BIG BAD LOVE
Stories by Larry Brown
Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill
Contents
Part I
Falling out of Love
The Apprentice
Wild Thing
Big Bad Love
Gold Nuggets
Waiting for the Ladies
Old Soldiers
Sleep
Part II
Discipline
Part III
92 Days
BIG BAD LOVE
PART I
Falling out of Love
Sheena Baby, the one that I loved, and I were walking around. It was late one evening. All the clouds had gathered up into big marshmallows and mushrooms, and it was an evening as fine as you could ask for except that we had two flat tires on our car some miles back down the road and didn’t know where we were or who to ask. Besides this main emergency, I knew things weren’t right. We were about ready to kill one another, and I’ve spoken on this subject once before.
Sheena Baby was LOVE, a sex-kitten goddess. I’d loved her for a long time, ever since I’d gotten rid of Miss Sheila, and I felt like I’d given part of myself away. Sheena Baby didn’t hurt for me like I did for her. I knew it. I’d thought about shooting her first and me second, but that wouldn’t have done either one of us any good. It wouldn’t be nothing but a short article in some paper that strangers could read and shake their heads over, then turn to the sports. Love goes wrong. It happens every day. You don’t need to kill yourself for love if you can help it but sometimes it’s hard not to.
If we’d had inflated tires I could’ve got her off over in the woods somewhere, put some Thin Lizzy on, told her how we could work it out. Told her not only to be my baby but to be my only baby. Later, in the dark, we could have moved together. But she didn’t love me, and I could see that finally, so I decided to be real nasty to her.
I said: “You just don’t want to listen to anybody.”
She said: “I’ve bout had it with your goddamn mouth.”
“Jam it,” I said.
“Kiss my ass,” she said.
“Make it bare,” I said, hoping she would, but she didn’t, and we walked off in different directions.
I didn’t know why something that started off feeling so good had to wind up feeling so bad. Love was a big word and it covered a lot of territory. You could spend your whole life chasing after it and wind up with nothing, be an old bitter guy with long nose and ear hair and no teeth, hanging out in bars looking for somebody your age, but the chances of success went down then. After a while you got too many strikes against you.
I didn’t know what to do, where to go. We were miles and miles from any town, anybody who might have flat-fixer services and could perhaps send a tow truck. I could see myself walking for days, sleeping in the ditches. I knew the first man who came along would pick her up, but I doubted that the first woman who came along would pick me up. I turned around and looked at her. Sheena Baby was getting smaller in the distance with each step, and I could see that fine ass she had wobbling. I knew she’d wobble it harder when she heard something coming down the road. She wouldn’t even have to stick out her thumb since she already had plenty of other stuff sticking out, and I couldn’t see myself doing without her for the rest of my life. I’d finally found the one I wanted, and now she didn’t want me. I knew I’d done it to myself, staying up all hours of the night playing Assorted Golden Hits and cooking french fries at two a.m., and letting the garbage pile up in the broom closet, not keeping my toenails cut short enough and scratching her legs with them at night in my sleep. It looked like when you first met somebody everything was just hunky-dory, and then you got to know each other. You found out that in spite of all her apparent beauty she had a little nasty-looking wart on her ass or she’d had six toes when she was born and they’d just clipped it off and then you got to wondering about genetics and progeny. You woke up in the morning before she did and leaned over and smelled her breath and said, Jesus Christ what the hell did you eat? Stuff like that broke the illusion, and formed opinions were changed when you really got to know somebody, when you lived with her and saw her in the morning and noticed that the backs of her thighs had little ripples of fat on them.
I wanted to run after her, though, because I loved her the way she was and I knew that nobody was perfect, especially not me, but I also knew that when a person found out how bad somebody else wanted them it automatically turned them off and they would begin to put distance between you, since the hunger one person has for another is seldom shared equally between them. It was sad, and it was messed up, but I had to figure a way out, because she was walking back the way we’d come, all the way back to Oxford, looked like, if she had to, and I needed two tubeless tires mounted and inflated pretty fast, or at least patched, and I needed a jack, and a four-way lug wrench, none of which I had. We’d gone out without those amenities, just for a short run to the beer store, and then picked up some Budweiser and things deteriorated from there. Went riding. Said fuck it. Decided to wait until later that evening to cut the grass. The smallest laid plans of mice and men.
