Country Hardball (5 page)

“I’ll pass word to lock up the ladies.”

He laughed. “Right. Speaking of ladies, is Tammy Sanders still working there?”

“Yes,” she said, and Clint could tell she was cupping the phone, talking softly. “It’s Tammy Adams now.”

“Oh.”

“That why you called? Looking for a date?”

“Not really. I don’t guess.”

“Well?”

“I don’t know. I was just talking to a woman about some dirt band fundraiser.”

“Sorry, bro. I’m plumb out of tickets. Sold the last pair to Skinny Dennis this morning.”

“No, I was just, this woman was saying how the girl went missing.”

“Staci McMahen. I know. Isn’t it awful? Can you imagine? How terrible is that?”

“Yeah, it’s pretty bad, yeah. She said that the girl had been going out with one of the Pribbles.”

“Danny? Yeah. I think Marlene mentioned that.”

“She said you were going out with one of the Pribbles, too.”

“Dwayne.”

“I guess.” Clint counted off a few seconds of silence. “You still there?”

“I’m here.”

“Well?”

“Well, what?”

“Well, I was just wondering if you were still going out with him.”

“Who I date is none of your business, little brother.”

“I know, I just, you know.” He shifted the phone from one ear to the other, then back. “I don’t know.”

She took a deep breath into the phone. “Dwayne and I are no longer an item, if you must know. Though it isn’t any of your business.”

“Okay.”

“Clint, a couple of drunk Mexicans.in hadasare you okay? You sound weird.”

“Weird?”

“Like lost. Distracted.”

“Yeah, I don’t know. I’m fine. Just a lot going on.”

“You need to talk about it?”

“It’s fine. Don’t worry about it.”

“Clint, if this is about the divorce, I mean, just think about Mom and Dad. How miserable they were and then when they got divorced, how much happier they were.”

“They were always happy. Everything was fine.”

“No. You don’t remember. You were too young. They were miserable.”

“No, they weren’t.”

“Okay.”

“They were happy. They were always happy. Everything was fine.”

“Okay. Okay. I can come over at lunch. Or tonight. We can have dinner. It’s girls’ night out, but I can—”

“It’s cool. I have to work late anyway.”

“I can treat. It’s no trouble.”

• • •

“Hey, Clint. Can I talk to you for a second?”

Clint finished tying his apron, picked up the price gun, and walked toward Ron’s office. “Sure, boss. What you need?”

“Just need to have a quick chat,” Ron said, moving behind the folding card table he used for a desk. “Close the door behind you.”

Clint sat down, rubbed a $1.49 pink sticker onto the inside of his index finger. “What you need?”

“Clint, as you know, we’ve been making some changes around here.”

Clint nodded.

“This is a tough economy. Consumer confidence, right? The big chains. The competition. All the regulations. Things like that, you know?”

Clint nodded. Looked up at the wall behind Ron at the wood-mounted photographs of the Little League teams the grocery store had sponsored through the years, the faces he couldn’t quite make out.

“So, as you know, we’ve been making some changes around here,” Ron said. “And we’ve had to make some difficult choices here. Not choices, really. I mean, if we had a choice, maybe. But we don’t have a choice. We have to do what we have to do. Nobody is happy about any of this. Is this making any sense?”

“Are you trying to fire me, Ron?”

Ron laughed. “No, no. It’s just that, we’re rolling out some furloughs. Time off. You can think of it as a vacation. An extra three weeks in the next six months.”

“Extra vacation?”

“Well, not vacation per se. It’s three weeks of furlough. Unpaid leave. We all have to take it. Even I have to take it.”

“Even you, huh?”

“All of us. We’re a team. We have to band together. Take one for the team, you know. Knuckle down and fight hard. Things aren’t like they were when we were kids. Tough times.”

“They used to have carnivals in the pa(in hadasrking lot.”

“Carnivals? I don’t understand.”

“Circus, I guess. Right here. In the front parking lot. Back in the ’70s and ’80s. The Shriners or Jaycees put it on for the kids, give us something to do. Good times back then.”

“I think I heard something about that.”

“It was before you moved here, I imagine.”

