Country Hardball (8 page)

Aunt Vee screamed from the front of the house. I could picture her leaning up on the arms of the chair, taking a deep breath. “How’s about you fix that woman’s antenna right and that’ll be your rent check for the month? Think you can manage that?”

So I took a couple of screwdrivers, a pair of pliers, a ball-peen hammer, and half a roll of duct tape, dropped them in a green pillowcase, and headed down to Miss Imogene’s house.

By the time I got down to her place, I had sweat and grit on the back of my neck. I knocked at her door, and she let me in. She offered me a glass of water, and I sat down in the living room. Thick red and brown shag carpeting matched most of the furniture and made the couch look like a little hill in the floor. I sat down and she brought me a glass of warm tap water and I downed it in a couple of swallows.)s that.

I started to tell her why I was there when she walked over to the television set and turned it off. I hadn’t even noticed the thing had been on. You get that way sometimes. You get something in your head that you have to do and you get focused on it so strong that you forget what you set out to do. You can get that way laying floors. You get so caught up in going one direction, then you look up and you’re caught in a corner and everything’s gone off kilter by a quarter inch.

“Doyle, you know you don’t need an excuse to stop by, but I see you got a pillowcase full of something there.”

I looked down at the tools and felt like I’d just dragged a mess of wet squirrels into her house. “Aunt Vee said maybe you could use some help down here on your antenna,” I said because those were the words I’d practiced on the way down and I hadn’t had time to think of anything else.

She looked puzzled, turned her head like my Aunt Vee did whenever something really weird would happen. Like if someone would say, “Today, the part of Alan-Michael Spaulding will be played by seventeen flaming armadillos.”

But then her niece started hollering from the back of the house somewhere. “I’m still hungry. I’m still hungry. I’m still hungry.” A chant almost, and she took that last “hungry” and let it linger out there like “hoooongreee” in some weird monster kind of rumbling. Then she was asking why can’t they ever have anything to eat and she knows it costs money and why can’t they ever get any money. She was walking and talking and by then she’d come to the end of the hall and could see that I was sitting there with a pillowcase between my feet.

I started looking anywhere else. Over to the photographs on the fireplace mantle. Over to the shelves where Miss Imogene had all her collectible dolls. Shelves that were empty now except for the doll stands and the ghosting dust around the edges.

So Miss Imogene sat there for a second until I thought of something to say. “She said your TV was acting up. Maybe you weren’t getting all the channels and could I help, she said.”

Her niece’s name was Constance, but she went by Connie. And Connie said how much she liked my aunt’s cooking and how sweet she was to have them both over.

I asked if they were having electrical problems after the storm.

Miss Imogene raised an eyebrow. “Why would you ask that?”

“Just noticed all the lights are off in the back is all,” I said.

“Oh,” she said.

“That’s environmental,” Connie said. “On account of the environment. We all have to pitch in and do our part.”

I nodded. “Yeah. We all have to do our part.”

We talked for a while longer about the weather. How hot it was going to get and how the weatherman said another big storm was coming that weekend.

“How’s your aunt doing?” Miss Imogene asked.

“Fine, I guess. What do you mean?”

“I just mean, you know, what with your uncle’s passing on like that.”

“Oh. Yeah. Fine, I guess. I don’t know. I mean, it’s been a couple of years, you know?”

“I know,” she said. ;
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an H“But that don’t always matter, now does it?”

“No, ma’am. Guess it doesn’t.”

“Well, she’d best stay safe. Got a feeling in my bones all heck is about to break loose.”

“Sure that ain’t just rain coming?” I asked.

“You joke all you want, but you heard what happened up there on the hill. Those Sawyers and Pribbles cooking up all those drugs until the whole house exploded.”

&#r a child fill

The light was fading away as they pulled into town for gas. “Need anything?” he asked Loriella, climbing out of the truck.

She shook her head.

Randy Pribble reached into his pocket, counted out some singles. A Camaro squealed in on the other side of the pumps, engine rattling.

