Men in the Making (15 page)

"Now hold on, baby doll," Glenda says. "I'm coming. If something's going to get twisted tonight, it better be me around you."

 

Back at the table, Garrett's holding forth with Tricky and the boys, throwing his hands around like he's on a Sunday-morning church show and something holy's taken hold of him. I grab a couple new beers from the bar, and when I sit down he winks at me, popping a toothpick into his mouth. Next to Tricky are the Hooper twins, DJ and Teke, and their cousin Nelson, three massive men with shining scalps. You put this foursome in the bed of a pickup, the bumper would throw sparks going down the road. Now Garrett works his toothpick around in his molars awhile, then he plucks it from his mouth and points it at me. "So then the foreman, old Henderson, he tells us to fire up the debarking drum, and it ain't but seven-thirty and already it's hot as the devil's dick out, and let me tell you something about your son-in-law here, Tricky. He reckons he'll stand right in front of the debarker's vents while I run the first load of logs, figures he'll get a blast of fresh sappy air in his hair when I hit the pneumatics. So I crank that big bastard up and load it with pine and tumble them logs barkless and clean, real quick work, but when I release the valves and the vents spring open, all I hear is this poor boy cussing and carrying on. I mean, he's howling, so I shut the machine down and haul ass around to him thinking something's gone wrong, maybe he's hurt, and there he is, bloody as a blind butcher. Shit's in his eyes. He's spitting it out his mouth. And then it hits me. It's them possums again. We've caught them nesting time to time in the debarker drum when the heat gets bad. And I shit you not, we must've tore a half dozen or more of them little sumbitches to shreds."

Garrett stops now for effect while the boys start chuckling, looking at me sidelong, then he tilts his beer back and slams it empty on the table. Even I can't help but smile. "Yessir," he says. "Tricky, your boy here was wearing possum insides
all over
his outsides."

 

It's when the women show up that things begin to get ugly, but not on account of them. Sandy, she's decked out with that black hair pulled back tight as the skirt that's riding up on those wide, hand-hold hips. Garrett talks a lot of lonesome-man trash, but his woman's got on her the kind of grade-school-teacher good looks that can drive a man to mischief when he's alone in the shower. As for Glenda, her hair's done up in pigtails. Her skin, it's got the sheen of something well-buttered to it, something so shining and bright you could kill the main to Slyder's breaker box out back, and so long as she was there, you'd still have enough light to drink by. They're lovely, the both of them, and they don't mind hearing it.

"There's my girl," Tricky says, pushing himself back from the table and slapping a palm against his knee. "Ain't she a peach?"

Glenda smiles, puts a hand on her hip and bats her eyes, then plops into his lap. "I'll bet you say that to all the girls who get your laundry done free for you."

"Sure do," he says, playing a domino from his hand. "Thing is, unless something's changed around here, and things rarely do, every girl who fits that bill has got her ass right this minute in my lap."

"How you feeling, Daddy? You know you're not supposed to be drinking a bunch of beer."

"Well it ain't going to kill me, now is it?" he says.

DJ and Teke raise eyebrows at each other and reach for their cigarettes. Nelson smoothes a hand over his shaved scalp, says, "You're too damn stubborn to die, you old fart, so quit talking your sympathy talk and shake the dominoes. These women came to dance, no doubt, not to hear your bellyaching."

DJ and Teke nod and blow smoke from their noses. Garrett and me, we take the hint and haul our ladies to the dance floor, or what's left of it, given the crowd. Somebody's gone and paid a half dollar to hear Willie Nelson sing about blue eyes and rain showers and heartbreak, and when Glenda leans her head back into the crook of my elbow I can smell the honeysuckle lotion she smoothes into her skin after showering. She tickles her fingers on the back of my neck while we turn and slide around the floor. On her face, wet-eyed worry.

"That Willie Nelson knows a thing or two," she says, closing her eyes.

"So do you," I whisper.

