Dirty Work (3 page)

You boys don’t know what it was like. Y’all didn’t grow up with the threat of a war hanging over your head. They was drafting then. Couldn’t just worry about pussy. Had to worry about going to
war
and getting your
ass
shot
off.
Especially if your ass was black as mine. Yeah. Aw yeah, y’all went out and trained, I know. But you ain’t got that threat over you. My mama, Lord, she cried, just took on something awful. Wasn’t never gonna see her baby again. Got down on her knees and begged You not to take me. Couldn’t stand to see me go. Closer to time it got, more she cried. Every night.

What’d she think, reckon? You’s gonna step down between me and the U.S. Government? She prayed enough for it, didn’t she? Never saw a woman so heartsick. Looked good then, didn’t I, Lord? Two hundred and nineteen pounds of blood and bone and muscle. That old woman raised me on peas and biscuits. Go home that’s what she’d
feed me. Tell me to eat. Last time I left I know I was laying in there in my bed and I woke up just before it was daylight. Light was on in the kitchen, and I could smell her cooking biscuits. Wasn’t nothing but a little old shack. I was gonna build her something better later. I woke up, just wide awake. I was leaving that day. Boarding a plane at Memphis, going for orientation and weapons fire before we jumped off. What we called jumping off. Jumping off the world. I had all that in head of me and I woke up in my mama’s house with her cooking biscuits for me. Smelled the same way every morning. Always smelled the same. She never woke me. Didn’t have to. Biscuits woke me. I heard her tell people, That child can smell them biscuits in his sleep and when he smells em he wakes up. My mama was so good to me.

I laid in there that morning. Had my uniform hanging up in there. Soldier of the most powerful nation in the world. And all I could think was Why, you know, why? I didn’t even understand the whole thing. Just went cause it was my duty. I’m sure there was plenty who went didn’t understand the whole thing. Just went cause it was their duty. This my country, I’m gonna fight for my country. Sentiment was strong for God and Country, young boys, listen up. Everybody’s daddy had been in World War II. Some daddies, anyway. Now they telling us we won’t never be in another one like that one again. That one taught us a lesson. We ain’t having no more futile wars. Till we have one in the Middle East. Or down in Nicaragua.

Ain’t no need in having a war lessen they just bomb
the hell out of you like Pearl Harbor or something. Then all you can do is just bomb the shit out of them right back, and fight, and get a whole bunch of people killed and finally not accomplish a goddamn thing except get your economy ruined forty years later.

Everything just pisses me off. The world gets worse all the time. Had one man one time that would have stopped it. Of course they had to kill him. And then things just went to shit. I don’t know what they want to watch this crap like “The Love Connection” for. If all these people so attractive and not married why ain’t they out legging down off TV? They seem like they had a good time, though. I guess I sort of like “The Love Connection.” I like old Chuck Woodery. But half the time these motherfuckers’ll let you get halfway through a program and then switch channels. Fraid they might miss something else. That morning I woke up in my mama’s house was the last morning I was whole, and with her. I’d shined my shoes the night before. Me and her had watched some old movie on TV. I’d brought us home a sixpack of Miller. Loved her a cold beer, now. She drank two and I drank three. It was old Jimmy Stewart in something. He was in the Civil War. And he got shot, and he had this beautiful horse, and his arm was almost blowed off, and this doctor said he couldn’t save his arm but saw that horse he was riding and remarked over what a fine animal it was. This guy was like a low-down motherfucker on the battlefield of life. Couldn’t save his arm, see, just couldn’t save it. Then he seen old Silver over there. And old Jimmy
Stewart told him, Doc, if you’ll save my leg, arm, whatever it was, you can have that horse. Well the old Doc decided he might could save it then. What I’d love to seen after he got through fixing old Jimmy Stewart’s arm was about four corporals come in there and get him and march him out to a wall and shoot the sumbitch full of holes. But old Jimmy never did write home again and his mama thought he was dead and finally President Lincoln got him in his office and told him he’d better write his mama if he knew what was good for him. Bunch of years later they (after they got happily reunited) found his old horse pulling a coal wagon in Kansas City or somewhere and bought him back for like five bucks. They was gonna keep him in a warm barn and all for the rest of his life. It was a real heartwarming story. It was a happily ever after.

