Joe (12 page)

He called the dog a few times but he didn’t come. He heard somebody going down the road on a three-wheeler and he looked past the corner of the house to see who it was. Some kid, his hair flying, who lived up the road toward London Hill.

He went into the kitchen and mixed a drink and sat down on the back steps with it. By dark he’d mixed two more.

He was on the couch with some music playing low when he heard the car pull up and stop. He lifted his wrist. Nine-thirty. A car door slammed, then another. He heard the dog growling under the house and he got up stiffly and went to the door. He called to the dog to be quiet when he saw who it was.

“Shut up,” he said. “Y’all come on in.”

“Will he bite?” one of them said. They were standing in the yard, just beyond the dim light cast by the living room lamp.

“He won’t while I’m out here. He better not.”

The dog rumbled a low warning in the dark beneath the porch. They didn’t come any closer.

“Hold him, Joe.”

“He won’t do nothin.”

“I’m scared of him.”

“Why, hell.” He went down the steps and squatted on the concrete blocks and whistled at the dog, trying to calm him down. “You better shut up under there. Y’all come on. He ain’t gonna bite you, I promise.”

As they stepped closer the dog was a white flash rocketing from under the house. They dropped their beer and tried to run but he nailed Connie and she fell. He had her boot in his mouth, but Joe grabbed an ear just as the dog tried to go up her leg. He pulled the ear taut and doubled his fist and gave him a lick on the side of his head. The teeth clicked like a steel trap as Connie snatched her foot away and got up.

“Son of a bitch, what’d I tell you?” he asked the dog. The dog tried to pull away from him toward the girls. They picked up their beer and stepped past him and went into the house and shut the door. The dog had his belly low to the ground, straining, and it was all Joe could do to hold him. He hit him in the head three times. The dog just closed his eyes and took it.

“When I tell you to shut up I mean shut up. You hear me?”

The dog straightened and stood balanced on all fours and looked
at him, his gaze clear and level and his eyes untroubled. He licked the hand that whipped him, then turned his head and stood watching the house. Joe turned him loose.

“You go get under the house and you stay there. Go on, now.” The dog walked away until he was once again a white blob and disappeared into the gloom by the steps. He settled there, invisible, a pale guardian who never slept.

Connie had her boot off and the leg of her jeans pulled up when he went in. Her friend was on the couch beside her, her face a little strained with fright.

“Did he get you?” he said. She shook her head.

“I think he just bruised it. It didn’t break the skin.”

“Hell, I should have held him, I guess.”

“What if you hadn’t been here?” the other girl said.

“If I hadn’t been here,” he said, looking carefully at her, “you wouldn’t have no business in my yard.”

“I ain’t hurt,” Connie said. She pushed down the leg of her jeans and started putting her boot back on. “We come to see if you wanted to drink a beer. What you got those Band-Aids on for? What you been into?”

“Nothin,” he said, and got up. “I’ll be back in a minute.” He walked down the hall to his bedroom and took an old work shirt out of the closet and put it on. They were talking in low voices with their heads together when he went back into the living room, but they pulled apart and smiled at him.

“What are y’all up to?” he said.

“We just been riding around,” Connie said. “We didn’t know if you’d be home or not.”

“I didn’t mean to be,” he said. “Who’s your friend?”

“This is Cathy. She lives down at Batesville. She knows Randy.”

He looked at her again. She was thin and had long black hair.

“I don’t really know him that well,” she said. “I just know who he is. I see him sometimes out at D.J.’s”

“You do? I don’t never see him. Tell him his daddy said hi next time you see him.”

“Okay. I will.”

“Is he still over there in that trailer on old Six with them other boys?”

“I think he is. We was supposed to’ve gone to a party over there a couple of weekends ago but we didn’t go. This girl I was with had a wreck.”

“Aw.” He got up and took his glass to the kitchen and started mixing another drink. “Anybody get hurt?”

“No sir.”

He looked at her and then grinned at Connie.

“I mean, no. She was fixing to drag this boy and run into him. But they got us for dragging. That’s why we didn’t get to go.”

He went back to the chair and sat down again.

“Don’t you want one of these beers?” Connie said.

“Naw. I drank some beer this afternoon. I don’t want no beer. I was just about asleep when y’all pulled up.”

“We didn’t mean to wake you up.”

“It’s all right. It was time for me to get up anyway. I’m glad he didn’t hurt you. Usually when he gets ahold of something he won’t turn loose.”

“What kind of a dog is that, anyway?” the girl Cathy said.

“He’s a pit bull, ain’t he, Joe?”

“He’s half pit bull. Half pit bull and half treeing walker. Why his ears look like they do. I meant to have em trimmed at the vet’s when he was a puppy but I never did.”

“He’s big,” the girl said.

He lit a cigarette and Connie opened a beer. He wondered why she’d brought somebody with her and knew she probably wanted something.

“Can I talk to you for a minute?” Connie said.

“Talk.”

“I mean . . .” She moved her head slightly toward Cathy.

“Oh. Well, come on back here.” He got up and she followed him down the hall to the bedroom. He sat down on the bed and she shut the door.

“What you want?” he said. “A quickie?”

She smiled and slid down over him, pushing him back on the bed, running her hands over the mat of hair on his belly. She kissed him, but he turned his head away suddenly and coughed.

“Damn,” he said. He put his fist over his mouth and coughed and coughed. “Shit.” He wiped his mouth and sat up and took a drink of her beer. “I got choked for a second. I got to quit smoking one of these days.”

“You all right?”

“Yeah.” But he could feel the blood running under the Band-Aids, and when he looked, he could see it. He got up and stripped off the shirt and wadded it and threw it on the floor. The Band-Aids were peeling loose.

