Stories of Breece D'J Pancake (9 page)

“How’s goin’, Bo?” She meant it, and that was appealing.

“Ain’t too clear on it, Lucy. Bored, I guess.”

“Try a different song tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow’s Sunday. ’Sides, I ain’t bored with my song.”

“How old are you again?”

“Sixteen, last count.”

“Took sixteen years to bore ya?”

“Took that long to take effect.”

Lucy laughed. Bo watched her face contort, wondered if she was laughing with him or at him, decided that was why the other men called her a whore, and smiled.

“You look hell-bottom low. Somethin’ eatin’ at ya? Yer momma sick er somethin’?”

“Nobody wants to talk to me, Lucy.”

“Quit cryin’ in yer coffee. You ain’t old enough to be a blubberin’ drunk.”

“Well, it’s the truth.”

“Got a girl?”

“Had one this summer. Her daddy moved off to Logan. We wrote, only I don’t hear much since school started up again.”

Lucy remembered growing up. “Yer okay. Just growin’ pains.”

“I guess it’s just I don’t say nothin’ worth listenin’ to.”

“Bo, listenin’s worth more to the listener.”

He would remember to look for meaning later; he sought another avenue of talk, but Lucy was too quick.

“Case of the lonesomes, huh?”

“Yeah.”

“Must be pretty bad if your best talker’s a whore.”

Bo hung his head and waited for the roof to fall. When it didn’t, he slowly added support.

“You ain’t that,” he said, looking as serious as he could without looking stupid.

Lucy searched for hand business, and found ten seconds in turning off the grill and wiping up a drop of coffee. “I like it… you sayin’ that. Yer the only one to believe it. Could be right good for ya. Could be dangerous. Don’t go talkin’ it around, hear?”

Bo shrugged. “Sure, Lucy,” he said, withdrawing to his scab and his coffee. He watched her clear the straw-bosses’ tables, showing bits of garter each time she bent. He rubbed his finger around the rim of the empty cup.

“How about another, Lucy?” he asked, as she bent long over a table to get at the corner. She smiled in a vague, sleepy way as she tugged her skirt down from her hips.

“Sure, Bo,” she said, moving behind the counter for the pot, and added, “Past time for work,” as she poured. “When the cat’s away…”

“Cat’s been doin’ some playin’ on his own.”

“Huh?”

Bo gave Lucy the dime, then placed a quarter under the saucer. Nobody tipped Lucy, which compelled Bo to do it. The tip was a game between them, a secret. All the coffee Bo could drink for thirty-five cents.

As he slid from the stool, Lucy asked, “What’s the rush? Tired of talkin’?”

“Need to look through the junk pile. Parts for my car. Gonna break out like gangbusters.”

“Take me with ya.”

“Sure,” he said for the sake of play, and stepped out into the creeping shade of morning. Somehow he thought of how fine he felt in a new way, a knowing way.

It was nearly nine when Enoch came in. Bo lay on a crawler under Beck Fuller’s Pontiac, draining excretions from the crankcase and twisting a filthy rag around the grease tits to remove warts of clay.

“Be a damn sight easier on the lift,” Enoch grumbled. Bo avoided the hole. He was forbidden to use the lift.

He scooted the crawler into the light, shoved his welder’s beanie back, and studied Enoch. Everything in the man’s posture had slipped to the lowest support. His jaws drooped, dragging the scalp tight on his close-cropped head. His belly pulled the same way against whatever power was left in his shoulders. All of this converged on his khaki pants, making the cuffs gather in little bundles at his feet.

“Don’t mind the work. Only thing doin’ all momin’. Where ya been at?”

Enoch lit a cigarette. “Checkin’ out a wreck. Dawn Reed and Anne Davis went off the road up by French Creek Church. Car rolled int’ the creek. Found ’em dead ‘smornin’.” He smiled at Bo, but Bo did not smile back. “Wasn’t they ’bout your age?” he sputtered.

Bo stood up and brushed his jeans. “Jesus, yes. I go to school with ’em. Drunk?”

“Don’t know yet. They was full of water. All scrunged up like raisins.

“Hey, her car was an Impala. I dropped it up to my house till the state cops are done with it. I’ll sell ya parts real cheap. It ain’t the same year as yours, but you could—”

“No thanks.” Bo’s stomach contracted, his nose, ears, and hands felt cold. Enoch cocked his head in wonder, took another draw from his cigarette, and turned away.

