Facing the Music

  “Well,” I said, “she’s got some grandchildren. She’s got them.”

  “Huh! I got a girl eighteen, was never in a bit a trouble her whole life. Just up and run off last year with a goddamn sand nigger. Now what about that?”

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “I need another beer!” she said, and she popped her can down on the bar pretty hard. Everybody turned and looked at us. I nodded to Harry and he brought a cold one over. But he looked a little pissed.

  “Let me tell you somethin,” she said. “People don’t give a shit if you ain’t got a place to sleep ner nothin to eat. They don’t care. That son of a bitch,” she said. “He won’t be there when we git there. If we ever git there.” And she slammed her face down on the bar, and started crying, loud, holding onto both beers.

  Everybody stopped what they were doing. The people shooting pool stopped. The guys on the shuffleboard machine just stopped and turned around.

  “Get her out of here,” Harry said. “Frank, you brought her in here, you get her out.”

  I got down off my stool and went around to the other side of her, and I took her arm.

  “Come on,” I said. “Let’s go back outside.”

  I tugged on her arm. She raised her head and looked straight at Harry.

  “Fuck you,” she said. “You don’t know nothin about me. You ain’t fit to judge.”

  “Out,” he said, and he pointed toward the door. “Frank,” he said.

  “Come on,” I told her. “Let’s go.”

  It hadn’t cooled off any, but the sun was a little lower in the sky. Three of the kids were asleep in the backseat, their hair plastered to their heads with sweat. The old woman was sitting in the car with her feet in the parking lot, spitting brown juice out the open door. She didn’t even turn her head when we walked back to the car. The woman had the rest of the beer in one hand, the pack of Marlboro Lights in the other. She leaned against the fender when we stopped.

  “You think your car will make it?” I said. I was looking at the tires and thinking of the miles they had to go. She shook her head slowly and stared at me.

  “I done changed my mind,” she said. “I’m gonna stay here with you. I love you.”

  Her eyes were all teary and bitter, drunk-looking already, and I knew that she had been stomped on all her life, and had probably been forced to do no telling what. And I just shook my head.

  “You can’t do that,” I said.

  She looked at the motel across the street.

  “Let’s go over there and git us a room,” she said. “I want to.”

  The kid who had come into the bar walked up out of the hot weeds and stood there looking at us for a minute. Then he got in the car. His grandmother had to pull up the front seat to let him in. She turned around and shut the door.

  “I may just go to Texas,” the woman said. “I got a sister lives out there. I may just drop these kids off with her for a while and go on out to California. To Los Vegas.”

  I started to tell her that Las Vegas was not in California, but it didn’t matter. She turned the beer up and took a long drink of it, and I could see the muscles and cords in her throat pumping and working. She killed it. She dropped the can at her feet, and it hit with a tiny tinny sound and rolled under the car. She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand, tugging hard at her lips, and then she wiped her eyes.

  “Don’t nobody know what I been through,” she said. She was looking at the ground. “Havin to live on food stamps and feed four younguns.” She shook her head. “You cain’t do it,” she said. “You cain’t hardly blame nobody for wantin to run off from it. If they was any way I could run off myself I would.”

  “That’s bad,” I said.

  “That’s terrible,” I said.

  She looked up and her eyes were hot.

  “What do you care? All you goin to do is go right back in there and git drunk. You just like everybody else. You ain’t never had to go in a grocery store and buy stuff with food stamps and have everbody look at you. You ain’t never had to go hungry. Have you?”

  I didn’t answer.

  “Have you?”

  “No.”

  “All right, then,” she said. She jerked her head toward the building. “Go on back in there and drank ye goddamn beer. We made it this far without you.”

  She turned her face to one side. I reached back for my wallet because I couldn’t think of anything else to do. I couldn’t stand to look at them anymore.

  I pulled out thirty dollars and gave it to her. I knew that their troubles were more than she’d outlined, that they had awful things wrong with their lives that thirty dollars would never cure. But I don’t know. You know how I felt? I felt like I feel when I see those commercials on TV, of all those people, women and kids, starving to death in Ethiopia and places, and I don’t send money. I know that Jesus wants you to help feed the poor.

