Moving On (46 page)

Lee Duffin

Patsy wrote, in all, seven replies, some long, some short. One she put in an envelope—she even stamped it. Then she carried it past mailboxes for days and one evening threw it away.

11

T
HE SPAGHETTI
, the mushrooms, the candlelight, Patsy, the nice well-lit apartment hung with strange pictures and posters of movie stars—all of it was a little too much for Peewee. When Jim let him out at his place of residence, a decaying motel on Telephone Road, he was so agitated that he scarcely knew what to do with himself. Walking across the muddy driveway, he stumbled over the tricycle of the cross-eyed tot who lived in the cabin next to his. It was an old tricycle, one wheel tireless, no handleguards, but Donna, the tot, wheeled it across the shaly drive with great expertise. Her mother was a fat slut named Doreen. She worked in a drive-in on Griggs Road, screwed a succession of Cajuns, and sometimes, on bad nights, used Donna for a punching bag.

Peewee’s quarters did not particularly depress him, though there were times when he could have wished for less mud. When he got home he felt restless, too keyed up for sleep. He had nothing to read but a few issues of
Rodeo Sports News
, and he had those memorized. He did have a couple of cheap dirty books, one called
Passion Flayed
and the other called
Her Talented Tongue
, but he was in no mood for dirty books. He got his black cowboy hat out of the closet and set out for his favorite drinking establishment, a place called the Gulf-Air Lounge.

No one could remember whether the Gulf-Air had originally been a cafe and turned into a bar, or had originally been a bar with ambitions to be a cafe, or what. It remained an uneasy mixture, largely bar but with a small grill where hamburgers could be cooked and chili heated. The clientele consisted almost entirely of the wretched of Southeast Houston—a motley collection of aging bar bums of both sexes, with an admixture of young vagrants, day workers, Cajun cowboys, truckers, and Gulf Coast roustabouts, most of whom came in to horse around with the shuffleboard or the miniature pool table.

Peewee took most of his dinners at the Gulf-Air, it being the place closest to his motel. Also, he had just turned twenty-one, and the people at the Gulf-Air knew it and weren’t always making him show his ID. He had got to know most of the people who frequented the bar at night, and he usually spent his evenings there sipping beer and eating Fritos and watching whatever was on the old blurry TV. He didn’t like beer, preferring Coke or Dr. Pepper, but all of his acquaintances regarded beer as the manly beverage and he felt obliged to drink it. He found that if he ate a package of Fritos per bottle it wasn’t so bad, and having to walk to the john to piss every twenty minutes or so was a comfortable, manly thing to do. All the people in the Gulf-Air called him Squirt, whether because he was short or because he pissed so much he didn’t know.

“Hey, Squirt, you’re late tonight,” the barmaid said when he climbed up on the barstool. Peewee began to chew a toothpick. The barmaid was a thin redhead from Lufkin—Nancy by name. Her three kids were growing up in Lufkin with her mother; she didn’t think cities were good for kids. She herself had never quite managed to get divorced from her husband, who worked off shore, and she was well known to a couple of truckers who laid up in the area. She was too faded to be mean, and Peewee sometimes aspired to her in his fantasies. The only encouragement he ever got was that Nancy would sometimes lean across the bar and put her hand on his wrist while she told him her troubles. The owner of the bar was a fat shaky drunkard named Big Woody, who sat at one of the tables with his shirt unbuttoned, drinking malt liquor and playing Moon with two other oldsters, an unemployed liquor-store clerk named Roscoe and a tire salesman from the Lawndale area whose name was Skeets. The bar’s two female habitueés sat in a booth nearby smoking and sipping beer and trying to goad one of the old men into making a pass at them. They were both part-time waitresses who lived off the money they scrounged from their multiple ex-husbands. One was named June, the other Gloria. The only other patron of the bar was a young man named Terrible Tommy. He drove a truck for a sterile-water company and wore a cowboy hat when he was off work. He was playing a solitary game of pool when Peewee walked in.

“Pearl or Bud?” Nancy asked.

“Pearl,” Peewee said touchily. He suddenly felt infinitely superior to the milieu he was in and sipped his beer a little haughtily.

The old man at the Moon game regarded Peewee as canaille and never let him forget it. Roscoe, the ex-clerk, was particularly foulmouthed and loved to tease Peewee about his job at the zoo.

“Well, we was wrong,” he said, turning a domino down. “We figured the lions ate you, sonny. Figured you’d be a nice smelly pile of lion shit by this time tomorrow.”

“Shut your goddamn foul mouth, Roscoe,” June said. “Peewee’s a nice boy. A lot more of a gentleman than some people I know.”

