Joe (27 page)

The sound of banging was irregular, hollow and muffled, and as he got closer he could hear small random curses. It appeared to be coming from near Joe’s house. He rounded the last curve and the old GMC was there, the hood up, the left front fender off, the bossman kneeling over it on the ground and attacking it with a ball peen hammer and a tire iron. The boy stood watching him for a moment. Then he smiled. He walked on up the road and turned into the yard. Joe was laying the flat end of the tire iron in the wrinkles in the metal and drawing back and whopping it with the
hammer. He would hit a few licks and then pause to examine his handiwork.

“Hey,” Gary said.

Joe looked over his shoulder at him and smiled.

“Hey, boy,” he said. “What you doing?”

Gary walked up beside him and squatted. The fender was lying with the painted side down and he could see the edge of an anvil sticking out from under it.

“I’s headed to the store. What are you up to?”

Joe laid the hammer down and sat back on his heels. He fished a cigarette out of his pocket and lit it. Sweat had soaked his shirt.

“Ah hell, I’m trying to beat some of the dents out of this fender. You still want this truck?”

Gary got up and went around to the front of it. The mangled grille was lying on the ground. He looked inside the engine compartment. The radiator had been pulled out, but what looked like a new one was lying on a piece of cardboard beside the truck.

“Is this all that’s wrong with it?”

“Yeah. I done had a new windshield put in it. I got another hood and put on it.”

Gary looked. The glass was new and it had a new inspection sticker in the corner. The hood was a pale green.

“How did you get it to the shop?”

“I had to go over to the junk yard where they towed it. They put that hood on for me and put that windshield in. I drove it home but the radiator had a leak in it. I got James Maples to bring me a radiator from town yesterday. I’m fixing to put it in quick as I get
through with this fender. Come here and help me hold it down, how about it?”

The boy sat down and gripped the edge of the sheet metal. Joe put his tire iron on it and beat a wrinkle flat.

“It may not look too good but it’ll beat not having one on it at all,” he said.

“We gonna work any more?” the boy said, in between licks.

Joe didn’t pause with his hammering. “Nah. We through. I got to get cleaned up. And go to Bruce. Get my money. Try to find my dog. You want to go?”

“Yessir.”

“All right. We got to put this back on. Put that radiator in. I ain’t been able to find a grille.”

The boy didn’t know whether to ask him about being in jail or not. Maybe Joe knew what was on his mind. He stopped hammering and looked up.

“I guess you heard what happened to me.”

“Well.” The boy looked down at the fender, looked back up, squinting against the sun. “Sort of. I heard you had a wreck.”

“That all you heard?”

“Nosir. I heard you got put in jail.”

“It wasn’t the first time,” said Joe. “Probably won’t be the last. Did you know I’d been in the penitentiary?”

Gary shook his head slowly. “Nosir,” he said.

“Well, I have. I did twenty-nine months for assault on a police officer. The motherfuckers pulled me over behind a shopping center uptown and thought they were gonna whip my ass. I wasn’t
doing nothing. Waiting on an old gal to get off from work. Now I was drunk, I’ll admit that. But I wasn’t fucking with them.” He looked up and smiled grimly. “But I had put one of em in the hospital about a month before.”

The twisted piece of metal in front of him was beginning to resemble a fender again, just a little.

“What I need are some dollies. I used to be a body man a long time ago.”

“What’s that?”

“Dollies?”

“Body man.”

Joe glanced up at him briefly and then back down.

Sometimes it seemed that the boy didn’t know a lot of things a boy his age should know. They’d been driving by the Rock Ridge Colored Church one day back in the spring and the boy had asked him who lived in that big white house.

“That’s a guy that fixes cars after they’re wrecked. You know. Put on new doors. New fenders. Or like this. Straighten the old ones. It’s cheaper. Sometimes it don’t look as good. You got to know what you’re doing. I used to paint a lot but I started having nosebleeds and I had to quit it.”

The boy nodded.

“I’ll give you a job this winter. We’ll start in setting pines about December. We’ll work on that till March or April. You can make you plenty of money then. Planting pays more than deadening.”