He put eleven dollars in the tank, walked in to pay. Saw a newspaper on the rack by the beef jerky. Picture of cops standing around a car, looking in the windows, red splatters from the inside. The story said the man had been laid off from some factory that morning. Father of three young boys. He drove around all day instead of going home. When five o’clock came, he pulled a pistol from the glove box, put a hole through his head. Above the car, the light had changed to green.

When Randy got back, the guy from the Camaro was leaning against a post, trying to talk to Loriella through the truck window. He was a big guy, skin tight like a child’s balloon twisted into the shape of a man.

Randy coughed, walked up behind him. “You got a problem?”

The guy’s shoulders jumped, and he took a step back. “No. No. Just … ” he said, looking around the parking lot, “just saying ‘hi.’”

“Well, maybe you oughta just shut your mouth, fatas” McWilliams said like set the s.”

“Yeah. Sure. No worries.”

Behind Randy, a minivan had pulled up, slowed, rattled around a pothole, kept going. He watched the fat man walk into the store; then he took a breath, counted the potholes in the parking lot. One at the van. Thought about what Loriella was going through. That part of life where the pastor takes you by the shoulders and talks about how God never gives you more than you can handle. Two more potholes near the road. Same as we all go through. A couple along the back. And all you get are the little things to keep you going. A lottery ticket. A good dinner. And Randy with barely enough cash for dessert. Forget about dinner.

He saw the fat guy walking out of the store holding a piece of wood with the bathroom key. Thought about his car. That gold necklace with the cross. He watched the man turn the corner at the building, step out of the streetlight. Thought about the guy driving his Camaro through town, able to stop anywhere he wants to buy something. The sort of asshole who never checks his pockets before getting to the counter, never counts his change, never checks the soda machine for a loose quarter. The sort of asshole who goes to work on a Friday and puts twenty on the Cowboys because he thinks it’s fun to gamble. The sort of asshole who gets into his Camaro after work and stops for dinner and those drinks they make with four or five ingredients.

Randy followed the man into the darkness.

• • •

Loriella was fingering the graduation cap tassel hanging from the rearview mirror when he got back into the truck.

He asked her was she all right.

“Not the same, is it? If I get my GED instead of walking.”

“Diploma? You mean maybe you want to finish?”

“I don’t know.” She pushed the tassel away, rested her chin on her hand. “I just don’t want to go back there, you know.”

“Yeah. Nobody blames you.”

“Blames me?” She turned to Randy as he pulled onto the highway. “Blame me for what?”

“For quitting,” he said, checking traffic. “I mean for not going back. Hell, Keith ain’t going back, neither.”

“Yeah, I heard that. What about his scholarship? Wasn’t he going to SAU?”

“I don’t know. I don’t think he’s worried about that. He’s still kinda messed up and shit.”

“Yeah. A lot of us are.”

“He was with her. You know, when all of y’all left the party. They were gonna, you know. Right? You know what I’m saying?”

“Of course I know.” Loriella wiped her nose. “Staci was one of my best friends.”

“Yeah.”

“She was gonna be a phlebotomist, you know?”

“What’s that?”

“Nurse who takes your blood.”

“That right?” He nodded. “Like a vampire?”

She grinned, but just a little. “Something like that. Gonna make good money, too. Couple of years in college. She could have … ” Loriella swallowed slowly, let the words trail off. “I never should have left her that night.">I said I didn’t ming out” She rubbed her eyes with the back of her wrist, mumbled out the window. Closed her eyes. “I was with her. I was with her. Right there.”

“They’ll find out what happened. It’ll be okay.” Randy watched the lights along the road as they drove in silence. The houses here and there. Satellite dishes in the yards. New cars in the driveways. Other people who went to college, learned skills you could put on a resume. He slid some cash across the seat to her. “Maybe we can have a little something to eat? We got a long night.”

She picked up the wad of cash. “Well, aren’t you Mr. Moneybags,” she said.

He tapped the steering wheel. “Forgot about that, I guess.”

She handed the money back to him. “Forget you’re a Cowboys fan?”

“What?”

“The money clip. Must be a serious fan to have a Dallas Cowboys money clip.”

“It was a gift,” he said, scanning the signs for a decent restaurant.