  She looked at what was in her hand, and counted it, jerking the bills from one hand to the other, two tens and two fives. She folded it up and put it in her pocket, and leaned down and spoke to the old woman.

  “Come on, Mama,” she said. The old woman got out of the car in her housecoat and I saw then that they were both wearing exactly the same kind of house shoes. She shuffled around to the front of the car, and her daughter took her arm.

  They went slowly across the parking lot, the old woman limping a little in the heat, and I watched them until they went up the steps that led to the lounge and disappeared inside. The kid leaned out the window and shook his head sadly. I pulled out a cigarette and he looked up at me.

  “Boy you a dumb sumbitch,” he said.

  And in a way I had to agree with him.

  NIGHT LIFE

  I decided a long time ago that it isn’t easy meeting them, not for me. Some guys can just walk up to a woman and start talking to her, start saying anything. I can’t. I have to wait and work up my nerve, have a few beers. I have to sit at a table for a while, or the bar, and look them over and find the one who looks like she won’t turn a man down. This sometimes means picking one who is sitting by herself, who is maybe a little older than most, maybe even one who doesn’t look very good. Sometimes I wait until she dances with another man, then go over and make my move after she sits back down. Sometimes, if I see one whose looks I like, I send a drink over to her table. But it isn’t easy meeting them.

  I’m in a bar just outside the city limits Friday night when three women come in and take a table next to the dance floor, the last table not taken. I order another beer and look out over the crowd, the band playing, the couples who have found each other drifting over the floor like smoke. Some of the tables have three and four women, some have couples, some have men, and one table has a girl by herself. I check her out.

  She has on a black dress and white stockings, is dressed, I think, a little like a witch. She has a bottle in a brown paper sack sitting on the table and she holds onto her solitary drink with both hands. She seems to have eyes for only this. I sip on my beer for a while and eye the creeping clock above the taps and finally I go over. She looks up and sees me coming her way and looks away.

  “Hi,” I say, when I stop beside her chair. I wish the band wouldn’t play rock and roll; you can’t even talk over the noise.

  She smiles but she doesn’t say anything. I’m going to be shot down.

  I lean over and shout above the music: “How you doing?” She says something that I think is “okay” and I feel completely stupid, leaning over her like this. She looks like she just wants me to go away quickly and leave her alone. I won’t score. She won’t dance. Friday night is flying away.

  “Want to dance?” I shout in her ear. The black horn player is crouched on the stage in front of the mike, the spotlight on him, his cheeks ballooned out as he blows and sweats, his jeweled fingers flying over the valves. She shakes her head and gives me a sad look. Smoke two feet thick hangs from the ceiling.

  “Hell, come on,” I say, putting
on my friendliest smile, feeling my confidence—what little I had to start with—ebbing away. They’re all like this. They won’t talk to you, they won’t dance. Why do they come out to a place like this if they don’t want to meet men? “I’m not going to bite you,” I say.

  She takes one hand off her drink and leans slightly toward me. “Thanks anyway,” she says. The flesh around her eyes looks dark, it’s bruised, she’s hurt. Maybe somebody slapped her. Maybe she said the wrong thing to the wrong man and he popped her. I know it can happen between a man and a woman. It can happen in a second.

  “You live around here?” I say. I don’t know what to say; I’m just saying anything to try and keep her talking.

  She shakes her head, closes her eyes briefly. Patience. She’s weary of this, maybe, these strange men asking, always asking, never stopping. “No. I live at Hattiesburg. I’m just up here for the weekend.”

  “You waiting on somebody?”

  She draws back and blinks. Now she’ll tell me it’s none of my business. “Not really,” she says. “I’m just waiting.”

  “Well come on and dance, then,” I say.

  She opens a small brown purse that looks like a dead mole and pulls out a white cigarette. I fish up my lighter and give her some fire. She inhales and coughs, her tiny fist balled at her mouth. Maybe she’s had a bigger fist at her mouth. Maybe she likes it.

