I didn’t say anything to him, but all of a sudden, he said: “I keep thinking I’ll learn to do something right. You think you live long enough, you ought to learn something right. You have a kid, you got this pure little thing, and a chance to do everything right by it, and every day you just screw things up ’cause you don’t know nothing worth a damn in the first place. You end up teaching this pure little thing everything you don’t know, and nothin’ you do know, ’cause you don’t really know nothin’. You’re just putting dirt on a snowflake, and the harder you try to clean it up, dirtier it gets. Goddamn, Baby-man, I hope I ain’t making you and Rick so dirty.”
I didn’t know what the hell he was talking about, and it worried me some because he had milk on his breath and not beer. Beer might make you talk like that, but milk and cornbread? It was as if he were speaking Greek. He had tears in his eyes, and I’d never seen that before. I didn’t know he could cry. I thought he was stone and wisdom rolled into one, and that night I knew he was neither. He was human as the next person, and I loved him all the more for it.
What he meant that night came to me later, of course, when I had kids of my own and saw that they were snowflakes that I was handling with dirty hands.
All I knew was what he said had something to do with me and Arnold, and mostly Arnold, but I didn’t know what that something was, except there was some kind of regret buried in his words.
When I was twelve, Arnold looked and seemed pretty neat with his greasy ducktails, tight pants, souped up Chevy pickup with the flame licks on the side, and he had money from little jobs he did here and there, and now and then he came over and had dinner with us, and afterwards he’d treat my little brother like a kid and me like a man. Me and Arnold would go out back of the house and throw knives in the dirt and he’d tell me about the girls he was seeing, and then he’d wink at me, just like I knew what he was winking about.
One time he gave me a pocket knife with a yellow handle that he’d burned my name into with a woodburning set, I kept that knife until the night my life got a thorn in it.
When I turned fourteen Arnold started coming around more, and Mama didn’t like it period. She saw what she called “a hole” in Arnold, and thought maybe she could hear the beat of leathery wings when he was around. She said to me, “You hang around with Arnold, you’re gonna catch something bad, and I don’t mean a cold.”
I listened like most kids listen. Not at all. One fall night, a few days short of Halloween, I went out with Arnold in his truck when I was supposed to cs sten have gone to the skating rink. He had some homemade hooch, and he gave me some in a paper cup. I got tight quick, because I’d never had any, and while we were sitting in his truck drinking the stuff, he said, “Let me show you something,” and he reached under his seat and pulled out a .38 revolver, said, “You know, we’re about out of liquor, and I ain’t got no money. But if we went over to ole Ben’s liquor store and I stuck this in his face, I bet we could get both from him.”
I remember thinking that idea was the funniest thing in the world, because I didn’t think he meant it. I was drunk and didn’t know it.
We drank some more and Arnold talked some more and smiled some more, and pretty soon we were on our way over to Ben’s liquor store, positioned just over the county line where drink was legal. I thought we were just playing a game. I figured Arnold had lied about not having any money.
Arnold had worked at Ben’s one summer stacking liquor crates, and he knew just where to go. There was a little road went off in the woods and came out at the back of Ben’s place. You could park out there behind some trees and walk up the back circle drive. Near the door was a key in a wide-mouthed pipe stuck down in the ground with a rock over it.
We parked in the trees and sat and waited for a while, looking at the dark store, because it had been closed an hour by the time we got there. Finally Arnold said, “He don’t go home for a while after he closes. Has some things he does after the stock boys leave. He counts his money and takes it home with him. He makes pretty good money.”
I still thought he was kidding, but he kept drinking until all there was to drink was gone, and I said, “You’re just funnin’. Take me home, Arnold. I’ve got nothing against Ben. You used to work for him. You don’t want to do nothing to him.”
“He skimmed on my hours some. I reckon I got a hundred, maybe hundred-and-fifty dollars coming. I could take a hundred-and-twenty-five and call it even.”
“He’ll know you,” he said.
