Men in the Making (14 page)

"Privacy?" Garrett says, fishing what's left of the six-pack from off the floorboards. "When you want privacy with Glenda, tell me something, you generally haul her out here to the side of the highway?"

Garrett's the kind of man who does more talking than thinking. Just this week, when one of these shirt-and-tie reporters who've come nosing around since the murder asked Garrett if he thought Jasper was a racist town, old Garrett looked into the camera and spit between his teeth. "Hell, no," he said. "We done elected blue-gums both as mayor and sheriff. Now what's that tell you?" Even so, Garrett every now and again makes good plain sense, so as crossways as it seems to be sitting on the side of the highway watching these dogs ravage one another, I've got to give the man his due. I crumple my empty and crack open a new can.

"Attaboy," says Garrett. "We ain't going nowhere. This is something you don't get to see but once, if ever, and we're gonna just sit right here and drink a cold beer and see it."

 

Afterward, on the way home, we decide we'd rather be drunk early than clean. We're halfway there as it is, and Conway Twitty's on the radio singing about whiskey and women and hasn't once yet mentioned a shower or soap, so there's maybe one of those subliminal messages working on account of that. Besides, the way all these reporters have been jammed into Slyder's Saloon since those sick bastards dragged Mr. Byrd down a rutted road until there wasn't anything left to drag, we figure we'd best get there early if we want a table level enough to set a longneck on. Instead of showering, once we clear the cloud of lovebugs, we crank down the windows to let the wind blast the dust from our hair. Outside, the sun is just beginning to hunker its way west, setting the treetops ablaze in such a way that the whole sky goes over to a kind of deep and waxy pink lipstick color. Garrett guns the engine and we speed toward home, breathing deep through our noses and shaking our befuddled heads at what we've just seen. It's a yeast farmer's wet dream out, too. The kind of hot and juicy you ought to be able to bottle and sell in drugstores. With the windows down, the forest smells akin to what you might get if you boiled Pine-Sol on the stovetop while roasting a sack of rain-soaked soil in the oven.

When we cross Route 190, Garrett veers left onto Main and spits out the window. Traffic's as heavy as it gets in a small town. High school kids with nowhere to be but on the streets, big sweating men trying to get home from work, all of it made worse by the news crews mulling around double-parked vans with their satellite antennas reaching up high as old pines, all of them just waiting for airtime so they can send word to the world of what a backward and bloodthirsty bunch of hicks we all are.

"If I was that dog," Garrett says, "I'd-a never let my lady know there was an alternative to the dog style. She's liable to get it in her head the old way's degrading or something, least if she's like Sandy she would. Hell, sometimes I get so tired of the same old thing I'd damn near do it on the side of the road just to spice things up, you know? Ten years of walking on that-time-of-the-month eggshells and what do I get? But you wouldn't know nothing about that, now would you, Mr. Newlywed. Your Glenda's a grinder, is she not?"

Now, maybe if someday we find ourselves making conversation somewhere in a locked-tight and soundproof and windowless room, and Garrett's tongue is tore clean out of his mouth and he's got both arms ground down to stumps so he can't write or do that sign language the deaf folks use, maybe then I'll tell him straight away that yes, he's absolutely right. A grinder, I'll say. No two ways about it. I'll tell him how matter-a-fact she
does
like to do it on the highway, preferably while I'm driving, and in the living room, with the lights on and the curtains thrown wide. In the ladies' room stall at Slyder's one Saturday night. I'll tell him about the rooftop, so help me God, when a new moon gave the night fully over to darkness and I arched myself beneath her, crawfishing my way backward, scooting up the shingled slope from eave to peak, all the while pressed between the hot sliding softness of my wife and the roof rash rising on my elbows and ass. I'll tell him about the shingle grit I'd picked grain by painful grain for a week from my skin.

