on it, and a clearing at the very top of the hill. They called it Humper’s Hill. Drive out here on Friday, Saturday night, there’d be a half-dozen cars parked, all of them rocking. Now the trees are gone, and so is the hill. They leveled it. The energy it must have taken to level it, to cut all those trees, and just to put up all these boxes that look just alike.”
“I was never part of that culture,” Leonard said. “We queers . . . gays, humped in greater privacy because we didn’t want straight, religious crackers, god-fearing assholes, to cut our dicks off. Mainly, I figured I’d have ended up killing someone. So the few interludes I had with others of my needs were in motels, or homes, now and again some place we could park, but not a community fuck park.”
“It wasn’t always dates, your best girl. Sometimes it was just plain old nasty, hormonal driven stuff. Guys would bring some girl, or woman, wanted to make a few bucks and they’d pull the train. Demeaning stuff all around.”
“You are so sensitive.”
“I guess I am. Even though the lady was doing it of her own free will, it was all so tawdry, someone you didn’t know spreading their legs in the back of a car and a bunch of guys standing around in line, waiting their turn.”
“You must have been out here to know about it,” Leonard said.
“You could know without being here, but yeah, I was here once when that was happening. For some guys it was a weekly thing.”
“So tell me about the time you were here.”
“Alright, and there’s more to this one than just being out here on Humper’s Hill. Fact is you’re kind of included in this story.”
“Alright, it’s your turn,” Ed said, and lit a cigarette.
“I don’t think so,” I said.
“Everyone else has done her.”
“I can see that.”
The back passenger door of the car opened and Jack climbed out pulling up his pants, swinging his dong like the pendulum inside a grandfather c
lock. He took his time to tuck it into place behind his jeans and fasten his belt. He was pretty proud of his dick, and had the nick name Horse.
“I’m all done,” Jack said.
“You was done before you got started,” a female voice from inside the car said.
“I did alright,” Jack said.
“Sure you did,” she said.
Jack coughed and sidled off to the back of the car and leaned on the trunk and looked at the moon as if it were his job to study the arrangement of craters.
Ed put his arm around my shoulders and walked me to the car and the open door.
“You might as well knock some off,” Ed said. He was kind of the co-coordinator of the event.
“It’s alright, hon,” Billie Sue said from inside the car. “I don’t mind.”
“I can see that,” I said.
“Oh come on,” she said. “I said I could fuck you all, and you’re the last one left.”
“Fuck Jack twice,” I said.
“Ah come on,” she said. “He barely managed it the first time.”
“To hell with you, you old whore,” Jack said.
“Flattery will get you nowhere,” she said.
Jack walked away from the car to the edge of the woods and took his horse dick out again and took a piss.
I looked in the car.
Billie Sue was big and fat and her belly heaved. Her legs were spread and what I could see was less inviting than a leap into the bayou at night. You couldn’t be sure what was down there. I looked away and felt ashamed of myself for being out there in the first place.
Billie Sue was married to a Baptist preacher, and she liked to take a break from gospel singing and collecting the Lottie Moon offering to come out in the woods and fuck the senior class. Lottie Moon was a missionary who bothered the Chinese by trying to convert them. She was a kind of Baptist hero, but for me she was a long dead busy body. Billie Sue had been doing her own form of missionary work amongst each year’s seniors for some four to five years. It was well known around town that she liked to bump with the boys, but her husband was said to give one damn fine sermon. The Baptists didn’t want to lose him. And the knowledge of what his wife did made everyone in the congregation feel good about themselves. A little adultery and hypocrisy was easier to accept in one’s self if the preacher’s wife was considerably more wicked than they were. I thought that was nice. The Church of Christ had fired their preacher because he got caught dancing at a honky-tonk.
“Come on, kid, hop on,” Billie Sue said. “I’ve got my second wind.”
“No disrespect to you,” I said. “Know you’re trying to break a record, but I just came out here to see the stars.”
“The stars?” Billie Sue said, and laughed.
“Well, I didn’t come for this,” I said.
“Shit,” Ed said. “You come for something, and it wasn’t any stars. I think you ain’t got the wood in your pencil to do it.”
“Now that I’ve seen what I’m supposed to do, and who’s gone before me, I’ll admit there might be a severe lack of wood.”
“You queer?” Billie Sue said, sat up and rested her back against the door on the far side.
“No.”
“Free pussy and you ain’t taking any?” Jack said. He had wandered back over. “That sounds queer to me.”
“Jack’s trying to get back on my good side,” Billie Sue said.
Mike, a guy I knew a little, moved away from the other boys who were drinking beer near the back of the car, came over to me, said to Jack and Ed, “Leave him be. It wasn’t any good anyway.”
“Fuck you,” Billie Sue said.
“I’ve had better when I didn’t have any,” Mike said.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Billie Sue said.
“It means it stunk.”
“Well hell,” she said, “by the time you was there, there had been eight others.”
“That explains it then,” Mike said. “Come on, Hap. Let’s go.”
“I didn’t bring a car,” I said.
