The Evening Star (72 page)

With that he walked on. Wilbur was so scared he was shaking. Wilbur might be arrogant when he was with whites, but he wasn’t too arrogant to be scared—he knew he had an enemy, and the enemy lived next door.

“That son of a bitch needs to be hung up from a tree till his goddamn black tongue falls out of his head,” Mickey said.

Neither Wilbur nor Tommy said anything.

For a few days Tommy watched Mickey to see if he was going to make some effort to kill Dog. It seemed to him that Mickey might try it. After all, Dog had belittled his chief, the
priest of his religion. Another Hank Williams Jr. song Mickey liked was called “A Country Boy Can Survive.” It praised the general competence and resourcefulness of country boys—they could skin deer, run trotlines, defend themselves against city dudes with switchblades. Tommy thought Mickey might try to demonstrate his country-boy competence and resourcefulness by trying to kill Dog, but this didn’t happen. He let Dog strictly alone and continued to stare at Tommy out of his pale, swamp-water eyes.

“I wish you’d call off your pit bull,” Tommy told Wilbur one night. “All that staring’s beginning to bug me.”

“Well, why don’t you just have a word with him about it, then?” Wilbur said.

“Because it would just make it worse,” Tommy said. “He only minds you—the Grand Dragon of the South.”

Wilbur smiled his self-satisfied smile. “I like that,” he said. “The Grand Dragon of the South. It rolls off the tongue nicely. Maybe I’ll join the Klan when I get out of here. I bet I could rise rapidly through the ranks of the Klan.”

“I’m sure you could,” Tommy said. “Just start practicing by telling your disciple to keep his dumb eyes to himself.”

“Why don’t you just tell him that you didn’t really mean that gooks are smarter than us?” Wilbur asked. “Tell him you were just teasing. He might believe you.”

“They are smarter than us,” Tommy said.

“I’m glad you’re ready to die for your beliefs,” Wilbur said, yawning.

For the next few days Tommy decided to counterattack, at least in the form of eye contact. Instead of avoiding Mickey’s eyes, he started staring at Mickey before Mickey could stare at him. When their eyes locked Tommy stared right into Mickey’s eyes until Mickey finally turned his head and shuffled off.

After that, Tommy felt a little better. He knew Mickey still hated him, but he thought he might have backed off a little. Mickey stopped spending quite so much time with Wilbur. He stopped talking about his plan for joining the Aryan Nation. He was still a menace, Tommy knew, but at least he
was a slow menace. In group situations Tommy knew he had to remember to keep Mickey in sight—keep him in front of him. As long as Mickey was in front of him Tommy felt sure he could out-maneuver him if he attacked. He even began to exercise a little in preparation. In high school he had had a martial arts phase; he lost interest before he could become a black belt, but he had worked up to yellow belt. He began to do judo exercises in his cell.

Wilbur did no exercises. If he even shot a basketball twice he was out of breath. When Tommy did his exercises, Wilbur watched from his bunk, looking bored.

“Gook exercises won’t save you when big Mickey comes,” he said.

“That’s your opinion,” Tommy said. “They might save me. Just because your fat disciple knows how to run a trotline doesn’t mean he can just walk up and strangle me.”

“You put too much faith in math scores, asshole,” Wilbur said.

Tommy kept on exercising. For a while he had accepted prison, and had even liked it. It was a place where he could withdraw, be invisible, and think his thoughts. Dealing with the discomfort and the regimentation took discipline, but then he rather liked that.

What was beginning to weigh on him was the company. He was tired of having to deal with spoiled brats like Wilbur or dangerous troglodytes such as Mickey Cleburne—and Mickey was not exactly the only troglodyte in the prison, either.

Now and then Tommy began to have thoughts of getting out. It wouldn’t be real soon—he wasn’t eligible for parole for nearly two more years—but it wasn’t hopelessly distant, either. Time did pass. One day by accident he had helped one of the prison technicians fix a computer. Tommy had been a precocious hacker—he hadn’t really kept up too energetically, but it turned out that he had more of a touch with computers than anyone else in the prison. Lately he had been getting asked to unsnarl some program or restart some computer on an average of once a week. Getting Tommy to
do it was better than paying a computer man to come all the way from Houston—and Tommy was quicker than most of computer repairmen anyway. He found he liked it when the prison people came and got him to help with some problem. It was good being back with computers. He didn’t tell Teddy what he was doing, but he began to think that maybe he and Teddy ought to do something with computers when he got out. They could invent computer games or something, maybe start some little business.

