What Dies in Summer

  Today we were on our way to Beauchamp’s Liquors over on Lancaster to throw the football around and maybe practice some pass routes, and we were making our next-to-last stop behind the old Keogh place back under the big oaks and pecans across from Herndon Park. L.A. had gotten down on her hands and knees and was peering into the crawl space under the house.

  “Here, Fangbaby,” she said, clicking her tongue softly. You could’ve fried meat on the street itself, but with the light breeze it was almost cool here in the deep shade at the back corner of the house. Across the street I heard the bobwhite chirp of the seesaw in the park, and for a second I caught the old-shoe smell of the crawl space. I held my football under one arm and watched L.A.

  “I hear something,” she whispered, reaching into the pocket of her blue jeans, where I knew she had a fried chicken gizzard wrapped in foil.

  All I could hear besides the seesaw was the birdy-birdy-birdy call of a cardinal somewhere in the bushes behind us.

  “Most likely a rat,” I said.

  But then Fangbaby materialized out of the darkness and edged forward: pink nose, long twitchy whiskers, bright green eyes watching L.A.’s hands carefully. There was no way you could mistake her for any other cat. She had a white head and neck, orange stripes the rest of the way back and only three legs, like somebody had thrown her together at the last minute out of spare parts. She was what Gram called feral, meaning everything scared her. One day she’d gotten half eaten by a couple of bird dogs from over on Alabama Street before I could kick them off her, and now she couldn’t hunt to feed herself.

  Trying to watch L.A. and the gizzard at the same time, she pickily sniffed it over the way cats do, like she hadn’t completely made up her mind about it yet, then took it carefully in her teeth and went front-hopping back under Mr. Keogh’s house, where she turned around and watched as we eased away.

  “Bet she lets me touch her pretty soon,” L.A. said as we pushed back through our break in the hedge to the sidewalk. This part of Elmore was paved with concrete that had seen better days, the cracks mended with thick worms of dirty tar that divided its surface into a mystery map of some hot, unknown world. I glanced up at the high cirrus clouds streaking the sky and saw a silvery commuter plane slanting down toward Love Field across the Trinity. I wondered who was on it, where they’d been and what it would feel like to fly away.

  “Probably bite the shit out of you,” I said, tossing the football up with one hand and catching it in the other, not really believing my own words. Wild cats are a tough sell, true, but L.A.’s magic with animals wasn’t something you wanted to bet against.

  “We’ll see,” she said. She unwrapped a sucker, popped it into her mouth, then balled up the wrapper and threw it at me. We angled across the concrete to Beauchamp’s, a one-story yellow crackerbox with a wide empty lot beside it that we used for a practice field.

  An old green Fairlane two-door with the windows cranked all the way down sat tucked into the shade under the big-leafed catalpa at the back corner of the store. From the rearview mirror a little black shrunken head with stringy hair and stitched lips dangled like a piece of rotten fruit.

  This meant our friend Froggy, the lady who owned the store, was here.

  Inside, it was cool and dark, with a smoky spilled-whiskey smell and neon beer signs in various colors shining down like alien moons. Froggy was perched on her stool by the register, where she sat all day smoking Chesterfields and watching the customers with those spooky pooched-out eyes of hers.

  “Hi, Froggy,” said L.A.

  “Junebug!” croaked Froggy. “Jasper! Come on in here and get you a couple RCs. There’s plenty in the cooler.” Probably not realizing we’d gladly stay anyway, she usually bribed us with stuff like this or maybe pickled eggs or chunks of fried boudain to hang around and listen to her yarns about three-day parties and gunshots in the dark and famous uncontrollable people she’d known, like Meyer Lansky and Ava Gardner and Ernest Hemingway. She seemed to use as many different words as Gram did but hers were quicker and edgier, going off like strings of firecrackers in her stories.

