“Don’t fun me. Don’t fun me again, or I’ll have me a bad spell that’ll be worse for you-all. I’ll whip you and anything that re-minds me of you.”
“See, Sis? Isn’t he great? He’s just the greatest!”
“What’d I just tell you?”
“He’s perfect. He’s i-deal.”
The mud petered out, and we hit the shoulder of a concrete creek. Water ran along deep at a high speed and hissed as it passed. We came to a bridge over this drainage ditch and switched clothes beneath it.
It was bad light under there, but we all stripped down to where our skins dappled the gloom, and moved about, ghostly, of course.
I didn’t have my shirt anymore.
They both had complete changes in that tote bag.
My socks had slipped away, so it was raw muddy feet I tugged my boots onto.
Jason tossed me the tuxedo jacket and I wore it over my bare chest.
Not much was said, but when something was, I answered, “The other way from you.”
5
All That Human Juice
I STILL CAN get lost. West Table, Mo., is such a big town compared to Blue Knee, where I was grown, down in Arkansas. That’s about an hour and a tall beer to the Delta side of Little Rock. Sixty Blue Knees’d fit into this town here and still have leftover citizens to loaf around the edges.
Blue Knee only held about a hundred souls and naturally I was required to know every damn one of them. In this town I can shuffle in the crowd and scarcely need to nod. So privacy can be had here in the hills, but it gets crossbred with loneliness, too. These Ozarkers don’t overwhelm strangers such as me with ready backslaps and quick invitations.
Some places I could find, such as the trailer court, which I reached about midnight in a small quiet rain. My wheels sat there, parked on the chat and pea-gravel lane beside the trailer I thought I’d begun this recent backslide in. My car was black, a sun-beaten black, an old Ford, the make that explodes into a fireball now and then. The car’s not big or strong, more runty and sputtering. It’s like driving a pregnant roller skate. The tape deck worked.
The windows were clouded on the inside, and drops beaded and burst and ran down the glass. I held the door open with a boot toe so the overhead light would stay on. Things that should’ve been there had gone absent and left bare spots in the mess. Several special pieces of clutter had left the scene, and I wanted them back.
I reached under the seat, into the springs, and felt the holster. The empty holster. I’d gotten shed of that popgun, I suddenly recalled. The danger in me having a pistol handy had mounted and mounted and blessed me with insights toward the future—some mean bumpkin in a juke joint shoves me and that spills bourbon and cola on my favorite shirt, the pale blue one with the chopped collar and the history of supplying good luck, pussy-wise, and I become a lunatic for three and a half minutes and decide I’ve just got to kill me a bumpkin to avenge that stained shirt. Such insights came in too clear. I sold the pistol to a pretty temperamental Indian in a casino parking lot at Tunica, Mississippi, more than a month back.
I’m not certain I was glad I’d come to my senses that way when I went toward the trailer door. The tux jacket had gotten soaked and hung on me and weighed me down like some shackle I did to myself ’cause I thought it had style. Lights were on in the trailer, and I might have merely driven away had I not heard the music—Groovey Joe Poovey singing “Careful Baby.”
I gave the door a couple of thumps.
The window curtains wiggled and I saw a hand.
Two more thumps and the door opened.
I looked at the man who was wearing a Sun Studio Memphis hat, and said, “First off, fat boy, that’s my hat.”
“Who you think you’re talkin’ to, punk?”
“A fat boy wearin’ my hat, that’s who.”
Back among my own element I know how to be. You’ve got to show your teeth and show them plenty.
The music had shifted to Rudy Tutti Grayzell, and I added, “And that’s my music.”
“That’s your shit car out there? I just about sold it to the scrap man this mornin’, but he wouldn’t come up to a ten-dollar bill on it.” He had an audience available behind him, which snorted.
This boy was short and bearded and not a great citizen. I had a slight hazy recollection of the bum. His gut was like a greedy kid’s Halloween sack on a Halloween when it didn’t rain cold rain to keep down the harvest. He had a front on him, an image thing, a look and demeanor that tried to sell you on the notion that you best walk softly near this bad tubby ’cause he’s evil, baby, a special brand of slippery fat evil.
