The Next Time You See Me (8 page)

“It’s never better,” Morris said. They were in the factory now, at the point where Morris would split left toward die cast and Wyatt straight ahead to packaging, and Wyatt dreaded the day so badly that he felt almost paralyzed. Despair was what it was. The despair of living a life that you didn’t understand and hadn’t bargained for, hadn’t deserved, could only wish upon your worst enemy.

“I’d lay low if you could,” Morris said, barely audible over the clank of machinery. “Don’t give them ammunition, don’t egg them on. Having them ride you is bad enough, but you don’t want this guy and his buddies jumping you in the parking lot.”

“You think he’d do that?”

“I wouldn’t put anything past him.”

Wyatt sighed. He couldn’t figure out how he’d made such a mess of things.

They parted, Morris lifting his hand a bit in good-bye before striding over to his station. Wyatt continued on, unsurprised to see that Jusef was already in motion, pulling motors off one of Saturday’s pallets and loading them, lickety-split, into rows in the first crate. “You move slow today,” he said in that strange accent of his, the way he seemed to force each word off the thick mass of his tongue, his heavy fringe of eyebrows punctuating the syllables, making all of his
pronouncements seem ill spirited whether he intended them that way or not. “You put me behind.”

Wyatt went to the computer and jabbed the space bar with his thick, clumsy forefinger, interrupting the screen saver’s neon-on-black pattern of spinning spirals and pinwheels. The program loaded, yellow text on a black background, little boxes in which he was supposed to type addresses, product ID numbers, quantities. “Do you hear me?” Jusef was saying behind him, and Wyatt was trying, he really was, but his finger was quivering, and the screen seemed to be quivering, and it occurred to him that it was absurd, going through the regular motions of a day and plugging numbers into a machine when nothing else in his life was regular. Morris’s kindness had taken him by surprise. What he felt now, contemplating it, was not gratitude but despair.

He was warm, sick to his stomach, and he leaned against the table to steady himself.

“You put me behind,” Jusef repeated. “Do you hear me?”

2.

Roma was what the locals liked to call a damp town in a dry county: you could purchase alcohol legally from a liquor store and beer from the grocery store but nothing by the drink and nothing at all on Sundays. If you wanted a bar or a dance hall you had to drive twelve miles south to Tennessee, to a strip of highway that had long ago been dubbed “the Tobacco Patch,” where you could find enough 101-proof liquor and legal adult entertainment to keep you satiated until the next trip to Nashville. Just over the state line there was a decent barbecue joint with an attached grocery store, which was stocked floor to ceiling with cases of Coors and Natural Light and a shelf of nothing but Boone’s Farm, the bottles gleaming under the fluorescents like quartz.
POKE’S
, the sign out front read, and the shack’s other features
included a half dozen picnic tables, good for the congregating smokers, and a large blue Port-o-San positioned maybe a dozen steps away from the restaurant’s entrance. Down the road a bit from Poke’s was the Patch’s first real bar, the Salamander, a one-room lean-to that was always getting shut down by the fire marshal. The clientele there were locals, regulars, full-blown alcoholics. The Salamander opened at four and closed at one
A.M
., when its regular stable of old drunks was either unconscious or wandering down the highway toward Nancy’s, where the luck of meeting up with a woman was better, though the drinks were much pricier.

Nancy’s was a dance hall. It was a Quonset hut the size of a roller rink and similar to a roller rink in design: The dance floor was a broad oblong of polished oak with a DJ’s station positioned right in the center. To the right of the dance floor was a long bar and two levels of seating, floor and deck, and this was where you could usually find a decent crowd of drinkers on Fridays and Saturdays, sometimes hundreds of them, their cigarette smoke curling toward the ceiling where it hung, trapped, like a storm cloud. Nancy’s had a live act and a cover charge on Saturday nights, the bands always country or rockabilly, their playlists never more daring or obscure than the tracks you could choose on the jukebox any evening of the week. But you paid for the thump of bass through the floorboards and the high screech of electric guitar vibrating off the metal walls, the three-dimensionality of the music when it was live and sweating and right in front of you. This was the appeal of Nancy’s. This was why, two Saturday nights ago, a group of coworkers from Price Electric had journeyed southward in three different pickup trucks, Sam Austen’s Dodge Ram leading the way, swerving left and right over the double yellow line because its driver was already halfway to sodden, a flask of something raw and almost chemical-smelling tucked between his legs and up next to his groin.

