Joe (11 page)

“I tell you what I’ll do,” he said.

“What’s that?” Wade was grinning, his eyes knowing, shining, as if they shared some secret.

“I’ll give you a beer if you’ll get me one while you in there, but first I got to tell you somethin.”

“All right.”

“Call him over here too.”

“Who?”

“Him.” He pointed to Gary.

“C’mere,” Wade said.

Gary walked over and stood beside his father. He looked at a place on the man’s neck.

“Look at me,” the man said.

Gary looked at his face. “What?” he said.

“I said look at me.” His eyes were dark and rimmed with redness. Gary looked. Looked deep at the hate burning in there, meanness ingrained but neutered by alcohol, impotent. Nothing to fear but still he feared something. He knew that he and his father would get in with this man and go wherever the road led as long as the beer held out. And he feared that.

“You see my face?” the man said.

“I see it.”

“I went through a windshield at four o’clock one mornm and I don’t give a fuck.”

“Say you got a beer?” said Wade.

“I got a whole fuckin case.”

“You want me to get you one?” said Wade, already heading for the cooler in the back end.

“Yeah. Y’all want a ride?”

Wade said that they did.

“Well, hop your fat ass in.”

The boy was squeezed up between the two men with his feet on the hump, while Wade was freely smoking Willie Russell’s cigarettes. Telling one lie after another. Russell had told them about ten times that he’d gone through a windshield at four o’clock one morning and didn’t give a fuck.

“You want a cigarette?” he asked Gary.

“I don’t smoke.”

“Well hell, try one. You might get started.”

“I don’t want one,” he said.

“Smoke one,” Russell said.

“I don’t want one.”

“What, you a candy ass?”

“Naw.”

The boy tried to sleep but he couldn’t sleep with them talking. They went over roads he hadn’t seen before. They pissed in the road and ran off the road. Russell opened the glove box and pulled out a Remington twelve-gauge shell and showed it to them.

“You see this?”

They saw it.

“I don’t give a fuck who it is. He can’t stand up to this. That’s double-aught buckshot. You believe me?”

Wade was jovial, chuckling with a cigarette hanging out the corner of his mouth. Benevolent. A Samaritan to guide his driver over the sand hills and through the rough dirt roads, down the
highways of patched asphalt lined with rusted wire and thickets of blackberries. Dark fat cows with white faces stood knee-deep in grass, their jaws so slowly working their tufts of fescue and their eyes fixed with such blank stares that they seemed stoned on a more potent weed. Willie Russell kept drinking, but he didn’t seem to be able to get any drunker. In the watered ice at the bottom of the Igloo, Wade found a fifth of peppermint schnapps and they started passing it back and forth, talking like old friends, the ice water dripping on the boy’s legs and soaking through instantly to his skin.

“I don’t let no sumbitch slap me,” Russell said.

“A sumbitch slaps me better look out. You know it?”

“Well,” Wade said.

“Cause I’m fixin to kill him.”

“Aw.”

“But I ain’t scared of the sumbitch and never have been. And I’ll whip his ass if he fucks with me. Again. If he ever. Fucks. With me. Again.”

Then why don’t you do it stead of talking about it? the boy wondered. Drunk talk’s all it is.

After an hour or so they turned onto a dirt road, the entrance to it overhung with great leaning trees and vines, the shade deep and strong like a darker world within the outer, a place of cane thickets and coon dens and the lairs of bobcats, where the sun at its highest cast no light over the rotted stumps and stagnant sloughs. The trees that bordered the road and spread out across the land beside it had closed their tops together, so long had they stood there admitting neither light nor shadow of hawk nor the blue
smoke of chain saws. Old timber, and magnificent, the bark worn slick on the cypresses from the constant track of coons and the black mud richly marked with the feet of the things that lived there. They went down the road past the posted signs and stopped on a wooden bridge. Russell got out.

“I’m ready to go home,” Gary told his daddy.

