Lucky Strikes (20 page)

“Oh, hold on. I meant unpleasant.” He give his glass a light swirl. “It seems they've uncovered your birth certificate. The original.”

I stared down at my ankles. Watched them cross and uncross.

“Well, so what? Who cares?”

“Just to be clear, Melia, the Warren County Juvenile Court now has two birth certificates in their possession. One claims that Hiram's your father, the other claims nobody is. Our good civil servants will likely conclude that one of those documents is a forgery. Experience and plain old common sense will tell them it's the one that appeared out of thin air.”

“Experience and sense. They ain't proof.”

“How about we call it a headache and leave it there?”

“I can take headache. I can take it for … six years and four months. What do you think, Chester? Can we hold out till I'm twenty-one?”

He tipped his head to one side, half shut his eyes. “I think we'll be in court before this year is out. And if I still have a law license by this time next year, I'll be politely surprised.”

“We can get through this, Chester.”

“I don't see that we have any other choice.”

Off in the distance, Earle was sawing off the end of a two-by-four, and Janey was pounding a nail into submission, and Hiram was wandering between them, bending now and then to pass on words of instruction.

“Maybe there's another way out of this,” I said. “Supposing we make Hiram an honest-to-God daddy.”

“Whoa, now.”

“I mean, we been calling him that long enough, it's kinda starting to stick.”

“You mean have him adopt you? All three of you?”

“Well, why the hell not? Wouldn't that keep the dogs off us?”

He looked at me. “So you're thinking Hiram's here to stay.”

“Don't it look like it?”

Chester raised his glass to his lips, took a tiny sip, and set the glass back down on his thigh.

“The judge would have to sign off,” he said.

“Well, that's where you come in.”

“It's not that simple, Melia. They'd have to ask questions. Conduct an investigation.”

“What for?”

“To make sure he'd be a fit guardian.” Chester paused just a fraction of a second. “And to see if he was guilty of any criminal activity.”

I stared at him so hard he actually wiped his brow.

“You know something I don't?” I asked.

“I don't know anything. Neither do you.”

I frowned, stretched out my legs. “When you say
activity
, you mean like what? Like being a vagrant or something?”

“Trespassing. Assault and battery. Theft. Uh,
fraud
.”

We was quiet.

“It's the kind of thing they'd look into,” said Chester.

But he sold hats to ladies in San Francisco. And made up ads for J. Walter Thompson. And met Clark Gable and learned how to cook from Yan Sing and …

And was any of it true? When it come right down to it, what the hell did I know about Mr. Hiram Watts?

All I could say for sure was that, a couple months ago, he'd been a bum. No different from any of the millions of others riding the rails and roads. He might've been living that way for years, and if that were so, then what had he needed to do to stay alive? How many scrapes did he fight his way out of? How many jail cells did he see the inside of?

And how much of
any
of that did I really care to know? It was like Mama used to say:
If'n you don't like the sight of worms, you'd best not turn over any rocks
.

So I set there a while longer, watching Hiram and Janey and Earle bang that porte cochere into shape.

“Know what, Chester? Forget I spoke.”

 

Chapter

NINETEEN

Now, I can't say for sure if it was on account of Hiram, but by the end of the summer, Brenda's Oasis was starting to do a little bit of okay. Oh, we was still up to our assholes in debt, but for the first time ever, the ground was rising beneath us.

Bills was getting paid, debts whittled … hope planted. I could see it in Earle's step, when he went sprinting out to greet a car. I could see it in our customers. Drivers who, in days of old, would've hurried past us without a second look—they was stopping now. Saying things like “How you?” and “Nice day overhead” and “Living good as common.” They was greens peddlers and hog farmers and shoe-store clerks. Firemen and laundresses. Schoolteachers. Drill instructors.

They come every hour of every day, in every manner of jalopy and wagon and coupe. So many of 'em, at times I couldn't keep their faces straight. But Hiram could. Their names, too. Jobs and hobbies. Every vanity and earthly desire.