“He came with me,” Ed said. “I knew he was going to embarrass me like this, I wouldn’t have brought him.”
“It’s alright,” Billie Sue said. “I don’t expect to be universally admired.”
“You deserve respect,” Ed said. “He can walk home, all I care.”
“I got a car,” Mike said.
I went with Mike and he drove us out of there in his ’62 Impala.
We rode down off the hill, out of the night, into the glowing lights of the houses along the way, and then into the brighter lights of the Dairy Queen by the highway. Mike parked in the Dairy Queen lot and we went inside, ordered hamburgers and Cokes. Mike went to the bathroom while the burgers were cooking. I picked us a table at the rear of the place and sat down. There was no one else there but us and the cook and the fellow at the register. Mike came back, sat, and said, “I really needed to wash up. I touched her a little. Not on purpose, but trying to guide it in, you know?”
“Okay,” I said.
“I’m not trying to make you feel bad about not doing it,” he said.
“I don’t feel bad.”
“She’s okay with it,” Mike said. “She likes it fine. It’s a hobby.”
“I know.”
“She did ten guys last year, and this year she was going for twelve. She did eleven.”
“Guess I messed up her record.”
“She really had her heart set on twelve.”
“Life is full of little disappointments,” I said.
The burgers and drinks were called. We went up and got them and brought them back to the table.
“That stuff they said, about you being queer out there,” Mike said, and turned his head a little when he spoke again. “You know, you’re like that, it’s okay with me. I’ve known a few. My uncle Bill was that way. One time I caught him sucking a school teacher’s dick in our living room. He thought I was out, but I was in the bedroom reading. My uncle was a teacher too. He taught art. The guy’s dick he was sucking, I don’t remember what he taught. Speech or something.”
“No. I’m not like that,” I said.
“You know that colored fella you hang with?”
“Leonard?”
“He’s queer.”
“I know.”
“It bother you?” Mike asked. “Not him being colored, but the queer part.”
“Some at first. I guess I didn’t know what to make of it. He seems like everyone else to me, except for the dick-sucking part. He doesn’t hide it any. I figure he’ll get killed on account of it. Hell, I might get killed on account of it, I keep hanging around with him. I like him though. He’s one tough sucker. He can be funny.”
“I don’t think of him as funny.”
“He can be.”
“I think it would take one tough customer to kill that nigger,” Mike said.
“I don’t think he likes being called a nigger. I’d stick with colored.”
“That’s something, ain’t it. Don’t call him nigger, but queer is alright.”
“I think he does say he’s queer. Says it plain and simple. I think he wouldn’t want someone else to call him that, though. I know I wouldn’t advise it.”
“About the queer stuff, don’t misunderstand me. I don’t mind he is. Shit, right circumstances, I’d try it.”
“What?”
“Sucking a dick.”
“Oh.”
“You?” he asked, and buried his face in his hamburger.
“Not on your life,” I said. “I’m okay Leonard wants to do it. He’s my friend. But I don’t want no snapshots of it, diagrams and such. I like pussy just fine. Just didn’t like that one tonight. I’m ashamed I went out there. I don’t know what the hell I was thinking. I sure wouldn’t want my girlfriend to know I went out there.”
“You have a girlfriend?”
“Not right now. But if I had one, I wouldn’t want her to know.”
“Course not,” Mike
said, and nodded his head. “Understand, I was just posing a possible situation. A what if. I wasn’t suggesting you and me might do such a thing. Suck each other’s dick, I mean.”
I got it then. I said, “But you fucked her.”
He cleared his throat a little and took a sip of Coke.
“Yeah,” he said. “Sure. It was fine. She was fat and a little sticky, but it was fine. I didn’t mean what you think I meant. That wasn’t what I was talking about. Not really. I was just talking.”
“Sure,” I said.
“Don’t say anything to anybody,” he said. “They might get the wrong idea.”
“No problem.”
“Hey, I’ll drop you off.”
“Thanks,” I said.
We finished our burgers without talking and went out to his car.
He drove us away. He knew where I lived.
“How about the team this year?” he said. “I think we’re going to stomp shit out of Mineola.”
“It could happen,” I said, as if I knew the first thing about football. I’d been to one game and that was so I could watch a girl I liked lead the cheers. She left with a football player and I left with some popcorn.
When Mike pulled up in my yard he cut the headlights so they didn’t shine in the house windows and stir my parents. I opened my door, and that turned on the overhead light. I said, “Thanks for the ride. See you later.”
“Hey, just to be clear,” he said, “I was just kidding earlier, but it might have sounded like, you know—”
“No,” I said. “It’s good. I get it.”
He looked at me there in the glow of the overhead light. He knew I got it alright.
I wanted to say something else to him, but I couldn’t come up with anything. I closed the door and he drove away. It was for a weekend, a short night.
I saw him at school after that. He always smiled and said hi, but he never sat with me at lunch, and he didn’t spend any time with me when we crossed paths. After a while I didn’t see him around anymore and I heard later from Leonard that he moved off to some place up north with his family.