Joe (18 page)

Fay would keep her own promises. The lights she dreamed of, the clothes she would wear, the distant cities shimmering in the highways of her mind. “He ain’t comin back,” she said. That old woman she had watched grow older and older until she was bent and wasted neither turned her face nor gave any sign that she’d heard. There was something bubbling before her in a lard can, set atop a niggardly fire banked with dirt on a rotten sheet of rusted tin in the floor. The smoke had settled comfortably in the ceiling, to drift at its leisure out the windows and shift slowly among the hewed timbers. They could hear the wasps dropping like lead shot on the floor in the other room. Not one penetrated that wall of fumes. By morning they would all be gone, scattered to the four winds, their paper home a fabled trophy for a small boy to prize.

“If he was comin back he’d of done been back.”

The little girl paid no attention. She’d made a doll of sticks and rags and she was rocking it to sleep. On its burnt face she laid some sweet kisses that almost made the older sister stay. Fay
watched her mother, perceiving not even the rise and fall of her chest to mark her breathing. Just the thin bubbling in the lard can, the wisps of steam playing below her face. She could almost hate her for staying with him for this long, never having a house to call her own. Nothing but squatting before a fire like this one for as long as she could remember. She couldn’t remember now how long Tom had been dead. Maybe it was ten years. Maybe it was twelve. And Calvin. Wherever he was, if he wasn’t dead, he was better off than them.

“I seen him in a dream,” her mother said.

“Hush.”

“He was in a car. Had the longest purtiest hair, like a woman’s. Long and curly, down on his back. Like Absalom. Absalom was on a mule runnin away from his enemies and caught his hair on a limb. I member the picture from the Bible was in it. He was tryin to cut his hair loose with a sword. Things’ll get better.”

“Things won’t never get better here.”

“They can’t get no worse.”

“That’s where you wrong, Mama.”

She stood up. She slipped her feet into her shoes and she picked up her purse and she looked around in the room. She had the clothes she was wearing, a skirt stuffed into the purse, and that was all she had. She looked at her little sister once. She was curled up in the corner, talking silently to the stick baby.

“I’m gone,” she said.

“If you goin to the store I wish you’d bring me back some Kotex,” the old woman said.

She didn’t look at her mother again. She stepped across the
floor and down the rickety set of steps and gingerly, dodging the briers, picked her way out of the yard and through the honeysuckle vines and only looked back once, at the ruined house and the smoke coming out of the windows and the tall black pines growing blacker as dusk fell.

Joe almost didn’t hear the dog for the rain on the roof. The sound of the growling was an undercurrent, an accompaniment, something that might have been there for a long time. The noise stopped, then it started again. It got a little louder.

“Is that that dog?” he said.

Connie was in the chair with just panties and a robe on, a beer in her hand. They’d been drinking since afternoon but he hadn’t touched her. There were days she couldn’t make him.

“I don’t know,” she said. “Is somebody out there?”

“I don’t hear anybody. Ain’t heard no car drive up.”

“It probably ain’t nobody. Ain’t nobody with any sense out in this.”

He nodded and lit a cigarette, coughing a little. “Why don’t you fix me another drink, baby?” he said.

She got up and took his glass to the table and got out some more ice and Coke and whiskey. She didn’t put much whiskey in it. She stirred it with her finger. When she handed it to him, he took a small sip and didn’t look away from the television, just held out the glass and said: “I can’t even taste that.”

She took it back to the table and poured more whiskey in it. She gave him the glass again and got her beer and sat down in the chair.

“We gonna go anywhere tonight?” she said.

“I don’t know.” He looked at her. “Where you want to go?”

“I don’t know. I just wondered if we was.”

“I hadn’t planned on it. Unless you want to.”

“We don’t have to.”

He looked away. “I’m just sorta enjoyin settin here with the TV,” he said. She had cleaned the house from one end to the other, washed all his clothes and ironed his shirts, cleaned all the bad food out of the refrigerator, feeding the scraps to the dog and trying to make friends with him. He guessed it wouldn’t hurt to take her somewhere, but he hated to get up and take a bath and get dressed and drive to town in all this rain.

“I guess we could go eat,” he said. “Get us a steak somewhere. Or would you rather have some seafood?”

“It’s just with you. I don’t have to go nowhere.”

What the fuck’d you bring it up for then? he wondered.

“I don’t guess we got anything here,” he said.

“Hot dogs.”

“I meant to give you some money and let you go to the store. I guess we need to do that before long.”

She nodded. The dog kept growling under the house.

“Stick your head out the door and see what that damn dog’s so unhappy about,” he said. She got up and went to the door and opened it. It was dark out there. She looked.

“They’s somebody out here.”

“Hit the light.”

She turned it on. A bright yellow glare lit up the mud and the streaming grass.

“Who is it?”

“I don’t know. He’s just standin out there by the road. What you want me to tell him?”

“Tell him to come on in.”

She looked back at him. “He ain’t gonna come in long as that dog’s out there.”

“Say you can’t tell who it is?”

“Naw. I don’t know who it is.”

“Well, fuck. It’s somebody either wantin a drink or money one,” he said. “That’s the only reason anybody comes to see me, anyway.”

He got up off the couch with his drink and went to the door. He looked out. There was a thin dark shape standing out by the road, just standing there. He squinted.

“I can’t tell who it is,” he said. She pulled her robe closed and held it with one hand. The rain slanted brightly in front of the porch light, obscuring the form standing so still in the glistening road.

“Shut up,” he said, but the dog wouldn’t hear. “I wish I could tell who it is.”