“Yer crazy,” he said, turning back. “Just nuts.
They—are—dead
. Got that? Don’t need no car no more.” He turned again to ward off fury. Bo traced a stick figure in the Pontiac’s dust with his finger, then wiped it out again. Another preachin’, he thought.

“I come in here ’smornin’ to get that miner’s Dodge out,” Enoch said. “Them tools was ever’where. You wasn’t nowhere. Sleepin’? Sleep more’n ya work. Snuck in t’ put ’em away while I’s down to the station. Figger Bill wouldn’t tell me you’s at that whore’s house?”

“She ain’t that,” Bo whispered, looking for something to throw at Enoch.

“She ain’t, huh? Well, how do you think she got that boardin’house? Bartram didn’t give it to her—she blackmailed ’im for it the way she done them other guys in Charleston. You stay clear of her, Bo, she’ll ruin ya.”

“Don’t tell me what to do,” Bo shouted.

“I gotta watch out for my interests. You work for me, you stay outa that house.”

“I quit!” he shouted so loudly his throat hurt. He threw his rag in the barrel for effect, adding, “I got enough on you to earn my keep without workin’.” Half out the door the lie frightened him; he wanted to turn back, blame Lucy, and keep his chance to leave forever. You blew it, something whispered, but pride pointed his way outside.

Inside, Enoch worried. Bo was probably lying. But what if he knew about him and the boys and Dawn? He looked up the road, but Bo was walking too fast to catch on foot. Enoch ground the wrecker to a start and whirled off up the road.

As the wrecker pulled up beside him, Bo set his jaw in silence. He looked at Enoch, and the flabby jaws said, “Git in, Bo, we gotta talk.” Once he had Bo inside, Enoch let the subject of blackmail sleep, and went on with his sermon:

“I know’d your daddy. That’s why I give ya this job. You’re a good mechanic, but you proved you ain’t no man by walkin’ out on me.

“I tried to be good to ya. Let you use my tools on yer car, even teached you how to be a mechanic… but I can’t teach ya how to be a man.”

“Try treatin’ me like one,” Bo hissed.

“All right. You want to work? Your daddy wouldn’t want me to let ya after the way you acted. I’m sorry to his memory, but I’ll let you come back.”

Bo looked out on the broom-sedge slopes. He could swear his daddy’s ghost answered, “Yech.”

“All right,” said Enoch. “Tonight we’re goin’ fox huntin’. I figger yer daddy woulda took ya by now.”

Bo hated fox hunting, but nodded and smiled. He wanted his job; he’d need a stake.

When he had finished servicing Beck’s car, Bo washed his hands, lit a cigarette, and waited to become hungry. Enoch had said he would be back, but Bo was glad to be alone.

Dawn and Anne were dead. He boiled memories of them in his mind. Dawn was chesty and popular. She was dumb, but smart enough to act smart. Bo respected and spoke to her. Anne was built so slightly she always wore white blouses so onlookers could tell she had a bra, and therefore something to hold up. Her only friend was Dawn, her only beauty was in her eyes. She’d never stare down a husband, Bo thought, so maybe it’s best. Dawn brushed against him a lot, not always so he would notice, but enough to make him wonder what she had meant.

Bo leaned his head against the red battery-charger and closed his eyes on Dawn’s memory, while a vision of Lucy rocked smiling in his brain.

He saw a clapboard house, worn silver by weather, now glistening in the sun. He felt the intruder-sun on his head and the power he loved coax him toward the cool shade of the house. He saw movement up the moss-green sandstone steps, across the grooved porch-floor, and through the screen door. In the cool dampness of the linoleum living room, his cousin Sally stood; her hair pressed in ragged bangs on her forehead, the rest pinned loosely behind. Little chains of grime made sweaty chokers around her throat, but she looked cool and remote as she moved toward him and took his hand. “I don’t love you,” he said, viciously. Images soon ran together in flesh tones, and he awakened.

The dream had excited him as the cold August rain blowing through a porch might break the monotony of heat and pleasure-chill his blood. He searched for a reason for the dream. Maybe, he thought, I made it up. Maybe it happened.