I went up the three steps fast and pushed inside, and he seemed confused.
“I believe I’ll collect my tapes—and right now.”
There was a fella on the couch, the sort of small, skinny alcoholic redneck who probably had a cannon in his sock and an undertaker for a brother-in-law. A female slumped against him, and she was exactly the type you’d expect to find in this trailer with these fellas.
I pushed the eject button on the music box and found the case for that one tape right away. There were tapes scattered all over, on the floor, on the TV trays, next to the scuzzy sink.
“Buddy,” fat boy said, “you’re really advertisin’ for an asswhuppin’, ain’t you?”
He’d gotten close. I’d already found some tunes—Wanda Jackson, Champion Jack D., Sleepy LaBeef, Magic Slim, Ronnie Hawkins, Carl Perkins, The Killer, and The King—but I dropped them of a sudden and hit him. This is one of the worst traits of us. His mouth busted to pulp and all that human juice dashed over his cheeks and beard, then began to drip down his neck, inside his shirt.
It’s the way of our world, which is the one world I know.
The little alcoholic didn’t reach for a cannon. He reached for a coffee cup of whiskey and silently saluted me with it.
The female said, “Have a seat, why don’t you?”
“Huh-uh. I ain’t had all my shots.”
There was a trash bag there, and I tossed my tapes into it, and maybe a couple of tapes not strictly mine (I’d been trying to find pleasure in typical dinosaur rock, really trying), and walked to the door. I looked back and fat boy was leaned over the sink, leaking himself into it, swirling down the drain.
I crossed the room again and snatched my hat from his hairy head.
“I don’t have hardly nothin’, man,” I said, “and you’re stealin’ from me! I can’t abide that. I can’t abide that at all, conscience-wise. It puts really wrong pictures in my head, man.” At the door I stopped and added, “You could let yourself learn from this, you know?”
THEN HOME. I had a room with no cooking privileges on Hyde Street where it snakes sideways across the hill above the square. It was a squat old and gabled sort of place, with separate rooms devised and jerry-rigged every which way. You’d discover some tiny, tiny nook off the kitchen and it would turn out to be some geezer’s world.
The social atmosphere tended to be like a wake, sort of, only today’s corpse hadn’t quite been settled on yet. Whenever you’d hear a fellow boarder hack and wheeze and shuffle down the hall to tap a kidney or puke, you’d hope aloud you wouldn’t be the one who found him at dawn, stiff and purple, jackknifed over the crapper.
Mrs. Soose collected the rent and set the tone. She was one of those unhappy, even miserable older gals who’ve found the entire planet to be a disappointment and go around all the time fretting and wondering just why Mr. Mysterious Ways has kept them alive and on earth for so terrible a long time. Probably she was only about sixty, but she’d done hard time every day and I won’t even think about her nights.
My room was up the first rank of stairs and toward the back. The front-door key worked fine, but the room key stuck. I gave several twists and kicked the bottom of the door a time or seven. It seemed, I guess, that the rain and humidity had gotten to my door and warped it shut.
I was contemplating a jump across the lower roof and a wet
crawl to my one window when there she was, in pale pink terry cloth and face cream.
“Hey, Mrs. Soose, my door’s stuck.”
“The lock’s been changed, Mr. Barlach. There’s the matter of the two weeks’ rent you guaranteed me on Friday last. When you got your first paycheck.”
I thought fast of a pack of lies but didn’t bother to say them. Mrs. Soose had heard all the lies of all the renters since before I’d been old enough to beat with a fist. My lies would hit her like spit, and she’d just wipe and get mad and stay mad.
“And your foreman—see, I called to see if you’d died in a wreck or somethin’—he told me you ain’t got a job no more.”
Anyway, blah-blah, I’ve slept in the Ford before. I took the wet tuxedo off, found a smelly shirt on the backseat. It was the light blue one with the chopped collar and the bourbon and cola stain.
