He drank and swallowed. He swallowed rapidly a time or two to keep it down. Hot bile rose in his throat. Great God, he said. What’s in this stuff?
I don’t know. Whatever you make whiskey out of. Daddy made it, it’s supposed to be good.
Crosswaithe’s eyes were watering, he could feel it in his sinus passages. I can taste old car radiators and maybe an animal or two that fell in the mash but there’s something I can’t quite put my finger on.
She was laughing. She hid her mouth with a hand when she laughed and he wondered if her teeth were crooked. She stopped laughing and wiped her eyes. A curving strand of black hair lay across her forehead like a comma.
You’re a good-looking thing, she said. I noticed it right off the day we bought the TV. Did you sell it to us because of the way I was flirting with you?
My brother-in-law said I sold it because your father had a hole in his throat.
What do you say?
It could have been a little of both. What’s with all these checks?
She fanned them out like a poker hand. There were six of them. They’re social security checks, she said. Daddy drawed them one a month after he got that cancer. I just saved these up. You’ll have to give me a ride into town to cash them, though. None of these cars around here works and I never was much of a mechanic.
Crosswaithe was taking cautious little sips of the whiskey against the cold. His feet felt numb and he kept stamping them to keep the circulation going. The whiskey was giving him a vague ringing of the ears. Why is it so cold in here? he asked. They’ve got this stuff out now they call fire, and it’s the very thing. Have you not heard of it?
Me and my boyfriend broke up, she said.
Crosswaithe searched for some connection however tenuous but he couldn’t find one.
I’m out of wood, she said. He used to bring me a load of wood now and then but he quit when we broke up. I’m going to Florida on part of this money anyway. Somewhere it’s warm.
There must be three or four thousand dollars there.
Four thousand and eighty dollars.
Since you had this money you could have just paid the note and saved everybody a lot of trouble.
The girl had the checks spread out and was holding them beneath her chin in the manner of an oriental fan. It’s no trouble to me, she said, giving him a sly smile above the fan. Besides, I knew if I waited you’d be coming to get it. He didn’t want to sell it anyway, and I knew he’d send you instead of coming himself.
Well let’s decide something one way or another. No offense, but I’m freezing my butt off in here, and there’s a heater in my truck.
If I’m going to Florida I don’t even need it. Over a thousand dollars is a lot of money for a TV I don’t even need.
Suit yourself, Crosswaithe said. It’s all the same to me. I suspect this might be my last day in the TV hauling business anyway.
I thought you looked like a man with a bridge on fire, she said.
BY TWO O’CLOCK they had the checks cashed and were sitting in a booth in Big Mama’s drinking long-necked bottles of Coors. The check cashing had taken place without their being set upon by federal agents as he’d secretly expected, Crosswaithe sitting in the truck keeping the motor running like the driver of a getaway car, watching the frozen streets and wondering how he knew there was something peculiarly amiss about the money. Something in her manner, some kind of bad news that just radiated off her. Or maybe Crosswaithe just had his radar turned up too high: for days he had divined machinations behind the curtains, tugs on the strings that controlled him, and he had to be on the road. Somewhere his name was being affixed to papers that needed only the serving to alter his life forever, and even the low-grade heat from the four thousand eighty dollars in his left front pocket did nothing to comfort him.
Beyond the rain-streaked window in the bar the day had gone gray and desolate. The sky had smoothed to uniform metallic gray and a small cold rain fell, a few grains of sleet rattled off the glass like shot. A flake of snow, listing in the wind and expiring to a pale transparency on the warm glass. There was an enormous coal heater in the middle of the room and from time to time one of the orange-clad deer hunters that peopled Big Mama’s would stoke it from a scuttle and with an iron poker roil sparks from its depths that snapped in the air like static electricity.
The girl’s name was Carmie and everyone seemed to know her. She seemed a great favorite here. Everyone bought her a beer and asked her if her old man had ever showed up and wanted to know if she was going to the dance at Goblin’s Knob.
What’s Goblin’s Knob? Crosswaithe asked.
A beer joint over on the Wayne County line. It’s a real mean place, they’re always having knockdown dragouts over there. Knifings. A fellow was shot and killed over there a week or two ago. I was thinking we might go over there tonight.
And then again we might not, Crosswaithe said.
It always amazed him and scared him a little how easily he fell into the way of things. For seven years he had walked what he considered the straight and narrow, a sober member of the business community, an apprentice mover and shaker. Yet it felt perfectly normal to be drinking Coors in a place called Big Mama’s with four thousand dollars in his pocket and a young girl sitting so close he could feel the heat of her thigh and whose nipples printed indelibly not only against the fabric of her pullover but on some level of Crosswaithe’s consciousness as well.
She kept talking about Florida as if their heading out there was a foregone conclusion and Crosswaithe did nothing to deter her. Part of it was the attraction of a world drenched in Technicolor, green palm trees and white sand and blue water: he felt stalemated by this monochromatic world of bleak winter trees, as if he’d been here too long, absorbed all the life and color out of the landscape.
There’s something that has to be done before we can go to Florida or anywhere else, she said.
Crosswaithe waited.
She had been making on the red Formica tabletop a series of interlocking rings with the wet bottom of her beer bottle and now sat studying the pattern she’d made as if something of great significance was encoded there.
Daddy’s dead, she said.
Well, I’m sorry your father died but I don’t see what it has to do with leaving. Seems to me that would be just one less thing keeping you here.
She was silent a time. I just can’t have anybody finding him, she finally said. She was peering intently, almost hypnotically into Crosswaithe’s eyes, and he divined that truth from her would vary moment to moment, and there was something so familiar in her manner that for a dizzy moment it was like looking into a mirror and seeing his reflection cast back at him smooth and young and marvelously regendered.
I went to see about him one morning and he was just stiff and dead. Just I guess died in his sleep and never made a sound. I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t have any money. Daddy kept all the money and he ran through it as fast as he got it. I took out running toward the highway to find help. Then I stopped. I sat down by the side of the road and thought it over.
You thought what over?
It was the thirtieth of the month. If I waited three more days there’d be a check in the mailbox for six hundred and eighty dollars. IfI told anybody there’d be death certificates and funerals and all that and the government would just keep the check. I thought about it from every angle and it just didn’t seem like I had a choice.
If you considered all those angles it must have occurred to you that sooner or later they might lock your ass up.
Of course it did.
And it also might have occurred to you that at some point six hundred and eighty dollars would become thirteen hundred and sixty.