Taft (18 page)

"This is a bad night?"

"Listen, I shouldn't have called you. I just don't think it's right, you being Marion's sister and all."

"What the fuck does Marion have to do with this?" She was on her feet now, standing straight up. There was no way not to notice how good looking she was.

"Nothing. Not a thing. I wasn't thinking about Marion."

She looked at me and for a second I thought she was going to smile. "Then who were you thinking about?"

"I was thinking about you."

"Jesus," she said. "You're not even good at this." She started looking around for her underpants. She had to leave the room to find them.

I got up and pulled the sheet around myself and walked out into the living room. There was a lot of damage out there. Wet clothes slung all over the place, a lamp knocked off a table. Ruth was untangling her shirt from mine where they were holding on to one another in a corner. "I don't know what kind of girls you've been doing," she said. "But they must be a pretty simple lot if you've been getting away with this." She leaned over and hooked her bra behind her. "It's different for me. The sex was good, and I've liked you for a long time." She stopped for a minute, her blouse half on and half off. She wanted to be sure she meant every word she said. "But the next time I'll kill you."

Ruth was her mother's daughter. I had a crazy kind of fondness for her all of the sudden. I wanted to ask her to sleep in my bed for the night and have it not mean anything. Ruth was wild and if it hadn't been for everything else this all could have meant something to me.

She found her shoe and slipped it on. She had to open the door to find her purse and raincoat and umbrella. She was lucky they were still there. The neighborhood wasn't that good.

"I can walk you out," I said.

"The hell you can." She slipped on the other green high-heeled shoe and was gone.

I had just laid back on the bed with my jelly glass, thinking about how many things I could screw up when the phone rang. It was Cyndi.

"Are you dead or what?"

"Sidetracked," I said.

"You used to call," she said.

I waited for a minute, tapping the receiver on my forehead. I couldn't think of anything to say to her, so I just hung up.

At Muddy's, a mysterious crowd had formed out of the rain. I'd just get to where I knew everybody that came in the place and then all of the sudden there'd be a new flock of strangers. Maybe I hadn't been paying enough attention to things lately. Maybe the tourist season was early. Everybody looked like they were having a good time. B. B. King was on the stereo, singing "Nobody Loves Me but My Mother." Cyndi was behind the bar and Arlene and Carl were waiting tables.

"Carl?"

He was in a hurry to get someplace, but he stopped. His hair fell into his eyes. "I was here and Cyndi needed help," he said. He had a white apron tied around his waist. I knew the T-shirt he was wearing. It said Coalfield Wrestling. I'd already seen it once that night. "Is it all right?"

"You don't have a card to serve liquor," I said.

"Fay's been working here all this time and she still hasn't gone down to get hers."

I never did remember to check those damn things. "Did you bring Fay?" I would have seen her if she was there. She would have come and said something to me.

"Fay's at home. I'm not here with her. I just felt like getting out was all." Carl glanced over nervously at his tables to make sure nobody needed anything. "She got really drenched after you dropped her off," he said. "She looked like she'd walked clear from the bar. My mother sent her up to bed after dinner. You carried her home?"

"Sure I did."

"I don't know what's wrong with her." A man at a back table waved his hand. "I gotta go," Carl said.

I guess Carl had been watching people wait tables long enough to get the hang of it himself.

"Never thought anybody would be in tonight," I said to Cyndi.

"Busy man like yourself has too much on his mind to think about a little bar," she said, pouring some Absolut over ice. "You've got your livery service to run, too. I know that cuts into your time."

I walked back behind the bar and poured myself a drink. Hard rules are broken in hard times. "Why don't you see if you can't go scare some of those people," I said to her.

"All right," she said. "But leave Carl out on the floor. He's doing a good job."

"Money out of your pocket, not mine," I told her, but she wasn't listening to me anymore. She took a hard look at all the people and then eased out onto the floor like a car pulling into traffic.

I stood at the bar watching Carl, thinking about how close I'd come to making love to his sister while he was five feet away. I don't know what seemed more unbelievable to me, that I'd started up with her in the first place or that I'd left her there. I wondered how long she stood outside after I'd gone. A minute, ten minutes, an hour? Was she watching me walk back towards my car or did she keep her eyes on the window? Was she cold? All that rain and I never got cold. When she finally went inside, did she go upstairs and take off her wet clothes, wrap a towel around her head before coming down to the dining room where her family was waiting on her? Did she sit down at the dinner table with them, in front of the blue wallpaper and under the brass light fixture, sing "Happy Birthday," and watch while her uncle blew out the candles on his cake?