“That right?”

“Yeah. Hey, you know where there’s a good place to eat? All I know of is cheap hamburger places.”

“There’s that fancy Chinese place over other side of the courthouse,” she said.

“It nice?”

“Don’t know. Never been.”

“How about seafood?”

“Sure. Whatever’s cool.”

• • •

She was putting another catfish bone into her napkin when the waitress came back.

“Would you care for any dessert?” she asked them.

“What you got?” Loriella asked, chomping each word as though she were chewing gum.

“Chocolate pie, lemon meringue. I think that’s it.”

Loriella smiled, raised her eyebrows at Randy.

“Go ahead, if you want,” he said. “I’m done.”

“Oh. That’s okay,” Loriella said. “No, thanks.” Then she looked at the paintings on the wall. Mostly landscapes. A couple head shots.

When the waitress started to move away, he told her to bring a piece of everything.

Loriella reached her hand across the table to his. “Thank you for coming,” she mouthed to him.

The waitress looked down to write on her notepad. “Oh, lord,” she said. “What happened to your leg?”

He looked down at the outside of his pants leg, a splotch of blood the size of a hand. “Hunh,” he said. “Dog got caught in some barbed wire this morning. Tore up a little.”

“Oh, no. Is he okay?”

“Yeah,” he said. “Better than my pants.”

She smiled. “Oh, good. I’ll get your pie.”

• • •

They were finishing the pie when the waitress came back with the check.

“That man over there, the picture,” Randy said. “That’s the guy anything,” he said.in hadas from
Apocalypse Now
, right? The boat captain took Martin Sheen up the river?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “Probably. He’s in that TV show now with that guy who hopped in other people’s bodies and that comedian with the bitchy wife.”

He said all right.

“I think he used to live around here, maybe. It’s Shelia’s Uncle Albert. Want me to ask was he the fella in that movie? What did you say the name was?”

“Never mind. Don’t matter.”

• • •

He put his arm across the back of the seat, turned to pull out of the parking lot. Watched her light a cigarette, run a comb through her hair.

“I still turn you on?” she asked.

He rubbed her shoulder, glad she wasn’t thinking about any of the trouble. Told her she turned him on. Told her everything would be all right. Told her he was sorry. About all of it.

“You know the human body has three trillion pores?”

He sent the back of the truck over a curb, pulled into traffic. “What?”

“Pores. The little holes where sweat comes out. I saw it on the news. There’s like three trillion on the human body.”

“That seems like a lot.”

“That’s what I said. I was telling Darlene at the Dairy Queen and I said that was a lot and she said she wondered who counted them and I said that’s silly. Don’t nobody count all those pores. They just look at part of you and multiply.”

“Yeah. I bet that’s what they do.”

“Still, awful lot of holes. It’s a wonder we’re able to hold anything inside us.”

• • •

They walked across the dirt to her mom’s house, sky mostly black, poked open here and there with stars.

“I can do this, you want to wait in the truck,” he said. “Won’t take long.”

“No. I know where it is. Wait here.” She walked to the back of the house, came out with a little box.

“That’s it?”

“Yeah. It’ll be okay now,” she said, climbing into the truck, easing the door closed.

“It will,” he said. “It will be fine.”

“You sure?”

He said he was. He told her how sometimes you just have to wait these things out. How maybe faith was all you had left sometimes, but you just had to wait. He told her the story of when he fell down into that well when he was a kid. How he knew he was okay when he pressed up against the wall, how he knew then the emptiness didn’t go on forever. All holes have sides.

He wanted to tell her about how he had plans for both of them, after her mother got better. How he knew what everyone thought of his family. His brother. His uncle. His two dead cousins. He knew he should say something to her, something about Staci. Something about how the best thing they could do would be to get away from that life, those people. His family. Even the family he’d lost. You leave behind the living and the dead. You just do. You can’t tie yourself to your family. You cand talked to her h’t keep looking behind you. You have to leave behind everything that holds you back. And he was working on that, working on getting himself free of all that. You have to just look ahead, he thought. He wanted to tell her everything at once.