  L.A. went into the cooler, came back with two cans of RC and handed me one. When it was later in the day we could sometimes get a beer out of Froggy if she was in a good mood and had a broken six-pack in the cooler, but I figured this time the sun was still too high for that. For some reason Gram wasn’t happy about us coming down here, but we liked the place and naturally we liked Froggy because she took us seriously and seemed to get a kick out of talking to us. We brought the returnable bottles we found to her for the refunds because we enjoyed the way she always messed up her count and argued with us that we had a dollar’s worth more than we really did. She also pretended not to notice the occasional Chesterfield we filched from her pack.

  “What are you two shady characters up to today?” she said. Her hair was like orange steel wool and she wore heavy flashing rings on her little crooked fingers. Her nails were long and lacquered blood-red.

  “Pass routes,” I said, sipping cola. I noticed a man working his way up the middle aisle behind us. He wore a Celtics muscle shirt and was kind of hollow-bellied, with big knuckly white hands that had freckles on their backs. He was looking at all the different kinds of liquor bottles, like he couldn’t make up his mind whether he was a whiskey drinker or a gin man. Like he thought it didn’t show when you’re looking for a chance to steal something. I figured him for a bum, or maybe a transient, like Gram would probably say—anyway a white man without a job—but to me he didn’t really seem very old for a bum in his sneakers and baseball cap turned backward. There was a big gap where his two upper front teeth should have been, and even though he had a mustache and a pointy Adam’s apple and needed a shave, something about him reminded me of the kid on the cover of Mad magazine.

  Froggy blasted off into a story about some hairy-eared husband she used to have.

  L.A. said, “I didn’t know you were married, Froggy.”

  “Why, hell, Junebug, one time or another I married about every knuckle-draggin’ potlicker and swingin’ dick in Texas,” she said. “Sucked ’em all dry as gourds too!” She cackled herself off into a long coughing fit.

  When she was recovered enough she took another drag on her cigarette, then suddenly her look went hard as she watched the man coming up behind us. I turned around in time to see him raise both hands in surrender and disappear toward the back of the store. L.A. saw this too, and I could tell she was having one of her mysterious thoughts as she watched him go, but of course there was no telling what it was. Not then, anyway.

  What I did know was that something significant, something I myself couldn’t see, had just happened, and that we were a long way from being through with this guy.

  4 | Catches

  AFTER WE FINISHED the RCs and heard about how Froggy had caught one of her husbands, the guy with the hairy ears that she told the most stories about, in bed with her manicurist and shot off one of his thumbs with her derringer—“Ain’t what I meant to shoot off!”—we walked back out into the blazing sunlight.

  When our eyes readjusted, we set up at the back of the lot with me at quarterback and L.A. at flanker, going out on my count for the timing pattern and playing it like she played everything, like her life plus the fate of the galaxy depended on it. She had just reached back on the run for a bad throw when, sure enough, the guy we’d seen inside came around the corner from the front of the store, stopped and smiled when he saw us. He stood there in the sun for a while, not even seeming to feel it, just smoking and watching us like somebody who didn’t have anyplace in particular he needed to be.

  And naturally with an audience on hand L.A. and I started hot-dogging a little, heat or no heat. It was one of those times when things come together for you. I was getting a lot on the ball and L.A., with the sucker in her mouth, was pulling the ratty old Wilson in from every kind of impossible angle. When I led her too much on one route she dove and got the pass anyway, doing a tuck-and-roll a
s she hit the ground and coming up with the ball. The guy put his Camel between his lips and slowly applauded as L.A. raised her arms to the imaginary fans and bounced around in her victory dance. A trickle of red had started from the road rash on her elbow, but I knew she’d bleed out altogether before she’d show her pain to anybody, much less this character.

  “Y’all pretty damn slick,” he said. “Reckon you could hit me with one a them bullets?”

  I looked at him for a second, then said, “Sure, come on. You can run a post.”

  “Post.” He nodded, moving the pack of cigarettes from the waist of his jeans to his sock. “You got it, podner.” He leaned out over the line of scrimmage, dangling his arm down and shaking his fingers to loosen them up, exactly like a real wide-out.