Hunger drove him beyond Enoch’s Law, and he ran quickly to the dinette. The door was locked, so he dragged himself to Brownie’s, where he bought cheese, crackers, pork-rind snacks, and two Big Orange drinks.

“Dolla-fourtee.” Bo handed the old man the money, tore into the cheese and Big Orange. “Don’t eat it here,” Brownie added, bagging the lunch.

Bo sat outside the garage in the cold sun and ate. He watched the Duncan sisters as they sat by their window and watched him with peeping sparrow-eyes. When he had drained the last Big Orange, he felt a wickedness rise in him as he chucked the empty bottle at the Duncan house, and he smiled to see them retreat behind their curtains.

Enoch returned at two-twenty, found Bo asleep against the battery charger. Cuffy had suggested cutting Bo’s throat, and now was the time, but Cuffy was not around, and Enoch was not a cutter of throats.

“Wake up, Bo, goddammit, wake yourself up.”

“What?”

“Look, I’m goin’ to get the dogs. You lock up at three, an’ be on the road afront of your house by six. I’ll get ya there.”

“Who alls comin’?” Bo yawned.

“Cuffy an’ Bill an’ Virg Cooper.”

“Cuffy an’ Bill don’t like me,” he warned.

“Don’t be a smart-ass an’ they will. Dress warm, hear?”

Bo nodded, thinking, son of a bitch.

He waited until Enoch’s wrecker silhouetted the grade and passed over, then he locked up and headed for Lucy’s. She sat alone reading a magazine and looking day-worn. Maybe she caught a man, Bo thought, but he threw her back. Over coffee he poured out his roil of sickness, hate, and confusion. Soon they were wrestling with the go or don’t-go of the hunt.

“Bo, ya drive people off an’ dump ’em. Go ahuntin’—they’re just tryin’ to be good to ya.”

He looked up sternly. “You don’t kick a dog in the ass then give ’im a bone.”

Then with a sudden fervor: “Maybe I could take Daddy’s forty-five automatic.”

“Can’t shoot foxie, Bo,” she warned. “Be nothin’ left to chase.”

“I know,” he said, as if a veteran of hunts. “I just want to show ’em I can shoot. You know, plug some cans.”

“Make damn sure them cans ain’t got legs,” she grinned.

He gulped his coffee and left so quickly he forgot to leave his tip.

The clay trail from the secondary to Bo’s hillside house was worn a smooth red in the center, bordered with a yellow crust. He followed the path into the perpetual dusk and sweet-chill of a pine grove. There the path forked, one toward the garbage pile, the other into a clearing where the house stood, rudely shingled in imitation-brick tar paper.

The clearing was scattered with pin-oak and sugar-maple leaves lodged in fallow weeds. The sugar maples blended their colors to camouflage the undying plastic daffodils his mother had planted around the porch.

Bo panicked when he saw the shedded skin of a copperhead on the porch steps, then laughed at the dusty suggestion, bounced on it daringly, and up to the porch. he opened the whining screen door, burst the jammed wooden door open, and heard his mother: “ ’Sat you, Bo?” He remembered how she used to call him her “only Bo.” As a boy he had liked it; now it made him shudder. But it didn’t matter; she no longer called him in that fashion.

“Yeah, Momma.”

As he washed his hands at the sink, he looked out the kitchen window at the heap in the backyard. It was slowly becoming a ’66 Impala again. “Like gangbusters,” he had said to Lucy, then asked himself, “When?” Turning his attention to his soap-lathered hands dissolved the question, but another sprang in its place: Why not use Dawn’s car as a parts department?

He tried to find peace in cooking, but while he chopped potatoes and onions into the skillet, he heard his mother stirring in the bedroom. The aroma of pork grease had reached her, and she shouted, “Smells good.” Instead of answering, Bo turned to sawing chops from a whole loin. These he fried also, not turning them until the blood oozed out and turned gray in the skillet.

His mother slipped into the kitchen with short, uneasy steps and dropped into the cushioned chair by the table. She had been resting. The doctor told her to rest eight years ago, when her husband died. Miner’s insurance paid her to rest until the rest sapped her strength.

She leaned a tired, graying, but still-brown head of hair against the wall, and let her eyelids sag complacently. She wore two print cotton dresses—one over the other. Two-dress fall, Bo thought, means a three-dress-and-coat winter.