“Ella…” I said.
“What do you mean, ‘do you want to stay?’”
“I mean you sound a little drunk, and maybe she ought not to stay.”
“You keep your nose out of my business, old man.”
“Old man?”
“Yeah. Old man.”
Ella took hold of Kevin’s shoulder. “Don’t, honey. They gave me a ride.”
Kevin pushed Ella down on the wet ground. Brett rushed over to help her up. “You get back in the truck, cunt,” Kevin said.
“That’s it,” I said. I had been standing outside the truck with the door open, leaning on it. I closed it and started toward Kevin.
Kevin said, “What you gonna do, fuckhead?”
“I can either sit you down and have a nice talk, or punch your lights out. Since I figure you’ll be a boring conversationalist, I like the second idea.”
“Punch my lights out?” Kevin said. “I’ll have you know I was a goddamn good boxer. I almost went pro.”
“Then I’m sure you’ve seen a left jab,” I said, and jabbed him. I hit him solid on the right eye and his head snapped back. Then I kicked hard off my back leg and caught him in the balls. I half-leaped then, caught his head as he bent over, drove it down with an elbow and lifted my knee into his face. When he came back up, his face bloody, I skipped in and caught hold of his arm and his shoulder, brought my right leg behind his right leg, and reared backwards hard as I could.
He went down quick and smacked his head against the dirt. Spittle flew out of his mouth and gleamed like a string of diamonds in the sunlight.
Ella rushed over, draped herself over him, held one hand toward me. “Don’t, Hap! Don’t hit him anymore.”
“Why not?” I said. “I’m just startin’ to enjoy myself.”
“He doesn’t mean it,” Ella said. “He can’t help himself. It’s not like him. He’s not himself.”
“Then who the hell is he?” I said. “Was he that other fella when he blacked your eye?”
“I pushed him into it,” Ella said.
“Jesus,” I said. “You better get straight, Ella. I can see a couple having a spat, even taking a slap at one another in a moment of anger. But this. Him punchin’ you around…”
Kevin had gotten up on one elbow. “You better go, man.”
“Why?” I said. “You going to whip my ass, big man?”
Brett came over and took my arm. She said, “Let’s go, Hap. Your testosterone is showing. Ella. You want to go with us, you can. You want to call someone about this. The women’s shelter. Whatever. We’ll make sure you get to do it.”
Ella shook her head. She started helping Kevin to his feet.
“You want to see the left jab again?” I said to him.
“You caught me by surprise,” he said.
“Looked to me I caught you in the eye,” I said.
“Then you kicked, like a sissy,” he said.
“Tell everybody a sissy kicked your ass, then,” I said.
Ella started helping Kevin toward the trailer. She paused and looked back over her shoulder. “Thank you, but it’s not your business. Really. It’s not your business.”
Ella went up the steps with her arm around Kevin. They went inside the trailer and closed the door. We got in the pickup and drove away.
Once we were out on the highway, Brett slid over close to me.
“You were magnificent, Hap.”
“I think I got a little John Wayne.”
“You know what?”
“What?”
“I just loved his movies. Will you take me home and seduce me?”
“Because I beat Kevin up you’re hot?”
“No. Because you got pissed when he called me a cunt. I am sometimes, but I thank you anyway.”
“You’re welcome.”
“I like what you tried to do for Ella. But she doesn’t change, Hap. She never does. I’ve tried to get her to leave him, but she keeps going back. Someday he’ll kill her.”
“I fear you’re right,” I said.
16
We drove back to Brett’s place, went to bed and made love, then showered together. I dressed and got ready to leave so she could have time to herself before going off to work.
As she kissed me ’bye at the door, I said, “I’ll be back.”
“Hell, I know that,” she said. “You done had a taste.”
I drove home, read until late, slept fitfully. Next morning I picked up Leonard and we cruised over to Antone’s.
The air was sweet-smelling after yesterday’s rain, but you could tell already it was going to be hot. It was going to be that kind of April where spring, except for an hour or so in the morning, was mostly forgotten. Ozone-layer problems, perhaps. I liked to blame it on all those evangelists and their goddamn hair spray. Hadn’t they heard of spritzers?
Antone’s was what used to be called a barber college and hairdressing salon. It did business, but it mostly trained people for business. It was located where Main crossed Universal Street. Below Universal was a poor section of town, but on the opposite side of the street things began to look up. Drive a short distance and you were on the town square, where things were clean and bright.
Go the other way, you were descending into a toilet that might flush at any moment. A place where Those in Power liked to keep the people they thought of as rejects.
We parked in the parking lot next to Antone’s and a recreation center that used to be a 7-Eleven before it got robbed so often it was sort of like a free-money drop for the thugs of LaBorde. Through the glass you could see folks who ought to have jobs, or kids that ought to be in school, shooting pool. There were a number of motorcycle types in there as well. I hoped none of them recognized Leonard from his little escapade at the Broken Wheel.
Leonard glanced through the glass at the pool players. He didn’t say anything, but the look on his face told me plenty. Leonard thought most of these folks were lazy shits and worthless, and I suppose he was right to some degree. Many of them were just that. Plain sorry. But I never found that life worked that way, black and white. Good and evil. Most of the time it was a mixture. That’s what made it so hard. You couldn’t generalize and be a thinker. There were assholes on both sides of the coin, but there were good people shouldering bad breaks as well. Miss two paychecks, have the car break down, and you could go from lower middle class to living in a cardboard box under the river bridge, eating out of Dumpsters and pushing a shopping cart.
Inside Antone’s there was a lot of activity, people cutting hair and doing perms on folks with a desire for cheap haircuts, coloring, and curls. Always a scary proposition to get a haircut at a beauty and barber college.
I used to get my hair cut that way before I decided three bucks was too much for what they did to me, and eight bucks downtown at a real barber shop was just right. When I got my cheap haircuts it wasn’t at Antone’s. It was the original barber college, and it was located in another poor part of LaBorde back when we called LaBorde a town, not a city. The place was cleverly named Bob’s Barber College, and it smelled of hair oil, shaving cream, and men’s sweat. That’s all you saw there. Men. It didn’t do beauty cuts and it didn’t do anything fancy, so it didn’t attract women. It was a place where men talked the kind of talk that used to be called man talk. Hunting and fishing, cars and dogs and women. Usually in that order.
Got your hair cut there, way it was done was limited. There was the Dust Bowl Oakie cut, which seemed mostly a kind of hand-on-top-of-head-and-cut-around-it style, shaving from about the middle of your head to below your ears. Then there was the cut called by many of us the Mental Health and Mental Retardation cut. Same style they gave the mentally handicapped at the state school. This translated as cut what you see, and all you want, long as there’s some hair left on the top of the head like a topknot. Got through with you on that, you looked a little bit like a turnip. There was also the GI cut, which was a shaved head. This was mostly given to those suspected of insects. And finally, there were standard jobs, like Little Man Number One. This was almost passable unless you wanted it blocked in the back. That didn’t exist. The head got cut pretty good, but when it came to the back of the neck, it got shaved slicker than a snot-covered doorknob. There was Little Man Number Two as well. This one you got a haircut and a shave, as well as a few deep cuts soaked in some alcohol-based stink-water that made flies light on your face. Lastly, there was Little Man Number Three, but it was so dreadful it’s difficult to talk about. This was the specialty of Bob himself, guy who taught the others. He gave all his haircuts while drunk and with a palsied hand, and many of us suspected his tools of trade were the Weed Eater and the garden snips.