He moved up behind her and stopped.
“You all right?” he said quietly.
She turned around to him. She looked tired and she looked pissed off.
“Why didn’t you come?” she said, just as quietly.
He felt helpless to give her an answer. It was too complicated to try and explain it here in the kitchen while he was listening to Mister Arthur snore on the couch. But if he was snoring, he wouldn’t hear.
“Different reasons,” he finally said. “I’m scared of you, I guess.”
She shook her head and walked over to the refrigerator and got a Coke out and opened it, then poured some in on top of the whiskey. Then she picked it up and sipped it and turned back around to him.
“Why are you scared of me, Eric?”
“I don’t know.” He picked up his glass and headed for the refrigerator, and opened the top and reached in for some more ice cubes. He shut the door and picked up the scotch bottle and poured some more in. He lifted the glass and took a drink. She was standing there watching him. He walked back over to her. He stood there in front of her and took another sip.
“You’re about the same age as my mama, for one thing,” he said. And after that he didn’t know what else to say. So he sat back down and just sat there, drinking with her in silence. The silence went on for a while. She put that drink down her throat quickly and then mixed another one. He could tell she had something on her mind. She just stood there drinking and thinking. He really wanted to go now.
“Fuck,” she said, and she started crying. And it seemed just a natural thing when he got up for her to come into his arms. He was still holding his drink but he set it on the table when he saw what was happening, just in time to get both his arms around her. He turned his head and looked back at Mister Arthur. What if he woke up and saw this? But there wasn’t anything he could do. He could feel her face up against his and he could feel the wetness she was smearing on him. She wasn’t crying loudly. It was mostly shaking. He could feel her breasts shaking against him and he didn’t mean to do it but he started getting hard. And before he knew what was happening she had her mouth on his and she was kissing him. She pushed him backward. He felt her at his zipper even while she was pushing him back and in just a few seconds she had pushed him into the den and around the corner where she stopped and reached into his shorts. She leaned her mouth against his throat and he could feel her hot breath against his skin. She pushed him against the wall and started going to her knees and the kid was hollering Shane! Shane! Come back!, and when she opened her mouth and put it on him, Eric almost fainted and also because he heard Mister Arthur stirring on the couch and pulled back and fastened his pants together before he could get up and come in there.
“You go first,” she said, and he was terrified. When he stepped around the corner, Mister Arthur was turning over on the couch but he wasn’t getting up. He was just moving around. Now he was still again.
Eric stood there with his heart in his throat and his breathing was only now starting to slow down. What if he’d walked into the den and turned on the light? It felt like the world was sucking a hole in him.
He went back over to the table and made sure his clothes were in order. He looked back at her. She was standing inside the door frame, resting her hand on it. He didn’t know what to do. He needed to get out of here was what he needed to do. Before she had another chance to get him in trouble. Hell, Mister Arthur might have a heart attack if he saw her doing that shit.
“Eric,” she said. He looked up. She was motioning him toward her with her hand, wanting him to come back in there. He knew he didn’t need to stay here. He knew he didn’t need to be in the middle of their problems, which he saw now were pretty bad if she was trying to suck him off with her husband on the couch about twenty feet away.
He walked back over to her and whispered: “I’m scared to.”
Her answer was to put her arm around the back of his neck and pull him close again. She turned him so that she could be facing Mister Arthur on the couch and watch him while she was kissing Eric and he saw what she was doing. And he pulled back again.
“I cain’t do it,” he whispered. “It ain’t right.”
She leaned to his ear and whispered: “Don’t you want me to? Doesn’t that feel good?”
“It feels great,” he whispered. “But it ain’t right.”
And by then Jada Pinkett had already woken up. Eric felt him nuzzling at his hand and he looked down and rubbed his head. Miss Helen saw him, too.
“Shit,” she said, and didn’t bother to whisper. “Hell, fuck it, forget it,” she muttered, and walked past him and back into the kitchen. He just stood there looking at her.
“I’m sorry,” he said. He didn’t know what else to say.
“What are you sorry for, Eric?” she said, raising her voice, and she picked up her drink. “Life’s too short to go around being sorry. You’d better get what you want while you’re young. ’Cause you’re only young once.”
She looked up at him and he could see more tears coming down her face. Now he was really sorry he’d stayed. But only because of her. He started to pull out a chair from the table and sit back down, because he was afraid Jada Pinkett was getting on her nerves by walking all around in the kitchen, and he was going to hold on to him or try to get him to lie back down, but she just finished her drink and turned and walked past the couch, and Mister Arthur turned over and sat up.
“Helen?” he said. His hair was twisted up on the side of his head and he reached for his glasses, on the coffee table. She didn’t stop, just kept going, out of sight. She turned on a light that lit up the hall and Eric knew there was a bathroom down that hall because he’d used it last night. Mister Arthur sat up and looked at the television, and then he looked at Eric. He looked kind of bewildered.