As Tommy began to let himself fantasize a future out of prison, he also began to let his attention slip a little. More than once he felt a moment of panic when he was outside in the exercise yard and realized that he had lost sight of Mickey. It happened in the dining hall, too. Tommy knew he had to stop drifting off that way, in his mind; the whole point of all his discipline and his exercising was to equip himself to be constantly alert. Even if he only slipped once a week for five minutes or so, it was still not good. He was in prison, and he had an enemy, and he had to make remembering that one fact his first priority. At night, when he was safely locked away from Mickey, he could let his new interest in the future blossom a little.

A moment or two, maybe only a second or two, before the pain came and tore a scream out of him, Tommy sensed that he had slipped again. He was in the exercise yard, bouncing a basketball—they had just had a little game. Though short, Tommy was not a bad basketball player—he had a turnaway jumper that was pretty effective. He was just about to whirl and shoot it, just practicing, when he happened to notice that the guys near him were all looking away. There had been a shift in density that he hadn’t picked up on quickly enough. He had been in the midst of a crowd, but now he wasn’t. The other guys were there, but they weren’t as close to him as they had been—they were now at a little remove, and they were all looking away. Too much space had spread around him.

Quickly Tommy tried to locate Mickey Cleburne, but before he could even turn his head to scan the prison yard the
pain struck and he began to scream. It was searing pain, as if a large hot needle were being jabbed, jabbed, jabbed into his spine. He fell, trying to get away from it. As he fell he tried to hold onto the basketball, but it rolled away. Then he flopped over, trying to get away from the pain, and saw Mickey Cleburne looking down at him.

“Ol’ gator got a sharp tooth,” Mickey said, as he turned away.

Even as he lay hurting, and as the first guard tentatively moved toward him, Tommy’s main feeling was one of surprise.

What surprised him was that the swamp boy Mickey Cleburne could put something that well.

20

Aurora and Rosie were in the prison hospital for almost nine hours, pacing and sitting, but the news, when it finally came, was that Tommy would live. They had failed to locate Teddy and Jane: it turned out that they had taken Bump to the beach that day. Rosie’s wedding—she had finally bitten the bullet, she was marrying Arthur Cotton—was taking place the very next day. There were a million things to do, but Rosie absolutely would not hear of Aurora going to the prison alone.

“That’s Emma’s boy that’s hurt,” Rosie said. “I feel like he’s my kid, too.”

Mickey Cleburne had stabbed Tommy with a five-inch piece of wire that he had found somewhere, probably only that day. He had twisted a loop for his finger to fit into, and still had more than enough wire left for an effective skewer. He stabbed Tommy six times. One lung and one kidney were punctured, and the spleen had been nicked.

Still, when they walked out of the prison into the muggy night, both women felt some relief—a lightness, really. They had been allowed, for a moment, to stand by Tommy’s bed in the prison hospital and he had smiled at them. It was a
brief, wan smile, but it brightened them both like a sunrise. They had both been afraid that Tommy, if he looked at them at all, would look at them hostilely or indifferently, as he had so many times.

But Tommy hadn’t been hostile—he had tried to smile. Rosie was so moved that she became weak. Aurora had driven them to the prison, and Rosie had had every intention of driving them home, but the weakness undid her.

“You’ll have to drive back, hon,” she told Aurora. “I might get out there on the highway and faint.”

“I can’t remember when I’ve seen Tommy look that welcoming,” Aurora said. “I suppose we’d better not get our hopes up too high, though. He was pretty sedated. Next time we come he might be the other way again.”

“It don’t hurt to hope a little, though,” Rosie said. The freeway south through the pines was almost empty, though now and then a truck or two purred smoothly past them.

“I’ve always tried to be hopeful,” Aurora said, feeling quite drained. “I’ve certainly been far more hopeful than you over the years. I’ve got slapped down a lot, though, particularly by the children.”

“Kid’s don’t live for nobody’s hopes but their own,” Rosie reminded her. “None of mine ever cared about what I hoped. You think this marriage I’m about to do is a big mistake, don’t you?”