Six months back, when Tricky came straight from the doctor's on a Saturday afternoon to give us the bad news, Glenda and I were making love in the shower, and while we dance and Willie sings and Glenda leans forward, pressing her face to my chest, I'm in two places at once. My feet are sliding in time to the music, but my mind is under that spray of water with her, both of us lathered with soap, Glenda with a foot up on each side of the tub so she could bend her knees and lower herself down onto me while I blinked water from my eyes and held her hips, watching them fall and rise. "Every time we come here it's raining," she'd said, working herself against me. It's an old joke between us, one that deserved its silly little answer. "Every time it rains here we're coming," I told her. Then the door rattled and the muscles in Glenda's hips twitched and Tricky's voice was hot and thick as the bathroom steam. "You rabbits get on out of there," he said. "I've got something needs telling."

And now, as Willie winds it down and Garrett and Sandy dance over close to bump hips with us and laugh, Glenda lifts her face back from my chest and I see her dark eyes are drowning, and still she manages a smile. "I was thinking about your daddy catching us in the shower," I tell her.

She takes my hand and we stand there awhile, waiting for the next record to play. "I was thinking about Mr. Byrd," she says. "Sandy says they had to hunt with dogs for the missing pieces. Spent half a day drawing spray-paint circles on the ground where they found his dentures or keys, a hand with a ring still on its finger—like that. Can you imagine?"

"I can't," I say, sliding her into the first three steps of a waltz. I mean to say something else, but instead a hard little fist of muscles starts clinching down low in my back, and I'm listening to the whisk of our boots on the dance floor and holding my wife a little too tight for good dancing, and all I can think about is those dogs on the side of the highway, about how the one on top took the trouble to lick clean his little woman's wound, about how even animals find ways to be kind.

I loosen my grip on Glenda's hand and lead her into a spin. Her pigtails whip the air and the hem of her dress parachutes out and she lets loose of a little squeal. I reel her back in, stepping long on the hard note of the waltz as I pull her in tight. She slips her fingers into the back pocket of my jeans, and I'm about to tell her about the dogs, about how Garrett called their position human style, but that's when the music stops, and so do we.

We stop and turn and Stu Slyder is standing by the jukebox with the electrical cord in his hands. He's turning up the television set over the bar with the remote control. Up there on the screen is the slick-haired man I saw earlier pressing creased money into Stu's hand, and he's standing now in front of Slyder's, his lips curled up in such a way that folks in living rooms all over God's creation will know that it pains him just to be here, to be standing amidst our kind. This whole town stinks something fierce, he might as well be saying.

"Turn that mess off," Garrett hollers, but Stu's not having any of it.

"Fixing to be
Candid Camera,
" he says, "so y'all be on your best behavior."

On the television, the reporter is gesturing wildly, talking about the town and the men who'd spent many of their adult years in prison. "For all we know, the murder could have been planned in this very bar," he tells us. "This is where the suspects were arrested. Just out back of where I stand right now, in the parking lot, police tell us that the blood-spattered chain they allegedly used to drag the victim to his death was recovered from the bed of the suspects' truck."

Glenda steps close behind me, reaching her arms around my waist. Stu Slyder is taking baby steps toward the television set, beaming at this windfall of publicity. The bar, loud and alive with talk and music a minute ago, is now taken with the kind of quiet you mostly hear in churches or hospitals.

"Channel Three News has since learned that the blood found on the chain and on one of the suspect's shoes matches the type of the victim, James Byrd Jr., and we have reports that other members of the upstart Aryan group have been known to frequent this establishment."

"What a bunch of horse shit," Garrett says.

Then the reporter opens the door and we begin to see ourselves on the television screen. I stand there stunned, my toes gone numb in my boots while the camera pans around the room and there I am, wide eyes rimmed in red, my work shirt faded and frayed near the embroidered nametag. Glenda's visible only as arms wrapped around my waist, and then we're gone, off screen, just like that, and I see what the reporter wants the world to see, a table full of hulking, hard-looking men with shaved heads and lit cigarettes, dominoes standing in rows before them. Tricky and Nelson and the Hooper twins, they sit there fixed in the lights of the camera while this reporter talks about the Aryan Nation and the KKK and skinheads, and when Glenda pushes me out of her way and stomps over to the camera, for a moment I watch her, the real her, and then I turn back to the television and see her there, her pigtails bobbing behind her as she spits at the reporter and swings around to point a finger at the cameraman, and at me—at all of us glued to the screen.