“Well, I ain’t. They ain’t a goddamn thing at home.”

The boy sat on the seat for a moment and then slid out the open driver’s door. He was tired of sitting cramped up and he wanted to stretch his legs. Russell was weaving on the edge of the bridge, waving a stream of his own into the stream below. Gary stepped to the edge and stood looking down. The water was twelve feet below, a thin trickle sliding over holes in the clay bottom where tiny fish hovered. He looked at Russell. He was pissing and holding a beer can straight upside down against his mouth.

Gary didn’t know where he was and he was hungry and he knew there was no telling where they would wind up. They’d taken a lot of turns and gone over many roads and this place didn’t look familiar. He saw the moccasin, immobile on the bank among the dried sticks and shriveled roots, a phantom appearing out of nothing. Without thinking he reached for the largest rock he saw and heaved it over. It made a great splash. Russell surged back and wavered on the precipice of the single two-by-eight that formed the border of the bridge and then, standing there with arms waving, dropped his beer and fell and caught himself by his arms and chin, hanging off the wood.

Gary went to him and grabbed the back of his shirt. Then he reached lower and caught his belt and heaved up on it.

“You little motherfucker,” Russell said. Gary turned him loose and stood up. He looked at the hands clutching so desperately the splintered wood, the fingers so splayed and vulnerable, the nails just begging to be stomped.

“Goddamn, boy, what’s the matter with you?” said Wade. He knelt and hauled on the back of Russell’s shirt.

“Help me get him up.”

“Let him get up by himself.” He stood back and watched Wade trying to pull him up over the edge. Russell clawed at the boards, his chest, half-emerged, his eyes wild and his hands waving and slapping hard at the wood. He came shaken and panting onto the bridge and finally lay with his feet hanging out over the empty air but for a moment, and then he got up and took three fast steps and slammed the boy against the truck.

“Boy, I’ll slap your face,” he said. Wade didn’t say anything. Gary looked at his father but he wasn’t even looking at them. The boy tried to move, but there wasn’t any use. The hands clamped on him were hard and ungiving.

“I ain’t done nothin to you,” he said. “Turn me loose.”

“I seen you laughin at me.”

“I wasn’t done it.”

“You throwed that rock at me.”

“I throwed it at a snake. I wasn’t throwin it at you.”

Gary pushed one hand off him and jerked the other shoulder away. Russell shoved him hard and he fell to the bridge. Wade was drinking a beer and looking off into the trees as if this magnitude of land were his and he was pondering its worth. No help from that quarter, never had been, never would be.

“You a lyin little son of a bitch. I think I’ll just throw your ass off in there and see how you like it.”

Gary kicked at Russell at first while scooting backwards. But then he turned over and came up and they met beside the truck. Twice he was slammed against the quarter panel. He pushed, blind, striking blindly. Russell laughed at him. He was being slapped and, after the first blow, he couldn’t even see where the hands were coming from. He didn’t know where his father was and he didn’t know why he wasn’t helping him and more than anything he was afraid he was going to cry. He did the only thing he could do. He spied a rock between his feet, one about the size of his fist, and he bent over and seized it and drew back and delivered it to Russell’s forehead. A steer in the killing pen goes down no sooner. He thought he’d killed him. A little droplet of blood squeezed out of the cut and ran down one side of Russell’s nose. Gary stood over him. With his foot he rolled him over to send him for good into the creek. But the old man walked over with a hand up to halt him.

“Here now,” he said. He pitched his empty can into the water below. While his son watched he robbed the still figure, turning out the pockets and taking the money. Russell lay on his back breathing raggedly, air and blood snuffling and mixing in his nostrils. The boy stood watching as his own breathing gradually slowed down, as his heart ceased its thumping. He heard the sounds his father was making in the truck after he turned away, but it wasn’t until the old man started walking up the road without waiting for him to follow that he looked and saw the pockets of his parent crammed full of beer and the neck of the fifth of schnapps in his hand.

