Stories (2011)

  "Godamighty," Vinnie said.

  "No sir," Leonard said. "We chained him on there after he was dead."

  "I believe that," Vinnie said. "That's some rich shit. You guys murdered this dog. Godamighty."

  "Just thinking about him trying to keep up and you fucks driving faster and faster makes me mad as a wasp," Pork said.

  "No," Farto said. "It wasn't like that. He was dead and we were drunk and we didn't have anything to do, so we --"

  "Shut the fuck up," Pork said, sticking a finger hard against Farto's forehead. "You just shut the fuck up. We can see what the fuck you fucks did. You drug this here dog around until all his goddamn hide came off . . . what kind of mothers you boys got anyhow that they didn't tell you better about animals?"

  "Godamighty," Vinnie said.

  Everyone grew silent, stood looking at the dog. Finally Farto said, "You want us to go back to getting some stuff to hold the nigger down?"

  Pork looked at Farto as if he had just grown up whole from the ground. "You fucks are worse than niggers, doing a dog like that. Get on back over to the car."

  Leonard and Farto went over to the Impala and stood looking down at Scott's body in much the same way they had stared at the dog. There, in the dim moonlight shadowed by trees, the paper wrapped around Scott's head made him look like a giant papier-mâché doll. Pork came up and kicked Scott in the face with a swift motion that sent newspaper flying and sent a thonking sound across the water that made frogs jump.

  "Forget the nigger," Pork said. "Give me your car keys, ball sweat." Leonard took out his keys and gave them to Pork, and Pork went around to the trunk and opened it. "Drag the nigger over here."

  Leonard took one of Scott's arms and Farto took the other and they pulled him over to the back of the car.

  "Put him in the trunk," Pork said.

  "What for?" Leonard asked.

  "Cause I fucking said so," Pork said.

  Leonard and Farto heaved Scott into the trunk. He looked pathetic lying there next to the spare tire, his face partially covered with newspaper. Leonard thought, if only the nigger had stolen a car with a spare he might not be here tonight. He could have gotten the flat changed and driven on before the White Tree boys ever came along.

  "All right, you get in there with him," Pork said, gesturing to Farto.

  "Me?" Farto said.

  "Nah, not fucking you, the fucking elephant on your fucking shoulder. Yeah, you, get in the trunk. I ain't got all night."

  "Jesus, we didn't do anything to that dog, mister. We told you that. I swear. Me and Leonard hooked him up after he was dead . . . it was Leonard's idea."

  Pork didn't say a word. He just stood there with one hand on the trunk lid looking at Farto. Farto looked at Pork, then the trunk, then back to Pork. Lastly he looked at Leonard, then climbed into the trunk, his back to Scott.

  "Like spoons," Pork said, and closed the lid. "Now you, whatsit, Leonard? You come over here." But Pork didn't wait for Leonard to move. He scooped the back of Leonard's neck with a chubby hand and pushed him over to where Rex lay at the end of the chain with Vinnie still looking down at him.

  "What you think, Vinnie?" Pork asked. "You got what I got in mind?"

  Vinnie nodded. He bent down and took the collar off the dog. He fastened it on Leonard. Leonard could smell the odor of the dead dog in his nostrils. He bent his head and puked.

  "There goes my shoeshine," Vinnie said, and he hit Leonard a short one in the stomach. Leonard went to his knees and puked some more of the hot Coke and whiskey.

  "You fucks are the lowest pieces of shit on this earth, doing a dog like that," Vinnie said. "A nigger ain't no lower."

  Vinnie got some strong fishing line out of the back of the truck and they tied Leonard's hands behind his back. Leonard began to cry.

  "Oh shut up," Pork said. "It ain't that bad. Ain't nothing that bad."

  But Leonard couldn't shut up. He was caterwauling now and it was echoing through the trees. He closed his eyes and tried to pretend he had gone to the show with the nigger starring in it and had fallen asleep in his car and was having a bad dream, but he couldn't imagine that. He thought about Harry the janitor's flying saucers with the peppermint rays, and he knew if there were any saucers shooting rays down, they weren't boredom rays after all. He wasn't a bit bored.