“You mean we’re gonna set out trees?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, how you do it? You have to dig a hole and everything?”

“Naw, naw, it ain’t like that. Here, let’s move it up a little this way. Make sure that anvil’s under it. All right. Hold it right there. See if we can get this big crease out of it. No, we set em with a dibble. Little old iron bar. It’s got a dull blade on it. You just kick it in the ground and it digs a little hole. You just stick your tree in and then close it up, stomp on it. Go on to the next one. Takes about five seconds.”

“Five seconds? How big’s the trees?”

“Oh, they’re just little bitty things. Baby pines. About a foot long. Naw, but what I was telling you about them motherfuckers . . . see a cop can fuck over you if he wants to. Don’t get me wrong, there’s some good ones. But you live in a place and get on the wrong side of the law like I did. Like I do. They’ll look for you. They find out where you hang out, they’ll park and wait for you. That’s what they did to me that night.”

“You mean the other night?”

“What other night?”

“The night you had the wreck. Got put in jail.”

Joe looked up at him and pointed to the fender with the hammer.

“You mean this?”

“Yessir.”

“Naw, naw.” He shook his head. “I’m talking about what I got sent to the pen over. Move it a little more that way. Hold it. Hell, I been out a good while. Stayed in two and half years. They tried to shoot me. After I whipped all three of them they did. Or one did. He went for his gun and I grabbed it. He was fixing to kill me. Told me he was. But all he did was blow his kneecap off. Hold it right there, now.”

The boy watched him while he hammered, watched the muscle bunching in his bicep and the pellet hole there and the crooked nose and the dark hair curled in ringlets on the back of his neck. Watched the tanned hands and the scarred knuckles, outsized, knotty with gristle.

“Only way I got out light as I did was my lawyer got him on the witness stand and made him mad.” He looked up, looked back down. “I told him they’d been fucking with me. He went and looked it up. They were gonna put me in as a habitual offender. You can get thirty years for that. They’d pulled me over seventeen times in sixty-four days. They’d arrested me once. That was when one of em hit me in the back with his stick and I put him in the hospital. My lawyer went to the police station. He looked at the arrest records. A good lawyer’s worth his money. I got old David Carson up at Oxford. He’s high but he’s good. It took me two years to pay him off after I got out of the pen. But it would have took me a lot longer if I’d still been in.”

He laid down the hammer and the tire iron and lit another cigarette.

“Let’s see what she looks like now,” he said. He raised the fender and turned it over. It resembled something of its original shape. “Hell, that ought to be good enough. Long as the bolts’ll go in.”

“What you want me to do?”

“Help me hang it back on the fenderwell. I got all the bolts over here in a hubcap. Hold it a minute.”

The boy stood holding the fender in place. Joe stooped and picked up the hubcap and set it on the breather.

“Now just hold it until I can get one started,” he said. He had a socket and a ratchet in his hand. “You just hold it and I’ll put em in. Yeah, old David’s a good lawyer. He’s been out here and deer-hunted with me. I’ve got access to some good timberland. I get it about a year before they cut it.”

The boy didn’t say anything, just stood holding the fender while he started the bolts and ratcheted them down. When he had three in, Joe told him he could turn it loose. He stepped back and looked inside the cab. Mud was caked on the floormats. The seat had a huge rip across the driver’s side. There was a rubber-coated gunrack mounted above and behind the seat. The dash was piled high with papers. There was a long brown sack with a bottle in it lying against the hump in the floor. Joe looked around the corner of the hood.

“You want to do something for me?”

“Yessir.”

“Reach in there and get me one of them beers out of that cooler in the back. Damn if I ain’t done got hot.”

He went to the back and raised the camper door. It fell twice before he got it to stay up. There was a big yellow Covey cooler with a red top in the back. He pried the lid open and looked inside. There were eight or ten bottles of beer covered with ice and water. He got one and looked at it.

“This here?” he said, holding it out.

