Lucky Strikes (24 page)

“Morning, Mrs. Blevins. My name is—”

“I know who you are.”

We looked at each other a good long time.

“Is Mr. Blevins around?”

“I believe he is.”

“Would it be okay if I spoke to him?”

She cast her eyes down at her own feet. She was wearing red mules with ostrich feathers.

“Come in,” she said helplessly.

The foyer had a chandelier so low, I had to duck to get under it.

“Bohemian crystal,” said Mrs. Harley Blevins.

“That so?”

“The floorboards are Virginia pine.” She started toward the back of the house, her mules dragging after her. “That tapestry is in the Aubusson style. You might also notice the china doorknobs. They're straight from Dresden. This here spiral staircase was custom designed by noted local architect Howard Baybury.”

On and on she went, like the world's most bored-ass tour guide.

“The desk is made of red oak. It's called a secretary desk, and it's got itself a roll top, see? Now over here, be sure to notice the pocket doors. So called because they slide into the wall like they're sliding into somebody's pocket.…”

“Hey, Mrs. Blevins, I'm real sorry. I gotta get back to the station soon.”

Her eyes swung back down to her shoes. Then she crooked her thumb toward the back of the house. “Past the kitchen and to your right,” she said faintly.

“Thank you.”

When I looked back, she was still there. Her thumb hovering in the air.

“Well, now,” said Harley Blevins, rising up from his leather chair. “What a surprise. Lord, now, get yourself a seat. No, no, not that one, take the wing chair. More comfy on the old can, know what I mean?”

It weren't even a proper office, you must know. More like a sunroom, only with heavy drapes thrown up where all the light would've been and, instead of rattan and wicker, leather and chintz and a desk half the size of the room.

And on every wall, framed photos. Pretty much the same picture. Harley Blevins standing in front of some service station, shaking hands with some Standard Oil goon. The same smile, the same vulcanized-rubber bow tie, the same seersucker suit, the same straw boater, the same peppermint-stripe shirts. You could've cut and pasted him from one frame to the next, and no one'd have been the wiser.

And here he sat now, in the very same clothes, his hands joined at the back of his head, his patent-leather shoes (shiny as the day they was born) propped on the edge of his desk.

“How many windows you planning to shoot out before you're done?” I asked.

“I'm afraid I don't know what you're alludin' to. I was fast asleep all night, and I sleep sound, girl.”

“One of your relations, then.”

A smile played at the corner of his mouth. “Are you adverting to poor ol' Dudley? I got news for you, he ain't got the stomach for certain jobs.”

I give a little nod.

“That thing you wrote 'bout Mama was low. Even for you.”

“And once more, Melia, I must insist I was asleep when that—”

“Thing is, if Mama really
had
been a slut, you wouldn't be hating on her now. No, sir, if she'd have sat with you in the backseat of your Chevy Eagle—like you was always asking her to—I bet you'd be calling her a Christian woman.”

He got out of his seat real slow. Walked round to the other side of his desk and laid one of his hands on my knee.

“Still got room in that backseat,” he said.

If I hadn't seen his eyeballs flick, I'd of never known there was someone behind me. I swung my head round and found Mrs. Harley Blevins standing in the doorway with a tray. Two glasses and a pitcher of lemonade, with six lemon slices floating on top.

“Figured y'all might be parched,” she said in a tight voice.

“You know what I'm parched for?” her husband said. “Some goddamned privacy. If it's all the same to you.”

She stooped and set the tray on the floor.

“Hey!” Harley called after her. “Miss Elephant Ears? Why don't you shut that damn door after you? Let the grown-ups talk a little.”

That door closed like a whisper. I peeled his fingers off my knee, one by one.

“Lemonade,” he muttered. “Christ.”

He walked to his liquor cabinet and pulled out a bottle of Bell's Royal Reserve. Poured about two inches into a cut-glass tumbler.

“You tell me this, Melia. If your mama weren't a little hot in the pants, how'd she convince Old Man Congreve to sell her that gas station in the first place?”