“Farmer Stokes! Got a new shipment of Prince William snuff just for you.… Say now, Floyd, how'd the missus like those glacé cherries I sent you home with?… Why, as I live and breathe, it's Ella Preston! Got your Schweppes Lemon Squash waiting for you at the bottom of the icebox. Colder than a polar bear … Why, Mrs. Grubbs, there's some fresh strawberries on sale, and it just so happens they remind me of your complexion, that's no lie.…”

Frances Bean got to be quite the regular. So did Mrs. Hicks and Mrs. McGuilkin. Basil Buckner said Hiram's coffee couldn't be beat this side of the Shenandoah, and every time Minnie-Cora Harper started seeing a new feller, first thing she'd do was bring him round for Hiram to look over.

“Well, this one looks most promising,” he'd tell her. “Boy's got a good head on his shoulders. And Lord, is he smitten!”

Now, at the risk of bragging on myself, it wasn't all Hiram keeping us afloat. One morning, we got a visit from the mayor of Walnut Ridge. Big red-throated gingery feller, ready to tear out the few wisps of hair he had.

“My damn brakes won't quit squeaking!”

All it took me was five minutes with castor oil and an old paintbrush, and those brakes was quiet as a queen's fart. Mayor shook his head and said, “Young lady, you live up to your reputation.”

From then on, he was a regular, and I knew our luck had turned for real when Pastor Goolsby did us the favor of stopping in.

“Melia,” he said, “my engine keeps shutting off when I least expect it. I'm in mortal peril every second.”

“Is it shutting off quick or slow?” I asked.

“Quick.”

“What'd the other mechanics say?”

“The other—”

“Harley Blevins's boys.”

His cheeks colored. “They kept telling me it was jammed. Bled me for a new gear key, but it didn't change a thing.”

I was back a half hour later.

“Engine was jammed,” I said. “But it weren't no gear key, it was the connecting rod bearer.”

“You sure on that?”

“Tell you what—you drive it around a few days. If it shuts itself off even once, you don't owe me a red cent.”

Well, next week, who should come driving in but the good pastor?

“Melia Hoyle,” he said, “the Lord must be working through you.”

“That'll be three dollars and seventy-five cents.”

From then on, Pastor Goolsby was a regular, too.

*   *   *

So against any betting man's odds, Brenda's Oasis was hanging on.

Business had got to the point that Hiram and me could talk about staying open an hour later. Hiring extra help in the fall when Janey and Earle went back to school. Buying us a tow truck.

We could talk about plate-glass windows.

And maybe it was the
wishing
that finally brought Harley Blevins out of hiding.

He started small at first. Trash cans turned over. Gas nozzles left dangling. Shaving cream on the windshield of our truck.

Then it started to build. Newspaper stuffed in the men's toilet. Chewing gum wadded into the coin slot of our pay phone. An old rocker swiped off the front porch of our house.

Then one of our gas hoses was slashed—slashed so fine we didn't even know it'd happened till the gas was flowing.

Hiram insisted on calling in the police, but the deputy who come by just lowered his chin to his chest and said, “I don't rightly see what we can do for y'all.”

“How 'bout you tell your boy Harley there to—”

But Hiram was already cutting me off. “Maybe you could swing a cruiser by every hour or so. Just to let them know they're being watched.”

“Can't promise every hour. We got a heap of ground to cover, Mr. Watts.”

“Whenever you can, then.”

The next couple nights was quiet. Then, Saturday morning, I come out to find the door to the service bay jimmied open, and ten new whitewall tires laying all over the ground. Each and every one of them slashed.

“Looks like we've got ten new tire swings,” said Hiram.

“At sixty bucks a swing,” I said, hocking spit on the ground.

That afternoon, Hiram drove into Front Royal to buy a heavy-duty padlock and a length of chain. While he was gone, Harley Blevins come driving on by in his butternut Chevy Eagle. Slowed the car to a halt, then pushed his head out the open window and looked at me straight on. Tipped his hat and drove away.

That night, over dinner, Earle said, “Ain't none of this'd happen if we had us a dog.”

“Oh, don't start,” I said. “Dog's just one more mouth to feed.”