I parked in the lot at Happy Bark Dog Food. The time of year was spring, and April was trying to drown this region, as usual. I opened the glove box and there was half a candy bar and a small bag of smoked almonds. So I could rest.
I pulled the rearview down and looked at myself in the mirror for a spell, trying to spot virtues.
Then I put my head back.
When the sun rose, don’t you know, I intended to find out if I could beg.
6
Lain Unrepaired and Become
VENUS HOLLER WAS the most low-life part of town, so I already knew where it was. I stalled until late afternoon before I let myself drive down there. I felt instantly at home.
What I came to know: Venus Holler as a name was one of those cruel country jokes that sticks. It was a holler of small, square homes that leaned sideways a bit like a bunch of drunks who can’t quite hear each other. The holler naturally lay across the tracks from the decent citizens of West Table, but so barely across the tracks that trains made these joints quiver. If a train passed at breakfast time, all the eggs ended up scrambled. There was an awful chunky road through the holler, a road that had been paved out of pity once back in the bygones but had busted up over the years and lain unrepaired and become forever rugged. The houses have their roofs pulled down low over the front stoops, like hats worn at a sulky angle over hungry stubbled faces. Back in the heydays this was where the whores all had to live, the whores who serviced all the cattlemen and pig farmers who shipped their stock from West Table and went on toots during their visits, as well as the local lovelorn. The name got to be Venus Holler, I’m told, precisely because a goddess is the very last dame you’d ever expect to find there—but if ever you did, for three bucks you could fuck her too.
I followed directions, knocked at the door.
The rain had rolled on and a freewheelin’ sun toured the sky. I looked around as I waited. The ridgeline makes this holler mighty hard to gaze up out of. It keeps your vision on what’s held in the holler and shunts the eye from all else. This is the kind of address where the wives will know short-cuts to the welfare office and have a bail bondsman’s home phone number taped to the fridge.
I heard footsteps and knocked again.
If this house was meat you’d let the dog eat it.
The footsteps arrived and the inside door jumped back. Someone was there, but the screen was between us.
“You’re not on time,” this woman’s voice said. “You’ll have to have a seat. Come on in, hon—there’s beer in the kitchen.”
She disappeared before I could see her, but her smell stayed behind to introduce her to me. The smell, I’d say, came from mimosa. A mimosa species of smell, anyhow.
Inside, the place pulled itself together, stood up straight, showed some effort. Everything was passably clean, and the furniture had slipcovers with cheerful designs in cheerful colors.
I decided not to be standoffish. I went into the kitchen, which was easy to find since there were only two ways to turn from the front room, and she hadn’t gone to the kitchen and her smell tracked to the left, to a bedroom, I now know. The fridge contents proved this was a gal’s fridge—a box of white wine, the kind with a spigot, yogurt all over the place, vegetable juice, and one li’l palm-sized minute steak. I wondered what Jason might eat, or did he eat the same. The beer was on the bottom shelf, in bottles, and it was your standard prominent St. Louis brand of beer.
And that made it just fine.
She called, “You’re not dressed how I expected. I think you spilled somethin’ on your shirtfront, there. But you should be at your ease, hon—that’s the way things come out for the best.”
I guzzled the first beer at the sink, there, just totally defeated that bottle in two fierce chugs. I grabbed another from the fridge, feeling a little bit goosed and hopeful, then drifted to the front room.
A painting on the wall was wide and showed smudged flowers and smudged lily pads on a funny-colored pond. A decent-standing walnut display case was cut to fit into the corner, and it had been crammed with cocktail glasses that said where they were from: Brennan’s, Cal-Neva Lodge, The Vapors, Harold’s Club, Stan and Biggie’s, The Arlington, The Peabody, Old Absinthe House, Tootsie’s Orchid Lounge—and so on for maybe twenty mai tais more.
“I need help. I had to change when I saw you. Which shoes do you favor, hon?”
This woman stood there, blond, in jeans and a thin clingy pink blouse. She held a pair of shoes in each hand.
I didn’t speak up, so she did.