“Not if we tie these shop rags over our faces, way they do in cowboy movies.”
We got out of the truck, and Arnold tied a rag around my face and another around his. We got the key from the pipe, and Arnold unlocked the door, quiet like. We slid inside, moved through the stock room, pushed open the swinging door that went into the store itself. There at the counter, sitting on a stool, bent over the register, a little gooseneck lamp beside him, was Ben, scrawny and birdlike with a nose the size of a hammer handle. He was rolling pennies into paper rollers. When he heard us come in, he looked up.
Arnold pointed the gun, said, “Give it up.”
Ben looked at Arnold and said, “Arnold Small. I know you. That mask don’t do you no good. You don’t want to do this. You go on now, I’ll forget this.”
Arnold jerked his mask down and said, “You owe me money. You owe me money.” Then Arnold said to me: “Git what’s in the register, up to a hundred-and-twenty-five.”
I moved toward the register as if in a dream. Arnold went around front of the counter, pointed the gun at Ben. Then the old man moved. He pushed ced.ist me back with one hand and with the other pulled a pistol from under the counter, thumbed back the hammer, pointed it at Arnold. I grabbed a bottle of whisky off the shelf and brought it down hard on his gun arm. The gun went down and hit the register drawer, went off. Bills flew up like butterflies.
I swung the bottle again, hit Ben solid across the forehead. The bottle broke this time, and down he went, unconscious, me standing there looking at whisky and blood flowing over his head and onto the floor.
Arnold got hold of me, grabbed a roll of pennies from the counter, and we were out of there, in the pickup, roaring away before Arnold realized he’d left his pistol on the counter, like an offering.
Arnold took me to the skating rink and parked out back. From where we sat we could see the skaters in the open rink, and the lights flashing out from the spinning bulbs didn’t seem like lights at all, but strips of brightly colored foil, and the skaters were musicbox figures, wound up tight, going round and round to a grating noise that was supposed to be music. The shrieks and laughter of the skaters mocked us.
Arnold said, “Git out, squirt. Don’t say you been with me. You came here to skate, but stayed out here and watched before going in. Let some people see you. Ben didn’t know you. Your face was covered.”
I untied the shop rag, which was pulled down around my neck, and tried to fold it, but my fingers wouldn’t do the job. Arnold snatched the rag from me, reached across and opened the door. I got out of the truck, and Arnold drove off slow and easy. Gradually, the world slowed down. The music in the skating rink became defined, the lights flashed as lights are supposed to flash, and the shrieks and laughter from the rink no longer seemed directed at me.
It was all over.
Mostly.
Arnold took the rap. The old man recovered with nothing more than a scar, and he couldn’t name Arnold’s accomplice, and Arnold wouldn’t name me. The judge liked the way Arnold had thrown the football in high school, liked the way he had run with the ball on his powerful legs, and he liked Arnold’s loyalty to his unnamed partner. The gun Arnold left on the counter turned out not to have been loaded, and the roll of pennies was worth fifty cents, not exactly big money. Arnold got six months on the county farm instead of a few years in prison.
I went my way, free and easy, and when I saw old Ben on the street from then on, I crossed away from him to keep us from passing, least he recognize the eyes t
hat had looked at him over the top of a shop rag mask. I was secretly glad when he passed on some years later, attacked by another robber, but this time one with a loaded gun and a more severe design.
When Arnold’s time was up, I couldn’t face him. I couldn’t thank him for being silent, because I had come to believe that was exactly as it should have been. That he owed me because I wouldn’t have been in on the deal had he not taken advantage of my age, got me drunk and drove me over there. I came to believe I was better than Arnold. That I always had been, and had only been slumming. I put the knife he gave me in a Prince Albert tobacco can and buried it out back of our house and dismissed him from my life.
I have felt that way since, except on dark nights when it’s three a.m., an chren a d I view myself in a different light. A light that shows me to be less than the man I pretend to be. A man who has never quite taken responsibility for his own actions.
