Then she saw the two old guys looking at her. She took a drag off her smoke and thumped her ashes into an ashtray and gave them a look of cool appraisal. Then she glanced away. She could hear murmuring. The murmuring sounded to her kind of like maybe one of the old guys was asking the bartender who she was. The bartender murmured something back, sounded kind of like: “I don’t know, she just came in.”
The old guy said something else. Anjalee sipped at her beer. She wondered what Christmas was going to be like up here if she stayed. Not worth a shit probably. Now that the cops had turned her loose, she didn’t have to leave. And she didn’t know if her probation officer would let her leave the state or not. She’d still have to see him sometime, unless she just took off and didn’t look back. And would they send somebody to look for her if she did? Did the Memphis Police Department really care if they had one less ho who worked the strip clubs in the city? Back at her place she had a small fake tree that she hadn’t decorated yet, hadn’t even taken it out of the box. It was only two feet tall. She’d been planning on getting Frankie a few things with the money he’d paid her, and inviting him over to open presents, hoping that maybe he’d have a few little things for her. They didn’t have to be anything big. She would have been satisfied with something little. She’d thought about baking a ham and maybe trying her hand at making some potato salad. She could have gotten a can of cranberry sauce. All you had to do was stick that son of a bitch in the refrigerator for a while and then open both ends and push it out on a plate and slice it up. She could have stuffed some eggs and used red-hot sauce the way her daddy used to do, another dim memory now recalled. That would have been almost like a real Christmas dinner. Now the lousy fuck wasn’t even around to fuck.
She’d managed to ask Ronnie if she could go back to her apartment after he got through with her and he’d asked her why was she asking him. This was while he was wiping himself off with a moist towelette, which he then wadded up and threw out the window, possibly for some other city employee to have to pick up with a nail on a stick.
She wanted to get to her place. Her probation officer seemed to be a pretty decent guy and she thought she could explain to him how it happened with Miss Barbee and Mr. T.J., but she didn’t know if they’d send her back to the old folks’ home now or not. She didn’t really want to go back there if she could get out of it. If there was some other place where she could go and do her community service, even if it was cleaning a building or something, she thought she’d rather have that. She didn’t want to think about the possibility that Miss Barbee had killed Miss Doobis or maybe Mr. Pasternak because what kind of a monster would want to hurt a sweet old person like that who in all likelihood was somebody’s daddy or mama? And as soon as she thought that, she remembered the slap and what it had sounded like and knew what kind of a monster it took. Miss Barbee looked like she was about half man.
“Hi there.”
She turned her head. She had her legs crossed. One of the old guys was standing next to her, holding his drink. He had one hand in his pocket and his suit was black with thin lines of silver in it.
“Hey,” she said.
He extended a tanned hand. Super-clean nails. A deep old scar, perhaps a burn, perhaps shrapnel from a war, which one?
“Harv Pressman,” he said, deep voice, just distinguished as hell.
“Hi. I’m Anjalee,” she said, and shook his big warm safe-feeling hand. She was trying to figure his age. He was older but well preserved. But what was old? Sixty? Seventy? She didn’t know but she figured that to a ninety-eight-year-old facing ninety-nine, sixty-three looked pretty damn good. She didn’t think he was seventy yet.
“I don’t think you’re from here, Anjalee,” he said, and he smiled with nice white teeth that looked to be his. “Is that a little north Mississippi hill country I hear in your voice?”
“I reckon so,” she said, and stubbed out her smoke.
He set his drink on the bar and lifted one foot and put it on the rail that ran in front of their feet. He clasped one hand in the other like a casual lawyer about to interrogate somebody on the witness stand. She saw a fancy watch. He dressed like he had money.
“I’d guess Tupelo,” he said.
“Wrong.”
“But not far.”
“Not even the same county.”
“But not far.”
“Far enough.”
“New Albany.”
“Nope. Pontotoc. Actually Toccopola.”
“Did you go to school there?”
She picked up her beer and held it. She could tell that in his youth he’d been one hell of a handsome man. Even now he resembled an aging movie star. She looked at his hand and there was no wedding band on it. The rings he had were really nice. She wondered what he wanted. But that wasn’t hard to figure out. Same thing they all wanted.
“Nosir. We ain’t got a school there no more. A long time ago we had one, and Elvis played out there one time before anybody ever heard of him. I went to Miss LeAnne’s Academy of Curl in Tupelo for a while.”
“I think I’ve heard of it,” Harv Pressman said, and picked up his drink for a small sip. As he did so, she looked away for just a moment. His friend was talking to the bartender down there and he was massaging the back of her hand with one of his fingers. The conversation they were having was decidedly private.
“What else do you like to do?” Harv Pressman asked.
“Well.” Should she tell him? Why not? “I like drawin’,” Anjalee said.
“Oh. You’re into art.”
“Yeah. I really am.”
