"I said, 'What d'you mean, Mr. Higgins?' He says, 'For a better quality rubbers.' Then he took his hat off and whipped the shit out of me with it. Next stop one month in isolation, son. I'm talking about down there with the crazoids, the screamers, the guys who stink so bad the hacks have to wash them down with hoses. And I had delirium tremens for two fucking days. Weird sounds snapping in my head, rockets going off when I closed my eyes, a big hard-on and all kinds of real sick sexual thoughts. You know what I'm talking about, man. It must have been ninety degrees in the hole, and I was shaking so bad I couldn't get a cup of water to my mouth.
"I got through two days and thought I was home free. But after a week I started to have all kinds of guilt feelings again. About the little boy in the accident in Fort Worth, about my own little boy dying in the fire. I couldn't stand it, man. Just that small isolation cell and the light through the food slit and all them memories. I would have drunk gasoline if somebody would have give it to me. So you know what I done? I didn't try to get the guilt out of my mind. I got high on it. I made myself so fucking miserable that I was drunk again. When I closed my eyes and swallowed, I could even taste that black cherry wine. I knew then it wasn't never gonna be any different. I was always gonna be drunk, whether I was dry or out there juicing.
"So in my head I wrote a song about it. I could hear all the notes, the riffs, a stand-up bass backing me up. I worked out the lyrics for it, too You can toke, you can drop, Drink or use. It don't matter, daddy, "Cause you never gonna lose Them mean ole jailhouse Black cherry blues."
I rubbed my forehead with my hand. I didn't know what to say to him.
"You still there?" he said.
"Yes."
"You gonna come over?"
"Maybe I'll see you another time. Thanks for the invitation."
"Fuck, yeah, I'm always around. Sorry I wasted your time."
"You didn't. We were good friends in college. Remember?"
"Everybody was good friends in college. It all died with Cochran and Holly. I got to motivate on over to another bar. This place bugs me. Dangle easy, Dave."
He hung up. I stared listlessly out into the sunlight a moment, then walked outside and finished changing the oil in my truck.
She drove up in her red Toyota jeep a half hour later. I guess I knew that she was coming, and I knew that she would come when Alafair was at school. It was like the feeling you have when you look into the eyes of another and see a secret and shared knowledge there that makes you ashamed of your own thoughts. She wore a yellow sundress, and she had put on lipstick and eye shadow and hoop earrings. The sacks of groceries in the back of the jeep looked as though they were there only by accident.
Her lipstick was dark, and when she smiled her teeth were white.
"Your hat," I said.
"Yes. You found it?"
"It's in the living room. Come in. I have some South Louisiana coffee on the stove."
She walked ahead of me, and I looked at the way her black hair sat thickly on her neck, the way the hem of her dress swung across her calves. When I opened the screen for her I could smell the perfume behind her ears and on her shoulders.
I went into the kitchen while she found her hat in the living room. I fooled with cups and saucers, spoons, a bowl of sugar, milk from the icebox, but my thoughts were as organized as a puzzle box that someone had shaken violently between his hands.
"I try to shop in Missoula. It's cheaper than Poison," she said.
"Yeah, food's real cheap here."
"Dixie Lee came along with me. He's in a bar right now."
"He called me. You might have to drag him out of the place on a chain."
"He'll be all right. He's only bad when Sal lets him take cocaine." She paused a moment.
"I thought maybe you wouldn't be home."
"I got a late start today. A bunch of phone calls, stuff like that."
She reached for the cups and saucers on the drain board and her arm brushed against mine. She looked at my eyes and raised her mouth, and I slipped my arms around her shoulders and kissed her. She stepped close against me, so that her stomach touched lightly against my loins, and moved her palms over my back. She opened and closed her mouth while she held and kissed me, and then she put her tongue in my mouth and I felt her body flatten against me. I ran my hands over her bottom and her thighs and gently bit her shoulder as she wrapped one calf inside my leg and rubbed her hair on the side of my face.
We pulled the shades in the bedroom and undressed without speaking, as if words would lead both of us to an awareness about morality and betrayal that we did not care to examine in the heated touch of our skin, the dry swallow in the throat, the silent parting of our mouths.
There had been one woman in my life since my wife's death, and I had lived celibate almost a year. She reached down and took me inside her and stretched out her legs along me and ran her hands along the small of my back and down my thighs. The breeze clattered the shades on the windows, the room was dark and cool, but my body was rigid and hot and my neck filmed with perspiration, and I felt like an inept and simian creature laboring above her. She stopped her motion, kissed me on the cheek and smiled, and I stared down at her, out of breath and with the surprise of a man whose education with women always proved inadequate.
"There's no hurry," she said quietly, almost in a whisper.
"There's nothing to worry about."
Then she said, "Here," and pressed on my arm for me to move off her. She brushed her hair out of her eyes, sat on top of me, kissed me on the mouth, then raised herself on her knees and put me inside her again. Her eyes closed and opened, she tightened her thighs against me, and propped herself up on her hands and looked quietly and lovingly into my face.
She came before I did, her face growing intense and small, her mouth suddenly opening like a flower. Then I felt all my nocturnal erotic dreams, my fear, my aching celibacy, rise and swell in my loins, and burst away outside of me like a wave receding without sound in a cave by the sea.
She lay close to me under the sheet, her fingers in the back of my hair. A willow tree in the backyard made shadows on the shade.
"You feel bad, don't you?" she said.
"No."
"You think what you've done is wrong, don't you?"
I didn't answer.
"Clete's impotent, Dave," she said.
"What?"
"He goes to a doctor, but it doesn't do any good."
"When did he become impotent?"
"I don't know. Before I met him. He says a fever did it to him in Guatemala. He says he'll be all right eventually. He pretends it's not a problem."
I raised up on my elbow and looked into her face.
"I don't understand," I said.
"You moved in with an impotent man?"
"He can't help what he is. He's good to me in other ways. He's generous, and he respects me. He takes me places where Indians don't go. Why do you have that look on your face?"
"I'm sorry. I don't mean to," I said.
"What are you thinking?"
"Nothing. I just don't quite understand."
"Understand what?"
"Your relationship. It doesn't make sense."
"Maybe it isn't your business."
"He was my partner, I'm in bed with his girl. You don't think I have some involvement here?"
"I don't like the way you're talking to me."
I knew that anything else that I said would be wrong. I sat on the edge of the bed with my back toward her. The wind fluttered the shade in the window, casting a brilliant crack of sunlight across the room. Finally I looked over my shoulder at her. She had pulled the sheet up over her breasts.