“It'd earn its food ten times over,” said Hiram, “if it saved us the cost of new whitewalls.”

“Well, maybe if everybody here didn't sleep like the dead, we wouldn't need us a watchdog.”

“It's a wonder we sleep at all,” said Janey, “you snoring like an alligator.”

“I'd sooner have an alligator than a mangy old fleabag.”

Looking back on it, I should've just fessed up. Me and dogs'd never really taken to each other. I weren't feared of them, exactly, I just didn't cotton to 'em, and I took it kinda amiss when they come at me with their nose or tongue. If the universe could've brought me a dog I didn't have to wipe off me ten times a day, I'd have given it a thought.

“Never mind the pooch,” I said. “I'm gonna take care of this problem by myself. You wait and see.”

Well, that very Sunday, we put up the porte cochere. I'd figured it for a five-hour job, but Hiram had everything measured so careful, it went up like incense. The posts, the roof, the arches … all sliding into place so sweet, you'd think they'd been searching for each other all their lives.

'Course Hiram kept fussing. Repainted some of the trim and checked the angle of the gutters and taped the joints and beveled the molding. But from the second we pushed it toward the sky, that porte cochere was one of the finest works I'd ever set eyes on. Every so often Hiram would step back and let his face go slack with wonder.

I thought,
Harley Blevins is gonna take this, too
.

Hiram went to bed early that night, and Janey and Earle, they wasn't far behind. Me, I got a pillow and a blanket and went outside and laid down on the porch swing. Brought the Rayovac flashlight with me, plus an old police whistle.

I laid there a long time, squinting into the darkness. After two or three hours, my eyes got so tired, all the stars took to wheeling like fireflies. Had to roll down my lids to make it stop, and I guess I must've closed them too hard 'cause I went right off. Woke up with a wheeze and a cough right at the pitch of dawn.

The sun was just starting to dribble down, and off in the distance, some cows was grousing, and a mockingbird was getting sassy. I tiptoed out toward the porte cochere, flashing my Rayovac, but the daylight was already swallowing it, so I set it on the ground and kept walking till I was standing under the porte cochere.

Still here
, I thought, leaning my hand against one of the columns.

Only the hand wouldn't pull away right off. I looked down at my palm and saw a strange smear of black. Dipped my finger in it and raised it to my mouth.

Tar.

From there, all I had to do was take three steps back to see the tar was everywhere. Every column, every arch, every molding. Staining every last stretch of white.

And there, on the column just beneath the Brenda's Oasis sign, a message.

BRENDA = SLUUT

To this day, I can't rightly say if they spelled the word wrong or just meant to drag it out a little.
Sluuuuut.
Or else it was too dark to see what they were doing.

The police whistle was still wrapped round my neck on a chain. I raised it to my mouth, but no air would come out. I believe it was still hanging off my lower lip when Hiram come walking toward me. He told me later that, as he folded his arms round me, I kept saying the same thing.

“I'm sorry.… I'm sorry.…”

 

Chapter

TWENTY

If I can learn you one thing about tar, it's this. Don't try to paint over it.

Not on a summer morning when the mercury on the shop window's already reading eighty-seven. Tar don't want to be covered up, it wants to bubble and ooze. Throw a brush at it, and it'll just grab on.

Only thing you can do, really, is cool it down with ice till it gets brittle. Then scrape off what you can. Cool it down some more. Scrape some more. Then rub in some Wesson oil, real hard, till the last specks is gone. It ain't the work of a few minutes, believe you me, and here it was Monday morning and the first truckers half an hour off.

“Unless my eyes deceive me,” said Hiram, “it was just the columns that got hit.”

“So what?”

“So grab all the tarps you can find from the garage. I'll grab some rope. We're going to wrap these columns up but good.”

“Supposing somebody asks what's underneath.”

“Tell them it's a
surprise
.”

Well, off we went, the two of us, and it were that very morning that Earle Hoyle decided to wake his damn self up. Guess he couldn't live another second till he'd shared that porte cochere with humanity. So he come running on out, eyes sprung wide. It's the one time I was ever sorry he could read.