“Hey, Mister Arthur,” Eric said. He waved, too.
“Hey, uh…Eric,” Mister Arthur said, and he found his house shoes and slipped them on his feet at the same time the bathroom door slammed very hard. “Is that Helen?” he said.
“Yessir. She just come in.”
“What time is it?”
Eric looked up at the clock on the kitchen wall.
“It’s about three-thirty. I guess I better go.”
But Mister Arthur got up and didn’t answer him. He went after Miss Helen, and he disappeared down the hall. Eric heard him knocking on the bathroom door.
“Helen?” he yelled. He was knocking really hard.
Eric heard the muffled answer from behind the door.
“Go away. Leave me alone.”
“Open this door, Helen. I want to talk to you.”
“No,” she said dimly. And then she started yelling a bunch of stuff and Eric couldn’t make out what all she was saying. Then they were both yelling at the same time and he couldn’t make heads or tails out of what they were saying except that Mister Arthur was threatening to break the door down and she was yelling for him to go ahead and do it. Damn. Why in the hell didn’t he go on when he had the chance? He started looking around to see if he could find Jada Pinkett’s leash, and his jacket, because he was thinking about trying to sneak out while they were making all that noise and maybe then they wouldn’t notice him. But he didn’t know where the leash was, and he didn’t want to get up and start looking for it in case she came busting out of the bathroom and they brought their fight in here. He’d heard his mother and daddy fight like that before she’d left for good. Their fighting had gone on for years before she left. He guessed she just got tired of it. And he never had understood what it had all been about, except money sometimes, and his daddy’s drinking. And his daddy’s carousing. And the people he hung around with that she called worthless white trash. But he knew Mister Nub wasn’t like that. And the thing that killed Eric’s heart the worst was that she never had written him even after all this time. He knew where she was. She was in Seattle. She lived in some kind of a hippie commune, his daddy said. His daddy said she
smoked dope and fucked hippies, and his constant comparing of Eric to his mother was another thing that had driven him away from home, that and the knowledge that his daddy was going to take Jada Pinkett out behind the barn and blow a hole in his brain just like all the other dogs he’d seen him do it to all his life. For different reasons. For being too old. For being too weak or too skinny or even for being just one of too many to feed that week. He wished now he could have told Mister Arthur all that. But there hadn’t been time. And now maybe there never would be. He was still screaming at her and she was still screaming at him and the next thing that happened was something he could hardly believe.
Mister Arthur broke the door down.
There was a moment of silence.
And then a long bloodcurdling scream like you’d hear somebody make in a horror movie and something that sounded like a roar from Mister Arthur.
“Come on, Jada Pinkett,” he said, but Jada Pinkett only stretched out under the coffee table again and put his head down on his paws.
“What have you been doing!?” Arthur screamed. “Whore!”
And he heard Miss Helen start crying. And then, amazingly, she ran out of the hall, holding her arms over her lovely naked breasts, which were bobbing delightfully, and she ran up the stairs. And up there the door slammed.
Gosh damn. He sipped at his drink. The credits were rolling on Shane. Then a commercial came on, Miss Cleo selling fortunes. Mister Arthur came walking around the corner like a zombie, shuffling his feet in his house shoes, not picking them up even an inch, and he walked slowly to the couch and sat down with his hands between his knees. He didn’t even seem to notice Eric. But he must not have forgotten that he was sitting there either. He turned his face and looked at him. It took him a long time to say anything. There were slamming noises coming from above. Eric could hear faint cussing, too.
“She’s got suck marks on her,” Mister Arthur said. “Hickies.”
Eric was struck too dumb to say anything at all. Mister Arthur turned his face back toward the TV screen, where somebody was selling Monster Hits from the Swinging Eighties. He watched the ad for a while.
“And I didn’t put them there,” Mister Arthur said to the television.
“I guess I better go,” Eric said. “Looks like y’all need some privacy.”
“Suck marks,” Mister Arthur said again. “About five or six maybe.”
“I was just lookin’ for his leash,” Eric said, getting up, wondering where in the hell he’d left it lying, wishing there was some more light in here, but not wanting to turn one on, because he could hear the old man crying now, and he didn’t want to look at him, and he truly hated himself for ever putting his arms around her and letting her do that to him.
About that time a loaded suitcase came flying down the stairs and tumbled over a few times and came to a halt. Mister Arthur turned his head and sniffled and looked at it.
“That’s her luggage,” he said, like a question.
“Yeah. I was just huntin’ his leash. Have you, uh…”
“I guess she’s leaving,” he said. “Is she leaving?”
“I don’t know,” Eric said, and stopped. “I was just—”
Then a small bag flew down.
Then a medium-size one.