  “On two,” I said. Looking over the defensive set, I yelled, “Hut! Two!” and slapped the ball. The guy dug out, juked left once and then cut in the afterburners, showing hellacious speed for an adult. He looked back after a dozen strides with the cigarette still in his mouth, and when I let the ball go he watched it spiral up, made a little adjustment to his route, got under it and cradled it in thirty-five yards downfield.

  “Yeehawww!” he crowed, strutting like a rooster as he came back to the huddle.

  “Where’d you learn to play?” I asked.

  “Cornhole U.,” he said, leaning aside to spit. “Down Huntsville.”

  We ran a few more patterns and the guy only dropped one ball.

  Finally he said, “You troops wanta go out for a couple? See if I still got a wing here?”

  “Sure, okay,” I said. L.A. looked down for a second and then nodded, dusting off her Levi’s.

  “Okay, y’all, this here’s Niggers-Go-Long. Wide right,” he said with a strict look at each of us. “We are fixin’ to go downtown.”

  We positioned ourselves to his right, and when he called, “Set!” then, “Hut! Hut!” and slapped the ball, we hauled ass. I did a little juke of my own to the outside for show, giving L.A. just enough of a jump to beat me downfield. The guy put everything he had into it, grunting as he let the ball go. Running all-out, L.A. got her fingertips on it and pulled it down just before she ran out of field at the edge of the sidewalk.

  “Hey-hey, Hall of Fame, man!” the guy yelled.

  L.A. wrinkled her nose as she walked back with the ball. We lined up again, and I caught the next couple of passes. We kept running routes until all of us were sweaty and winded.

  “HoofuckinHAHH!” the guy said. “Jeez, that was great!” He sidled over to me, dropped his cigarette and ground it out in the gravel with the toe of his sneaker. He flicked a couple of sweat drops from his eyebrow with his thumb. “So hey, what’s your name, podner?”

  “James.”

  “More like Biscuit,” said L.A. from the milk crate against the wall where she had sat to retie her sneaker. My father had called me that years before because he said when I was little I’d do anything for a biscuit, and ever since then L.A. had taken an evil pleasure in doing the same, to the point that I didn’t waste energy anymore resisting it. Concentrating on her shoelace, she didn’t look up.

  “Well, fuckin-A, Colonel Dogbiscuit, I presume.” A quick left-handed salute. “Permission to address the colonel as Biscuit, sir?”

  “Sure.”

  “My name’s Earl. Hot Earl, the Peckerwood Pearl.”

  We shook hands. L.A. showed no interest.

  “Where you from, Biscuitman?”

  “Jacksboro.”

  “Jacksboro. Good. Good town to be from.” He licked along the bottom of his mustache, still a little out of breath and looking thoughtful. “How about Miss Sweetmeat there, she with you?”

  “Yes sir,” I said, realizing I wasn’t really answering the question the way he meant it. From the corner of my eye I saw L.A. picking at the seam of the football, frowning.

  Earl twisted back over his shoulder toward L.A. “What’s your name, little sister?”

  “Lee Ann,” she said. “We’re cousins. I’m not anybody’s sister.” She tossed her stubborn ponytail and unwrapped another sucker, a green one this time.

  “Well, okay, then,” said Earl, winking his red-rimmed eye at me. “So, you got family in Jacksboro, Biscuit?”

  “Not anymore. My dad’s dead.”

  For some reason this news seemed to lift Earl’s spirits a little. By now L.A. was moving away along the store wall, tossing the ball up against the yellow brick and catching the carom, paying no attention to us.

  “And what about her?” Earl said. “Where’s she from?”

  “She’s from here,” I said. “Is your name really Hot Earl?”

  Earl was pulling at his lower lip. His mind was somewhere else. “Say what?” he said. “Oh. Yeah, Daddy used to call me that. When I was a kid.” He smirked. “Called me other things when I got older.” Taking another look at L.A.

  “You know, that ain’t bad stuff there at all, Biscuit.” He took me farther aside, threw his arm over my shoulder and gave me a squeeze. “You noticed the way she wears them little jeans like that?” he said softly. “I know you did.”