Wyatt, who was balanced in the backseat of the king cab between a Styrofoam cooler full of beer and what appeared to be the remains of the truck’s factory stereo system, thought the brew smelled more
like kerosene than any drink he knew, and so he turned it down, politely as he could, when Sam offered him a pull on it. Already he felt foolish. Here he was, fifty-five years old, riding in the backseat of a drunk teenager’s truck—he’d be in jail by the end of the night. But the boys had asked him, no, begged him, to come, and they’d been almost kind about it, and Wyatt couldn’t rightly tell them that he had anything better going on. Most Saturday nights he and Boss sat on the couch and watched a movie Wyatt had rented for free from the public library. Sometimes, when the newspaper ran a coupon, he’d order a pizza for carryout, seeing no reason why he should pay a delivery charge and tip when he could drive the five minutes and get it himself. More often he would pick up a pound of ground chuck from Piggly Wiggly and fry burgers and onions in the same skillet he’d used in the morning to cook his sausage. Every now and then he’d purchase a six-pack along with his groceries, but he never had more than two beers in a night, and these he spread out over hours, savoring them. Wyatt was no great drinker.

Sam was singing along to an Alan Jackson song playing loud through his new compact disc player, a marvel of electronics so complicated looking, so full of buttons and blinking neon lights, that Wyatt thought it looked more like the panel on a spaceship than something you could purchase for two hundred bucks at the nearest Circuit City. Gene Lawson, riding shotgun, tipped back his can of beer, swallowed the dregs, and pitched the empty out the window, nailing a stop sign. “Bull’s-eye,” he said, putting his left hand up, palm open, as though requesting a high five. Wyatt, now well trained, opened the cooler and fished a can from the bottom, where the ice was packed. He put it in Gene’s hand.

“Appreciate it,” Gene said.

Sam gunned it through a yellow light, the truck’s transmission squealing before he could jam the gearshift into fourth. The kid didn’t know what he had, didn’t know how easily he could lose it all, daddy or no daddy. Wyatt couldn’t remember a time when he’d ever been that foolish, but maybe that was his problem. His own father had
died of a heart attack when Wyatt was seventeen and a senior in high school. Wyatt hadn’t been a good enough student to set his sights on college, so he probably would have ended up in one of the local factories anyway, but he’d missed out on those Sam-style years of partying and blowing his money and trolling the honky-tonks for pretty girls.

“State line,” Sam called, and he and Gene touched the roof of the cab with their right hands, a gesture Wyatt didn’t understand and cared too little about to bother questioning. The thought of his couch, of Boss’s warmth under his left hand and the TV’s remote control in his right, had never been more appealing.

“That’s our little ritual,” Gene said in the silence that followed. Gene was a few years older than Sam, old enough to drink legally, but he had a chubby boy’s face that he attempted to hide, or age, with coarse whiskers. “Say a little prayer to your angel when you get to Tennessee, ’cause you’ll probably need it. And thank the Lord for Kentucky when you drive back over.”

Sam took another swig from his flask. “Praise the Lord!” he said stupidly.

The boys clinked their drinks together.

They passed Poke’s and the Salamander, and then Nancy’s was visible just around a bend in the road, glimmering in the moonlight like a half-buried relic. There was something kind of mystical about it, the metal structure pulsing like the mother ship, the security lights outside all haloed in clouds of limestone dust from the gravel parking lot. And of course Wyatt’s presence here, riding backseat with a couple of man-boys, smelling of the English Leather cologne that he usually only broke out for funerals and occasionally church, was surreal; the night had the texture of a dream. He would wonder, hoping, the next day:
Was it?

“All right, Tubs,” Sam said once they parked and shut off the car, cutting off Alan Jackson before he could finish his plea to not rock the jukebox. “We’re parked. We’re going to a bar. Might as well have you a beer while it’s free.”

“I don’t mind waiting till we’re indoors,” Wyatt said.

Sam leaned around the seat and popped the lid off the cooler, making the Styrofoam squeal. “Get your ass a beer, man,” Sam said. “We’re not going in until you drink one. I’m determined to see you have a good time tonight.”

