"Don't worry about it."
"Are you kidding? He's got mental diseases they haven't named yet. I ain't puttirfg you on, son. He's got a hard-on for you you couldn't knock down with a hammer."
"Don't use that language in the house."
"Sorry, it's a speech defect or something. His head reminds me of a flowerpot somebody dropped on the concrete. It's full of cracks and the dirt's starting to leak out, but he don't know it yet. Dig this. Sal built an elevator platform for the piano at his club, one of these deals that rises up into the spotlight while the guy's playing. Except after the club closed this two-hundred-and-eighty-pound bouncer got on top of the piano with this topless dancer for some serious rumba boogie, and somehow the machinery got cranked up and the elevator went right up to the ceiling and mashed them both against a beam. It broke the guy's neck, and the broad was trapped up there with him all night. So Sal says it's a real big tragedy, and he holds the funeral on a Sunday afternoon at the club, with the casket covered with flowers out in the middle of the dance floor. But the undertaker messed up the job, and the guy's neck was bent and his head was out of round, like a car tire had run over it, and the dagos were slobbering and wailing all over the place while Sal's singing on the mike in a white suit like he's Tony Bennett. It was so disgusting the waiters went back to the union and threatened to quit. Later Sal says to me, "It was a class send-off, don't you think? Jo-Jo would have liked it." Except I found out he only rented the casket, and he had Jo-Jo planted in a cloth-covered box in a desert cemetery outside of town that lizards wouldn't crawl across."
"Good night, Dixie."
He shook his head and forked another piece of pie in his mouth.
"You worry about my bad language, and you're fixing to squeeze Sal in the peaches. You're a wonder to behold, son."
I set the alarm on my Seiko watch for two A.M. and went to sleep. It was raining lightly when I was awakened by the tiny dinging sound on my wrist. I dialed Sal's number, then hung up when a man with sleep in his voice answered. I waited fifteen minutes, then hung up again as soon as the same man said "Hello" irritably into the receiver. I drank a glass of milk and watched the rain fall in the yard and run down the window, then at two-thirty I called again. I put a pencil crossways in my teeth and covered the mouthpiece with my handkerchief.
"Who the fuck is this?" the same man said.
"Where's Sal?" I kept my voice in the back of my throat and let it come out in a measured rasp.
"Asleep. Who is this?"
"Go wake him up."
"Are you crazy? It's two-thirty in the morning. What's with you, man?"
"Listen, you get that dago welsher out of bed."
"I think you're loaded, man, and you'd better stop playing on the phone and forget you ever called here."
"You don't recognize my voice, huh? Maybe it's because a guy put a wrench across my windpipe, a guy that gutless kooze sent me to see. I didn't catch a plane back to Vegas, either. I'm one hour away. I better not find out you're hitting on my broad, either."
He was quiet a moment, then he said, "Charlie?"
I didn't answer.
"Charlie?" he said.
"Hey, man…"
"What?"
"I didn't know. Hey, man, I'm sorry. You should have told me. It's late, and I been asleep, and I didn't know it was you."
"Get him on the phone."
"Man, he's out. I mean, like him and Sandy must have smoked a whole shoe box of shit before they crashed. How about he calls you in the morning?"
"You got some kind of skin growth over your ears?"
"Look, man, I go in there, he'll tear my dick off. He's been crawling the walls all day, anyway. Look, I don't know what's going on between you guys, but I don't want to get caught in it. Okay? I'm not putting you on, man, he can't talk to you. He really smoked his brains tonight."
I waited five seconds and listened to him breathe.
"Tell him I'm coming," I said, and hung up.
I overslept the next morning and was awakened by the sound of Alafair fixing breakfast in the kitchen. She was too short to function well around the stove, and she clattered the pans loudly on the burners.
"I can walk myself today, Dave," she said.
"No, that's out. We do everything together, little guy. We're a team, right?"
She stood in front of the stove, her face quiet, her head even with the top of the stove, looking at the skillet full of French toast.
"It makes me feel funny in front of the other kids," she said.
"I'll drive you, then. It'll be like I'm dropping you off on the way to work. That'll be okay, won't it?"
"Clarise don't know how to take care of Tripod. She's always mad at him."
I turned off the stove, picked up the skillet with a dish towel, and set it in the sink to cool. The French toast was burned around the edges.
"We're just going to have to accept some things now. That's the way it is, Alf," I said.
She packed her lunch box silently, then ate only half of her French toast, and went outside and waited for me on the front step. The wind was blowing off the river, and the sunlight through the maple tree made shifting patterns of leaves on her face.
Later, Dixie and I went to an early AA meeting. Afterward, one of the members who worked in the job-placement service told Dixie that he had found him a part-time job operating a forklift at the pulp mill out on the river. We walked home, and it was obvious that Dixie was not happy at the news. He sulked around the house, then took his sunburst guitar out on the back steps and began playing with a thumb pick and singing a song that I had heard only once before, | many years ago. The words went to the tune of "Just a Closer Walk With Thee."
"Now, bread and gravy is all right, And a turnip sandwich is a delight, But my kids always scream For more of them good ole butter beans.
Well, just a little piece of country ham, Just pass the butter and the jam, Just pass the biscuits if you please, And some more of them good ole butter beans.
Just see that woman over there, The one with both her hands in the air. She's not pregnant as she seems. She's just full of good ole butter beans."
I opened the screen and sat down on the steps beside him. It was warm, and the clover in the grass was alive with bees.
"You're supposed to report to the plant at noon, aren't you?" I said.
"That's what he said."
"You going out there in slacks and a Hawaiian shirt?"
"Look, that job ain't exactly what I had in mind."
"Oh?"
"Ain't that place a toilet paper factory or something? Besides, I don't have experience running heavy equipment."
"A forklift isn't heavy equipment. And I thought you told me you operated one in Huntsville."
"For about two days, till I dropped the prongs on a guy's foot."
"We had a deal, podna. We don't renegotiate the terms."
He made a sliding blues chord high up on the guitar's neck, then ran it all the way down to the nut.
"I learned that from Sam Hopkins," he said.
"I went out to his house in the Fifth Ward in Houston. People said them nigras'll leave you bleeding in the street for the garbageman to find. They treated me like royalty, man."
"I spent some time Wednesday in some courthouses east of the Divide."
His face went blank.
"I found some of the deals you made over there."
He continued to look out at the lawn and the bees lifting off the clover.
"I'm not an expert on the oil business, but I saw some peculiar stuff in those lease files," I said.
"They're public records. A person can look all they want to." He began fishing in his shirt pocket for a cigarette.