"They ain't skinheads, you asshole!" she screams. I'm right there, not ten feet from her, but what I feel instead of pride or love or some impulse to protect her is an acid-hot drip in my guts, a kind of embarrassment you feel for people you don't know when they come unglued on afternoon talk shows. "That's my daddy," Glenda says, and then she's flailing away at the camera and Tricky is up in a hurry, wrapping her in his big sunburned arms, and I just stand there, the only one left watching the screen, marveling at the television version of my life.

It's not until Stu Slyder steps in that I snap out of it. He's up there onscreen, his fat blue tongue visible through the gap in his teeth as he moves between the camera crew and Glenda, as he stutters and sputters and rants about the First Amendment and then—never mind that Tricky's got her in his arms, never mind that it's all under control—then the fat bastard leans in with two rigid fingers and thumps Glenda up high on the chest, just below the tender skin of her neck, and that's all it takes.

I haven't hit anyone since high school, haven't been hit since my father one time backhanded me in the jaw for getting smart with him about something I can't even remember anymore. But tonight it comes so natural I would swear it's something you're born with, the backward snap of the elbow, the instinctive grip of the other man's collar. The spill of adrenaline into your veins when you make blood spray from another man's nose. My knuckles crack with the impact, and the sound of it is sharp as the fireside pop of hickory kindling, only louder. His head, it snaps back and I jump him, slamming him to the floor. He's on his back, pinned down with that ridiculous flap of comb-over hair dangling around his ear, and I keep throwing punches, knocking his big head against the hardwoods with each blow until his eyes glaze over with a bloodshot brand of fear I've never seen before.

Then he kicks his legs hard and throws all his weight to one side and I'm caught for a moment off-balance, reaching down to catch myself when he throws himself forward, slamming his forehead into my mouth, and I don't know if the cameras are still rolling or not, don't know if Glenda is burrowing her face into Tricky's chest or staring down at me with the same kind of unease I'd felt for her not a minute before. All I know is that my eyes are awash with hot white light, and that I've got blood in my mouth for the second time in a single day, and that mine tastes sharply of iron, and that Garrett is leaning down and hoisting me up by my belt, saying,
Holy shit, hoss, that was a serious big can of whup-ass,
and that when my vision comes back the first thing I see is the reporter with his microphone at his side and his eyes on the floor, probably praying I'm done swinging for the night.

Then we're making a break for it, shuffling past the pay phone for the back door, getting the hell out of there. In the parking lot, the moon is throwing light off the chrome of the pipe fitters' Harleys as they kick them to life. Garrett's laughing hard, howling into the night, asking,
When did you get to be such a shit kicker?
as he loads Sandy into his truck and cranks it up. Glenda shoots me a long and blinking and altogether confused look, a look you might give your husband if, say, you caught him jerking off in the shower, then she climbs up into the driver's seat of my truck and slams the door. I circle around to the passenger side, breathing in the exhaust of all these loud engines, and before I get in I spit a fat wad of blood into the parking lot gravel, and there, at my feet, half a tooth floats yellow and broken in a thick pool of red.

 

In the truck, I don't know what to expect. A stern talking-to, maybe. A ride home and a night spent alone in bed while Glenda walks the halls talking quietly into the telephone. Instead, there's an unexpectedly cool swirl of air pouring in through the windows and, outside, a drift of clouds running up on the moon. There's the hum of tires on concrete and the rumble of the engine through residential back roads to the outskirts of town, where Glenda steers over an old logging bridge and puts the headlights on bright and slows to a crawl, centering the truck on the dirt road while we bounce in and out of ruts and over roots and the chassis squeaks and shimmies. "Not afraid of ghosts," Glenda says, "are you, sugar?"

I inhale and the night air saws away at the exposed nerves of my tooth. Tree branches lean in to brush the truck's front quarter panels. Glenda, she keeps on driving.

"Don't know," I say. "Never met one."

A mile or so up, the road is roped off with yellow police tape. Glenda kills the engine and grabs the flashlight from beneath the seat. "Night like tonight," she says, "can't get any weirder, I'm thinking."