He seemed to be pretty interested, seemed to be waiting for her to go on, but Ronnie’s laughter in the dirty cop room was still a mocking echo in her ears. What did that asshole know about Elvis? What did he know about being sick of being poorer than anybody you knew and trying to get your ass out of it any way you could even if it meant selling it?
“And how does it go these days?”
She set the beer glass down and picked up the shot glass and drank the rest of the Herradura, picked up her lemon chunk, sucked it briefly. She didn’t care what it looked like. She’d never claimed to have a lot of class anyway.
“It don’t go too good sometimes,” she said. “I don’t seem to get around to it enough. I want to. But it seems like early in the mornins is the only time I can work. And I don’t see enough of those. I’m always up late.”
“Do you work?”
“Well…not exactly.”
He took another sip of his drink and set it back down.
“You mind if I pull up a chair?”
“Please do,” she said. He was friendly and nice and easy to talk to. She could tell he’d been around. A mature man who’d seen much of the world maybe. Somebody it might be interesting to talk to. Somebody who might even be sugar-daddy material. Potential sugar-daddy. She took a sip of her beer. Sugar-daddy-in-waiting maybe.
He pulled up a chair and when she fished for another cigarette, he outed with a gold lighter and she bent her face to his flame. She raised her eyes to him and smiled. She was glad now that she’d touched up her lashes.
By the time she’d switched to Dickel and gotten some cigarettes, he’d had another drink and was telling her about fishing for blue marlin off the coast of Cuba, and watching killer whales off the south coast of Africa.
By the time she’d finished her wings and that drink and ordered a second one, they were sitting close together and she was tipsy and wanting to kiss him. He said he knew a great steak house where they could get the best porterhouse in the whole city. Kobe beef from Japan, he said, raised in dark sheds and fed beer mash and massaged daily for the ultimate in tender T-bones.
“Well, let’s see,” she said, and looked at the clock above the back bar. It was about fifteen till seven and she knew Harv was getting hungry because he’d already mentioned it once. She never had called up to the room or checked the front desk to see if there were any messages waiting for her from Len
ny. There hadn’t been time. She’d been too busy laughing and talking with Harv because he was just plain fun to be around. One of those kinds of people.
“You need to eat, don’t you?” Harv said. He looked at her drink.
“Hell, they’ve got a bar. Come on, let’s go.” And he started getting up, so she just went with him.
67
Miss Muffett had a dream but it wasn’t a wet one, even though there was lovemaking with a guy on a picnic blanket, with a picnic basket. It was springtime. Birds cheeping. Grass green. She had both legs again. It wasn’t the first time she’d dreamed it. In that dream she was always swimming in cool lake water either before or after the sex stuff with the guy with the picnic basket and picnic blanket.
When she woke up, she felt surprisingly refreshed.
When she looked out the window, it was getting dark.
When she stretched and yawned, it felt pretty good.
But when she reached for her leg, it was already gone.
68
Domino was actually only two and nine-tenths of a mile from the barn he’d slept in when he stepped out from behind the big silver gas tanks at Rosie Baby’s Grocery on 7 South at the intersection of 328, which, if he got on it and stayed on it, would lead him not straight but curvy back to Papa Johnny Road. The red-and-white Ford pickup idling at the pumps after getting ten dollars’ worth of unleaded needed a wash job and in the back end had a whitetail’s head with two horns. Domino saw it when he slipped out from behind the gas tanks and ran across the twenty yards of open gravel and got in the truck, whose door the owner had conveniently left open for him. He slammed the door and pulled on the headlights and jerked it down in Drive and shot past the two cars parked at the side of the road and turned it back right hard at the exit and went back up the road in front of the store and made a left on 328, just barely making it in front of an oncoming car, its horn blaring WAAAAAAAAaaaaaaa and on down the road past him, fading, his foot hard down on the gas. It would take a few minutes for things to fall into place. It would take the state troopers and the deputy sheriffs who patrolled the county roads a few minutes to get into a position to where they could get behind him or set up a roadblock ahead of him. If he stayed under the speed limit, and didn’t attract a cruising cop’s attention, he knew he could be back at Papa Johnny Road in probably not much more than ten minutes. If he saw cops near there, he’d drive on by. Or dump this one and get another one. And do it again if he had to. But he needed that weed if he could get it. It was freedom. He had nothing left to lose. Except his life. And it hadn’t been so hot so far.
He looked in the rearview mirror. Something was behind him. He had the gun there in his pocket and he pulled it out and laid it on the seat. They weren’t going to take him alive if he got a chance to shoot. He’d already made up his mind about all that stuff. Fuck going back to that place. There was a paper sack on the seat and he’d noticed it when he’d first gotten in. The headlights back there weren’t getting any closer. He tried not to worry about it. If it was cops, they wouldn’t turn their lights on until they could read the tag and determine that it had been stolen. The person at the store was probably just now calling somebody for help. Everything took time. It took time for the truck to get hot. It took time for meat to thaw out. It took time to serve time.