“Yes. But I don’t see what that has to do with—”

“They had rides and a tiger and an elephant. I rode the Ferris wheel with my dad. They stopped it when we were on top. Let people off. It rocked and rocked. Freaked me out. He said it would be okay. He said we’d be fine. I climbed under his arm, and he wrapped me tight, and he said we’d be fine. He said when we got down we’d go find Mom and MeChell and we’d get some ice cream, then we’d tell them how everyone else on the Ferris wheel was screaming. Then a few years later I helped bury a dead elephant.”

“Um, okay.”

Clint stood up. “When are we supposed to take this time off?”

“In the next six months. Monica has a spreadsheet in the office up front.”

“I’d like to start mine now.” Clint took off his apron, rolled it up, set it in the chair behind him.

“You’ll need to check with Monica. I’m not sure—”

Clint turned, walked out the door, through the storage room, the back door.

He stopped behind the building, lit a cigarette, tossed the filter, watched it spin in a rain puddle. Then he walked to the edge of the brush, stepping on saplings, feeling them snap to stubs until he got to the slight rise in the earth. He kneeled, dug a hole. Reached into his back pocket, pulled out the paper from the courthouse and set it in the hole, then covered it with damp dirt. He lay down in a small clearing, looked up at the vacant sky, and closed his eyes.

He’s covered in a cold darkness. A sheet, slipping back against his head, his ears. Between his eyes, pressing against him, a cold metal pole. Voices around him. Stern. Yelling. He can’t understand what they are saying, but knows it is important. He pushes the pole, small steps, his legs in slacking chains, scraping grit beneath him. The pole leans forward as the darkness lifts, light from under the sheet of nightfall. Forward steps, shuffling. Small. The pole heavier as it moves upright, sunlight and coolness, air slicing in. He can see the men standin the orange-pi

The boy sat in a folding chair at the kitchen table, a boomerang pattern in a pale sea of Formica, loading playing cards into a black plastic shuffler. Half a stack on a ledge on one side. Half on the other. Split the cards on either side of the cube, nine or ten inches each way. He looked through the kitchen window for a few seconds, then flicked the switch, the fwoosh and clicking until all the cards had been placed in a new order. He’d look at the fresh stacks, a new set of possibilities. Eight of spades on top. Jack of hearts on the bottom. Then thumb through the deck until he found the aces. Then split the cards back into two stacks, feed them through each side of the machine again. Two of clubs on the bottom. Four of spades on the top. Then he split the cards another time. His father had been gone for three days.

Averdale Tatum fumbled through the junk drawer to find her nephew a fresh set of Evereadys. She pulled one out, held it up, looking at the image of the electrocuted cat jumping through the number nine, and handed it to the boy.

“These are Cs,” he said. “Need Ds.”

She took the battery back, set it on the counter. Dug through a misfolded road map, a string of red ribbon, a tape measure, two Phillips-head screwdrivers, a handful of loose, picture-hanging nails no one needed.

She shut the drawer, pulled it open again to tuck the ribbon back in. Closed it shut. “You’re ten years old. Whyn’t you go outside and play?” she asked. “I got some cleaning up to do.”

• • •

The boy held the barrel of his Daisy pellet gun, dragging the butt along the dirt and gravel road toward the cutoff for the oil well. Cans. Bottles. Line ’em up and knock ’em down. He held the barrel of the gun at the end, swung the rifle like a golf club, sweeping chunks of rock from one side of the road to the other.

The white clouds blew like lace across the pale blue sky. Just before he got to the turn, he saw a chicken hawk on the wires above him, at the edge of the clear-cut field. The boy held the rifle in the fold of his arm, reached into his pocket for the white, plastic box, slid a handful of pellets into the butt of the gun, twisted closed the opening. He lifted the rifle, set the sights at the bird’s back. He took a deep breath, and when he’d finished the exhale, he pulled the trigger, heard the spit of air as the pellet flew toward the bird. The bird stayed still, and the boy pulled the trigger again. And again, stepping forward.

• • •

Averdale Tatum went through the mail she’d taken from her brother’s house that morning. Important Information Enclosed. Reply Today. Sign Up and Save. She pulled the only bill from the stack, slid the rest into the kitchen garbage.

Standing at the refrigerator door, she pulled off a photograph of Champion Tatum and his son, standing on the church steps in Easter shirts and ties. “I have to pay your damn electric bill and watch the boy? Might as well just have the damn current shut off.”