“Horse turds,” Roscoe said. “You wouldn’t know a gentleman if one was to piss in your ear.”

“Where you been all night, sugar?” Nancy asked.

“Having dinner,” Peewee said, using the phrase for the first time in his life. “I was almost over to River Oaks tonight.”

“Doing what?” Roscoe asked, winking at Big Woody. “Stealin’ hubcaps or fucking poodles?”

Peewee remained impassive. “Visiting some friends,” he said proudly. “They go to Rice. One of them’s going to be a Ph.D. That takes a lot of studying.”

“I guess that would leave me out of contention,” Skeets, the tire salesman, said. He had a dry voice and when he held two dominoes up to look at them the dominoes chattered like teeth his hands shook so.

“The only thing I was ever interested in studying was pussies,” he said. “They don’t give no diplomas for that.”

“Naw, you learn about them in the school of hard knocks,” Roscoe said. “I’ve knocked against many a hard one too.”

“You old turds,” Gloria said. “You don’t deserve no women, the way you talk.”

“Oh, goddamn, what am I going to do?” Nancy said, turning white. “Here comes Lee Harvey. That’s his Chevy driving up.”

“What’s the matter with that?” Big Woody asked. “I thought he was your sweet thang these days.”

“We busted up,” Nancy said. “He’s been off in Seattle. Richard’s been staying at my place while he was gone.”

“So what the shit?”

“Lee Harvey never agreed we busted up.”

Everyone looked worried. Everyone
was
worried. Peewee regretted not staying home. The one thing he didn’t like about life on Telephone Road was that everyone there went armed. He was used to the concept of Fist City, which meant fist fights, but he had not adjusted to the gun crowd.

“Everybody just act natural,” Nancy said. Terrible Tommy was sighting studiously down his cue at the eight ball.

In a moment Lee Harvey slouched in, a stocky middle-sized guy with a greasy forelock dangling over his forehead and his cuffs turned up two rolls on his hairy wrists. He walked around behind the bar and dispensed with preliminaries.

“Where’s that goddamn Richard?” he asked. “Gonna kill that son of a bitch’s ass.”

“Why, honey?” Nancy whimpered.

“Gonna stomp his guts out,” Lee Harvey went on. “Where is he?”

“I don’t
know
. What are you picking on me for? I don’t keep up with Richard, if you want to know the truth.”

“Oh?” Lee Harvey affected surprise and glanced around as if to share the joke with everyone. He wasted the glance, for the bar was paralyzed. The Moon players might have been sculpted, and Terrible Tommy, a crick in his back, was still taking aim at the eight ball.

“Then what was them goddamn rubbers doing there by the bed?” Lee Harvey roared suddenly. “Fine thing to find, coming in off the road.”

Nancy had been squeezing out a rag to wipe the bar with. She started to retreat but before she could Lee Harvey slapped her with one meaty hand and knocked her on her behind. She scrambled up, back-pedaling, but he grabbed her by the collar of her cheap uniform. It tore, one of her slip straps broke, and she fell again and sat on the floor behind the bar sobbing and holding her torn dress together pitifully, the strap of her slip still dangling.

At that Lee Harvey seemed to lose interest in her; he walked out from behind the bar and studied the position of the balls on the pool table.

“What’s the matter, your goddamn back broken?” he asked. “Hell, you got a straight in.”

Terrible Tommy flinched and shot so hard that the cue ball hopped off the table, hit the cement floor with a crack, rolled between Roscoe’s legs, and came to rest against the jukebox. Lee Harvey snorted and leaned over the bar to glare at Nancy. “You better get your cheatin’ ass on home when you get off,” he said. “I’m going to look for Richard.”

Without another word he left the bar and roared off. Nancy got to her feet and hurried to the ladies’ room, sniffling and wiping her eyes. The bar relaxed again.

“Well, a two-timing woman don’t deserve no better,” Roscoe said pontifically. June and Gloria glared at him.

“I guess you was always the loyal type,” June said.

“Son of a bitch made me scratch,” Terrible Tommy said. “Shoulda climbed his ass.”

“Wouldn’t have been nobody to get you down,” Big Woody said.

Nancy came back in wiping her eyes with a paper towel. She had managed to make some repairs and seemed relieved and rather cheerful.

“Lord, that man’s got a temper,” she said.

“I’m just glad we all survived,” Roscoe said. “Hate to get my ass shot off over somebody else’s pussy.”

“Shut up,” Nancy said with spirit. “Lee Harvey don’t need no cheap gun. He wouldn’t beat you up, anyway, you’re too scrawny to bother with.”