"Miller two times," Carl said.

"You're good at this." I reached into the case and got his beers. He looked happy. Compared to how I'd seen him through the window, he looked like he was on top of the world.

"Runs in the family," he said. He smiled and headed off to his table. I didn't like it, how much he looked like her.

There were only two hours between my coming in and closing the bar, but by the time we shooed the last customer out I felt like I'd been there for a month straight. I would have just as soon thrown a match in the cash register than counted up the money. Cyndi and Arlene were walking in their sleep, turning chairs onto tabletops and trying to push brooms, but Carl was everywhere. Maybe he'd been to the bathroom for a perk, but at least this time there was someplace for all that energy to go.

"We'll have this done in no time," he said to the room.

I went upstairs and did the money, thinking how much better life was going to be once I taught Wallace how to do it. When I came back down, the place was quiet and everybody was gone but Carl. He'd taken a chair off a table and was just sitting there, staring at nothing. The whole room was dark except for the streetlights coming in through the front window. All the other chairs were turned upside down.

"The girls went home," he said. "I didn't know if you liked somebody to wait around or not."

"You don't need to stay," I said. "Appreciate all your help tonight."

"I've never been in here when nobody else is around. I like it, so quiet. You wouldn't think a bar could get this quiet."

I nodded. I had wanted to hurry him up, get him out of there, but all of the sudden I felt so tired I didn't want to do anything but sit for a minute. I tossed the blue bag down on the table and pulled off a chair for myself. I was thinking about Ruth and Fay. I was too tired to stand.

"I used to like to go to the gym when nobody was there," Carl said. "It was the same sort of thing."

"You were a wrestler."

"Fay told you that?"

I pointed at his chest. "Your shirt," I said.

Carl looked down and seemed surprised to see it there. He nodded. "Had a hell of a year last year," he said. He ran the flat of his hand across the letters. "You ever wrestle?"

I shook my head. "Boxed some when I was a kid. Mostly street stuff."

"Boxing," he said. "I was always interested in that. They don't have a lot of high school boxing. They think it's all right for kids to pin each other's heads to the floor, but they don't want you hitting."

"I'm not saying I took boxing lessons. We were mostly just interested in punching one another out. There wasn't a lot of sweet science to it."

"Wrestling is a great sport," Carl said. "All about concentration and strategy. All up here." He tapped his head with two fingers.

"We used to say the same thing about boxing, but it was just a bunch of us whaling on each other. It doesn't sound so appealing to me now."

"I couldn't wrestle anymore," he said. "Even if it's about using your brain, you've got to be in a certain kind of shape. Discipline, mind and body, that's what the coach used to say. I'm too far off my weight now. I didn't work out all winter."

"So maybe you should pick it up again."

Carl waved his hand, like I had suggested he should become an astronaut. "It's too late for that."

"Too late? What are you, old man, sixteen?"

"Seventeen," Carl said, like that should make it all clear to me.

I leaned into the table, feeling a little less tired all of the sudden. "But Fay's seventeen."

Carl nodded. "We both are right now. Eleven months apart. In February we're both the same age. My father used to say that for a month a year we were twins. It took us a while to figure that one out. My father used to say it was his favorite time of year, two birthday parties, two cakes."

"So your Dad's in high cotton now." I do not know what possessed me to say it. I hadn't forgotten about Taft, even for a minute.

Carl looked at me, so surprised. "He's gone," he said.

"Left?"

"Dead," Carl said.

We were both quiet. I told him I was sorry to hear that.

Carl nodded. He looked at his T-shirt for a while, thinking things over. "Let me have a drink."

"Can't do that. Not right after you told me you were seventeen."

"Be a friend," Carl said quietly. He was asking, not expecting it. He was just putting his request out there and hoping. "Nobody here but us chickens."

It made me laugh to hear that come out of his mouth. "You've been listening," I said.

"I'm listening all the time."

"What do you drink, Carl?"

"Southern Comfort."