She sat down in the chair, still holding the got two catchers, should have beenpicture. “I don’t mind watching the boy,” she said. “Just wish I knew when you were coming home. If you were coming home.”

She looked at the picture, creased the picture in half, folded the boy away so she was just talking to her brother. “I know she shouldn’t have just left the two of you like that, but people got problems, Champ. Ain’t nothing you can do to hold them. You just gotta listen.”

She tossed the photograph onto the table with the electric bill, the card shuffler, the mismatched salt and pepper shakers. “Did you listen?”

Then she shook her head, walked over to the window on the east side of the house, looked out at the little shed where she and her baby brother would head out for blocks of frozen peas, frost-fuzzed and stacked on wire shelves in the rusted icebox. She thought of the time they had walked in and looked up to rafters dripping with milk snakes, all red and yellow and black, swinging above them along the bicycle tires and broken chairs. She had left Champion on the cinderblock steps, eased across the floor planks, and come back with a rock-hard bag of purple hull peas held above her head.

“I shoulda done better by you, Champ,” she said. “I shoulda looked after you after Eleanor did that to herself. I shoulda made you tell me where you were going, what you were up to, running off like that.” She lifted her arm, wiped her nose on the shoulder of her housecoat. “Who am I talking to?” she asked out loud.

• • •

The boy walked over to where the bird had fallen, lying in a heap of briars and broken limbs. He watched the bird for a moment, waiting for it to try to fly away, but it didn’t move. The boy used the barrel of his rifle to turn the bird onto its back, looking into its eyes. Deep black marbles that shone like a coffin.

When the bird blinked, the boy fell backward, but got up and walked back over to the bird. The bird twisted its neck at an angle, the way you’d ask someone “Why?” The boy wondered if maybe the bird had broken its neck.

He waited for something to happen. The bird would fly away. Maybe the bird would flap its wings and fly at his face. Maybe he’d wait long enough and the bird would die. But then what? The boy wondered what would happen, what he should do. Should he bury the bird? Say a prayer? He’d been too young last year to go to his mother’s funeral, but people had come to the house after and patted him on the head. Aunt Averdale. Uncle Horace. Aunt Janeva. Cousins he’d never seen before or since. People from the church they went to on holidays. Patted him on the back. Patted him on the knee.

The boy leaned his rifle against a fence post, lay down next to the bird, and put his palm on the bird’s chest. The bird fluttered at his touch, shifted along the ground, then settled under the boy’s hand.

The sun was dropping behind the scrub pines, and the boy had to close his eyes to the glare. He thought of lying in bed with his mother when she got the sadness. Of her stroking his hair and mumbling a song to him until they both fell asleep. So he hummed a little to the bird, then started singing the only thing he could think of to sing. The song he heard at the end of every service, waiting to see if someone had been saved. Every head bowed. Every eye closed. “Just as I am, without one plea. But that thy blood was shed for me.” He hummed some more, working in words when he could remember them. “With many a conflict, many a doubt. Oh, Lamb of God.”

He kept his eyes closedhe pressed a button and the chair ming out as he hummed, took slow breaths. He thought about the story of Peter cutting off the Roman soldier’s ear and Jesus putting the man’s ear back. He thought of his Sunday school teacher walking him down to the church office where his father met him, everyone else crying. The news that his mother was gone. That she wouldn’t wake up. All the people in the church office standing around, with his father in the chair. So many men in suits and ushers’ boutonnieres, ready to go in to the church service. To big church. But now standing in the church office with his father sitting in a chair and some women in flowery dresses handing each other Kleenex. And him standing in the doorway with his Sunday school teacher, Miss Velma, until one of the women looked and saw him and ran over at him and scooped him up and hugged him and said she was sorry and everything was going to be all right and it would be fine and it would be okay. It’s bad now, but will be okay. It will be okay. But it wasn’t.

• • •

Averdale Tatum pulled the mason jars from the box, set them one at a time into the sink, turned on the tap, set a box of pectin on the counter. She pulled jar tongs from the drawer, pulled her apron from the back of the door. She’d always set aside extra jars of jellies and pickles for Champion. Sweet pickles for the boy, the kind he called “bug pickles” because of the black spice balls floating around the jar like bug eggs.