What you got to do is stay up late at night and check your
TV Guide
for this good stuff. You’ll maybe see it once in the next fifty years. I done seen it. Just can’t remember the name of it.

But me and Mama had a good time that night, watching that movie. We was cooking us some popcorn in between times. She’d run in there and turn the burner on and run back in and set down and I’d run in there and put the popcorn on and she’d run in there and shake it and run back and then I’d run in there and shake it and that way didn’t neither of us miss much. And we had butter. REAL butter. Not this fake shit now. My mama still had a churn between her legs every morning.

But it come time to go. That morning it did. She fixed
me some coffee, I was smoking for the first time in front of her. She didn’t see me leave from Memphis. She just saw me leave from Clarksdale. Cotton was up. Most of them around us had a pretty good stand. Looked like they’s gonna make it good that year. I felt better, finally, looking at it, knowing I wasn’t going to have to chop no more of the shit. My little sister was standing out there with us. Old boys I knew from Tunica was taking me to Memphis. They was all out there in the car waiting. One of them times, you know. I didn’t have to report until the next morning. We was going to Beale Street that night. But there my mama and them having to tell me goodbye. And what a thing for her, me having to go off to something like that. Ain’t no words to say, except the ones everybody thinking about but just don’t want to say. Don’t die.

What you gonna tell em? You can’t do nothing but kiss em and hope they right.

I wish they’d put that other movie back on, that one I seen that time. One where that guy had all his arms and legs blowed off and his face too. That guy talked to Jesus a couple of times. I don’t think Jesus ever come and set on his bed like He does mine, though.

I
was thinking about Thomas Gandy. He was a little kid who lived right down the road from us when I was a little kid. It was right after they sent my daddy to the pen.

You ever tried to remember the earliest thing you could remember? I mean when you were little and what you were doing? I have. For a long time the earliest thing I could remember was riding on a wagonload of cotton with some little black kids and jumping around in it. But I got hypnotized one day by this girl who was going to school over at Ole Miss and after I came to I got to remembering some stuff that was even earlier than that. It was a long
time ago. I saw a man get killed. Well, I didn’t really see it. I just saw him after he got killed.

Nobody’s ever talked about it to me. Not even my mother. Some things people just don’t talk about.

In my mind I put myself about four. Maybe I was five. I don’t know. I know Max wasn’t born yet.

The thing I remember most is the man lying there in a big pool of blood. It was black. Like he was stuck in the middle of a great big scab that was growing on the ground. I remember us on the porch, just sitting there, looking at him. I know I kept asking Mama something, over and over. I guess it was because I couldn’t figure out why that man was just lying in our front yard, not moving.

My daddy killed him over something about my mother, but I don’t know what it was. I don’t know if this guy was trying to go with her or what.

I think I heard the shot. I don’t know where I was. That’s what’s aggravating about it. Maybe if I’d seen it, I might have been able to understand what it was all about. But I didn’t. It’s like I just appeared on the porch and saw him lying there. A dog came up and smelled him. I remember that. Then the dog jerked backward and went away.

I know they came and got my daddy that day. They must have. I mean you can’t just kill somebody and then hang around the house. When you do something like that, you’ve got to pay for it. I know. I’ve had to pay for a lot of things myself.

After they hauled my daddy off to the pen, that left me
and Mama to fend for ourselves, as they say. We had to get our cotton patch through the summer without the weeds taking it and then get it picked in the fall. I don’t know how she did it. But I do know how she did it. She got out there with a hoe and worked, all day, every day. Maybe I was five. I can’t think. My head’s still messed up. Five or six. I helped her. Wait a minute. Max is six years younger than me. Maybe she was pregnant when they took him. I bet that’s what it was. Hell. Maybe he freshened her loins the night before he shot that asshole, whoever he was. He must have been an asshole. He must have done something really shitty for my daddy to have to shoot him and go to the pen.