If the thing with Arnold was bad, there was another whammy to come. My father began to sleep less, drink and brood and argue with my mother. But Dad’s guilt and dissatisfaction didn’t last long. One afternoon on his way home from work at a construction site, he stopped off for a beer in his favorite bar on the other side of the county line. While he was having his beer, a drunk pulled a gun on the bartender for some reason, and my Dad lost his temper because the bartender was a friend of his.
He jumped the drunk and took the gun away from him and beat him to the ground with it. He threw the gun behind the bar and the bartender poured Dad one on the house and Dad drank it. The drunk dozed on the floor while the bartender called the cops. The drunk’s girlfriend, who had been sitting calmly in a booth watching the action, took a .22 pistol out of her purse and popped it at my father.
The shot caught Dad in the right eye and it was all over. She got a year because she was pretty, the drunk got six months because he was the sheriff’s cousin.
After all these times of driving out, just parking and looking at the mobile home, was this going to be the time I actually walked up to his door and knocked?
What was I going to say? Hey, Arnold, how’s the old hammer hanging? Haven’t seen you in ten years, and haven’t ever invited you over or called you or even sent you a Christmas card, and the knife you gave me those years ago I buried in a tin can along with you being my brother, and I know I owe you a debt I can never pay and I resent it, but our stupid nephew has his balls tacked to a board, and since it’s something illegal and dangerous, I thought of you immediately.
He’d probably have punched my lights out, and I wouldn’t have blamed him.
A big yellow dog came out from under the mobile home, squeezed past the lawn mower handle and looked in my direction and barked. I got in the pickup and pulled around in a tight half-circle, backed some, straightened the truck on the road, and started away from there.
As I went, I glanced in my rearview mirror. Through a parting in the trees, I saw the door of the trailer open and a huge, bearded man step out, then I was going around a curve and couldn’t see him anymore.
7
Before I reached home the sky grew death black and the rain slammed the truck and the wind rocked it. I drove along carefully through town and passed the city limits sign and made the subdivision called Black Oak just as the sky went strangely absent of rain and there was a split in the clouds, and the dying sun dripped off the pines and oaks and trickled over the ground as if being absorbed.
Black Oak isn’t really much of a subdivision. It’s practically in the country, and everyone out here owns anywhere from one to three acres. The residents are mostly quiet and like to pretend they’re in the suburbs, which is damn funny. A creek runs alongside our house, and behind us is a thick woods where curious deer stick their heads out now and then and cranes wade in the creek and spear minnows with their long, sharp bills.
I nosed the truck up our long drive to the garage, pressed the garage door opener, drove inside and closed up. I sat in the truck and felt warm and comfortable for a while, but the feeling passed.
I plucked the photo album off the seat of the truck and held it in my hand, but didn’t open it. I got the coat off the floorboard and wrapped it around the album and put the coat and what it contained on the floorboard on top of my guns.
I didn’t want to walk in the house with the album and have to answer questions. Not yet anyway. I knew I’d eventually tell Beverly, but not until I thought some things through and figured what to do.
When I came in the back way, Wylie met me at the door with his squeaking yellow porcupine toy. He poked it into my balls and jumped on me. I kneed him in the chest like you’re supposed to do to break a dog of the habit. He yipped in pain and dropped the porcupine and picked it up again. This time he just poked me in the balls with it and didn’t jump up on me. I patted him on the head, took it out of his mouth and prepared to toss it for him to catch, just as Beverly came in from the living room.
“I was about ready to send out the National Guard,” she said.
“We got to talking,” I said.
Wylie could see where this was leading. No porcupine tossing. I had my hand down by my side with his porcupine in it, and he mouthed it out of my fingers and left the room, looking for someone more sympathetic to a dog’s needs.
“I didn’t even know where to call or look for you,” Beverly said. “Billy moves so much I can’t keep up with him. He still in that place over on Rose?”