He reached his hand out and felt the side of the sack. It was cold, it was hard. He wasn’t going to believe that. But his fingers found the fold of paper and opened it up and he stuck his hand down in it and felt cold round tops with pop-up tabs, meshed in a plastic template. He separated one and pulled it out and held it up. In the dim blue light from the dash, he could see that he was holding a cold Miller tallboy. Like a gift from some ragged angel. It said right there on the label that it was the champagne of bottled beers.
69
Out in Mr. Hamburger’s backyard, there was a patch of muddy plowed ground that he’d dug up recently with his red five HP Troy-Bilt tiller in preparation for turnips sometime, and now there was a hole in the middle of it with mud flying out and landing on top of a white plastic leg that was lying there. The mud kept flying and after a while it stopped. Then the leg moved. It slid forward a bit at a time and finally toppled over into the hole, and there was a shoe sticking up on the end of it. It was shiny and black and had a strap around the heel. It looked like a doll’s shoe.
Then the leg began to move again.
70
Domino drank fast but he had only one and a half down by the time he got back to the curve he recognized. He didn’t see any cars sitting around anywhere. He started slowing down, but not too much. If any cops were parked on the side of the road, he was just some dude going on down the road, man, just out having a little drive, bro, just sipping on a cool one and digging a few tunes, homes. He wished he had time to stop and find that Townes Van Zandt.
It was black as the inside of a tomb down there, which was real good. He just swung on in like he lived there, and wondered if anybody did, because there weren’t many tire tracks, just a few, and he couldn’t tell if they were fresh or not. If things could go his way, just for a few minutes, he could open the back of the truck, pull the deer out of the way, pull a few boxes out until he saw the one with the red streak, get it, and be on his way. If a cop stopped him, he’d just have to kill him. He was past the point of doing anything else now.
Slow, slow, he pulled around the curve. The truck was sitting right there where he’d left it about twenty-four hours before. Maybe this was just a farming road. Maybe there were some fields on down past the rest of these trees and maybe the only vehicles that ever came in here were tractors and combines and fuel trucks. Maybe nobody who came down this road would think anything about a truck left sitting for a day or so. He’d just have to make it fast.
He stopped right behind the reefer truck and left the stolen pickup running. He got out and went quickly to the back door. When he opened it, he could see the whitetail’s horn. He grabbed it and pulled him out, and let him fall to the ground. Then he started pulling out boxes. They had thawed out some and some of them were soft. He pulled out four, then he thought he saw the weed box, but he had to lean in and catch the corner of it with his finger, but he hooked it into a flap and tugged it toward him. He slid it closer and stepped slightly aside so he could read the side of it by the light of the pickup’s beams and there it was: PRIME RIB. With a red slash across it. It was money he needed to help him get somewhere else in the country. Oregon was looking pretty good. Rain. Ocean. Cliffs. Hang gliding.
He turned to put it on the seat of the truck or throw it in the back end and Rico stuck a pistol up beside his head and cocked it and said: “For some reason, dumb sumbitches always return to the scene of the crime. So, dude, like, where’s my little brother?”
Domino looked at him. He had a couple of Band-Aids on his swollen face, and he had one tooth knocked out, but he was grinning through a blood-soaked piece of gauze and he just didn’t look real good. He looked like he might be getting a little unstable right here almost at Christmas.
71
Helen was about to get all drunk and messed up. It was already past ten-fifteen and Eric hadn’t shown up. He probably wasn’t coming. Old Tyrone had bought her a few more drinks, but she hadn’t decided what she was going to do with him yet. He’d been telling her all about his job, which involved global-positioning systems for long-haul truckers and a bunch of technical shit about satellites and computers. She’d figured Eric would be here by now, and she wondered if he was having second thoughts. Or maybe somebody had come in late wanting a hamster. Or a gerbil. Or some goldfish.
The bar had filled up with lots of men and women and there was laughter and music filling up all the air. She could smell cigar smoke, which she liked, and folks were starting to crowd in beside them.
Tyrone had switched from scotch to bourbon and he had a couple of them under his belt now. He’d patted Helen on the arm a couple of times during some laughs and had touched her knee l
ightly once, but it was plain to see that he wasn’t one of these guys who was overly aggressive with his advances toward women. He wasn’t going to grab her tit or anything. She looked toward the door again, and Tyrone leaned toward her.
“What about your friend?” he said. “He’s not standing you up, is he?”
Helen smiled thinly. Was Tyrone being an asshole?
“He had to get off work,” she said. “He might have had some late customers.”
“What does your friend do? If you don’t mind me asking.”
Helen picked up her drink and finished it. She didn’t know if she wanted to go to bed with Tyrone or not in case Eric didn’t show up. And what if he didn’t? What was she going to do? Just stay here? If she got any drunker, it would be dangerous to try and drive home.