  Pork pulled off Leonard's shoes and pushed him back flat on the ground and pulled off the socks and stuck them in Leonard's mouth so tight he couldn't spit them out. It wasn't that Pork thought anyone was going to hear Leonard, he just didn't like the noise. It hurt his ears.

  Leonard lay on the ground in the vomit next to the dog and cried silently. Pork and Vinnie went over to the Impala and opened the doors and stood so they could get a grip on the car to push. Vinnie reached in and moved the gear from park to neutral and he and Pork began to shove the car forward. It moved slowly at first, but as it made the slight incline that led down to the old bridge, it picked up speed. From inside the trunk, Farto hammered lightly at the lid as if he didn't really mean it. The chain took up slack and Leonard felt it jerk and pop his neck. He began to slide along the ground like a snake.

  Vinnie and Pork jumped out of the way and watched the car make the bridge and go over the edge and disappear into the water with amazing quietness. Leonard, pulled by the weight of the car, rustled past them. When he hit the bridge, splinters tugged at his clothes so hard they ripped his pants and underwear down almost to his knees.

  The chain swung out once toward the edge of the bridge and the rotten railing, and Leonard tried to hook a leg around an upright board there, but that proved wasted. The weight of the car just pulled his knee out of joint and jerked the board out of place with a screech of nails and lumber.

  Leonard picked up speed and the chain rattled over the edge of the bridge, into the water and out of sight, pulling its connection after it like a pull toy. The last sight of Leonard was the soles of his bare feet, white as the bellies of fish.

  "It's deep there," Vinnie said. "I caught an old channel cat there once, remember? Big sucker. I bet it's over fifty feet deep down there."

  They got in the truck and Vinnie cranked it.

  "I think we did them boys a favor," Pork said. "Them running around with niggers and what they did to that dog and all. They weren't worth a thing."

  "I know it," Vinnie said. "We should have filmed this, Pork, it would have been good. Where the car and that nigger-lover went off in the water was choice."

  "Nah, there wasn't any women."

  "Point," Vinnie said, and he backed around and drove onto the trail that wound its way out of the bottoms.

  DIRT DEVILS

  The Ford came into town full of men and wrapped in a cloud of dust and through the dust the late afternoon sun looked like a cheap lamp shining through wraps of gauze. The cloud glided for a great distance, slowed when the car stopped moving forward, spun and finally faded out and down on all sides until the car could clearly be seen coated in a sheet of white powder. It took a moment to realize that beneath the grime the car was as black as tar. The wind that had been blowing stopped and shifted and the dust wound itself up into a big dust devil that twirled and gritted its way down the rutted street and tore out between two wind-squeaked abandoned buildings toward a gray tree line in the distance.

  Outside of the car there wasn’t much of the town to see, just a few ramshackle buildings wiped clean by the sandstorms that chewed wood and scraped paint and bleached the color out of clothes hung on wash lines. The dust was everywhere, coating windows and porch steps and rooftops. Sometimes, in just the right light, the dust looked like snow and one half expected polar bears and bewildered Eskimos to appear. The infernal sand seeped under cracks no matter how well blocked or rag stuffed, and it crept into closed cars and through nailed-down windows. The world belonged to sand.

  The street was slightly less sandy in spots since tire wheels and footsteps kept it worn down, but you had to stay in the ruts if you drove a car, an
d the Ford had done just that before parking in front of a little store with a single gas pump with the gas visible in a big dust-covered bulb on top.

  The car parked and a man on the passenger side got out. He had a hat in his hand and he put it on. He wore a nice blue suit and fine black shoes and he looked almost clean, the dust having only touched his outfit and hat like glitter tossed at him by The Great Depression Fairy. He leaned left and then leaned right, stretching himself. The other doors opened and three men got out. They all wore suits. One of the men wearing a brown pinstripe suit and two-tone shoes came over and put his foot on the back of the car and wiped at his shoes with a handkerchief that he refolded and put in his inside coat pocket. He said to the man in the blue suit, “You want I should get some Co-colas or somethin’, Ralph?”