“What we gonna do with him?” he called.

Wade didn’t look around when he answered, just kept walking.

“I ain’t doin nothin with him.”

“We gonna just leave him?”

“You better get the fuck away from him.”

He looked down at Russell and saw the wisdom of this. But what of the future and the chance of meeting up with him again? It wouldn’t be his father. It would be him.

After a while he went after the old man, keeping his distance, the bag of cans he retrieved from the back end rattling faintly against his leg.

Joe wouldn’t let Curt sit on the front seat when he took him home. He made him ride in the back where the hands rode. After he left Curt’s house, his arm started to hurt a little more, but he knew that was shock wearing off, knew it was natural because he’d been shot once before, with a .22. It was hurting like hell by the time he pulled up in front of his own house. He took the whiskey inside with him.

With his chest naked and the bloody shirt in the trash, he faced himself in the bathroom mirror and surveyed the damage. Two in the neck, one in each arm. Puckered and swollen craters of flesh, the blood already black deep in the meat. He picked up the whiskey off the vanity and took a drink. His face was unmarked and he couldn’t imagine all that missing his head, three loads. The ball in his left arm lay blue against the skin, having come from behind, and it was the size of a pencil eraser and very hard. The two on the outside edges of his neck had passed through. He dabbed alcohol over the wounds, front and back, and stoppered them with Band-Aids.

It was sort of like being shot with an arrow in a Western. Home surgery was required. His knife wasn’t sharp enough. He took it
out and tested the edge with his thumb and put it back in his pocket. The piece of lead moved around under the skin of his left arm when he put his finger on it. There was a peculiar feeling of fever in both his arms. He felt around on the other arm and couldn’t feel anything. There was just the hole in back. He found a hand mirror of Charlotte’s and held it over his shoulder, looking at the wound in the mirror. He turned the bottle of alcohol up over it and doused it thoroughly. It burned a little and then quit.

He had to go back to the kitchen to find the tape and he had to look in three drawers before he found it, some half-inch stuff he’d bought a long time ago for masking a car’s windows. He wrapped some of it around one side of a new double-edged razor blade and then he held himself still before the mirror. The blood started as soon as he began to cut, and he had to blow it out of the way, to see where to put the blade. The pellet looked to be just under the skin but it was actually in the muscle. He cut with the grain, separating the fibers of his body, tensing his shoulder as much as he could in the hope that it would pop out. But he had to widen the hole and grit his teeth and close his eyes sometimes as he bore down on it, until he felt the steel meet the lead. Then he squeezed it like a pimple, the black ball tearing itself out of the wound and forcing the tissue aside until it slid all slippery and skinned to the surface, where he picked it off with his other hand and held it in his palm. A little piece of lead, badly misshapen. He threw it in the trash.

He stood and let the blood flow for a while, then took up the bottle of alcohol and upended it against his arm, sealing the mouth of the bottle with the muscle of his bicep. Tiny boiling clouds of blood entered the bottle and he watched while the alcohol slowly
turned pink. When he’d stood it for as long as he could, he took the bottle down and wetted a washcloth and bathed the blood off his arms and chest. He patted around on the hole with a dry tissue. The flesh around the lips of the wound was puffy. He put Band-Aids front and back.

The whiskey still stood on the sink beside him, and he picked it up and drank some of it, then shivered and shook his head. Blood was seeping out around his bandages. He turned off the light in the bathroom, staggering a little, and took the bottle with him. It wasn’t even dark outside yet. There was no way he could go to town, bleeding the way he was. It would ruin another shirt if he put one on. He lit a cigarette and opened the back door and looked out into the woods behind the house where a matted little copse of honeysuckle surrounded the remnants of a treehouse he’d built once, now only rotten boards hanging from rusty nails. If he killed Russell they’d send him back. This time they’d keep him until he was old.