Joe

  His routine was to charge his things and get Joe to drop him off by John Coleman’s on Fridays to pay his bill. This Friday Joe put gas in his truck while the boy was inside and then followed him in to pay his own bills. The storekeeper was counting some money back into the boy’s hands. The boy said thank you and went out and got in the truck.

  “How about addin up my bill, John?” The old man reached for a pad of notes and a pencil. He started punching buttons on his adding machine, sucking on a cold cigar.

  “Y’all bout to get wrapped up?” he said.

  “We like about another week, I believe. We ought to done been through but we just had so much to do. All that rain early.”

  John rang it up. “Looks like twenty-two fifty.”

  “Thirteen gas, John.”

  Joe gave him the money and took his change back and stuck it in his pocket.

  “Thank you, John.”

  “Thank you. Listen,” he said, his eyes cut toward the door. “That boy there that works for you.”

  “Him? Yeah. I wish I had about ten of him. We’da done been through.”

  “Is he not that Jones’s boy?”

  “Who?”

  “Wade. I know that was him come in here the other day and wanted to charge some stuff to that boy. Said they both worked for you. I wouldn’t let him have nothin till I talked to you. But the more he stayed in here the more familiar he looked. If I ain’t mistaken he lived here a long time ago.”

  Joe looked toward the door and pulled out his cigarettes.

  “That boy’s last name is Jones. His daddy’s sorta fat and don’t ever shave. I don’t reckon he ever takes a bath, either. Smells like he ain’t had one in about twenty years.”

  “That’s him,” John said. “I knew that was him. Have you not ever heard em talk about all that shit that happened down there on the Luster place a long time ago?”

  They had leaned closer to each other over the counter and were talking in low voices like assassins plotting, like revolutionaries talking revolt.

  “Seems like I heard Daddy and Uncle Lavert talk about it one time. It was somebody hung down there, wasn’t it?”

  “Hell yes. It was three years before I went to Europe. That boy’s daddy was in on it, they said. He left out. Oh, it was a hell of a mess. It was Clinton Baker they hung. He was down there three days before they found him. Hangin in a tree and buzzards eatin on him.”

  “Aw hell.” He had to think about that for a moment. “How come em to kill him?”

  “Don’t nobody know. J. B. Douglas was in on it, him and Miss Anne Maples’s oldest boy. Buddy. And that boy’s daddy, they said. But he run off. I thought that was him.”

  “Well damn,” Joe said. He looked out at the boy. The boy was in the truck looking down at something, saying silent words. “What did they do to em?”

  “Well, they all run around together, Clinton and Buddy and all of em. They had a old house they gambled in down there. After they found Clinton and went and got him down and all, they went over to J. B.’s house to talk to him, see if he knowed anything about it. Sheriff went over there. That was old Q. C. Reeves. He pulled up in the yard and started across and J. B. come out the door with a shotgun. And fore they could even decide what he was up to, he set down on the porch and stuck it in his mouth and blowed his brains all over his mama’s porch. With her standin in there in the kitchen fixin to put dinner on the table. I never seen so many flowers at a funeral as his had. It was the worst thing to happen around here in a long time. Buddy Maples went to the pen but he died or got killed down there, I still don’t think the truth was ever told about that.”

  “What, did he admit to doing it?”

  “He admitted he was in on it. Or admitted enough to where they talked him into pleadin guilty to murder. Hell, they didn’t even have a trial. But he never would tell how come they done it. That was the thing of it. They was every story in the world told about it.”

  “Like what?”

  “Aw, hell, you can hear anything. It was told they poured gas on him and struck a match to him. I don’t know if it’s true or not.”

  “Goddamn,” Joe said. “Well, could they not still get him? His daddy, I mean?”

  “Shit, I don’t know. It’s been so long ago. I knew damn well that was him come in here other day.”

  Joe looked out toward the truck again. “I wouldn’t let him have anything if I was you. That boy would be the one that would have to pay for it. He owe you any money?”

  “Him? Not a penny. He’s bought a good bit but he’s always paid.”

  “Well.” He looked up at John Coleman. “What in the hell would they want to burn him for?”

  The old man lit the cigar and took a long slow puff of it and laid it in the ashtray. He leaned on his elbow and turned his head away.

  “They’s probably drunk,” he said.

  They coasted to a stop beside the growing cotton, where the honeysuckle blossoms hung threaded through the hogwire in bouquets of yellow and white, the hummingbirds and bees constant among them and riding gently the soft summer air. The boy held some money out.

  “Here’s half of it”he said.

  “Half of what?”

  He pushed the money at him. “A hundred dollars. You said you’d take two. You ain’t changed your mind, have you?”

  “Just keep it. You can pay me when I get my new one. I got to have this one to drive till then.”

  “I wish you’d go on and take it while I got it. Or keep it for me.”

  “Just hang onto it.”