“It’s pretty over in that part of town where I was,” Peewee said. “You have to be smart as hell to go to Rice.”

“You have to be a goddamn Communist, the way I hear it,” Roscoe said.

As Peewee was finishing his beer a stranger came into the bar, a little man with neatly combed hair, baggy green pants, a white tee shirt, and tattoos on his arms.

“Anybody here know where Satsuma Street is?” he asked. “I been looking for that mother for a fucking hour.”

“Shit, yes,” Skeets said. “It’s right off Seventy-fifth. I could find it blindfolded.”

“Good for you,” the man said a little belligerently. “I’m from Spring Branch, myself. We still breathe air on that side of town. What’s this shit you breathe over here? Reason I can’t find Satsuma Street, I’m afraid to stick my head out the window, ’fraid I’ll asphyxiate while I’m looking at the street signs.”

“Oh, horse turds,” Roscoe said. “This air ain’t so bad. What it really smells like is Japanese pussy.”

“Well, I wouldn’t know about that,” the man said, still surly. “You-all got any chili?”

“See if that chili’s turned to concrete yet,” Big Woody said, and Nancy went to the pot of chili and stirred it vigorously.

“It’s fine,” she said, and just at that moment the phone rang and it turned out to be for her. Lee Harvey had decided he wanted details. While she was talking Big Woody heaved himself up and went to serve the customer. He filled a bowl with chili, put some crackers on the plate, and carried it over to where the little man sat.

“Whatcha drinking?”

“Pepsi Cola,” the man said moodily.

“Ain’t got it. Got Cokes.”

“Okay.”

Roscoe swiveled around in his chair, a fresh match held between his teeth. “Lemme get a good look at you,” he said. “You must be a member of the goddamn Pepsi generation.”

“Aw, shut your mouth,” the stranger said. “If you don’t you’re gonna have to shit dominoes for the next couple of weeks.”

“Tough guy,” Roscoe said, and the old girls twittered.

“Don’t yell at me!” Nancy said. “I ain’t your wife or nothin’!”

“Well, I’ll be goddamned,” the stranger said, looking at the chili with disgust. “You call this chili? Where’s the beans?”

Woody was on his way back to the Moon game, but he stopped and looked calmly at the man. “They’re in there,” he said. “Poke around a little. The light ain’t too good in here.”

The stranger poked. “Not a fucking bean,” he said.

“You ain’t looking good.” Woody waddled back, took the spoon, probed awhile, and came up with not one but two beans.

“There you are. Beans.”

“Two fucking beans,” the man said. “I ain’t gonna pay forty cents for two fucking beans.”

“You never ordered beans, you ordered chili.”

“When I order chili I expect beans,” the man said. “See if there’s some in the pot.”

“See yourself,” Big Woody said. “I’m the owner, not the waitress, and the waitress is on the phone. Satsuma Street will be there all night.”

“What kind of service is that? A man has to fish his own beans out of a goddamn chili pot.”

“Best kind. You get more for your money. Take all the beans you can find, we don’t care.”

“What do you want to do?” Roscoe asked. “Fart in your wife’s face or something?”

At that, to the horror of all, the little man leaped to his feet dragging a very shiny pistol out of his pants pocket. “Kill your ass!” he said, blasting at Roscoe as Big Woody struggled heavily for the cover of the bar. The bullet passed to the right of the Moon game and hit the top of the jukebox with a loud splat. “Hello, Vietnam” was playing and continued to play. Terrible Tommy huddled under a barstool, poor cover, and Peewee accidentally sucked his toothpick into his mouth and had a horrible gagging moment trying to bring it out.

“Cheat a man out of his beans,” the stranger roared, turning the gun on Woody. Woody whonked into the Coke box, almost rupturing himself, and the bullet intended for him hit the jar of pickled pigs’ feet just to the right of Peewee. Vinegar and pigs’ feet splattered into his face and onto his immaculate hat. Nancy had departed for the ladies’ room again, and just in time, for the final bullet hit the telephone dead center, puzzling Lee Harvey no end. He assumed the niggers were rioting and had caused a panic in the bar, with everyone rushing wildly for their guns. Peewee didn’t dare move for fear of straying into the line of fire, but fortunately the man abruptly stopped shooting and ran out the door, gun in hand. The bar quickly gathered itself for retaliation. Roscoe pulled out his gun and Big Woody grabbed the .38 that was underneath the cash register. They both hurried toward the door, firing a fusillade as they ran. The old dames had both knocked over their beers and were crouched in the booth sobbing and trying to keep the beer from dripping onto their skirts.