“What happened to you?” she said.

“Don’t worry about it. I’m just gonna get a bath cloth and wash it off. I’ll be right back.”

He stepped into the bathroom and took a washcloth from the clean pile of towels in a chair and soaked it in hot water and washed the blood off again. It looked as if the wounds had scabbed over lightly once, but he’d torn them loose messing with the dog and with her. Now they bled freely, clear fluid seeping with the blood. She came to stand beside him and watch him watching himself in the mirror. His face was on backwards and the part in his hair on the wrong side. It made his face look twisted. She touched his shoulder. There was a Polaroid picture lying on the vanity and she picked it up and looked at it. Somebody who looked a little like him, only twenty years younger, with the sides of his head almost shaved, in a coat and a tie, holding a pretty girl in a white dress by the arm. Old happiness ingrained on their faces as they smiled at the camera, the future a bright promise on that day long ago.

“This is your wife,” she said. She touched the picture almost reverently and put it back down. Then she moved it, so it wouldn’t get wet, as if that time could be preserved by the image of its past existence.

“Was. Has it stopped?”

She looked at his neck, at his arms.

“Yeah,” she said. “I think it has.”

“Good. I ain’t got no more Band-Aids, anyway. I was gonna go uptown after some but I never did go. I had me a few drinks and laid down. I should’ve went on.”

“You want me to go get you some?”

“Naw, hell. I don’t guess. If I could just get it to quit bleedin
it’d be all right. What was it you wanted to ask me?”

“Nothin,” she said quietly. “It don’t matter.”

“Hell, tell me.”

“We just thought you might want to go out. She’s wanting to meet Randy. We thought you might know where he is. He wasn’t at home.”

“You didn’t have to come back here to ask me where he is. What else you want?”

She turned away from him and looked out at the black night beyond the back door. The little shed and the junk scattered around it were illuminated in the cold glow from the yard light.

“Frank’s back. I don’t want to stay at Mama’s.”

He stopped what he was doing and looked at her. Looked at her hair and her back and her tight jeans.

“I thought she run him off.”

“She did. Two times. He called her beggin the other night and she told him he could come back if he’d leave me alone. He promised. I got my stuff and left.”

“Why don’t she just shoot the son of a bitch?”

“Aw, she says it ain’t his fault and all this shit. Says I go around in front of him half naked and he can’t help it. Every time I go in a room I look around and he’s right behind me.”

“He’s wanting to fuck you.”

“Hell. I don’t know what for. You just as liable to walk in the door and catch em on the couch going at it as not. I’m sick of it. Sick of her, too.”

He stepped back into the bedroom to pick up his drink but it wasn’t in there. He got another drink of her beer.

“Well, they’s another room here. You still work up at that cleaners?”

She turned around with her hands in her pockets.

“Yeah. I wouldn’t need it long. Just till I save some money and get me an apartment. Or a trailer. I won’t be no trouble. I won’t tell her where I am.”

He shook his head. “Shit. She’ll know where you at.”

“Who’s gonna tell her?”

“Don’t nobody have to tell her. She’s called over here before looking for you. Wanting to know if I’d seen you.”

“What do you tell her?”

“I don’t tell her nothing because I don’t figure it’s none of her damn business. Hell, you’re twenty-one, ain’t you?”

“Three more months.”

“Well. You old enough to where you can do what you want to.”

“He’s liable to come over here.”

He laughed. “I hope to hell he does. I don’t know why your mama supports the sorry son of a bitch. Long as I’ve known him he ain’t never held a job. I put my old lady through a lot of shit but I always had a job. She’d have put me down pretty damn quick if I hadn’t.”

She’d been standing in the hall talking to him and now she came in and sat on the bed. She leaned up and got her beer and held it between her knees with both hands, watching him going through the closet.

“I don’t want to get you in any trouble,” she said.

“You ain’t gonna get me in no trouble. You got a car, ain’t you?”

“Yeah. That’s mine out there.”

“You got to carry her back home tonight?”

“Cathy? Naw. She’s got her car uptown. I just have to take her to town.”

He found another old shirt and put it on and closed the closet door.

“Why don’t you let me ride up there with you, then, drop her off and take me to the drug store? I got to get some stuff to put over this. I’ll ruin my sheets and everything else. All my shirts.”

“You got it,” she said. She got up from the bed and went to him. “I didn’t know nobody else to ask.”

“Hell, it’s all right. You welcome to stay over here.”

She kissed him, but he just patted her on the ass and gently pushed her away.

When they got out to the car, he made the other girl get in the back seat with the dog.

“Y’all start coming over here regular,” he said, “you better get to know him.”

They went back by Henry’s for the deer meat, but she wouldn’t go in. Cars and trucks were wedged against each other in the tiny yard with no possibility of exit for those hemmed in against the porch. They sat in the dark on the front seat for a few minutes while he tried to identify the vehicles of enemies who might have reason to challenge him in his weakened state.

“I won’t be but a few minutes,” he said. It was more like thirty. But later, in bed, he told her that he couldn’t go in and not speak to anybody. He didn’t tell her that he’d taken three hundred and twenty dollars out of the game during the time he was there. He didn’t tell her about the eyes that shifted in the smoke when he
walked in, the shadowed figures and drinkers spread out along the walls who paused in the moment a hush fell over the room. They saw him bleeding from the four holes and not a man asked the cause of his ills when he squatted with the money and the dice in the circle of light on the floor, the old boards and dust, the false teeth in his head gleaming like bones and his eyes bright with pain and liquor. He won the money and nobody asked him to stay and try to lose some of it back. But he thanked Henry for the tenderloin and even tried to pay him for it.