Joe (33 page)

“Yeah. It’s always been like that.”

Joe sat there for a moment longer and then he looked at the boy.

“I talked to your daddy a little while the other night. He said one of your sisters run off. Is that right?”

Gary was wiping the brush on a nearby pine tree. He nodded and stuck his cigarette in his mouth.

“Yeah. Fay took off. Shit, she’s been gone for a good while.”

“Where’d she go to, reckon?”

“No telling.”

“Y’all didn’t go look for her?”

“Naw.”

“Why not?”

He gave Joe a little smile, lifted his shoulders in a small gesture of fatalism.

“I don’t know.”

He sat looking at the boy, watched him while he poured a little
gas from a jug into a jar and put the brush in it and swished it around.

“She got mad at Daddy,” he said. “She didn’t like this place. Thought we’s gonna get in trouble staying here. You the first one that’s come around.”

“What y’all gonna do if the owner comes around and runs you off?”

“Move, I guess. I’m ready to go if you are.”

Joe waited just another moment.

“You ain’t missing none of your money, are you?”

“Not a bit. I’m ready to go if you are.”

The old truck was parked beside a new van, and Joe looked through the tinted windows, admiring the blue upholstery and the woodgrained paneling inside it.

“Boy, you could do you some crackin in this thing,” he said. Gary was standing beside him with his hands cupped around his face, looking with him.

“Hell fire. I could live in this thing,” he said. “Reckon how much it costs?”

Joe stood back and looked around.

“Shit. Probably about twenty thousand. You ready to go?”

“Yeah.”

“Let me walk over here and crank it up and see how much gas it’s got in it,” Joe said, and he pulled the keys out of his pocket and opened the door and got in. The motor turned over slowly and caught, then died. He sat there pumping the gas pedal.

“Always give it a little gas before you try to crank it,” he said.
The motor spun again and caught and he revved it up, little spurts of blue smoke coming from the tailpipe. The boy looked up and down the road in front of the auto dealership. Traffic was fairly heavy. He imagined the pedals under his feet and the wheel and the gearshift in his hands. Late afternoons of joyous tranquility on country roads with the radio playing, the girl beside him languishing on the seat, smoking a cigarette, her legs crossed, laughing with him. No more walking up and down the road.

Joe pulled on the handbrake and got out. The truck sat there shuddering and vibrating, idling with a rough stutter.

“You got plenty of gas to get home,” he said. “You might want to stop at John’s and put some more in it if you’re going to ride around some, though.”

The boy reached in his pocket and pulled out his money and held it out in a folded wad.

“Here,” he said.

Joe looked at it. “What’s that?”

“I got the money,” he said. “Count out what’s yours.”

“Hell, I ain’t worried about that. Just stick it back in your pocket. I got to find the title when I get home and sign it over to you anyway. You’ll have to get you some insurance. You know that, don’t you?”

“Insurance?”

“Yeah. It’s a law in Mississippi. Can’t drive without insurance. It’s got insurance on it now. It’s still in my name. After I sign it over to you it’s yours. I’ll show you what all you need to do sometime. Just come out to the house one day before long and we’ll
find the title and get it fixed up. I’m gonna go on. You gonna be all right?”

“Sure.”

“You want me to follow you?”

“Naw. I’ll be fine.”

“All right, then. I’ll see you later.”

He walked over to his new truck and got in and cranked it up and pulled out. Gary put his money in his pocket and went to his truck. The door was open and he got in and sat down, looking at everything. He knew that certain pedals had to be pushed. He’d watched Joe drive it over and over. He closed the door. It sat there idling. He stomped the clutch and threw it violently into reverse and let out on the clutch and it died. He pulled it back down into neutral. It cranked easily now that it was warmed up, but he choked it off three times before he noticed the lever sticking out beside his left knee. He unlocked it and pushed it in and managed to back the truck up three inches before he choked it off that time.

By the time he managed to back it out of the parking space, two salesmen from inside had come out, maybe to make sure he didn’t run over a new car on the lot. He could see them watching him and it made him nervous. He tested the brakes, jerking to a stop, then pulled it down into low and leaned far over the steering wheel and drove down the hill toward the road. He slammed it to a halt and let out on the clutch and it died again. He sat there cranking on it with one hand tight on the wheel. He looked both ways. Cars were coming both ways. He’d meant to watch Joe to see which way he went, but in all the excitement he’d forgotten to. He thought he might have gone left, so he turned his wheel to the left, too.
Cars were still whizzing by. He waited patiently for five minutes, until the road was completely clear, revved the engine up to a controlled screaming whine, and dumped the clutch. The truck shot out into the road and he cut the wheel so that the body slanted over on its springs and he missed second and then dropped it down into third, but it had plenty of torque by then and he went flying toward the first traffic light. Nobody had told him anything about that and he went through it on red. A new Firebird coming across squalled its tires and nosedived with smoke flying into a Volkswagen that had already been wrecked once. The boy weaved to the right and went around them, craning his neck to see. The drivers were looking at him and yelling inside their cars. He went on down the road. He made it through two yellows and one green, but at the next intersection cars were turning onto the street and he had to come to a complete stop. He wondered why the Firebird had come out of a side road like that and just plowed into another car. He felt a little better now, felt that he was starting to get the hang of it. He managed to glide to a fairly smooth halt and get it back down into low. As he sat there waiting and looking around, a police car with siren screaming and blue lights flashing came out of the pack of cars ahead and passed by him at fifty or so, gaining speed. The light turned green and he went on.

He turned the radio on low. The music was comforting, something low and sweet by a woman with a voice full of anguish. He had lots of plans, new clothes and a wash job for the truck, regular trips to the grocery store with his mother and sister in tow. No more walking to John Coleman’s. Just drive up there and have a
cold drink when he felt like it. Ice cream for little sister before it could melt.