  “Yeah, that’ll be all right. But don’t come back with all manner of shit like you do. We ain’t havin’ a picnic. Get some drinks, a few things to nibble on, and that’s it.”

  As the man in the pinstripe suit went into the store, an old man came out to the pump. He looked as if he had once been wadded and was now starting to slowly unfold. His hair was as white as the sand and floated when he walked. “I help you fellas?”

  “Yeah,” said Ralph. “Filler up.”

  The old man took the hose and removed the car’s gas cap and started filling the tank. He looked at the car window, and then he looked away and looked back at the store. He swallowed once, hard, like he had an apple hung in his throat.

  Ralph leaned against the car and took off his hat and ran his hand through his oiled hair and put it back on. He stared at the old man a long time. “Much hunting around here?” he asked the old man.

  “Lot of hunting, but not much catching. Depression must be gettin’ better though, only seen one man chasin’ a rabbit the other day.”

  It was a tired joke, but Ralph grinned.

  “This used to be a town,” the old man said. “Wasn’t never nothing much, but it was a town. Now most of the folks done moved off and what’s here is worn out and gritted over. Hell, you get up in the morning you find sand in the crack of your ass.”

  Ralph nodded. “Everything’s gritted over, and just about everybody too. I think I’m gonna go to California.”

  “Lots done have. But there ain’t no work out there.”

  “My kind of work, I can find something.”

  The old man hesitated, and when he asked the question, it was like the words were sneaking out of the corner of his mouth: “What do you do?”

  “I work with banks.”

  “Oh,” the old man said. “Well, banking didn’t do so good either.”

  “I work a special division.”

  “I see . . . Well, it’s gonna be another bad night with lots of wind and plenty of dust.”

  “How can you tell?”

  “’Cause it always is. And when it ain’t, I can tell before it comes about. I can sniff it. I used to farm some before the winds came, before the dust. Then I bought this and it ain’t no better than farming because people ’round here are farmers and they ain’t got no money ’cause they ain’t got no farms so I ain’t got no money. I don’t make hardly nothin’.”

  “Nothin’, huh?”

  “What you’re givin’ me for this here gas and the like, that’s all I’ve made all day.”

  “That does sound like a problem.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  “So if I was to rob you, I’d just be keepin’ my own money.”

  “You would . . . You boys staying in town long?”

  “Where’s to stay?”

  “You got that right. Thirty, forty more feet, you’re out of town. There ain’t nothing here and ain’t nobody got nothin’.”

  “That right?”

  “Nothing to be had.”

  Ralph said, “My daddy, he had a store like this in Kansas. He ain’t got nothin’ now. He got droughted out and blown out. He died last spring. You remind me somethin’ of him.”

  The other two men who had been loitering on the other side of the car came around to join Ralph and the old man, and when Ralph said what he said about his old man, one of the men, brown suited, glanced at Ralph, then glanced away.

  “Me, I’m just hanging in by the skin of my teeth, and I just got a half dozen of ’em left.” The old man smiled at Ralph so he would know it was true. “I’m just about done here.”

  “You a Bible reader?” Ralph asked the old man.

  “Everyday.”

  “I figured that much. My old man was a Bible reader. He could quote chapter and verse.”

  “I can quote some chapters and some verses.”

  “You done any preachin’?”

  “No. I don’t preach.”

  “My old man did. He ran a store and preached and had too many children. I was the last of ’em.”

  The old man looked at the tank. “You was bone dry, son, but I about got you filled now.”

  —————

  In the store the man in the brown suit with pinstripes, whose name was Emory, saw a little Negro boy sitting on a stool wearing a thick cloth cap that looked as if it had been used to catch baseballs. The boy had a little pocketknife and was whittlin’ on a stick without much energy.

  Emory looked at the boy. The boy latched his eyes on Emory.

  “What you lookin’ at, boy?”

  “Nuthin’.”

  “Nuthin’, sir.”