“No.”
“See what I mean? You should have called, you were going to be this long. I wanted us to go out to eat.”
“You’re right. I’m sorry. Have you eaten?”
“No, but JoAnn has. She was hungry.”
“Well, let’s go out anyway. JoAnn never likes anything except McDonald’s, and I’d rather have my dick cut off than eat there.”
“Shhhh, the kids will hear.”
“They in the living room?”
“Upstairs watching cartoons.”
“Then they won’t hear… Don’t they watch too much TV?”
“It’s Saturday. They always watch too much TV on Saturday.”
“Oh yeah, that’s right. I’m all turned around. I thought it was a school night.”
“If I didn’t know better, I’d say you’ve been drinking. You’re acting more like an idiot than usual.”
“Well, we going out to eat, or what?”
“The weather—”
“It cleared off about the time I drove up.”
“I guess we could… You stay away that long again, weather’s like that, give me a call, okay?”
“I’m sorry, honey.” I held out my arms and she came to me and we kissed lightly and I ran my hands over her ass.
“Keep that up, Buster, and I’m going to do you the way we have to do Wylie, only I won’t knee you in the chest.”
“Promise?”
She pushed away from me with a smile. “Don’t push your luck.”
“Ah, come on. You know you married me because I’ve got a big dick.”
“You’re a legend in your own mind, sweetheart.”
“That hurts.”
“Good. I’m going to brush my teeth. You call the kids down and get them ready.”
“Oh, great. How about I go brush my teeth and you call them down and get them ready?”
“Uh-uh. I’ve been with the sweet little shits all afternoon. It’s your turn to have fun playing Leave It To Beaver.”
“But I’m scared of them.”
“Me too.”
She left the room and I poured myself a glass of ice tea. I leaned against the fridge and drank it. Everything seemed back to normal, I was home in my warm house with my kids upstairs gluttoning out on a video tape and Bev and I had talked ourselves into going out to eat, which suited me just fine. Beverly hated to cook, and you could tell it from her cooking which tasted as if it had been purposely mistreated and made to taste memorable, if not enjoyable. That’s why I did a lot of the cooking when I wasn’t working. I had
a strong sense of survival.
I finished the tea and called the kids down, and they never knew I’d been gone. My nine-year-old, Sammy, came down the stairs his usual way. Sideways, both hands on the rail, hopping with both feet from step to step so hard his dark blond hair bounced as he came.
“Cut that out, would you?” I said. “You’re shaking the whole house.”
“Okay,” he said, but he didn’t stop. He finished off the stairs that way. JoAnn came down a few moments later, taking the steps the way you were supposed to, but talking as she came. “Daddy, Sammy called me a turd and he hit me too.”
“Well, don’t do that, Sammy,” I said. “Listen up, kids. We’re going to go out to eat. I want you two to go brush your teeth… No. I want Sammy to go brush his teeth, and JoAnn, you go to your room and we’ll lay you out some clothes.”
We went into her room, dodging stuffed toys and kicking mounds of scissored paper scraps aside. I picked out a dress for her. She said, “Daddy, I don’t want a dress.”
“When I pick out pants you want a dress,” I said.
She shook her long, red hair. “Please, Daddy?”
“All right.” kAlllon
We picked out a shirt with a dog on it and some jeans.
I left her to dress, told her I’d be back to help her put on her socks, then I went to check on Sammy in the bathroom. I made him quit playing with his toothbrush and finally got him to get down to what he was supposed to do, and when that was done, we went to his room and waded through toys and books and got him some clean jeans and a flannel shirt out of the closet.
“Wear your slip-on tennis shoes,” I said, digging a pair of socks out of his sock drawer.
“I don’t know where they are, “ he said.
“Well, look for them.”
“I can’t find them.”
“You haven’t looked. Get down and look under the bed.”
“They’re not under there.”
“How do you know? You haven’t looked.”
The phone rang.
“You look while I answer that,” I said.