He went halfway through town without incident and then, seeing a beer sign he recognized outside a store, he turned right suddenly without signaling. Somebody behind him blew a horn. He blew his in answer and drove on up to the store, parked and left it in neutral. He pulled out the handbrake, leaving the motor running.

Inside the store there was air-conditioned coolness. Five or six older black men were sitting around a table playing cards in the relative dimness of the rear of the building.

“Hey,” he said to everybody. Another old man was almost asleep behind the counter, propped in a high chair with his jaw in his hand. The coolers were on the far wall and the boy walked over and stood looking through the glass. All kinds of brands, all of it cold. He picked a brand that had a colorful label and opened the door and reached in and got a six-pack. He walked back up to the counter with it and set it down.

“I need some cigarettes, too,” he said, and started pulling his money out.

The black proprietor came awake groggily and looked at the beer and put his hand on it and looked at the register and blinked and yawned. He looked at the child standing before him and said: “What kind?”

“Winstons,” the boy said. “I need me about two packs, I reckon. And some matches, too.”

The storekeeper hit some buttons on the register and pulled the cigarettes out of a rack over his head and bent beneath the counter
for the matches. He pulled out a sack and put the beer in it and dropped the other stuff in on top.

“You ain’t workin for the man, is you?” he said. The boy stopped and looked at him.

“I used to,” he said. “I just bought his truck.” He pointed out the window. “See it out there? I got to wash it, though.”

The man shook his head.

“I think you could use you a new fender, too. Seven eighty.”

The police car went screaming back by as he walked out of the store with the sack in his hands. He wondered what all the excitement was about. Bank robbery maybe.

He drove out of town slowly, sipping happily on a cold beer, digging the music, the world as fine as he could remember it being in a lifetime.

There was a woman Joe saw sometimes who lived in a small community twenty miles south of London Hill, and he rode down there one Friday evening to see if she was home. She lived alone and she had a lot of money that she liked to spend on him. He never saw her out anywhere at all and she never mentioned other men, never called, never bothered him, was always glad to see him. Whenever he got with her they would drink for days and wind up in hotels in Nashville or Memphis or Jackson, Mississippi, ordering room service and driving her white Cadillac around and mixing drinks in the car.

The road to her house wound down through low hills and farms with ponds scattered throughout the green pastures. The evening he went, there were bats about and swifts coursing the coming night on their sharp-tailed wings. The earth lay doused in the cool of the approaching night and hay wagons with their loads of tiered green blocks churned slowly over the land with the helpers throwing the bales up. He breathed in the good scent of freshly mown fescue and slowly lifted a beer to his mouth.

The road was white stone and the tires sang slowly as he eased into the night. Silage barns stood in the distance and he saw a bobcat enter its run and disappear through the bordering bushes. Catfish ponds lay faintly green in the gloom, and on one bank, a farmer stood, throwing out feed by the handfuls.

The night moved in and he had to turn his parking lights on. He had to slow down once for a dog that was lying in the road. The dog got up grudgingly, it seemed, looking back over its shoulder as it walked to one side.

“That’s a good way to get run over,” he told the dog.

He sped up once he got on the state highway, his radio fading as he headed south. He changed to another station but it was no better. Finally he shut it off. He pulled his headlights on and the bugs swarmed in small knots ahead of him, blasting into the windshield and sticking there. The window was rolled down, his arm hanging out, and the wind was moving through his hair. The beer between his legs was empty so he pitched the bottle over the roof of the cab with a hard upward swing of his arm and looked back to see it sail into the ditch. He got another one from the cooler in the floor and twisted the top off, drank deeply and set it between his legs.

Near a small road sign that advertised a steak house he turned right and went slowly down a patched asphalt road where trailer homes and Jim Walter homes sat side by side, their yellow lights glowing, the people reduced to dim forms in the yards, tires hanging from scrubby trees with ropes. Just past this, kudzu lay solid on both sides of the road as far as the eye could see, claiming every hill, every light pole, every tree. Eventually it thinned away
and there were trailers once again. A mile past the last one a fine brick home sat back from the road, a long low structure with a well-kept yard and a white wooden fence that ran around all four sides of the property. He slowed and turned into the driveway, a gravel lane between pine trees whose limbs nearly brushed the sides of the truck. He crept down the driveway with the rocks crunching under the wheels. When he came out of the trees there was no car in the carport and no lights on in the house. He stopped.

“Well shit,” he said. He sat there looking for a moment, knowing he should have called first. It was nearly dark. He shoved the gearshift up in park and got out, walked up the little brick pathway, looking at the flowers she had planted there, and stepped up on the small stoop and knocked on the door. From somewhere came the faraway yap of dogs. He knocked again and then turned and went back to the truck and got in and turned around in front of the house and went back out the driveway. A car was coming down the road, slowing as it passed him. A man was driving, with a woman sitting beside him, and they looked him over as they went past. He didn’t wave. He turned the wheel and lifted the beer to his lips and drove quickly back to the state highway and turned the wheel east, toward Lee County, toward Tupelo and a bigger city and more bars and more policemen available to get after him. Knowing it as he sped that way, not really caring.

Full darkness descended and he kept drinking, tossing the bottles out over the roof and reaching for fresh ones in the floor. Later he stopped at a liquor store just inside Tupelo and bought a bottle of Crown Royal and checked in at the Trace Hall and pocketed the key without going to the room and got back in the truck and drove
to a honky-tonk a few miles away. He hid his pistol under the seat and locked his truck. A sign outside the door promised the appearance of George Jones but he doubted it.