  “Yes, suh.”

  Emory wandered around the store and found some candies and some canned peaches. He got some Co-colas out of the ice box and set them dripping wet on the counter with the canned peaches and the candies.

  Emory turned and looked at the boy. “You help out here, nigger?”

  “Just a little.”

  “Well, why don’t you do just a little? Get over here behind the counter and get me some of them long cigars there, and a couple packs of smokes.”

  “I don’t do that kind of thing,” the boy said. “That there is Mr. Grady’s job. I just run errands and such. I ain’t supposed to go behind the counter.”

  “Yeah. I guess that make sense. And them errands. What’s a nigger get for that kind of work?”

  “A nickel sometimes.”

  “Per errand?”

  “Naw, suh. Per day.”

  “That’s a little better. There’s white men workin’ in the fields ain’t making a dollar a day.”

  “Yes, suh. They’s colored men too.”

  “Yeah. Well, how hard are they workin’?”

  “They workin’ plenty hard.”

  “Say they are,” Emory said, and took a hard look at the boy. The boy’s eyes were still locked on his and the boy had his hands on his knees. The boy’s face was kind of stiff like he was thinking hard on something but one eye sagged slightly to the left and there was a scar above and below it. He had one large foot and a very worn-looking oversized shoe about the size of a cinder block.

  “What happened to your eye?”

  “I had a saw jump back on me. I was cuttin’ some wood and it got stuck and I yanked and it come back on me. I can still see though.”

  “I can tell that. What’s wrong with your foot?”

  “It’s a club foot.”

  “What club does it belong to?”

  “What’s that?”

  “You ain’t so smart, are you?”

  “Smart enough, I reckon.”

  “So, with that foot, you don’t really run errands, you walk ’em.”

  The boy finally quit looking at Emory. “Ain’t that right,” Emory said when the boy didn’t answer.

  “I s’pose so,” the boy said. “That a gun you got under your coat?”

  “You a nosey little nigger, ain’t ya? Yeah, that’s a gun. You know what I call it?”

  The boy shook his head.

  “My nigger shooter. You know what I shoot with it?”

  The boy jumped up. It caused the stool to turn over. The boy dropped the stick and the po
cketknife and moved as fast as his foot would allow toward the door, turned and went right along the side of the store, giving Emory a glance at him through the dusty glass, and then there was just wall and the boy was gone from view.

  Emory laughed. “Bet that’s the fastest he ever run,” he said aloud. “Bet that’s some kind of club-footed nigger record.”

  —————

  The old man was topping off the pump as the boy ran by and around the edge of the building and out of sight. By the time the old man called out “Joshua,” it was too late and from the way the boy was moving, unlikely to stop anyway.

  “What the hell has got into him?” the old man said.

  “Ain’t no way to figure a colored boy,” Ralph said.

  “He’s all right,” the old man said. “He’s a good boy.”

  The other two men were standing next to the pump, and Ralph looked at them. He said, “John, why don’t you and Billy go in there and see you can help Emory?”

  “He don’t need no help,” Billy said. He was a small man in an oversized black suit and no hat and he had enough hair for himself and a small dog, all of it greasy and nested on top of his head, the sides of his skull shaved to the skin over the ears so that he gave the impression of some large leafy vegetable ready to be pulled from the ground.

  “Well,” Ralph said, “you go help him anyway.”

  The old man was hanging up the gas nozzle. He said, “That’s gonna be a dollar.”

  “Damn,” Ralph said. “You run some of that out on the ground?”

  “Things gone up,” the old man said. “In this town, we got to charge off of what the suppliers charge us. You know that, your daddy owned a store.”

  Ralph pondered that. He buttoned and unbuttoned his coat. “Yeah, I know it. Just don’t like it. Hell, I’m gonna go in the store too. A minute out of this sun ain’t gonna hurt me, that’s for sure.”

  Ralph and the old man went into the store side by side until they came to the door, and Ralph let the old man go in first.

  The old man went behind the counter and Ralph said, “You sure look a lot like my old man.”