Very slowly, I poured myself a glass of lemonade.

“She listened,” I said.

“Like hell.”

I took a long swig, passed a palm over my mouth. “God's truth, Mama didn't have nary a design on that place. We was just driving on through—on the way to trout fishing—and coming down Route Fifty-Five, we see this sad ol' gas station. Sad ol' coot sitting in front, looking like he was serving forty years in Sing Sing. Our tank was three-quarters full, but Mama didn't care, she pulled right on over, asked him to fill it up. And being how she was, she couldn't help but talk the feller up. Turned out he had a daughter in Blacksburg, you know that?”

“Can't say as I did.”

“His dearest wish was to spend his final years with that there daughter. Only problem was, he couldn't afford to move lest he sold the station, and the place was in such bad shape nobody wanted to buy it. 'Cept for … oh, how'd he put it?… some crawly old varmint.”

Harley Blevins saluted me with his glass.

“Well,” I said, “that's when the idea first come over Mama. The way she figured it, me and her was good at fixing cars. She had some money left over from her aunt Dot. No kinfolk to tie her down in Cumberland. So why the hell not?” I finished off the lemonade in three more gulps. “Deal was done in ten minutes, and all it took was listening to some lonesome old cuss by the side of the road.”

Harley Blevins give his whiskey a twirl. “That is an inspiring tale, Miss Melia. You wanna know what I was doing at your age?”

“Something evil.”

“You're right about that. I was three miles under God's earth. Digging coal for eighty cents a day in the Mill Creek seam.”

“Just like Dudley's daddy.”

“He tell you 'bout that, huh? Well, the difference between me and my brother was he couldn't see himself no place else and I could. Some days that was all I could see.
Else.
So, soon as I turned sixteen, I hit the road. No prospects, not even two pennies to rub together. Just an itch to be gone.

“Oh, you can bet I took just about any job I could find. But the whole time I was—I was trying to see
through
, know what I mean? Which way was the world tending? Sometimes I'd just stop whatever it was I was doing and look
around
. Waiting for a sign.

“Well, one day I was hitching me a ride out of Harrisonburg when this old Pierce-Arrow come flying past me. Didn't stop, of course, the Pierce-Arrows never did, but I stood there thinking,
Harley, what does this world get more and more of each passing day?
Why, automobiles, that's what. And what's gonna make those beauties run to the end of time? Petroleum. Whoever can get ahold of that—front or back end—they's gonna have dollar bills coming out their assholes.”

He set his glass on his leather desk pad.

“Well, I found me a station right off. It was this little ol' gas shanty over in Cedarville. Real shithole, just tar paper on some metal sheeting. Nozzles half coming off the pumps. It was a good location, though, right off Winchester Pike, and I
knew
, with a little fixing up, I could make the place fly. Trouble was I didn't have no damned capital. But there was a feller in town who did. Funeral director, if you can credit it, and he had himself a daughter. 'Course she weren't too pretty—nor bright—but she sure was sweet on me.”

His hand curled round his glass, lifted it back to his lips.

“Now, I don't mind confessing it, Melia. In those days, I was a sinner. A heathenish wretch. But I got down on my knees and I said, ‘
Tell you what, Lord. You get this girl to marry me, you get her old man to lay out the bucks for this here station, you make all that happen for ol' Harley, and I'll pay you back, I swear.
'

“I was a man of my word, too. First year I turned a profit, I give back one-tenth to the church. Every time I bought another station, I put another chunk in the collection plate. And when the men in wool suits and neckties come from Standard Oil…” With a light smile, his eyes danced toward the photos on the wall. “Yes, ma'am, when they come a-calling, asking if I wanted me a wool suit and necktie of my own—why, that very next day, I put in another chunk. 'Cause the thing about God, Melia? He's a man of business. You honor your end, He honors His.”

He cinched up his lips.