Anyway I was thinking about Thomas Gandy. He was a little bitty kid with glasses and a crew cut. His head looked like a bristle brush, and his glasses could blind you in the sun if he bounced the light on you just right. You’d be throwing your hands up in front of your eyes like the Prince of Darkness was coming in the window. Thomas was a real milquetoast who cuts folks like me’s heads open now and makes a lot of money for fixing whatever’s wrong with their heads. I think that’s why I was thinking about him. I know they’re wanting to take a look inside my head. They’ve been wanting to do that for a good long while now.

Yeah but old Thomas, he didn’t always occupy such a lofty position in the world. No sir. At London Hill, Mississippi, a long time ago, he was once forced to
eat
a large piece of dried cowshit and then say it was good and almost
say that he’d like some more, please, with sugar on top.

Matt Monroe was a sadistic little bastard when he was six years old and the only thing that’s changed about him is he’s grown. And there was a time when he worried me a lot. He doesn’t worry me now. Now he’s as nice to me as he can be. There used to be a school at London Hill and that’s where I started. It was a big old white building on a hill. Kids from Paris and Potlockney and DeLay went there, but there weren’t very many of us in each class. I didn’t know anybody until I started to school. But it didn’t take me long to find out I didn’t want anything to do with Matt Monroe.

He caught old Thomas Gandy out there in the yard about the third day of school. Miss Lusk, our teacher, had stepped down the hill to the store to get some more milk for the kids. I didn’t know what was happening, but Matt turned on Thomas and every eye on the playground turned with him. He backed him around the side of the schoolhouse and down to the fence where Mr. Autry Jordon kept his cows. Then he pulled Thomas Gandy’s glasses off. We knew something bad was coming. Thomas Gandy, future brain surgeon, was about to be humiliated. And we were like a bunch of little ghouls getting ready to watch it. One kid went to be a lookout on the corner.

Old Thomas was sort of blinking in the sunlight, slowly. Trying to use the vast resources of his awesome mind to help him.

Matt Monroe peeled off a piece of dried cowshit from
where a cow had hiked her tail against a post and told Thomas Gandy to eat it.

Thomas said he wasn’t going to do it. Said he was gonna tell Miss Lusk on him.

Matt Monroe’s eyes were too close together and he had long greasy hair that he used either Vitalis or Vaseline on. He weighed about eighty pounds. About forty more than Thomas.

I think Matt said, “You tell Miss Lusk and I’ll knock your head off. You whore. You queermouth.” That’s the kind of child Matt was. He had Thomas backed up against the post by then, and Thomas was doing everything he could to keep that turd out of his mouth. He had his jaws locked. He had his eyes wide open.

Matt told him to open his mouth and close his eyes, and he’d give him a big surprise. And just as he was about to try and jam the cowturd in, Thomas clamped down on his hand like a dog that hadn’t eaten in about a week and started gnawing it for all he was worth. He was slobbering a little, like Matt Monroe’s hand was the best thing he’d ever tasted. Matt finally got his hand out of Thomas Gandy’s mouth and he wasn’t happy about it. It was bleeding, and it had little fang marks all over it. Everybody just hushed. It was like seeing Sonny Liston get knocked down by Willie Pep.

Thomas wound up on the ground with Matt on top of him. He let out this big grunt. Matt had his arms pinned, with his knees on his shoulders. He had that old cowturd right over his mouth. Thomas kept shaking his head.
He set a record for holding his breath that day. He held it until his face turned purple, then black. Then he had to open his mouth to get him a big breath. And the old cowturd went right in there.

People think man is cruel. Hey, what about the
child
of man? There ain’t nothing meaner than some little deranged six-year-old sadistic motherfucker loose in a playground. You think a person’s got to be grown before he’s a maniac?
Shit.

“Say it’s good!” Matt screamed.

“Bood!” sprayed Thomas. “Beal bood!”

“Now say you want some more!”

“Wampfmore!”

I think you’ll agree with me when I say that Matt Monroe’s mother should have put him in a towsack and drowned him when he was little.

“Please!” Matt shouted.

“PWEESE!”

“With sugar on top!”

Thomas never did put in his request for sugar on his cowshit because he started crying and could only say Shhh, shh, shh after that. I guess Matt thought that was good enough. He let him up and gave him back his glasses. Old Thomas wouldn’t even look at us when he left. But he did exactly what he’d told Matt he was going to. He went and told Miss Lusk on him.