Wyatt thought about saying that he didn’t need beer to have a good time but knew how square that would be. And it wasn’t the beer he had a problem with, anyhow. But how could he tell these boys that?
I’m too grown-up for all of this. I was always too grown-up for all of this.
He’d come, hadn’t he? He was in it for the night, like it or not.

“All right, Christ,” he said, pressing the tab on a Coors Light. He took a long swallow, appreciating its chill, and then followed with another draft.

“Chug that sonofabitch,” Gene said, and Wyatt thought,
What the hell.
He finished the beer a moment later, belched loudly, and leaned forward to pitch the can out of Gene’s window. The boys laughed and clapped Wyatt on the shoulder, and then they were all climbing out of Sam’s truck, Wyatt a little flushed but otherwise fine. All of this was silly, yes, but not the end of the world. He would convince Sam to let him drive home once the guys had gotten their partying over with, and if Sam refused, he’d slip out and call a cab. Nobody would notice, anyhow. In the meantime, he’d have a couple of beers, listen to the band, and watch the rest of the bunch get shitfaced. They were gathering together now, seven men from three different trucks, none of them except for Wyatt a year older than thirty: Sam the best looking of the bunch (and knowing it, too) with his blond hair and blue eyes and his slim waist, cinched in even tighter by a set of light-washed Levi’s; Daniel Stone nearly as pretty with his black hair and suntan, but lacking the charisma to make the sale the way Sam could. The rest were passably attractive in the way that men who could attach themselves to more attractive men sometimes were. Wyatt hadn’t even been that lucky. At Sam’s age he’d been five foot ten, his current height, and about twenty pounds overweight (lean years compared to now); he’d worn his hair, already thinning, long in the front to hide his white bulb of a forehead. And what few friends he’d made in high
school he lost upon dropping out, because he was too busy, always too busy, for anything but work and his mother, and when she died he was thirty-eight and already past the point, he’d believed, of being anyone different than he was already.

Wyatt watched, silent, as the other men chided one another, finished beers, checked their reflections in the windows of their vehicles and patted flyaway hairs into place. Vain as women.

“All right, fellas,” Sam said, clapping his hands at the group as though they were a pack of rowdy dogs. “Let’s get in there.”

The bouncer at the door was checking IDs. Wyatt, at the back of the group, watched as Sam pulled his wallet smoothly from his back pants pocket, flipping the ID sleeve over with the conviction of a clergyman, and the guy barely glanced at it before giving Sam a nod and stamping his hand. Wyatt wondered if the fake had just been that good or if Sam had just been that good. Probably the latter. When Wyatt’s turn came, the bouncer wanted to see nothing from him except his five dollars.

He smelled Nancy’s before he could see it well enough to move forward. Cigarette smoke hung thickly in the doorway, and a set of multicolored lights behind the band flashed red and blue against the fog, turning it into something that seemed almost solid in the otherwise dim room. Behind the smoke he could sense the heavy, sticky edge of old frying grease; beneath that, the tang of body odor. It was almost hot despite the building’s size and the time of year, and as Wyatt pressed ahead through the crowd, following the white glow of Daniel Stone’s polo shirt, he could see an oily sheen on most of the bodies around him. He tripped a little and found himself almost kissing-distance to the face of a woman about his own age. The too-pale powder on her upper lip bubbled with hot sweat, reminding Wyatt unpleasantly of the sight of flour and sausage fat in his cast-iron skillet on the mornings when he took the time to make a little milk gravy.

“Excuse me,” he said, backing up, but she seemed not to notice.

The men from work had gathered against the corner of the bar, each trying to claim the nearest bartender’s attention, and so Wyatt looked
around for an empty table, a place to sit and observe. At first there was nothing. The stools at the bar were all occupied, the tables laden with empty glasses and beer bottles and shoulder-to-shoulder with people, but then the band’s leader announced a slow song, told the men to “grab the nearest looker,” and some of the tables cleared out then. Wyatt seated himself at one immediately.

He’d been there for only a moment, peering through the bad lighting at the shift and spin of the dance floor, when he heard a soft “Oh” to his side, and he turned in time to see a woman backing away, a foamy pint of beer in each hand.