“I have these, my nice comfortable flats, or these, my tall fuck-me, fuck-me, fuck-me heels. Which do you favor?”
“Well . . .”
“Oh, why am I askin’ you? I know what you think—but the flats are so much more sensible for when we dance, hon.”
The woman tossed the pair I would’ve chosen off somewhere, put the other on.
She was one of those gals who look like they’ve patterned theirselves after a child’s doll. A Barbie who has gone to seed on roadhouse whiskey and panfried chicken. I’d put her age at plenty old enough, but not yet too old. Thirty-five, or maybe forty, but not much over that. She had a big smell, big hair, big smile.
“It’s less awkward,” she said, and sidled close up to me, “if you present my gift to me now, and I’ll hide it away, and that will be all we’ll say about that.”
“Might this gift be a cash gift?”
That big smile stepped aside, then she snapped a cigarette between her lips and lit it with a thin golden lighter.
“If you’re not Steve Jimmerson’s brother-in-law from Cape Girardeau, then A, you owe me for the beer, and B, you better quick say something sweet that doesn’t scare me. I’m easily frightened.”
“A mistake was made,” I said. “That’s all. Look here, now, I—you know—I went into that store up the road there, Lake’s Market, I think they call it, or somethin’, and they directed me here. The man at the counter. What I’m lookin’ for is this tiny red-haired girl, said her name was Merridew, which is the name I asked after at the store. They said knock here.”
About this instant she had things sorted out. Her eyes narrowed and her lips twitched as if a mocking laugh was getting into position to spring forth.
“Now how did she get her hooks into a rugged ol’ long, tall cowpoke like you?”
“I met her, that’s all.”
“She’s not be-guiling. She doesn’t bother to be appealing, not often, not often that I ever did see.”
“She’s got a way, though, that comes across—to me, at least.”
“Does she now? Think you might could get a li’l of that cotton, do you?”
“Never say never.”
“Jamalee is my daughter—did you know?”
“Naw. Naw.”
“I’m Bev Merridew—that’s why Tim sent you to the wrong house. You say Merridew around here and that’s usually me. Not far off, though, it’s goin’ to always be Jason, I imagine.”
I did the beer in. I wasn’t sure what to do with the bottle.
“He’s a right glamorous boy—I can testify to that.”
r /> She sucked and blew smoke, gave me an up-and-down look the way a warden might when he was deciding which tier to jail you on.
“No,” she said, and shook her head. “No, huh-uh, you’re not, I can tell. Not you, cowboy.”
She beckoned me to a side window, and I stood there and got rocked by her smell and smoke and sharp savory possibilities that were dangled merely by her posture and presence.
“Right there,” she said, and pointed to the next house over. “Jam and Jason stay there, close by but out of my hair. They’re old enough.”
The next house over was like a reflection of this one in a dented mirror that had been settled on by dust.
“Scoot. I’ve got a caller droppin’ by any hot minute now, and you can’t be here. So ske-daddle.”
At the doorstep I turned back to the screen, which had been tragic for quite a few flies that were squished there, and added, “My name is Sammy Barlach, and growing up I always kept chickens—so you know I’m a good lover.”
THESE WERE THOSE households of the awful fully shared. I parked in the mud-rut driveway. I knew such places by heart. Everything fine or wonderful got hoarded each to his own, but the miserable shit passed around and around and up and down.
A yellow bus honked on the road and went by, carrying a load of tired young Baptists home from the Bible camp that sat four or five miles down. There were two babes in rusty-lookin’ diapers wrestling with a dog in a mud yard across the street. Mom squatted on the porch, cherishing her cigarette, and there was a squad of dead schnapps soldiers scattered to the side of the steps.
I soon changed my mind, stepped out of the Ford, and went over to Jamalee’s door. I could see she stood inside the screen door, watching me. The screen had been given a rounded, pooched-out shape by insiders leaning into it, headfirst, pushing a little farther out each time, hoping for some slightly improved view, I guess.
“Well, look what the rain washed by,” she said. “Didn’t expect to see you.”