She said nothing and her face showed nothing and she did not look at him but straight ahead. There was nothing strange in that. They were very nearly the same age, and he had known her, more or less, all of his life. She had always been a shy, quiet girl. When she came with her mother to the house to work for his daddy, he could never remember her saying anything.
“I’m just going myself,” he said. “You want a ride?” The place where she lived was almost a mile away. It was late but he was in no hurry to get home to Elfie. She glanced briefly at him and walked away. “No skin off my ass,” he said.
He got into the truck with a bottle of whiskey. He knew the old man would be waiting for it, but he took his time anyway. The house where his daddy lived was old and tilted slightly to the left, with a wide porch running around three sides. It was two stories, with a second floor where nobody ever went, where his daddy stored furniture and old clothes and newspapers — the Atlanta Constitution and the Albany Herald and the Macon Telegraph—all of which the old man subscribed to and which came in the mail a day late and took up his mornings until he began drinking whiskey at noon. Joe Lon could have moved into the big house with his father and his sister, the old man even asked him to, offering to clean out the second floor and let him and Elfie have it, but Joe Lon would be damned and in hell before he would do that, and even though he loved his father, admired him, and could tolerate his sister, he knew that it would never work to try to live in the same house with them.
Among other reasons it wouldn’t work was he liked to beat Elfie occasionally, or didn’t like it, rather he couldn’t help it, and his father would have killed him if he had ever found out he punched Elfie. More than once they had had to tell the old man that Elfie had fallen out of the door of the trailer onto her head when she turned up with two black eyes, or had run into the closet door or closed her hand in the stove oven, which actually once was true but it was because Joe Lon was holding her fingers there with one hand while he slammed the oven with the other. The old man told people everywhere that his daughter-in-law. Elf, was a goddam fine woman, good mother, but she was probably the clumsiest human being God ever made.
The old man was not a good man by anybody’s reckoning; he just didn’t hold with hurting women. He had once castrated a Macon pulpwood Negro who drove bootleg whiskey for him because the Negro had stolen a case off the truck. Another time he and one of his friends had scalped a white man for some reason that nobody ever knew and the old man had not disclosed. He also had probably the best pit bulldogs in all of Georgia, which were the pride of his life and which he loved deeply and which were the best fighting dogs because he treated them with a savage and unrelenting cruelty that even other pit bull owners could not bear to witness or emulate.
Joe Lon drove his pickup down the narrow lane bordered on both sides with the skeletoned limbs of winter-naked pecan trees. The huge house was dark except for the front room where the old man lived and the thin wavering light of his sister’s television in a side room toward the back. Joe Lon didn’t know what time it was but he knew it might be after midnight. He was drunk, but not good and drunk the way he liked to be. The whiskey simply had refused to take hold beyond a certain point. On the seat beside him were two quarts of bonded bourbon. There were no labels on the bottles. There never were. It tasted like Early Times. He thought it probably was, and it was also probably hijacked stuff. He’d gotten it for two dollars a bottle, a whole goddam trailer of it. He hadn’t asked where it came from. He never did.
Joe Lon let himself in and went down the short hall to the room where his daddy sat with his back to the door watching a dog strapped onto an electric inclined treadmill. It was a standard training device for fighting dogs. His daddy was nearly deaf and he did not look up even though Joe Lon slammed the door. His daddy was named Joe Lon too but was called Big Joe, partly to distinguish the father from the son and partly because the old man was nearly seven feet tall. There wasn’t a hair on his head but he had eyebrows that were thick and black and very long.
When Joe Lon came up behind the chair and leaned down and said into Big Joe’s ear: “Here’s the goddam whiskey,” the bald head did not move at all but the eyebrows twitched, seemed actually to turn on his face.
“Bout time,” said Big Joe. “I been sober since sundown.”
“I magine,” said Joe Lon. He had to shout to make himself heard.
He went over and sat in a ragged overstuffed chair. Big Joe broke the seal, raised the bottle, and took a tentative swallow. He brought the bottle down, looked at it, shook it gently, then handed it to his son.
“Git us that pitcher,” said Big Joe, but Joe Lon had already gone to the sideboard, where there was a white crock pitcher beside a wash basin. He brought two short glasses and the pitcher of water. He poured a glass and gave it to his daddy. He had brought a glass for himself but he never did get around to pouring any water in it. He set the glasses on the floor beside the chair and did not look at it again.
“You ought to have a little water with that whiskey,” said Big Joe.
“I been trying to git drunk,” said Joe Lon, his voice flat and disinterested. “It don’t seem to be working though.” They watched the dog on the treadmill. The sound of his breathing, wet and ragged and irregular, filled the room. There was no alternative for the dog but to run even though he had obviously gone as far as he could go, further even, because now and then his front legs collapsed and the treadmill kept turning and the dog’s knees were scraped and ground against the electrical tread until somehow he regained his feet. The front of his legs was raw and bleeding. But the dog made no sound except for the irregular gasping gulps of air he managed to suck in over his lolling tongue. Part of the reason he made no sound was a weighted device strapped onto his lower jaw. It was to strengthen the snapping and chewing muscles and it had been hooked onto the animal’s jaw most of the afternoon so that now the dog could no longer support the weight and his mouth was splayed as though ripped, as though it were a raw and bleeding wound.
“How’s Elf?” said Big Joe.
“She ain’t doing bad,” said Joe Lon.
“She ain’t run in to nothing else has she?”
“Not yet,” Joe Lon said, “but shit you never can tell, she’s apt to fuck herself up any time.”
“She’s a good woman, Elf is,” said Big Joe, “and you a lucky man. You one lucky man and don’t you ever forgit that, Joe Lon.”
“Shit no,” said Joe Lon, “I ain’t gone forgit just how fucking lucky I am.”
“You cuss too much for a boy,” said Big Joe. He passed the bottle. “I never liked that word for cussing. Fucking is no kind of word for a man to use to cuss with.”
Joe Lon didn’t answer and they watched the dog, which had fallen, struggle back up from his battered knees again. Since he had been in the room the steady insistent sound of the television had been coming through the wall. Laughter, sudden and joyous, burst in and among the dog’s breathing. His sister, Beatriz Dargan Mackey but called Beeder by anybody who had a chance to call her anything which was not often because she stayed pretty close to the Muntz, had on Johnny Carson. Johnny’s sly badgering voice mixed nicely with the pit bull’s bloody breathing because the dog had started hemorrhaging from the mouth now and it smoothed out the ragged edges of sound until it almost sounded like someone with a pleasant voice humming a sweet song a little off-key.
The old man whispered softly toward the dog now and Happed his batlike eyebrows: “Take it, you mean sumbitch. Do it! Work!” He crooned it in a little sing-song voice, the name words over and over again.