  “I’m afraid I might lose it or somethin’ll happen to it.”

  But Joe wouldn’t take his money, and finally the boy put it back in his pocket. He got out and pulled his shirt off the seat and shut the door. He leaned in the window.

  “I’ll see you Monday,” Joe told him. “Be out here at six, okay?”

  “We ain’t gonna work tomorrow?”

  Joe looked up the road, then looked back. The boy seemed worried.

  “Naw. I got to have a little break this weekend. You know what I mean?”

  He was sure he didn’t but the boy nodded that he did. He stepped back sadly. Joe shifted into gear and let out the clutch, tossing his best worker a wave of the hand. When he looked back through the camper glass he could see him walking across the road. Dark was half a day away. And it didn’t matter what his daddy had done, what he did was all that mattered.

  He reached under the seat for the whiskey and got it up between his legs and twisted the cap off. He laid it on the seat and took a drink. It was hot, he had no chaser, it burned going down. Summer was coming and soon it would be Friday night. And yes, they had probably been drunk when they burned him. A man did things he wouldn’t normally do when those little devils were running loose in his head.

  He called Connie from a pay phone outside a drug store that was just down the sidewalk from B&B Liquors. He was chewing gum and he had set his fifth on the concrete so he could dial. The telephone rang in his house three times and then she picked it up and said hello.

  “What you up to?” he said. “Naw, hell, not right now. I just got some stuff I need to do.” He listened to it a little while, not long. He never listened to it long.

  “Well, I’s probably drunk when I said it. You ought to know by now not to pay attention to me. I’m liable to say anything.”

  He coughed into the phone. A police cruiser crept at an idle around the parked cars and rounded the end of the lot and stopped.

  “Listen, I got to go. They’s a goddamn cop settin right here watchin me. I guess the sumbitch thinks I’m drunk. Me? Naw. Not yet. Hell, I don’t know. Go shoot some pool or somethin. Go out to Vivian’s. I might be out there later. I don’t know what time. Naw, I ain’t gonna promise. Well, suit yourself then.” He hung up. “Goddamn women.”

  He picked up his bottle and walked straight as an arrow in front of the police car and got in his truck. He halfway expected the car to follow him. It did, for a wh
ile. It went out of the shopping center after him. But halfway up the hill it turned off and he went on about his business.

  There was nothing but a porch light showing at Duncan’s house. Joe parked the truck behind a green Grand Prix and got out and took a drink from the bottle. He put the pistol under the seat.

  He could hear it raging behind the door when he knocked, its barking harsh, the growling a little hysterical. Then the sound of somebody cursing, a yelp of pain from the Doberman. The door opened two inches. He saw an eye, a chain, a black muzzle three feet above the floor, where ivory fangs drooled a ropy spittle.

  “That son of a bitch bites me I’m gonna kill him,” Joe said. “Go put him up.”

  The door closed. Other doors were slammed inside. Brown beetle-bugs bombarded him and the porch and the light. The door cracked open again and then it opened all the way. He stood there, waiting.

  “You got that bastard put up?”

  “He’s in the kitchen,” she said. “Come on in. He ain’t going to bother you.”

  He wanted it made plain, though.

  “I’m tellin you, now. That sumbitch bites me I’m gonna blow his fuckin brains out.”

  “He ain’t gonna bite you.”

  “All right, then,” he said, and stepped inside. There were women wall to wall, old and young and fat and skinny. They lay on couches and sat on the floor eating popcorn and watching movies from a video store. He guessed it was a slow night. He had to step over some of them. The worn dowager who had let him in went to the small bar she tended and waited there, her bosom like mangoes, her lips like blood.

  “Can I fix you up with somethin, baby?” she said. She scratched absently at something in her hair.

  Joe leaned on the bar and set his whiskey down.

  “Come here and give me some sugar, Merle. I want you to lay them lips on me.”

  “Where you want me to lay em, honey?”

  “I ain’t decided yet.”

  She smiled and bent over to him. He kissed her for about a minute and then pulled away.

  “Damn,” he said. He picked up her hand and held it. “Why don’t you just marry me, Merle? We wouldn’t even have to fuck. Just kiss and cook supper.”

  “You asking?”

  “Hell yes.”

  She laughed and went to the icebox and got a canned Coke out. She took a glass from the cabinet and scooped ice cubes from a tub in the sink. He looked at her sad rippled legs and the bra that cut into her back, and shook his head.

  “I ought to asked you about twenty years ago,” he said. “For real.”

  She mixed his drink using his own whiskey and set it before him. He held her hand again.

  “What you got the blues over tonight?” she said. She reached for a barstool, still holding his hand, and drew it up close and sat.

  “Hell, I don’t know. I’m all right.”

  “I’ve heard you say that before. I believe you said that the night you shot that cop.”

  He lowered his head. “Well.”

  “Can you still fuck?”