Hell, put us in a room with no ears and I'll even embellish some things, but not now. Not here. In this little neck of the Big Thicket, words bounce around from tree to tree, house to house, and mouth to blathering mouth, so I don't say a thing. A year back, the night before Glenda and I got married, her daddy, Tricky, threw us a party at Slyder's, rented the whole place out. This was in the days before he found out about his cancer, before his black hair turned loose of its gray scalp, and when he pulled me a new Lone Star from the ice and twisted her open, he put his big, thick-skinned hand on the back of my neck and told me to be careful where I let my mind wander, especially when Glenda wasn't around to keep it penned up. Glenda's mom, he told me, had run out on him because he one time
thought
about cheating. He said news—true or otherwise—travels that damn fast or faster here in Jasper. Said all he was doing was having a dirty daydream about the new drive-thru girl at the Cream Burger, and when he got home the old lady had cleared out. "And all I done," Tricky said, holding his beer bottle like a microphone, "was lean in a little when this gal handed me my lunch so I could see what she had working under her shirt."

That's just the way it is around here, so I don't tell Garrett a thing. I don't mention how in the early days, after I'd run into Glenda at the Easy Clean Laundromat she inherited from her grandma and we'd been out a time or two, she took to taunting me. About how one night, while we walked along Coon Creek out back of my place, she'd crouched behind a sweet gum tree and stepped out of her dress before wading through the tangle of shoreline shadows and into the water. "Come on," she said, working water with cupped hands over her moonlit skin. "
Get in here. You aim to be a man tonight or not?"

Instead, I let Garrett drive and I drink what's left of my beer and I try not to think too much about Glenda, about how her skin shines even in the darkness, even beneath the water; about how Garrett's wife, Sandy, spends her lunch break away from the police station filing room where she works and eats instead at the laundromat, where she fills my wife's head with the latest horror stories about the way James Byrd was killed, about the root-riddled road that ripped his body apart as he thrashed and slid, chained behind his murderers' truck; about how Mr. Byrd used to smile and whistle while washing his work clothes on Sunday nights; about how Glenda's started talking lately about going out to Huff Creek Road so she can see where it happened, so she can smother her imagination in the reality of it, no matter how gruesome; about how tore up she gets nights on account of her daddy and his cancer; about how some nights she lets loose to crying even while we're making love, and how it hollows me out so that I think nothing will ever fill me up again.

Some nights I'll sleep in restless fits, the muscles of my lower back burning with spasms so that I dream I'm an animal with a boot on my neck and a red iron searing another man's initials into my hide. Every night this week, after I think she's cried herself to sleep, I've jerked awake to a bed half full and the sound of her voice in the hall. Even over the telephone, Tricky will have her in stitches, and through the cool hum of the air conditioner her quiet laughter will push its way into the room. I'll prop myself up in bed and feel the kinks in my back turn loose. And I'll listen, trying to imagine what he's saying, how he's managing to make her laugh.

"I can't push it out of my mind," Glenda will tell him. "I'm serious, Daddy. I keep seeing it. Over and over. His body tearing apart on that road, and it's not like I knew him that well, but I keep expecting him to walk into the store and set his laundry bag on one of the machines and nod and smile at me while he feeds dollars into the change machine. I keep hearing his whistling. He had such a pretty way of whistling, so high and sweet for a man his size, and he wasn't showy about it, either. You could tell he wasn't doing it for anyone but himself."

And then she'll stop talking and start listening, her bare feet sliding across the hardwoods while she paces, her breathing loud enough to hear, and then she'll let loose the slightest of half-swallowed laughs. "It's just that I don't know what I'm ever going to do without you," she'll say, and I'll wonder how a man gets to be man enough to hear that and go on telling jokes. Man enough to give of himself exactly what's needed.

You aim to be a man tonight or not?
It stings more than a little to think about it, but as Garrett pulls into the back lot behind Slyder's and tilts the rearview down so he can watch himself run a comb through his tangle of red curls, all I can think is that more and more, when I'm alone with my wife, it's not the wild sex I'm after. I don't want all the gymnastics or the risk of being seen or the shingle grit stuck in my skin. Instead I want her to laugh, to wink at me while stepping out of her skirt, to turn off the lights and shut the bedroom door and pull me with her beneath three or four quilts so that I can have her all to myself, so I can duck my head beneath the covers before we make love and see her skin glowing there in the darkness, calling to me in some shiny new language only I can understand, lighting my way while I reach out and hold her and keep her from crying and answer her in the voice of the man I've somehow managed to become.