An argument arose, one that had been brewing, about me talking to some chick a few nights past in a bar, somebody who’d seen some of my work. I’d warned her about that, about how I couldn’t avoid that, and for a while she’d seemed to understand. She even suffered their phone calls for a while, various ladies calling at all hours of the day and night.
But then she got to saying, “Another call for you,” handing me the phone with a tight-lipped smile, pulling up a stool to watch me while I hunkered down over the phone and spoke a soft and inquisitive hello into the mouthpiece, and listening to every word. She wanted the number changed. I didn’t. She wanted it unlisted. I protested. People needed to get ahold of me for consultations, estimates, I told her. They need to get ahold of you for other stuff, too, looks like, she said. It got pretty bitter. We started fighting. We’d have to make up before we could make love, and that’s always a killer. It got to killing the sensitivity between us, and once you get that eating at you, you’re a prime candidate to end up chasing somebody down a road, like I wound up doing that evening.
She kept walking and I started walking after her. I was trying to get close enough to call out to her. I knew it would sound awful, and you know it would if you think about it, but I knew too that she’d probably just ignore it, keep on walking, do me like that.
It kind of reminded me of being at the Memphis Zoological Gardens one time, years before, before puberty hit me. I was walking around with a balloon on a stick in one hand, a cone of cotton candy in the other. I was just wandering, and wandered over near the bear pits, where a large group of people had gathered. They were large bears, I don’t know, brown, or maybe grizzly. Something was going on, you could tell. The bears were down in a large pit with rocks and an artificial pool and an artificial cave, living out their artificial lives. People were pointing down into the pit and grinning. I pushed my way up through the crowd to see what was happening. Fathers had children sitting on their necks, holding them by their legs. There were two bears down in the pit, big fuzzy things. One of them was standing and the other one was lying on its back with its front paws up in the air, waving its head around and looking at the people. It looked a little drunk.
I looked at the bears and looked at the people and then looked at the bears again. The bear that was standing put its nose between the hind legs of the bear that was lying on its back and took a long hard sniff. The bear that was lying on its back raised its head and curled its lips out in a long tunnel and said ROOOOOOOOOOOO! real loud. The bear that was standing raised its head and shifted its feet and stuck its nose between the other bear’s legs again and the bear on it
s back waved its forepaws when the other bear took a long hard sniff and said OOOOROOOOOOO! MOOROOOOOOO! GROOOOOOOO!
The people grinned and pointed and the bear that was standing wiggled its nose and stuck it back between the other bear’s legs and took another long hard sniff and the bear on its back closed its eyes and waved its head and said BROOO-OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO! Then the bear that was lying on its back got up and licked the other bear for a little bit, they both did, then they slowly turned together and went into their cave and out of sight. The crowd kept looking. I did, too. The bears didn’t come back out, though. I felt, even way back then, that something strange and mysterious was going on, something we weren’t going to be allowed to see. The crowd drifted away after a while, in ones and twos, then threes and fours, until I was the only one left. I kept watching the dark mouth of that cave, but there was nothing to see except the black air inside it, and shadowy forms slowly moving in there. After a while I went away, too, and left them alone.
I suddenly remembered all that, going down the road after Sheena Baby, the way you will. I was afraid for some stranger to pick up Sheena Baby, because I didn’t know what he might do or try to do to her. These days, you don’t want to be hitching rides with strangers. There’s too much that can happen. I didn’t want to see anything worse than me befall her. I was bad enough, and I knew it, and I wanted to be better to her, try and rectify things if only I could. But she seemed to be walking faster, and I wasn’t getting any closer to her. My legs were hurting, and it was hot, but there was some beer in the car. She’d already passed it but I was getting closer to it. I finally reached it and stopped to take a breather beside it, and saw the cooler in the floorboard and said, Well, hell, as long as I’m here.