“Yeah,” Joe said, without looking up. The boy walked back and handed it to him. He put the ratchet down and twisted the top off the beer and tossed the cap out in the yard. He turned the beer up and took a good third of it down, then looked at his watch.
Nearly eleven o’clock. Damned if he wasn’t starting earlier every day. He set it down on the fan shroud and balanced it precariously there and picked up another bolt.

“You like beer?” the boy said.

“Yeah. Do you?”

“I ain’t never had one.”

Joe looked around at him and grinned. “Ain’t never had one? How old did you say you were?”

“I think I’m fifteen. That’s why I ain’t never got a Social Security card. I ain’t got no birth certificate.”

“I thought everybody had a birth certificate.”

“I ain’t. My mama said the place I was born you couldn’t get one.”

“Why hell, I wouldn’t worry about it, then. You won’t even have to file income tax. Long as you don’t hold a public job. You won’t even have to register for the draft. You ever been to school?”

“Nosir.”

They stood looking at each other across the ten feet that separated them.

“You can’t read.”

“Nosir.”

He picked up the beer again and drank some of it. “There’s worse things, I guess. How do you sign your name?”

“I ain’t never had to.”

He bent under the hood of the truck again. He couldn’t understand how the boy could have come this far without knowing what a church was.

“Can I buy one of those beers from you?”

He leaned around again and looked at him.

“What?”

“I’m kinda thirsty. I was headed up to the store to get me something to drink. Can I buy one of them from you?”

Fifteen. Maybe. And never had a place to call his own, don’t know where he was born. He’d go up to the house one day and get him. See what kind of shape they were in up there.

“I tell you what, son. You can drink one of them beers if you want it. I don’t reckon your daddy would care, would he?”

“I don’t reckon.”

“But you can’t buy one from me. Friends don’t buy things from one another.”

“Yessir.”

“And don’t say sir so much to me.”

“Yessir.”

Joe bent under the hood again.

“You still want to give me two hundred dollars for this truck?”

An hour later he had it running with the radiator full of water. He had changed his clothes and had most of the black grease washed off his hands. The boy had finished his third beer and was sitting in the yard.

“Come on and get in,” Joe told him. “I need to go by the store and get some gas.”

The boy climbed in the other side. He wasn’t saying much. He’d already noted how good those cold beers were. He understood now what the old man was after on all those nights and weekends and weeks sometimes, what he went for and what he
wanted to feel. Nothing mattered now, he knew it the first time he met it. He was with the bossman, who was going to take care of him, and he probably wouldn’t even have to worry about walking back home. He was going to get the truck, some way, some day, and then he’d learn how to drive it.