Aurora was trying to go around a small pickup. The pickup had appeared to be going rather slow, but now that she had committed herself to passing it, it seemed to have increased its speed. The Cadillac managed to pull even with it, but that seemed to be the best it could do. Efforts to edge ahead were unavailing, yet she didn’t feel like giving up and slipping behind again. It was a very annoying pickup; also, somewhere behind, she felt sure that large trucks were massing, getting ready to honk at her if she didn’t get out of the fast lane. On the whole, it was not a moment in which she wished to be bullied yet again into a discussion of Rosie’s chances of finding happiness across the street as the wife of Arthur Cotton.

“Rosie, I’m passing a car, or rather, a pickup,” Aurora said. “I’ve told you repeatedly that I take no position on this marriage. I scarcely know Arthur Cotton. I’ve heard he’s a man of probity—for all I know he may make you very happy. What else can I be expected to say?”

Rosie sighed. “I ain’t seen much of this probity, if it means what I think it means,” she said. “I wish I knew if I was doing the right thing. It ain’t like you not to tell me what you really think, either—but you ain’t telling me what you really think. Not what you
really
think.”

“You know something? I stopped
really
thinking several months ago,” Aurora said. “I got old or something—I don’t know. But you might as well not ask for real thinking from me, because I can’t do it anymore. When I try, I get a headache, or else I drift. Half the time we were in the waiting room I wasn’t even thinking about Tommy. I’ve always liked to try and count for something, but I don’t know if I do count for anything now. Do you know what I mean?”

“No, but let’s go to the Pig Stand, if we ever get around this pickup,” Rosie said. “If I don’t get something in my stomach pretty soon I think I might faint from all this worrying.

The lights of the Pig Stand parking lot were orange in the Houston mist. Dawn was not far away. Despite the late hour, two men in baseball uniforms were lazily tossing a softball back and forth to one another under the orange lights.

“Do you think there’s something wrong with those men?” Aurora asked, watching them toss the softball. “Surely this is not a normal hour for baseball.”

“Let ’em alone, they’re just playing catch and it’s a free country,” Rosie said.

Inside, they were served immediately but watched nervously by the waitresses at the Pig Stand. Since Hector Scott had died in the number six booth, the easy camaraderie Aurora and Rosie had once had with the waitresses hadn’t been quite so easy. The same words were said, the same questions asked, the same orders given, and the same food served, but something had changed.

“I think they expect somebody to die every time we come
in now,” Aurora observed, watching the waitresses huddle as far away from them as possible. “I think it’s a little unfair. After all, Hector is the only person who’s died in all the years we’ve been coming here. I wouldn’t have thought they’d hold it against us this long.”

As they were paying, two of the waitresses and the elderly cashier congratulated Rosie on her upcoming wedding.

“You should of let us cater your reception,” Marge, the elderly cashier, said reproachfully. “We cater receptions left and right and we do a bang-up good job, too. I usually serve the punch.”

“It’s just a small service,” Rosie said, embarrassed by the attention.

“That was something of a lie,” Aurora told her in the parking lot. The two men were no longer pitching the softball—the parking lot was empty, except for themselves and the gentle mist.

“Your whole family’s coming, which alone means that it won’t be a small wedding,” Aurora added. “I admit that the groom would probably have been rather taken aback at the thought of the Pig Stand catering the reception, but I personally don’t think it would have been such a bad idea. A few pig sandwiches and a lot of liquor might loosen Arthur and his set up a little—nothing I’ve tried seems to.”

She had given two dinners for Rosie and Arthur, and neither had been a success. After each of them, Rosie had cried for a long time and kept Aurora up half the night worrying the question of whether the right thing or the wrong thing was being done. Aurora had tried inviting the Petrakis brothers, she’d tried inviting Pascal, and she had made Teddy and Jane come to both dinners, but for once—or, rather, for twice—her touch failed her and nothing clicked.

“Them waitresses all think I’m a silly old fool, I can see it in their eyes,” Rosie said.

“Nonsense, I saw no sign of that, and I saw their eyes,” Aurora said. “They’ve never met the groom—how would they know whether you’re making a mistake or not? You don’t even know yourself.”