"Jesus Christ." I shook my head. "You're never going to get anywhere in this world drinking that." I got up and went behind the bar. I put some ice in some glasses and picked up the Southern Comfort and a bottle of Maker's Mark. "You give this a try," I said. "If it doesn't suit you, you can go back to where you came from." Cough syrup. A man ought not die before his son learns to drink something other than Southern Comfort.

Carl poured himself a healthy dose of Maker's Mark. "I appreciate this," he said, getting down to the business of drinking.

"Just don't go telling anybody about it."

"My father let me have a beer with him every now and then. He said he'd rather I do it where he could keep an eye on me."

"Your dad been gone long?"

"Last June," he said. "Early."

"That's no time."

"It changes. Sometimes he's been dead for years and other times it was yesterday or this morning or ten minutes ago. It just depends on how things are going. There's no counting on it." Carl put his finger in his drink and spun it around. He was trying to make the ice melt faster. "Sometimes I think he's going to walk in that door." He licked off his finger and pointed to the front door of the bar. "He's going to say, Carl, what in the hell happened to you? Then I start to get all worried, you know, trying to think of what I'm going to tell him. I start trying to make up some sort of lie. I'm thinking, Tell him you have a really bad flu. The flu's been making you run a fever. Tell him you've been working nights and it's fine but you haven't slept. Insane, bullshit stuff. Really insane, because right in the middle of getting all worked up I remember he's dead." He tilted his head back and sucked down the rest of his drink. Then he took a mouthful of ice and started crunching on it. "I like this," he said, picking up the bottle of Maker's Mark.

"I'm afraid that's it for tonight," I said, taking back the bottle. I knew where this was going and I didn't want to be driving another Taft across town.

"You in a hurry to get someplace?" Carl said. "There's no place to go this time of night. No place nice."

"I meant to be asleep an hour ago." I cleared off the table and turned my chair upside down. Then I started to wonder about something. "When do you sleep, Carl? You and Fay both are here seems like every night. When do you get your schoolwork done?"

"We're not here all the time," he said, like he genuinely had no idea what I was talking about. "I feel like I'm never here, I'm always waiting to get here. And sleep, I can sleep anywhere. In the morning, I sleep in the car, in the parking lot at school. I miss a few classes every now and then. I'm not so interested in school."

"What about Fay?"

"Fay does okay in school, I guess. Better than me. She does her homework after work. She just doesn't sleep. I don't think the light is ever off under her door."

"Maybe she sleeps with the lights on."

Carl thought about it for a minute, like it had never occurred to him before. "Maybe so," he said.

"I'll walk you out."

Carl pulled on an old jean jacket, took a Winston out of the pocket and lit it. For some reason I thought how glad Mr. Woodmoore would be to make a new friend who smoked. "Maybe you'll show me how to box some time."

"Like I said, I didn't have the science of it. It was all just a bunch of hitting to me."

Carl put his cigarette down in an ashtray on the bar. We were ten feet from the door, but that's not the same as being out the door. "I don't know a thing about hitting somebody."

"Then you're better off."

"I'm serious," he said. It was clear enough that he was. "Show me."

"Jesus Carl." I didn't stay with boxing long. I was too worried about my hands, about jamming something in my wrist. When it comes to not getting punched, no group of people are more on their toes than musicians. The ones who liked to fight never lasted in the business long. Spending your nights in bars with too much booze and other men's women can be dangerous for your hands if you liked to fight. Hands were bread and butter. I put the blue bag down on the bar and took his hand. It was built like a peony, this hand. The same sort of white and pink colors, too. One strong blow would knock it all to hell. I rolled it over and looked at the other side. I remembered it then. I had held this hand already, when it was Fay's. "When you make a fist, you think about rolling your fingers in. You need to cut those fingernails shorter if you don't want to slice yourself up." I curled the fingers in, just little finger bones slipcovered in skin. I felt almost like I was bandaging his hand. "This is going to protect them. You're going to put your thumb here, in the front, right under this knuckle." I moved his thumb over. He had torn down the cuticles on either side till they were bleeding. Carl watched his hand like it was television. "That's a fist," I said. "When you hit, you hit here, from the top joint to the knuckle." I slapped my hand against his to show him where. "Hit flush. Keep it just like that and chances are you won't break your hand when you go to punch somebody."