“All four of them are nice and fat,” Karen said.
“I love squirrel. Ain’t had one in ages.”
“Well, you shot them, so you get the first pick of the meat.”
“How do you like them fixed?”
“Fried. Squirrel and dumplings. I like them all kind of ways.”
“Me too… you sure are pretty.”
Karen smiled at him.
“You sure are blunt.”
“Just think you ought to tell a girl something like that.”
“You’re pretty young, aren’t you, Goose?”
“You’re young too.”
“I ain’t as young as you.”
“Well, I ain’t so young I don’t know a pretty girl when I see one. A girl like you, you was my girl, I’d take care of you. Anything you needed or wanted, I’d get it.”
“How about a million dollars?”
“It might take some time, but I’d get it. I’d rob somebody I had to.”
“That’s not what a girl wants to hear. Least it ain’t what I want to hear.”
“What do you want to hear? I’ll say it.”
“That ain’t the way either, Goose. Like that, it don’t have no meaning.”
“I can’t say nothing right, can I?”
“Not much.”
“I still think you’re pretty.”
“Thanks.”
“That was my baby in you, I wouldn’t run off. I’d make sure it had a home.”
Karen teared up. Goose said, “I didn’t mean to mention that. I didn’t mean to make you sad.”
“That’s how it is, ain’t it? Got myself knocked up, didn’t I? Listened to Hillbilly. Told me I was pretty, just like you did. Told me lots of things. I ought to known he was just talking. Just wanted under my dress. I’m just a chippie.”
“Naw, you ain’t. You just got tricked, that’s all. Anyone can get tricked.”
Ben came up, sat down, tried to look polite. Goose gave him the squirrel innards to eat.
“You finished, Goose?”
“Got them all done.”
“Why don’t we take them to the tent and I’ll fry them. You can help me.”
“I’m for that.”
When Lee and Clyde drove up, got out of the pickup, Sunset came out of the tent wiping her face with a napkin, wiping away the grease left from the squirrel she had been eating. She watched as Lee and Clyde came toward the tent. They looked happy.
“You two fellas look like you just ate the canary,” she said.
“Naw,” Clyde said, “but we busted his ass. He tried to fly like a canary, but the ground got in the way.”
“Yeah,” Lee said. “He was lucky the ground stopped his fall.”
Clyde let out a hoot.
Sunset studied them for a long moment, thought maybe they were drunk after all.
Lee said, “I don’t know how you’ll feel about it, Sunset. Maybe it wasn’t the thing to do. Childish, perhaps, but we went to see Hillbilly.”
“Had a come-to-Jesus meeting with him,” Clyde said. “Well, Lee here, he was the preacher, I was just in the amen corner.”
“You both jumped on him?”
“Not exactly,” Clyde said. “Not that I’d have cared if we had, and had some help. I wouldn’t have felt bad the army helped us.”
“Tell me.”
“We went over where Hillbilly told me he was,” Clyde said, “and he was with some whore, and your daddy went up there and beat Hillbilly’s ass like he was nailed to the floor, threw him out a window. I hit him with the slap jack then. Twice.”
Sunset brought her hand to her mouth. “Did it… hurt him?”
“Hell, yeah,” Clyde said. “He didn’t bounce worth a damn. You hit a guy with a slap jack, it’s gonna hurt. But that slap jack, it wasn’t nothing to what he got upstairs, way he came out that window, butt naked.”
“Is he… dead?”
“Naw,” Clyde said. “Wasn’t that big a fall. But he ain’t pretty no more. I don’t know it’s permanent, but he looks like he went through some kind of grater and got put back together by a drunk.”
“I’m sorry, Sunset,” Lee said. “I know you had feelings for him.”
“Should have seen it when Lee hit that sonofabitch with his new guitar,” Clyde said. “That was an ace moment, that’s what I’m trying to tell you.”
Sunset slowly smiled. “Wish I had been there to see it.”
“Especially that part when he come naked out that window,” Clyde said, “flapping his arms. Fallen from five feet higher, they’d be digging his ass out of the ground with some kind of machinery.”
Sunset laughed, got between them, put her arms around them, “You boys ought to be arrested, but hell, that ain’t my jurisdiction, now is it?”
“No, it ain’t,” Clyde said.
“There you are,” Sunset said. “I’m gonna have to let it go. Come on inside. We got fried squirrel to eat.”
32
Back in bed, upstairs, the whore nursed him, but Hillbilly didn’t like it none, because she had seen him get his ass beat. And handily. And by an old man. And he wasn’t looking so good right now. When he checked himself in the mirror, he saw a guy he didn’t know. Guy with glass cuts all over him, like some kind of pox, a broken nose, fat lips, swollen right eye and a cheek that looked like something a chipmunk ought to have, all stuffed up with nuts. But it was just a swelling where a back tooth had come out. His balls weren’t peachy either. All black from being kicked, like rotten plums about to drop off. The fall made him hurt all over. His knees were banged and so were his elbows. He couldn’t believe he hadn’t broken something. He felt a little shook up inside, like something big and fast had run through him, gut to gill.
The blonde pulled a glass sliver out of his penis with her fingernails, put it on a handkerchief on the end table by the bed.
“You can go,” Hillbilly said, as she placed a damp cloth on his business, making him wince.
“Honey, you sure?”
“Yeah. I want you to.”
“That fall was bad. You could be broke up inside. Maybe you ought not be alone.”
“No. You can go.”
“You gonna come see me?”
“Sure.”
“It won’t cost you nothing. You didn’t finish, you know.”
“I know. You go on, now.”
She got up, put on her clothes. When she was at the door, she said, “I’m sorry about your guitar.”
“Okay.”
“You still got the harmonica.”
Hillbilly snatched the damp rag off his crotch and threw it at her. “I said get out.”
The rag struck her on the shoulder. She opened the door and went out quickly.
Hillbilly lay there and thought about what he would do next. Besides move slowly.
Then it came to him. Rooster had given him an idea. It wasn’t the one Rooster had, the one he wanted him to do, it was another.
He thought about the red apartment over the drugstore, where McBride stayed. He had to go over there, talk to the man, see was there a place for him in this operation McBride and Henry had going.
One thing he prided himself on was he took the easy path on everything, unless it had to do with getting even. The easy path wasn’t necessary then. He’d crawl over sharp rocks and kiss a mule’s shitty ass to get back at someone did him wrong, especially some old man made him look and feel foolish in front of a goddamn whore.
He thought he’d get up right then, get dressed, go over and see McBride, but his body thought different.
It said: Lay down, boy. You ain’t doing so good.
Hillbilly listened. Let his body have its way. But his mind raced, and his mind had ideas, and his mind was mean.
After they finished eating, and the ass whipping Lee had given Hillbilly was told another time, and everyone was sitting around inside the tent drinking coffee, Sunset slipped outside with a strip of white cloth she had torn from an old towel. She tied it to a limb on the back of the big oak tree.
Ben trotted up, watched her tie it. When she finished, she knelt down and gave him a pat.
All she could do now was see if Bull showed.
She hoped he would.
She needed him.
And she was pretty sure, Zendo, though he didn’t know it, needed him as well.