Joe (7 page)

“What if he comes back?”

“He ain’t comin back. It’s dinnertime.”

“He might, though. He might come back after while to see if we still here.”

“You hear what I said?”

“Yeah.”

“Then do like I told you.”

“We done got just about all the cans,” he said, but he was already climbing back up through the door.

A pattern emerged, one they discovered by employing a system of regular reconnaissance. The Dumpsters were emptied on Tuesdays and Fridays, which left the other five days of the week for harvesting the depths of them. They changed their salvage operations to night, covered safely by the cloak of darkness. Parts of each day were given over to walking along the sides of the highways, the boy down in the ditches throwing the cans up onto the road, the old man shuffling along and stuffing the sack. Often he would have to sit down and rest, and the boy would range far ahead and come back with his arms laden and his own sack full. They dumped the cans in a pile beside the house, and they would stand sometimes and quietly contemplate their growing wealth.

The old man made a trip to town one day, hitching a ride with a farmer who was going to the feed mill in a pickup. The farmer had a load of shelled corn, big sacks of it that swirled chaff into the face of the rider where he sat nodding in the back end.

When the truck stopped, he roused himself and got out in front of a barnlike building, its walls patched over with roofing tin and Purina signs. A rutted parking lot of gravel was littered with rusted farm implements, their moving parts frozen solid with corrosion and decorated with ten or fifteen cats. He climbed down from the back as the farmer came around.

“I sure thank you for the ride,” he said. “Is it much further to town?”

The farmer was a man in denim pants and a T-shirt, a busy man hurrying toward his feed. “It’s bout a mile,” he said, pointing up the road with his chin.

Wade nodded. He looked, his eyes taking in the searing strip of asphalt lined with trees standing still under no breath of air and the sun overhead like a white coin in the sky. The farmer started lifting the sacks out and handing them across to a black man who had come silently from the depths of the shadows inside the building pushing a heavy two-wheeled cart.

“Well, listen,” Wade said. He put a somber look on his face. The farmer in the truck stopped with both hands on the sewn ears of a sack and regarded him, the muscles in his forearms standing up like little ropes.

“You couldn’t loan me a dollar or two, could you? I got a sick youngun at home and I done called about the medicine. They said it was five dollars and somethin and I ain’t got but four dollars.”

“A dollar?”

“Yessir. A dollar or two. I hate to ask you after I done caught a ride and all with you but she sure needs that medicine.” He had one hand on the sideboards of the truck and his upturned face looked weak and ashamed.

“Why, hell,” the farmer said, and looked ashamed himself. “Feller, I don’t even know you.”

“That’s all right,” the old man said quickly. “That’s okay. I thank you for the ride anyway.” He turned away and had taken but three steps when the farmer called out to him.

“Hey. Wait a minute.”

He turned. “Yessir,” he said. Waiting.

“Hell. Come back here a minute. You didn’t say nothin about you had a sick youngun.”

Wade scuffed his shoes among the little stones.

“I just hated to,” he said. “You’s good enough to give me a ride and all. I hated to ask you for anything else.”

The farmer in the truck and the black man on the dock were watching him. The black man pulled the cart back and turned it and pushed it away into the dim stacks of feed and disappeared. The farmer got down from the truck and dusted his hands off. He approached his rider with a hurt look, his eyes downcast.

“Is she bad sick?” he said.

“Well. She stays sick pretty much. Been sick all her life.”

The farmer nodded and rubbed his chin with a finger.

“How old is she?”

“She’s four years old. Course the doctor’s always sayin he’s surprised she’s lived this long. They said at first she would never live this long.” He lifted his head and looked off into the distance, shaking his head slightly in awe. “She don’t never complain, though. Just to look at her you’d never think they’s nothin wrong with her.”

“Well, Lord,” the farmer said softly. “I got a granddaughter four years old.” He had one hand in his back pocket and one hand rubbing his lower lip in indecision. It didn’t take him long. He pulled out his billfold and opened it. He took some money out and thrust it at the old man as if it were burning his fingers.

“Take this,” he said. “She might need somethin else.”

Wade didn’t look at the money but shook his head firmly. “I couldn’t take that,” he said. “I
can’t
take that.”

The farmer shook the money at him. “Go on,” he said. “Hell fire. Take it.”

“I sure hate to, mister. You done been so good already.”

The farmer walked close and stuffed the money down in the old man’s pocket. Wade stood with his head down, shaking it. He did that for about a minute. Then he turned and took five steps and stopped and looked back. The farmer was standing in the gravel watching him, his face touched with compassion or maybe something else.

“I got a bunch of stuff to do here or I’d carry you on into town,” he said, and he seemed still ashamed. “But if I’m here when you come back by I’ll be proud to give you a ride back home.”

“I thank you,” Wade said. “I reckon I better get on uptown and see about that medicine.”

“Well. I hope your youngun gets all right,” the farmer said softly.

The old man nodded and walked away.