Later he remembered stopping by the store and getting ice and gas, the long ride to Bruce and the long wait in the hot sunshiny cab of the truck at the Weyerhauser plant, the big chain-link fence and the piles of logs as far as the eye could see, the water spraying over the stacked lengths of them. Joe stayed inside nearly forever, it seemed, and he got sleepy in the truck. They ate somewhere, thick hamburgers and fries in little white cardboard containers. A roadside stand had T-shirts and the bossman bought him one, AC/DC, although neither of them knew their music; the shirt was for a boy who needed one because he didn’t have one on and might need one wherever they wound up. Two kindred souls, one who sat on the tailgate drinking another beer while the other one kicked the bushes and stomped the clumps of grass beside the freshly skinned tree, whooping and hollering and looking all around. Many houses, many yards, one where Joe struck up a conversation with a pretty young housewife, making her laugh easily, admiring her with his eyes, her knowing it. No, but she hadn’t seen the dog. And now she had his number if she needed to call him. There was an old man in a rocking chair in another one. Joe pulled up right beside the porch, where the old man had a cane planted firmly between his shoes, hand-rolling his cigarettes, the little bag and paper pinched up tight against his chest, nodding or shaking his head; the bossman was genial and deferential to
advanced age, good natured, easy, but each time, he pulled away from a house, saying
Goddamn, I won’t never find him.
Down dirt roads they drove, past houses off dirt roads, little yards enclosed by high woods and brush, enclaves carved out of the wilderness where deer came at night and sniffed at the children’s toys. Once he thought he slept. They were miles removed from where they had been, Joe having given up on asking folks and just riding the roads in a dry county and drinking whiskey, trying to find his dog, telling Gary over and over what a good dog he was.
He wouldn’t have done anything to you, maybe just nipped you a little.
Sometimes they met cruisers with uniformed deputies or even the real bad boys, the highway patrol, military, hardass, looking for people like them.
Don’t never wave to them. They know you guilty of something when you wave.
Days and nights in the ring at Fort Jackson when Joe held the middleweight title for sixteen months and defended it successfully nine times—Gary heard about that. Women and divorce and rolling the bones, jail and a grandbaby coming, he’d raised that dog from a puppy, had been the only friend he’d had in a while. Everybody thought he’d gone crazy but he hadn’t gone crazy.
They tell ever kind of lie on me it is. The bastards would hang murder on me if they could get away with it. You listen to what I’m telling you. A poor man ain’t got a chance against the law. How can some rich son of a bitch do something and get off? And a poor man go to the pen? It’s money. The rich ones know the judge and play golf and shit with him. Hell, go out to the country club and have a few drinks. Weighs about a hundred pounds. He’s got long ears but a docked tail. Well yessir I meant to get around to doing that but I sorta did a halfway job on him.
Oh, he’s a unique looking dog, I promise you that. But if you happen to see him. It don’t matter what time you call. Day or night. Yes sir. Thank you, sir.
A deep green creek stirring beneath a steel and concrete bridge, the bossman wearing shades and holding his dick in one hand and a whiskey bottle in the other, grinning and saluting him where he stood pissing in the road. Having to jump in and zip up his pants quickly because somebody was coming.
You ain’t drunk, are you? I used to know an old gal who lived around here. Now, son, you talk about some good stuff. I wonder where that damn dog is. He’s got to be around here somewhere. Some where.
Stopping at a store for cigarettes, his head lolling out the window, pigskins to sober up on that were of the hot variety and made him drink more. He didn’t have to be home at any particular time, he was sure.
Just drive yonder way,
the boy kept saying.
Just drive yonder way.
He got it in his head that somebody had stolen the dog, or that the police might be holding him against his will. And there he was finally, standing not fifty yards from the tree Joe had hit, then loping, staying out of the road, where the cars whizzed by at sixty, even when they saw a man trying to get his dog by the side of the road.
You got more sense than I thought you had. Get back there. Lay down and behave. We going home right now.
The sun growing gentler and the evening light changing, going softer, touching the horizon beyond the road faintly blue, the clouds rolled up high in white masses steadily changing shapes. Once again roads that he knew or had been on if even briefly. Here the bridge where the man he had to hit with the rock.
You point the motherfucker out to me. I’ll settle his goddamn hash.
The same fat cows, the same lush grass. A doe
deer feeding among them now, little wild cousin with lespedeza hanging from her working mouth, the heartprint hooves. Both of them drunk now, a roady buzz that would linger for a while. Lights beginning to come on in London Hill, the storefront lit, a flashing glimpse of the old man standing under the naked bulb where it hung from a cord in the soot-stained ceiling.
I’ll drop you off if you’re ready to go.
They stopped and let the dog out. Joe held him and made Gary pet him and the dog accepted it and licked his hand. The broad tongue raspy, pink, wide. The creased forehead with its knots of tooth-marked scars.
Yeah, but all them dogs is dead. You better sober up a little before you go home. Oh? You ain’t ready to go home? Well, I could find some place else for us to go, yeah.
Late evening coming, little flocks of nine and ten doves sailing over the light wires or perched on the same with their feathers ruffled and squatting in deep composure. Meeting people with parking lights on, the air suffused with the smell of things living, the trees green and standing with their grapevines twisted about them and their roots knurled deep in the good earth. A warm late spring or early summer evening with the branches beginning to merge together, for things in the distance to grow less plain, finally until night fell and all the lights had to be turned on and the day was another event.