  “Not much. Just ever once in a while.”

  “You the only one I ever seen that would admit it.”

  “What you see is what I am. Last time I tried it I couldn’t do nothin. Just bump up against it. I done got too old, I guess.”

  He picked up his drink and sipped it, and took some money from his pocket, the leaves of green not missed by the eyes that watched from the dark living room.

  “Here,” he said, and gave her a five. “Keep it.”

  As she put it in a drawer under the counter, the Doberman walked out of the hall and stood looking at him. Coal black, a chain of silver, sleek and lithely muscled, and the lips lifting ever so slowly from the white teeth that lined his mouth. The dog hated him, had always hated him, ever since he was a puppy. He wished for the pistol under the seat with a slight chilling of his blood and felt that something that hated so strongly for so little ought not be allowed to hate anymore. The dog stood ravenous and slobbering on the bright yellow linoleum, the flanks tense and the brown eyes not blinking. Joe looked into the animal’s eyes and the eyes looked back with a deep and yearning hatred.

  “Harvey,” one of the girls called. “Harvey, settle down.”

  Joe watched him, watched him hear her voice and relax, all the muscles so keyed going slack at once, the hide sliding shiny and loose over the back and legs. The dog walked to a water dish and lapped three times and raised his head and looked at him again. He growled.

  “Put the son of a bitch up,” he said again.

  Merle got down off her stool then and whistled the thing back, and Joe sat there sipping and hearing the toenails clicking down the hall, until she shut the animal away in a darkened bedroom and turned and came back to sit with him.

  “What do y’all keep that goddamn thing around here for?” he said.

  “Duncan says it’s a good idea. Says it stands to reason that a deputy sheriff or anybody else we don’t want in won’t come in with something like that standing in the door, gives everybody else a chance to run out the back door and hide. I don’t believe he likes you,” she said.

  “Hell naw, he don’t like me. He’d like to eat my ass up is what he’d like.”

  It hit him then that there wasn’t any reason for the thing to be here and there wasn’t any reason for him to keep coming over here as long as it was because eventually it was going to nail him. Somebody was going to take it too lightly, one of the girls who could pet it was going to turn it out on him one night.

  He looked down into his drink and heard the Doberman scratching at the thin door with its nails, whining and wanting out. He could imagine the dog in there in the dark, growling low, sitting on his haunches, leaning forward to gnaw and worry the wood. He lurched up suddenly.

  “Where you going?” Merle said.

  It smelled the Doberman when he opened the truck door and let it out in a flow of white liquid muscle. He told it to hush when it started whining and then he caught it by the collar. They dragged each other toward the door, him trying to drink from the bottle with one hand and hold his dog in the other. When they got up on the porch it barked and pawed at the door. Joe knocked, three thunderous blasts upon the flimsy wood. A pale girl opened the door and took one look and slammed it back, but he pushed it open before she could turn the lock. He went on in with the dog in tow. Only three of the girls were still up and they began to edge to the corners of the room. The dog had begun a low insistent growling and was straining forward an inch at a time, its toenails digging in the shag carpet.

  “Where’s he at?” Joe said, and then it got away from him. He grabbed for it and missed. It hurtled down the hallway to the room and bounced once against the door, and the Doberman spilled out in a rush of clicking teeth and flying saliva and slobbering outrage. In that tight little space they reared and sought each other’s throats, the sounds they were making fearsome and out of control. The half-Pit came dragging him backwards into the kitchen, the blood already soaking into the white muzzle, where the Doberman was held, locked by the throat.

  “Kill his goddamn ass,” Joe said. The girls were screaming and going out the door. He pulled up a chair and sat down to watch it. There wasn’t much to watch. The Doberman was shitting on the floor of the kitchen, while the half-Pit went deeper and deeper into his throat, mashing the blood out like water from a sponge, throttling and shaking him, droplets of blood flying over the clean walls and the table, the floor slick with it. The Doberman went down in the blood, his eyes glassing over slowly, the shine of life fading. The half-Pit turned him loose, licked curiously at him once, whined and looked back at its master, its face gore-stained and its tail wagging

  “Good boy,” Joe said, petting his dog.

  They made it eight miles down the road before the deputy’s car caught up with him. He wouldn’t pull over. The dog had its head hung out the window, its long ears flapping in the breeze. He’d always liked to ride. Joe pulled over in the midd
le of the road with blue light flashing inside the cab. Through the side mirror he saw the car drop back, heard the big engine start to scream. It shot forward and tried to come around the left side, but he pulled over to the left, watched the car slide sideways and halt briefly with dust rocketing and swirling before the headlights. He could hear gravel flying behind him. He got another drink of the whiskey and closed one eye so that he could see how to stay in the middle of the road. Orange fire barked from the window of the deputy’s car, shots aimed for the tires. He reached over and found a half-warm beer on the seat and opened it, started using it for a chaser while they reloaded.