We’d conveniently had our two flats under a shade tree, and it wasn’t bad under those large reaching limbs. It was almost cool, and the beer was cold, so I helped myself to one and sat down on the side of the road, leaning up against the car. It gave me ample time for reflection. You can figure out just about anything if you get ample time for reflection. You can sit back then and get the big picture. I opened that beer and took a long cold drink of it, then lit a cigarette, and the world didn’t seem nearly as bad then. There were some other trees on the side of the road, and it was nice and shady, and there was a little ditch with some frogs sitting in it. It was kind of tranquil. I thought, Well, what if she does leave me? Is it the end of the world? No, it wasn’t the end of the world. The world wasn’t going to roll off its axis just because somebody had a broken heart. The sun wasn’t going to stop rising. I asked myself if it would be painful. Yes, it would be painful. It would hurt for an undetermined number of days or weeks. If I was lucky it wouldn’t hurt for the rest of my life, but there was no telling how long it would be until I found another one as good as her. They didn’t make them like her every day. I looked up the road. She was gone.
I sat there and drank beer for a while, smoked cigarettes. It wasn’t a bad way to while away the time. I didn’t know what to do about the car (it was her car). I didn’t want to just leave it. I didn’t know but what there might be vandals about, unlawful guys who might strip off the wheels and rip off the radio/tape player, make off with the battery. I didn’t want to sit around there and watch it all night, though. So I got to looking at the car. Both the flats were on the driver’s side. And suddenly the idea came to me, Why don’t you just drive it like it is, but real slow? It was such a good idea I couldn’t figure out why I hadn’t thought of it before. I had read somewhere that you could drive on a flat for ten miles if you drove real slow. I knew that even with two flats I could probably drive it faster than Sheena Baby could walk, and that I might eventually catch up with her. So I got in the car and put the beer between my legs. I turned the key and it cranked right up. It was just sitting a little low on my side. I knew it looked a little ridiculous, probably, and I hoped nobody would drive up behind me and start hooting at me.
I turned around slowly in the road, testing the feel of it. It felt a little bumpy. The thought came to me that I might be ruining the tires, but I just got another beer out when that thought hit me.
I tried to see how fast I was going once I got straightened out and headed after Sheena Baby, but I was still in low gear and the speedometer was just bumping up and down between o and 5 mph. I figured Sheena Baby was probably walking about 2 or 3 mph. I wondered: Could I shift into second? I did. The tires went to slapping a little faster. The needle rose to nearly 10 mph. I smiled. I knew I’d overtake her before long.
I turned on the radio and tried to find a little music. I put my sunglasses on. I felt like I was making some real progress.
The last time I’d been in Sheena Baby’s car there’d been two or three joints in an empty Marlboro pack in the glove box. I flipped it open and the Marlboro pack was still there. I elbowed the wheel and peeked inside the pack and, sure enough, there were still two whole joints in there. I got one out and put the other one back up. Things were getting pretty groovy. It was a Sunday evening and Army Archard was counting down all the top 100 hits of 1967. I lit that joint and bumped down the road drinking my beer and keeping time on the steering wheel, holding the smoke in deep. After a while I was just shaking my head over how good it all was. I listened to Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin and Elvis Presley and The Doors and Cream and Grand Funk Railroad and CCR and Percy Sledge, wawa wawa wa. I got to singing out loud and moving my shoulders around and when that joint got short I took little tokes and got all I could out of it. Army was breaking in once in a while, commenting on how fine it all was and talking about how lucky we’d all been to be alive in that era. I agreed with him 100 percent. I wished I’d gone out to San Francisco and worn flowers in my hair. I wished I’d been hip instead of picking cotton. All of a sudden it didn’t bother me any more that Sheena Baby was leaving me, and I saw that it had been inevitable. We were two different people. We came from different backgrounds, and our interests were not similar. It was a wonder that we’d stayed together as long as we had. Love took a lot of different forms and sometimes what appeared to be love wasn’t really love at all, was just infatuation in disguise. It hurt when that happened, and it messed you up for a while, but sooner or later you got back on your feet and faced the world and saw that love was hard to find and sometimes it took some looking. Love wasn’t going to just walk up and slap you in the face. It wasn’t going to tackle you around the knees out on the sidewalk. Love wasn’t going to leap out of a second story window on top of you.