“And then you and your mama come along. Couldn't hardly believe my eyes when I first laid eyes on you. Little bitty things mixing it up with truck drivers. When y'all put up that grave marker for a sign, I swear I near bust a gut laughing. I said to myself,
Harley, you just hold out for a year, they'll be blowing out of here like cottonwood puffs
. But y'all hung on. Spite of everything.

“Oh, I know I should be the first to congratulate you, Melia—no, I
should
—but you just stick in my craw. You do. See, me and God had us a working relationship, and you got in the middle of it. You stole my customers. You made me look like a fool in my own town. You even turned my nephew against me.”

“That's news to me,” I said.

“And you wanna know the worst part?” He was smiling now, but just with his lips. “You even made me question my faith. ‘Cause when the Lord ain't living up to His end of the deal no more, a churchgoing man starts to wonder. He does.”

“Maybe God weren't never on your side in the first place,” I said. “Maybe he ain't on nobody's.”

“Now that is a sinful thing to say, Melia Hoyle. It is sinful, and it is mistaken, 'cause what I concluded? All
this
,” he said, sketching a circle round me, “this is just the Lord's way of testing me. He knew things was coming too easy for me. I was getting a little … ha!” He grabbed some flesh round his belt. “A little prosperous, yeah! A little
soft
, needed me some hardening up. That's why the Lord brung you into my life.”

He brought his glass to his lips, realized there was nothing left in it, set it back down.

“I'll give you ten thousand dollars,” he said. “For the station and the store and that thing you call a house. That's more than anyone else in God's creation'd give you.”

I closed my eyes.

“Think what you could do with that money, Melia. You could quit busting your ass eighteen hours a day. Send Earle to college. Put Janey in some pretty dresses.” A light pause. “As for that so-called daddy of yours, you could set him up with all the hooch he can handle. Buy him his own distillery, why don't you?”

“He don't drink.”

“My error.”

I unshut my eyes. Harley Blevins was staring straight at me.

“You hold on to that there station, Melia, it'll bury you. You let go, you walk away the richest girl in the Blue Ridge. What's it gonna be?”

I stared at the glass in my hand. Then I set it on Harley Blevins's mahogany desk. Watched the ring of sweat well up from underneath.

“It's no,” I said. “It's even
more
no than the last time you asked.”

He set there a long time. “How come you always do just what I expect you to?” he said.

He opened his desk drawer and pulled out a brown kraft envelope. Unwound the string and tossed it to me.

Inside was a stack of pictures, maybe ten or twelve. Nothing like the ones on Harley Blevins's wall. No, sir, each picture had but the one man in it, and he didn't look pleased to get his picture took. Nobody was shaking his hand. He was all alone, looking frontward, then sideward, with dull, heavy, lost eyes.

And in every picture, one of those eyes was skewing out of its orbit.

Name    
WATTS Hiram John

Aliases    
None

Born    
1889
        Trade    
Laborer
        Comp    
Fresh

Marks    
Lazy left eye

“I gotta admit,” said Harley Blevins, “that boy made it too easy on me. Never once gave 'em a phony name.”

My head weren't clear, 'cause all I could think in that moment was somebody must've liked Hiram a whole bunch to snap so many shots of him.

Only it wasn't just the photos. It was the words at the bottom.

MO, etc.
    Larceny

On it went, page after page.

Larceny, House, Public House-breaking

Larceny, Shop and Warehousebreaking

Shop and Club Housebreaking

Officebreaking

Burglary

Larceny, Shop, Officebreaking

And sometimes, tucked at the bottom of each sheet, an extra detail or two.

Begs in residential areas and breaks into houses he finds

unoccupied.

Gains access by means of bodily pressure.

Forces lock.

Breaks window in rear of premises.

Breaks public houses in afternoon.

Uses various methods of entry.

The words got fuzzier the more I looked at 'em…'cept for the two words that appeared at the end of near every page. They stood out just fine.

Works alone.

And two more words, on the very last page.

Often inebriated.

Now, I'd seen a million mug shots in my day. On post-office walls or train-station corkboards. Hung up outside taverns, glued to telephone poles. I'd pass 'em by without another look. This was the first time they ever looked back at me.