“Well, don’t make him just stand out there in the rain all night.”

“I ain’t making him stand out there. Didn’t even know he’s out there.”

“He’s scared of that dog’s what it is,” she said.

“Well, go down there and hold him. He won’t bite you.”

“That’s what you said last time.”

“He knows you now, though.”

“Shit.”

“I don’t want to get out. I ain’t got any shoes on.”

“I ain’t either. I wouldn’t touch that dog if I did.”

“Aw, go on.”

“Not me.”

“I wish to hell I knew who it was,” he said.

And then the little wet shape called out: “Would y’all hold that dog?”

“Aw, hell,” Joe said. “Here. Hold this.”

He went down the steps barefooted and snapped his fingers until the dog came out to stand beside him, then squatted in the rain and took him by the collar. He patted him. The dog strangled with his rage.

“Settle down, now. Ain’t nobody messin with me,” he said. He tightened his grip on the hamestring.

“I got him,” he said. “Come on in.”

“You sure you got him?”

“Who is it, Joe?”

“This boy I know. Come on, now, I’m gettin wet.”

The boy stepped off the road and came slowly across the muddy yard, never taking his eyes off the dog. His feet were encased in gobs of red mud.

“Go on up the steps there,” Joe told him. “Take your boots off.”

The boy bent over and started fumbling with the sodden laces on his boots.

“Go on up the steps,” Joe said. The boy straightened and looked at him, looked up at Connie.

“You can set down right here and take em off,” she said. She moved back from the door, and he went up the steps and sat on the doorsill.

“Y’all hurry up,” Joe said. “I’m gettin wet.”

The boy got his boots off and set them together on the top step and stood and turned and walked to the center of the room, where he stood shedding water onto the carpet. Joe turned loose of the dog and shoved him under the porch with his foot and slammed the door going in.

“Damn, Gary,” he said. “How long you been out there?”

“I don’t know. A good while.”

“Let me get you a towel,” Connie said.

“Bring me one, too. Boy, you soakin ass wet. You liable to be sick from this. Why didn’t you holler?”

The boy looked up, small, muddy, forlorn. Quietly dripping all over the floor. “I hollered one time,” he said. “That dog almost come after me. I’s afraid if I run he’d come after me anyway.” He motioned helplessly with his hands. “I’s sorta trapped,” he said. “Couldn’t get no closer and couldn’t get no further away.”

“What’s you gonna do? Stand there all night?”

He thought about it. He shook his head. “I guess I would’ve. Fore I’da had him get ahold of me.”

Connie came back with the towels and gave him one. He dried his hands and then started rubbing his head with it.

“He ought to get out of them wet clothes,” she said. “He’ll have pneumonia.”

“Aw, I’m all right,” Gary said. “I just wanted to talk to you about workin some more.”

The bossman draped the towel over his shoulders and picked up his cigarettes. He smiled a little crooked smile, not unkindly. “Work? Boy, don’t you see what it’s doing out there? It’s pouring down rain.”

“Yessir,” Gary said. He rubbed the towel over his head. He put a finger in it and drilled his earholes a little.

“Where’s my drink at? Have you got some pants he can wear? What size waist you got, anyway?”

He looked down at himself. “I don’t know what size,” he said. “My mama gets my clothes for me. I just wear whatever she gets.”

What he was wearing was a pair of khaki pants that were pinched up around his waist with a belt that was six inches too long. A Kiss T-shirt and a pipe welder’s cap.

“I think I got some jeans he can wear,” she said. “Let me go in here and see.”

“Well, set down,” Joe told him. “I didn’t know you were out there. You oughta hollered.”

“I figgered if I hollered again he’d nail me. I bet nobody comes messin around here when you ain’t here.”

“Why I got him. I ain’t here much. Way things are now, some sumbitch’ll back a truck up to your door and just load up what he wants while you gone to work. He won’t bother somebody just walkin down the road, though. A dog’s smarter than you think. Anybody comes in this yard they better have a gun. I got to be here when they read the meter. Long as you stayed in the road he didn’t bother you, did he?”

“Nosir. He just growled was all.”

“You could have walked on off and he wouldn’t have done anything. The road ain’t his. He knows what’s his.”

“Here,” Connie said, and handed him a pair of jeans. “Try these on. I believe they’ll fit you.”

He took the jeans and looked them over and looked around.

“Bathroom down the hall,” she said, pointing. “You can change in there.”

“Yesm,” he said, even though she wasn’t four years older than he was. He found his way down the hall and went into the bathroom and shut the door. Then he groped around in the dark looking for the light switch. Feeling all over the wall. He turned it on and then he stood for a minute just looking at all the products scattered on shelves and around the sink and lined up beside the bathtub, a wide assortment of ointments and creams and shampoos and deodorants and colognes and aftershaves. He opened some of them and sniffed, and looked at their labels. Meaningless symbols printed there whose messages he could only imagine. In the mirror stood a wet boy-child whose hair was twisted all up over his head like a rooster’s comb. He found a brush on the sink and pawed at his hair with it, slicking it down long over his ears. There was long downy hair all over his chin and neck that he’d never shaved. Finally he pulled the threadbare shirt over his head and unbuckled the belt and pulled the wet trousers down over his knees and stepped out of them and stood naked in the room, his balls shriveled and drawn from the cold and the wet. He dried himself all over and put on her blue jeans. They were almost a perfect fit except that her legs were longer than his,
so he turned them up at the bottoms four inches and went back up the hall. They were sitting down in the living room when he walked back in. He stood there holding his wet clothes in his hand.