In the air-conditioned cool of the supermarket he plucked a small bunch of grapes from the produce stand and had them all in his mouth by the time he got to the peanut butter. Squatting against the shining jars of jelly, he worked his mouth stealthily, firing the seeds down between his feet into a razored-open carton that he pulled from beneath the shelves. He went up front and got a cart and loaded the little section in the rear with dented cans of Vienna sausage and purple hull peas from a crate of damaged goods marked
down to quarter price. He was a careful shopper, a bargain hunter adding figures in his head, carrying the ones. Like a blank-eyed countryman, he stopped in the middle of the aisle with his face up, as if the computations he performed so swiftly in his mind were written on the ceiling panels. He paused beside the dairy case, idly inspecting the merchandise, noting with disbelief the price of real butter. When no one was looking he opened a plastic half-pint of grape juice from the shelf and poured it down his throat, placing the empty carton behind the full ones. A few feet away, a boy in a green apron came pushing out from the double metal doors that led to the back. He got a quick glimpse of baled flour tiered to the roof, dog food on skids, block walls against which pallets of beer and soft drinks were neatly arrayed. He pushed his cart down to the meat case and examined the chickens and pork chops. Leg quarters were on sale for twenty-nine cents a pound but he passed them by. He picked up a package of sliced smoked picnic ham, the meat so brown and delicately marbled, the cooked hub of sawn bone in the middle. It was $6.97 for eight slices. He dropped it in his cart. Through the glass he could see a great hanging side of beef on a hook and butchers at work around tables. There was a button to summon the meatcutters set into the front of the case, and he pushed his cart down to it and pressed it with his finger, watching them. Heads looked up, looked back down. A young black man with a white paper cap on his head stared at him with thinly veiled disgust and wiped his hands on a paper towel before coming out to the front. He bent over the meat case and rearranged sirloin steaks and chuck roasts as he worked his way down to this customer.

“Can I help you,” the butcher said, when he stopped in front of Wade.

“Y’all got any meat scraps?” Wade said.

“Meat scraps?” He looked out from under his cap, his hands moving busily and with trained efficiency over his goods. He stopped and rested his forearms over the back of the case and looked up the aisle.

“Yeah. Just some old bones or meat scraps for dogs. You got scraps to throw out, don’t you?”

The butcher shook his head and he didn’t look happy. “I don’t know how much we got. Have to go back in the back and see. Ain’t cut much today.”

“I want some if you got some,” Wade said. “I got some dogs at home.”

“Well, we kinda busy,” the butcher said. “I can go look when I get through with what I’m doin.” Then while he shuffled the meat he mumbled about his own dogs and his daddy and his daddy’s dogs, the full meaning of which Wade couldn’t understand.

“Well, where’s the manager?” Wade said. “I’ll go ask him.” He started looking around wildly.

The black man stood erect quickly. “Naw,” he said. “Naw, don’t go ask him. Hell, I’ll go get it.” He turned away and started toward the back.

“Y’all got a bathroom around here?”

The butcher pushed open one of the doors and jerked his thumb to the right. “Round back.”

“Y’all care for me usin it?”

“Help yourself.” He banged the doors when he went through.

The old man left his cart in the detergent aisle and stepped quietly through the swinging doors. He didn’t see anybody back there among the cardboard boxes of ruined lettuce and black bananas, wet mops, sacks of potatoes, spilled cat litter. There were two massive white doors on the left. He walked all the way to the back of the room and looked to the right. He saw the door marked
Men.
The door was open and the light was off. He jerked his head left as the butcher came through with a box on his shoulder and went into the rear of the meat market, saying soft motherfuckers to himself. Wade went to the double doors and looked back out, toward the front. There was nobody out there. He knelt by the second freezer door and felt of the Miller tallboys stacked next to the white frost that oozed from the bad gasket at the lower corner of the door and crept across the floor, up the sides of the cans like a fungus. They were cold as ice, sweating thin beads of condensation. He took two from the plastic template that bound them and put in each pocket the champagne of bottled beer, then rose and made his way to the bathroom, where he turned on the light and locked the door.

When he emerged, belching, ten minutes later, he’d smoked two cigarettes in utter comfort and buried the empty cans in the trash bucket beneath wads of toilet paper he’d taken off the roll and stuffed in there. He retrieved his cart from the aisle and went down to the meat case. The same butcher looked up and saw him before he could press the button again. He came out of the meat market with a large cardboard box, marked on the side in heavy pencil
NO CHARGE.

“Here,” he said, and handed it across. It was a heavy box, the
sides bulging. Wade just barely got it in his cart. He opened the flaps and looked inside. Bonemeal and bad briskets and the pink tails of pigs. He nodded.

“All right,” he said, but the butcher had gone back inside. He glared as Wade pushed his cart away, then swung his meat cleaver down to the block with a vengeance.

Pork and beans were on sale, four cans for a dollar. A dozen went into his cart, along with two loaves of the cheapest bread. When he turned into the beer aisle he’d spent all he was going to on food.

He stopped and mentally added up his purchases. He considered the weight of his goods. Displays of beer were lined up on both sides of the aisle, the shelves stacked with many different brands. He ignored the imported and went straight for the domestic. Budweiser was $3.19 a six-pack for twelve ounce. Shit, he thought. He looked at a twelver to see if he could cut the cost. It was $5.99.

“Thirty-nine cents,” he said, and a woman standing next to him jerked and looked at him and moved away. Busch was a little better at $2.98 but still he shook his head. The Old Milwaukee in cans was the best comparable buy he could see at $2.49 for fourteen ounces. But then he saw twelve-ounce bottles for $2.09. He stood there in a dilemma for three or four minutes trying to figure. For a fleeting moment he considered putting some of the bread back. Then he thought about the pork and beans. He was looking back and forth from his cart to the beer. And then he realized that he hadn’t even considered cigarettes.

“Shit,”
he whispered. A boy sweeping the aisle was trying to sweep around him.

“What’s the cheapest beer y’all got?” Wade asked him. The boy stopped and scratched his head. He looked around as if seeing it for the first time, since, in fact, he was.

“I don’t know,” he said.

“Well, see if you can help me. You got anything cheapern this Old Milwaukee? It’s two forty-nine.”

The boy went from display to display, checking prices.

“I guess we got this here,” he said, tapping a stack of quarts. “It’s sixty-nine cents.”

Wade eyed it doubtfully. “What’s that shit?” he said.

“Says. Misterbrow. Somethin.”