  “Thanks,” she says.

  “You going to school at Hattiesburg?” I say.

  She nods, looks around. “Yeah.”

  “Just up here living it up on the weekend.”

  “Not really. I just came up to Jackson to sort of be by myself for a while.”

  Something’s bothering her, I can tell. She only wants to be left alone. She doesn’t want to dance. She has her own bottle and her own table, her own troubles of which I know nothing. So I draw back a chair and put one foot up in it, rest my elbow on my knee. “How come?” I say.

  She cups her face in her other hand and dabs at the ashtray with the cigarette.

  “Oh. You know. Just getting away from everything.”

  “Yeah,” I say. I know the feeling. I begin wishing I’d never walked over here. “What’s your name?”

  “Lorraine,” this Lorraine says. She doesn’t ask me my name.

  “You look sad, Lorraine. What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing,” she says, apparently only mildly pissed. “Nothing’s wrong. I just want to be by myself for a while. I’ve just got some things I have to deal with.”

  I know. I know all people have things they must deal with. I have things I must deal with. I must deal with lonesome Friday nights, and these little semihostile confrontations sometimes occur as a result. But I don’t know when to stop.

  “Don’t you like to dance?” I say. I feel like a fool. Am a fool.

  “Sure. Sure I like to dance. I just don’t feel like it tonight.”

  “Well,” I say. I hate to get shot down, blown out of the saddle. But most of the time. I get shot down. I hate to have to turn away and go back to the bar without even a dance. I hate for them to beat me like this. But she probably does have some problem. There’s probably a man involved somewhere, somehow. Possibly even a woman.

  “Don’t take it personally,” she says. “Maybe some other night.”

  “Sure,” I say, and I turn away. I walk a few steps and stop. I look back at her. She’s taking the top off the bottle. I don’t know what’s the matter with me. I go back to her table.

  “You sure you don’t want to dance?” I say.

  “No,” she says, not even looking up. “Not now. Please leave me alone.”

  She’s just lucky is all. She doesn’t know just how damn lucky she is. The last of the Budweiser is almost warm, so I raise it aloft and signal to the sullen barmaid. I know her. She knows me. Her wet swollen hands reach into a dark cooler. I give her money but she doesn’t speak. She doesn’t want to look at me. Her heavy breasts sway as she rubs the bar hard, her eyes down. I watch them move. I watch her move away. She finds something to do at the other end of the bar. I take a drink.

  A large number of people are wanting in the bathroom. I wait for three or four minutes before I can get inside the door, and then it’s old piss, wet linoleum, knifecarvings above stained urinals that shredded butts have clogged. Water is weeping out from the partitioned commode stall where there is never any toilet paper. Others in line behind me are now waiting their turn. Their faces are scarred and murderous; it won’t do to bump into them. To these no apology is acceptable. They’ll cut their knuckles again and again on my broken teeth after I’m on the floor.

  I go back out, into the noise and the smoke and the dark. A woman touches my wrist when I go by her table, one of the three I saw earlier.

  “Hey,” she says. “How come you ain’t asked me to dance yet?”

  And there she is. Dark hair. Pale face. Sweater.

  “I was fixing to,” I say. “You want to wait till the band starts back up?”

  “Set down,” she says. She pulls out a chair and I sit.

  “Where’s your friends?” I say. I hope they won’t come back. I don’t know why she’s picked me, but I’m glad somebody has. Even if the night turns out wasted there is hope at this moment.

  “They over yonder,” she points. “I’ve seen you before.”

  “In here?” I need my beer. “Let me go over here and get my beer and I’ll be right back.” She nods and smiles and I can’t tell much about her except she’s got knockers. I get my beer and come back.

  “I saw you in here other night,” she says. “Last weekend.”

  That’s not right; I worked all weekend last weekend, trying to make more money. But I say, “Yeah. I come in here about every weekend.”