  “No sir,” I said, wondering if he saw the lie in my face.

  “How-dee-doo,” said Earl. His lunch-meat-and-cigarette breath was getting a little hot. I tried to pull back, but he just held on to me and stayed right there in my face.

  “Won’t be long at all, young man like yourself be gettin’ some ideas,” he said, jerking his head toward L.A., who had stopped tossing the ball and was checking out her other sneaker. “Just lookie there.”

  Earl obviously didn’t know much about my head if he thought we were going to have to wait for me to get ideas. I looked at L.A. bending over in her white Fair Park T-shirt with the red Ferris wheel on the front.

  “You can see them little titties real good, can’t you?”

  I flinched slightly because that’s exactly where I’d been looking.

  Earl got more conspiratorial. “Listen, you guys like movies?” Talking now for L.A. to hear too.

  “I guess,” I said.

  “Some movies maybe,” said L.A., drifting our way.

  “Fact is, I know how to make movies myself. Done made a bunch of ’em.”

  I thought about this for a few seconds, beginning to show a little interest.

  “Tell you what,” said Earl. “I could put you two monkeys in a movie.” He pointed at us with two fingers.

  L.A. was listening to Earl now, seeming to shake off some of her attitude.

  “No way,” I said.

  “Damn straight,” said Earl.

  It occurred to me I had no idea how movies actually got made. But surely it was more than just a one-man operation.

  “A movie movie, or just some home movie or something?” L.A. said, continuing to sidle in closer. She took the sucker out of her mouth, inspected it for a second, then put it back. Making up her mind.

  “Nothin’ but the real deal,” said Earl. “True Hollywood all the way. Guys and gals doin’ ever-what comes natural.”

  L.A. kind of made a face, but Earl wasn’t looking at her. He was looking right into my eyes.

  “Well, so where do you make the movies?” I said.

  “My place,” Earl said, beginning to look excited. “Wanta check it out?”

  Glancing at L.A., I saw a little glint come and go in her eye. She was always surprising me one way or another, but not today.

  I said, “Where’s your place?”

  “Right down the alley here,” he said. “Over the garage.”

  L.A. shrugged and gave me the let’s do it look.

  “Sure,” I said. “Let’s go.”

  5 | Showtime

  EARL BOWED and swept his arm through the air to usher us into the alley. He whistled quietly through his teeth and cracked his knuckles as we walked along. The tune sounded like maybe something of Fats Domino’s. He dug his elbow into my ribs to demonstrate that we were into something good together.

  We came to a le
aning double garage with an unpainted apartment above it. The garage was empty and smelled of dust and old lawn mowers. Earl started us up the chancy-looking stairs on the outside wall, L.A. first, then me, then himself. He sang a line about somebody’s baby being called Shoo-Ra under his breath as we climbed, and halfway up the stairs he leaned forward and bumped his forehead lightly against the small of my back.

  On the landing at the top of the stairs L.A. looked down over the railing and then back to Earl, and when he nodded she opened the unlocked door. We all went in. There wasn’t much light but I could see a small square wooden table, a chair and a bed with no sheets, just an army-green blanket and a bare pillow. The little kitchen had a gas stove and a short refrigerator on the counter, and between the bed and the table was a window with a roll-up shade pulled most of the way down. A million little stars of light sparked through the brown shade from the sun behind it. All over the floor, on the table and bed, everywhere, there were dozens of pint and half-pint empties, all rum bottles with the caps missing.

  Mom’s boyfriend Jack was a whiskey guy when he wasn’t drinking beer. The bottles he brought it home in were generally bigger, and he got rid of them when they were empty. I watched L.A. pick up one of Earl’s flasks and sniff it.

  “What does this stuff taste like?” she said.

  “Never mind that,” said Earl. “Here, let me make you a place to sit.” He pushed the blanket and a couple of empty bottles back from the edge of the bed. He ignored L.A., but she came over and sat beside me anyway, rolling the football back and forth along her thigh. She looked around at the room.