A big man came from the still-open diner to pick his teeth by the light from the front windows. Yellow highlights gleamed on his black rain slicker as he moved down the street and around the corner and out of sight.
The dishwater-blond waitress, alone behind the counter, reached under it for a movie magazine she placed open between her elbows on the red linoleum top. She leaned swaybacked with her behind stuck out while she read. The counter’s wooden edging had been chipped and carved by generations of pocketknives. Most of the stools had rips in their imitation-leather seats.
When the man off the night freight came in and shook water from his army fatigue cap, she straightened quickly, blushing at being caught goofing off. His fatigue jacket was wet-darkened across the shoulders. The walk in the rain had sobered him up. He was not tall, but wide and blocky. He grinned at her.
“Good night for ducks.”
She had the sort of soft Georgia accent that made every sentence a question, almost every phrase a sort of invitation.
“Don’t figure you look as if it’d melt you none?”
“That’s for sure. You still serving?”
“Burgers an’ fries? Chili ’n’ beans with oyster crackers?”
“I’ll have it all. Uh... you got tea? Maybe with lots of cream and sugar for it?” He didn’t much like tea, but he liked coffee less.
She giggled. “Tea’s for little old ladies.”
“That’s about what I feel like, with the rain and all.” He jerked his head toward the three booths under the windows that fronted the street. “Over there?”
“You just pick your spot, Johnny Doughboy.”
Must be an army base somewhere around here; he was just as glad she hadn’t noticed all his clothes weren’t government-issue. In the end booth he opened his duffel bag and took out a dog-eared Gold Medal Original by John D. MacDonald, then sat with the paperback open in his hands, looking out through the window’s cheap wavy rain-streaked glass at the deserted length of side street. Two pale lights bounced above the wet-gleaming gravel like buttons on a string.
The main street, at right angles to this, would probably be called Center or Main or Broadway. Unless it was named after Robert E. Lee or Stonewall Jackson. Here in South Georgia, that war was still being fought. That’s why he’d chosen the booth: if the big man showed up again, he’d be out the back door. A week of riding the boxcars had made him wary and observant.
When the man didn’t appear again, he started to read The Damned, was instantly immersed in the lives of the people at a stalled river ferry in a sun-scorched little town south of the border down Mexico way. Be nice to see Mexico for himself.
As he read, two dark shapes dropped off another rattler when it slowed for the same grade outside town. Their heavy shoes also struck the embankment running, but because of the rain sank into the soft grade fill to send out showers of wet cinders. One of them missed his footing in the dark, rolled down the slope until the long wet grass beside the right-of-way stopped him. He sat up and sniffed the half-acrid smell of dirt newly wet down.
He laughed. “Hey, man, old brakeman never catch us now.”
A moving shadow trudged back, slid down the embankment on its heels, lit a cigarette, became a man.
“I’d of whupped that bastard flat, you hadn’t stopped me.”
The cupped match flame revealed a young, hard face with deep-welled blue eyes and a square, cleft chin. His hair was brown and curled tightly against his skull by the rain.
The Negro, taller, stood up to brush the red loam off his brown cord trousers. “We don’t need no more trouble.” Slanting rain popped on his leather jacket and slid off, glistening. A dirty plaid cap hid his kinky hair. He was light-skinned enough to be called high yaller. “Come on, let’s go into town and get us something to eat. I got two bits and two dimes and two pennies. You got any loot?”
“Half a pack of butts,” said the white man. “God, Larkie, could I use a drink. I’m wet and cold clean through.”
“No whiskey, Dale. Won’t no one serve a white man and a colored man anyway.”
“If we weren’t tap city—”
“But we is.”
They waded through the sodden saw grass and smartweed that choked the ditch. A quail exploded from beneath their feet to squeak away into the darkness. Beyond the tracks was a shallow-rutted road of muddy sand. They turned toward the fitful yellow pocks that marked the town through the falling water. Far ahead, the freight train they’d left dropped its pressure with a sigh. Buckthorn and beaked hazel bushes flanked the road to their left, smelling fresh and sweet in the rain.
The dirt track became a badly maintained gravel street. The rain seemed to drift: through the wind-tossed streetlights’ dim glow, but it drummed the wooden sidewalk like running feet.
“Diner up ahead,” said Dale.
They hesitated in the windows’ pale yellow glow to peer in cautiously. There was a lone patron in a window booth, munching a hamburger, immersed in a paperback. He wore an army fatigue jacket and was maybe a couple of years younger than they were. Probably from some local army base, as much a stranger as they. No worries there. A homely waitress was behind the counter, washing fountain glasses in gray soapy water.
“What you think, Dale?”
“I think she’s got a kindly face. I think I got to get something into my gut.”
Normally Larkie would have waited outside, but it was raining hard now. The door’s hinges squeaked. They stopped just inside to drip water on the floor. The girl looked at them uncertainly, then at the man in the window booth, then back at them. She finally came down the counter drying her hands on the towel wrapped around her middle like an apron. Her hair was the color and texture of straw, nearly as straight. She was without makeup and with a slight squint.
“Yes?”
“Look, miss.” Larkie’s hands moved like instruments to measure her credulity. “We got us forty-seven cents. It’s cold and wet out and we just passing through. What that buy us?”
She bit her lip, looking at the man in the booth again. But after his first quick sharp glance, he had not looked up from his book.
“Well— I’ll let you have two bowls of chili and two coffees, if you promise to eat fast? It should be fifty cents but I’m about to close up? I’m not supposed to serve—”
She stopped abruptly. Perched at the end of the counter they slurped hot chili and drank steaming coffee as fast as their mouths could stand it, crunching down the whole heaped bowl of oyster crackers she brought.
“Any work around here?” asked Dale. Under the light he was too big-boned for his size; although his hands were thick and powerful, his wrists managed to make them seem small.
“No work in the state, I don’t think.” She looked around nervously, then leaned across the counter the way she had done to read her movie magazine. Her hair smelled of dime-store shampoo. “Listen, where are you boys from?”
“Up no’th,” said Larkie.
She nodded. “You’d better... Uh, they’re sort of funny about... coloreds and whites around here. You’d do better to either split up or else go back up north again. You don’t know how it is in this state.”
“We’re learning,” said Dale. “Me and Larkie have—”
“Much obliged for the food, ma’am,” said Larkie. He laid his forty-seven cents on the counter. “Wisht we had something extra for you.”
The girl blushed. “Oh, that’s okay. You take care.”
“We most surely will, ma’am.” He turned to Dale. “Come on, white boy. Let’s blow.”
The big man in the black slicker was standing on the boardwalk, absorbed by a dusty display of women’s hats in the millinery store two doors down from the diner. He looked like the sort of man who would find women’s hats singularly uninteresting. Without seeming to, he blocked their way.