“A cat?” said Bub. He didn’t get it.
“Yeah. A cool cat is your slick customer. He don’t sweat nor git excited. He’s always got a laugh on his face. And he a rebel. He rebels against things, ’cause he knows things is fucked against him. But he always stays cool. Nothing gets him hot.”
Bub contemplated this novel idea. Suddenly a carhop appeared.
“What’s the ruckus, honey gal?” Jimmy asked her.
“Some old boys robbed the IGA,” she said. “They done killed some people and a nigger too.”
“Oh, you just wait,” said Jimmy, giving Bub a big wink, “bet that changes real soon and you find out nobody’s been shot for real.”
“I don’t know,” said the girl.
“What’s your best burger here?”
“We got all kinds. They sell a lot of the Bacon Supreme. You got your bacon and your cheese and your lettuce and tomato. They got to hold it together with toothpicks. They put a little flag on it. It’s really cute.”
“Sound good to you, Bub?”
Bub nodded. He was hungry.
“Yeah,” said Jimmy, “two of them Bacon Su-premes, two orders of the fries, and you got a good milk shake? I mean, now, made out of real ice cream and milk, mixed up superthick on one of them beater things?”
“Yes sir. Best shakes in the town.”
“You bring us two. Chocolate.”
“Strawberry,” said Bub.
“One choc, one straw,” said the girl.
Jimmy sat back. He lit another Lucky, inhaled deeply, then looked at his watch. He seemed like a man without a worry in his mind.
“You just re-lax now,” he crooned. “It’s all going to be all right. It’s going to be cool. We are the coolest cats around.”
The girl brought the hamburgers and it was the best hamburger Bub had ever had. In Blue Eye, a place named Check’s Check-Out offered hamburgers, but they was greasy wads of overcooked beef on a tough little bun, nothing like this. Heaven: the meat was so damn tender, the cheese tangy, but that bacon really made the thing sing. Who’d ever think of putting a piece of bacon on a burger?
“Damn,” Bub said, “ain’t that a damn burger?”
“That’s a king burger,” said Jimmy. “The king of all burgers. Okay, now, you just come with me.” He got out of the car, taking the bag that said IGA with him ever so casually, and just began to amble along, easy as can be.
“By now, they got our car ID’d,” he said. “We wouldn’t get two damn blocks with it. So we’ll git another car right where I got the last one. See, this is working out just fine.”
They turned off the main road and walked a block or two into a nice little area with small houses neatly kept. The summer heat was lighter because of the heavy green trees that closed everything off. It felt enchanted. Water sprinklers heaved back and forth like giant fans on a few of the lawns and a couple of young men mowed their grass, the mowers sounding clackety and mechanical. They passed an old lady.
“Howdy, ma’am,” said Jimmy. “Nice day.”
“Nice day to you, young man,” she answered with a smile.
Soon enough Jimmy came to an Oldsmobile parked unattended in a driveway. He turned back and smiled at Bub.
“See, you get all nervous, you can’t do nothing, people sense you’re up to bad. You be cool, you just smile and look like you got the whole world in your back pocket, they back off and give you all the room you want. You just watch how damn easy this gonna be.”
With that, he sauntered up the driveway, opened the door and in a second had the car started. He backed up.
“Come on, Bub. You gonna wait for Mr. Earl Swagger himself to invite you?”
Bub got in.
Off they drove, in another nice car, tooling down suburban streets as mild as could be. Jimmy looked at his watch again, as if he had a schedule to keep.
“Turn on the radio, find us some good tunes,” he said.
This felt weirdly familiar to Bub and he bent over and worked the dials and knobs as a crackle of sounds came out. But none of that hard-driving hillbilly crazy stuff that Jimmy preferred. He got some country, Patsy Cline, he got that Perry Como singing about the moon hitting your eye like a big pizza pie, he got Miss Day doing “Que Sera, Sera” and he got—
“Authorities in Fort Smith have set up a two-state dragnet to locate two armed and dangerous men who robbed a downtown grocery store, killing four men including a police officer.”
Bub just heard the killing news dumbly.
“The police say that newly released car thief Jimmy M. Pye, of Blue Eye, and his cousin Buford ‘Bub’ Pye, also of Blue Eye, were responsible for the outbreak of violence on peaceful Midland Boulevard. They theorize that the two killers will attempt to return home to the Polk County wilderness.
“Says State Police Colonel Timothy C. Evers,” and here a richer, deeper voice came across the radio, “‘If I know my bad men, they’ll head to land they know. Well, they’ll run into our blockades and we’ll take care of ’em the way they should be taken care of.’”
“That ole boy sounds ticked,” said Jimmy. “He sounds like we got him out of bed or something. Jesus.”
“J-J-J-Jimmy?”
“Yeah, cuz?”
“He did so say we done killed them boys.”
“Well, maybe they was real bullets in my gun. But there weren’t none in yours. You in the free. You was just ’long for the ride, Bub. Your cuz Jimmy wouldn’t get you in no shit, that I swear. Wouldn’t be cool at all. Now, we’s just gonna head out to Blue Eye, pick up Edie and off we go. Figure we may lay up with an uncle I got over in Anadarko, Oklahoma. He’ll—”
But Bub was crying.
“Bub, what’s eating you, boy?”
“Jimmy, I want my mama. I don’t want to go to no jail. I didn’t want to kill nobody. Oh, Jimmy, why is this happening? It ain’t fair. I never did nothing wrong, not nothing. I just want—”
“There, there, Bub, don’t you worry ’bout nothing. I swear to you, you got it all up ahead: California, a job as a star’s Number One Boy. You can bring your mama out there and buy her a nice little house. It’s all set up. I swear to you, all set up.”
Bub began to sniffle. His heart ached. He threw the gun on the floor. He just wanted to make it all go away.
“Well, lookie here,” said Jimmy.
Bub looked up and saw a gaudy sign against the bright blue sky, but since it was midday, the sign wasn’t turned on. It said “Nancy’s Flamingo Lounge” and Bub noticed that all up and down the street were other places called “clubs,” all of them with unlit signs and the sleepy look of nighttime spots. Jimmy pulled off the road and down a little driveway so that he was out back, in a parking lot area dominated by a large, blank garage.
There was utter silence.
“Hey,” said Jimmy. “Guess what? We there. We made it. We gonna be fine.”
Bub watched as the large garage doors of the structure peeled back and Jimmy eased the car forward. Darkness and silence swallowed them, cut only by some jangled music, far off, as from a cheap, small radio.
“Cool,” said Jimmy.
3
hen he got there, he thought everything would clear up, but instead—and of course—things simply got more confused. He took a room in a cheap motel near the Mexican quarter of town and spent the morning fretting in his room about his next step. Here’s what he came up with: no next step.