I rode along there, slightly bumping, the needle wobbling between 7 and 10 mph. The tires went whop whop whop, and the rubber squirmed under the iron rims, and it made the car rock gently. I knew I was going to make it. I knew all this was just a temporary setback.
Army Archard kept playing those great hits from 1967. I kept drinking that beer. There was plenty more in the cooler. I had plenty of cigarettes. I saw a figure walking along the road, growing larger as I got closer, and I beat time with my hand on the steering wheel and slapped the floormat with my tennis shoe. I knew she’d feel funny when I bumped by in her car. It hit me too that I’d go home and sleep alone, that I wouldn’t have her arms around me to hold me in the night, not have her arms any more forever.
Her arms, any more, forever.
I slammed on the brakes right beside her. She stopped walking and turned and looked at me. We looked at each other for about a minute. There were a lot of things I could have told her, a lot of promises I could have made and broken later, just anything to get her back in the car. But all I said was, “You want a ride?”
She didn’t say anything when she got in. She shut the door and knelt on the seat across from me, with her fine thick legs folded up under her, deeply tanned, muscled as hell, a bodybuilder with fourteen trophies. I was skinny, coughed in the mornings, had a lot of gas most days. Her eyes were close to me, staring into mine, deep blue and beautiful. She came to me. She came to me and she wrapped her arms around me and squeezed me (she c
ould bench two hundred) tight. She mashed her lips down over mine and crushed my mouth tight against hers and pushed me back against the door and I could hear her breathing hard through her nose. She was sucking all the air she could and kissing me as hard as she could. My side of the car was low and she was on top of me, trying to climb up into my lap, pawing at me and hugging me alternately, pushing me hard against the door. The door opened and I fell backwards out into the road and Sheena Baby crawled down from the car on top of me except for my feet, which were still in the car, and she laid down on top of me, kissing me, pushing the back of my head down hard on the asphalt, mashing my ears between her two hands, panting, forgiving all, covering me completely with love, blocking out the sun with it, there beside a flat tire and the rusty underside of the car on the open road where anybody driving by wanting a testament to love could ride by and see it, naked, exposed for the whole world to view.
That was when the cops pulled up, two of them, with hard faces and shiny sunglasses, and I saw with a sick feeling in my heart that our happy ending was about to take a turn for the worse.
The Apprentice
This can’t be living. I drink too much Old Milwaukee and wake up in the morning and it tastes like old bread crusts in my mouth. All my underwear’s dirty, I can’t find my insurance policy.
Here I was thinking we had a good normal marriage. She dirtied up my car and changed the TV channels for me, and I’d bring her Butter Pecan Crunch home from Kroger’s. I’d tell her to just leave the dishes until tomorrow, things like that. I didn’t even say anything when her dog pissed in my chair. For better and for worse and all that. I even nursed her in sickness once.
Judy wanted to be a writer. Writewritewritewritewrite. That’s all she studied. She was always writing something, and always wanting me to read it. Hell, I’d read it. Some of it. I’d tell her it was pretty good if it was. Only most of the time it wasn’t. I’d try to be honest. She wrote this story one time about a man whose wife was always speeding and getting tickets. This woman would get three or four tickets a week. She’d come home and tell her husband about the tickets, and he’d raise hell with her. This went on for a while. The tickets were piling up. They owed something like sixteen hundred dollars to City Hall. So finally the guy decided he’d do something about it. He killed his wife. Blew her head off with a shotgun, and then confessed to the whole thing. When the cops found him he was wiping up her blood with the old traffic tickets. Terrific story, right? I told her I didn’t think much of it, and she got pissed off. That was the thing of it. If I told her I liked one of her stories, she’d pin me down on the couch with the story in her hand and try to get me to point out every paragraph, every sentence, hell, every word I liked. And if I didn’t like it, she’d sulk around the house for three or four days. There just wasn’t any pleasing her.