  Dark hair. Pale face. Sweater. Knockers. Jeans. I look down. Tennis shoes. With black socks.

  “I used to come in here with my husband all the time,” she says. “You want a drink?”

  I lift my beer. We sit for a while without saying anything. The band is coming back, moving around on the stage and talking behind the dead mikes.

  “That’s a pretty good band,” I say.

  “Yeah. If you like nigger music. I wish they’d get a good country band. You like country music?”

  “Yeah,” I say. “Sure.” But I wish I knew George Thoro-good personally.

  “Who you like?”

  I have to think. “Aw. I like old Ricky Skaggs pretty good. Vern Gosden, I like him a lot. John Anderson.”

  “I used to be a singer,” she says.

  “Oh really?” I’m surprised. “Where?”

  She looks around. She shrugs. I watch her breasts rise and fall. “Just around.”

  “I mean, professionally?” I sip my beer.

  “Well. I sung at the Tupelo Mid-South Fair and Dairy Show in nineteen seventy-six. Had a three-piece band. That’s where I met my husband.”

  “You’re divorced,” I say.

  “Huh. Wish I was.”

  Here’s the one thing I don’t need: to get hooked up with somebody who has more problems than I do. I’m already on probation. I don’t need to get hooked up with somebody who will sit here all night telling me how her husband fucked her over. But she has some really nice, truly wonderful breasts. It won’t hurt to sit here and talk to her for a while. Maybe she’s as lonely as I am.

  “What? Are you separated?” I say.

  “Yeah.”

  “How long?”

  “About two weeks. Listen. I don’t give a shit what he does. He’s a sorry son of a bitch. I don’t care if I don’t never see him again.”

  “You’re just out to have a good time.”

  “Damn right.”

  I tell her I think we can have one.

  By ten we’re out on the parking lot in her new Lincoln (surprise) and she’s braced up against the driver’s door. I have her sweater and bra all pushed up above her breasts and I’m moaning and kissing and trying to get her pants down. We’re half hid
den in the shadow of the building, but the neon lights are shining on the hood and part of the front seat. People in certain areas of the parking lot can see what we’re doing. I don’t care; I’m hot. Her nipples have been in and out of my mouth and she’s halfway or halfheartedly trying to fight me off. She smells of talcum powder and light sweat. We’ve been kissing for ten minutes, but she doesn’t seem to be excited. I know already, deep down, that something is wrong. She keeps looking out over the parking lot.

  “Oh baby,” I moan. I kiss the side of her neck and taste makeup on my tongue, slightly bitter. Patooey. “Let’s do it,” I say.

  “Not here,” she says. She pushes out from under me and takes both hands and tugs her bra and sweater back into place. I look at her for a moment and turn away. Not here. That might mean maybe somewhere else.

  “Oh we’ll do it,” she says. Sure. “We just can’t right now.” She rubs the side of my face. “My husband might be around here.”

  “Your husband?” I say. What’s this? “I thought you said you weren’t worried about him.” It’s always like this. They all have some problem they have to lay on you before they’ll give it to you, and even then sometimes they won’t give it to you. “What? You think he might come around here?”

  She brushes the hair up away from her eyes and pulls at her pants. She pulls down one of the visor mirrors and checks her face.

  “He might. I told you we used to come over here.”

  “You said you didn’t give a shit what he did.”

  “I don’t.”

  “Then what are you worried about?”

  “I’m not worried. I just don’t want him to catch me doing anything.”

  “Aw,” I say. “Okay.” I understand now. She’s another one of the crazy ones. I don’t know why I’m the one who always finds them, goes straight to them like a pointer after birds. They’re not worth the trouble. They drive me nuts with their kids and their divorces and their diet pills and their friends in trouble and their ex-husbands for whom they still carry the torch. They promise and promise and promise. I know she’s crazy now, I know the thing to do now is just forget about it, go back inside, leave her out here. “Well, I’m going back in here and get me a beer,” I say. “I don’t want to get mixed up with you and your husband. I’ll see you later.”