And then she herself came down, hair brushed, clothes changed, wearing a long black coat with a scarf around her throat, looking in her purse. She appeared to be enraged.
Mister Arthur stood up. “Where you going?” he said. “You’re drunk.”
She stopped right in front of him. “You damn right I’m drunk! I’m getting the fuck out of here! I’m taking the Jag and I’m getting some money out of the ATM! You can do what you want to with this house! I’m going back to Montana! Where you found me!”
“Where you fucked everybody in Missoula!” Mister Arthur shouted. And she started picking up her bags. They must have been pretty heavy because she looked like she was having a hard time with them. Eric didn’t know whether to try and help her with them or what because Mister Arthur was just standing there. He looked like he was getting mad.
“Okay, Helen,” he said, and his voice had begun to shake with anger. “If that’s what you want to do. Just leave me. Then get the hell on out.”
“I will,” she said, and pulled the strap for the small bag over her shoulder. “Eric, will you please help me get the fuck out of here before I scream?”
He looked at Mister Arthur. Mister Arthur looked extremely pissed. But he turned his head slowly and nodded slightly at him.
“Go ahead and help her if you want to, Eric. If she wants to go, she can go right now.”
And he sat down on the couch but turned his face back toward Helen for a moment. He looked really pissed. “You can just forget about getting anything for Christmas this year,” he said.
84
Texado was even better than Southern Living had said it was. They got there long before dinner and had time to admire the whole house with the middle-aged lady who showed them the rooms and the furnishings and recounted the history of the house for them.
The lady put them in an elegant upstairs room whose back doors opened onto a fine wood gallery that overlooked a brick courtyard like those you’d find in New Orleans. The furniture looked so old that Merlot was almost scared to sit on it. It was still plenty early enough to go out, not even close to dark yet, so they locked their room with the key the lady had given them and took off down the sidewalk and it was only about thirty minutes before they were in the casino, which was basically a big floating boat that was moored in the Mississippi River by two very thick ropes that were hooked to the bank. It had a wide gangway, a huge parking lot, and buses gladly ferried suckers back and forth twenty-four/seven, even on Christmas, even on Christmas Eve, Thanksgiving, Fourth of July, Rosh Hashanah.
Inside it was lit brightly and there was music playing and people talking and bells were going off and all manner of folks were walking around, old ladies with bad legs on walkers and slick young pomaded dudes with girls on their arms, people in muddy overalls who looked like they’d just stepped from a cotton field, and probably had, security people in good suits, semiprofessional gamblers out of Vegas with flashy diamond/gold rings and gold chains around their necks, retirees up from Florida in print shirts and berets, a wide mixture of humanity, all come to be happy in risking their money in the hope that they might not lose what they already had but instead hit the big jackpot and get some more.
Merlot couldn’t get over how loud it was. There were no windows or clocks. Penelope bought twenty dollars’ worth of quarters right away and got a free beer and started playing the progressive slot machines with an intensity Merlot found a little bit scary. She got to where she would hardly even talk to him. Once in a while she’d hit for twenty or thirty dollars and the quarters would come rolling out and she’d put them in a large plastic cup that she pulled from the stacks of them that sat on each side of each machine. And there were a lot of machines. Bells were ringing everywhere, lights flashing, skimpily dressed girls with short dresses and net stockings and push-up bras carrying around trays of free drinks.
Pretty soon she had a couple of cups half full of quarters and when she started betting fifty cents at a time, he told her he was going to walk around for a while and see what was happening. She just nodded and kept playing.
He stopped a cashier and gave her a twenty and got some dollar tokens and went over to the bar where a country & western band was doing covers of Merle and Waylon. He hated like hell that Waylon died. He got the bartender to give him a beer and tipped him one of the tokens and started playing the poker machines in a row in front of him. He kept looking around. He hadn’t said a word to her yet about Candy. And they’d probably be back at his house before tomorrow night. She was getting really insistent about seeing where he lived and he knew there was no good reason why he shouldn’t be able to take her over there. No reason that she’d be able to understand anyway.
There wa
s some older lady a few machines down and she was playing the same kind of machine he was on. She wasn’t winning anything and he wasn’t either. Not for a while. Then he got to playing five-card stud and won a little. He punched the Pay button and when the quarters rolled out, the old lady turned to him and leaned over. She had glasses thicker than his and she had several black and decayed teeth. A nearly toothless hag.
“You like it. Don’t ye?” she said, and he nodded.
“Oh yeah.”
He went back by and checked on Penelope one time and she was still playing, but she was losing now and pissed off and was feeding the machine very slowly and had gone back to betting a quarter at a time.
“How much were you up?” he said.
“Shit, baby. Almost two hundred one time.” She stopped one of the cashier carts and gave the lady another twenty-dollar bill for a roll of quarters.
“I think I need to move to another machine.”