 

Inside, standing back of the bar, Stu Slyder is damn near salivating at all the business coming his way on account of this murder. If you'd lived here all your life like I have, and you happened upon Slyder's tonight, aiming to have a long sit-down with the boys over a few cold ones, you'd no doubt stop at the door and marvel awhile, wondering if you'd taken a wrong turn somewhere, maybe stumbled across some secret white-collar society in your yellow-dog town. There are guys in neckties everywhere. Back at the pool table. Bellied up to the bar. And instead of the familiar stink—sawdust and sweat and spilled tap beer—the place is ripe with the smell of aftershave. Stu is smiling his gap-toothed smile, trying to keep his shirt tucked in despite the downward slump of his belly. He's sliding bottles across the bar, slicking the stray hairs of his comb-over back with the palm of his hand. It don't take much of a man, I'm thinking, to get rich off his hometown's troubles.

Garrett makes his way back from the bar and hands me a longneck. "Lookit that leech," he says. "Teeth on him, he could eat corn on the cob through a picket fence, and
would
too if he thought he could make a buck doing it. Promise him ten dollars for the pleasure and he'd kiss your ass on the steps of city hall and give you an hour to draw a crowd."

"He counts all his money after tonight," I say, "the price is liable to go up."

"Sounds about right," he says. "He's a counter, sure enough. Always did like that math. Sucked up to Mrs. Earlich so bad in algebra class you'd have thought her big tits reached out all the way to his desk."

Looks of Stu's new brick house up on the highway, I'm thinking, maybe we all should have sucked a little of that tit. He's a tight-ass, all right, but he ain't stupid. Besides, this is the only bar in town with a dance floor. And they still got Bob Wills on the jukebox. And then there's Glenda's daddy, Tricky, huddled as per usual around the big corner table with his fellow pipe fitters playing forty-two, every one of their heads sheared clean as summertime sheep. They're slapping dominoes on the tabletop and scratching the backs of their necks and no doubt comparing notes on the Harleys they've got ready to roll out back. Six months back, after Tricky's first couple chemo sessions, all the boys of the pipe fitters' local shaved their heads. It was a hard man's brand of brotherhood, and the night they did it Tricky walked into the bar, and when he saw them his eyes filled with a liquid look of something like love. These are rough-hewn and heavy men, men with calluses thick as rawhide, men who aren't afraid to keep something tender beneath their rib cages, and to expose it to the elements when occasion calls for it, no matter how it hurts. Tonight, it's these men and their laughter and the cold bite of beer on my teeth that set me at ease, despite the fact that Stu Slyder is talking quiet-like to one of these hair-gelled reporters, leaning in close enough to kiss the guy. He reaches across the bar and takes a sharply creased greenback from the man, some high denomination, I'm guessing, and I catch Garrett's eye and nod in that direction.

"A value-added whore," Garrett says. "I shit you not. Put a quarter in his ear and his teeth fold back."

"Save us some seats over by Tricky," I say. "I'll call the girls."

Garrett nods and I make my way to the pay phone in the back near the ladies' room. As soon as Glenda picks up the phone she says, "Where are you and why aren't you here?"

"Got sidetracked," I say. "We hit some gravel on the way home, started sliding and slid clean over to Slyder's. Go get Sandy and meet us here, would you?"

"Figured as much," she says. "Already got the quilt in the truck, so don't get too drunk on me. I got plans for you yet tonight."

"Looks of this place," I tell her, "the whole world's got plans tonight, and they mostly include Slyder's. You wouldn't believe the out-of-towners."

"Well, hang in there, old-timer. I'm on my way. Is Daddy there?"

"Him and the whole crew."

"Well, then it can't be
that
bad. They'd just as soon drink water as mingle with strangers."

"Then keep your headlights on bright when you pass over Coon Creek and you oughta see them all bending down for a drink. I'm serious, sugar. I ain't ever seen the likes of this. I keep thinking of what my cousin Ty said after that school bus went into the ravine last year out his way and all those kids drowned. He likened living in Harlingen that week to being in the freaking zoo, and on the wrong side of the bars, too. Strangers gawking at you, getting on the TV and twisting things all around."