“Blue said he had business too.”
“He said he had business too,” Bobby said, and walked away.
The next week, they showed up in town together a couple of times, buying some groceries, toiletries for Jewel, boxes of shells for Blue.
They never held hands or kissed or did anything romantic, but they were together, and people talked. Said, Well, of all things. And I never thought I’d see the day. How do you like that? I guess this is the day the cows actually come home.
Blue called and invited Shelley and Elgin to join them one Sunday afternoon for a late breakfast at the IHOP. Shelley begged off, said something about coming down with the flu, but Elgin went. He was curious to see where this was going, what Jewel was thinking, how she thought her hanging around Blue was going to come to anything but bad.
He could feel the eyes of the whole place on them as they ate.
“See where he hit me?” Jewel tilted her head, tucked her beautiful red hair back behind her ear. The mark on her cheekbone, in the shape of a small rain puddle, was faded yellow now, its edges roped by a sallow beige.
Elgin nodded.
“Still can’t believe the son of a bitch hit me,” she said, but there was no rage in her voice anymore, just a mild sense of drama, as if she’d pushed the words out of her mouth the way she believed she should say them. But the emotion she must have felt when Perkin’s hand hit her face, when she fell to the floor in front of people she’d known all her life — that seemed to have faded with the mark on her cheekbone.
“Perkin Lut,” she said with a snort, then laughed.
Elgin looked at Blue. He’d never seemed so... fluid in all the time Elgin had known him. The way he cut into his pancakes, swept them off his plate with a smooth dip of the fork tines; the swift dab of the napkin against his lips after every bite; the attentive swivel of his head whenever Jewel spoke, usually in tandem with the lifting of his coffee mug to his mouth.
This was not a Blue Elgin recognized. Except when he was handling weapons, Blue moved in jerks and spasms. Tremors rippled through his limbs and caused his fingers to drop things, his elbows and knees to move too fast, crack against solid objects. Blue’s blood seemed to move too quickly through his veins, made his muscles obey his brain after a quarter-second delay and then too rapidly, as if to catch up on lost time.
But now he moved in concert, like an athlete or a jungle cat.
That’s what you do to men, Jeweclass="underline" you give them a confidence so total it finds their limbs.
“Perkin,” Blue said, and rolled his eyes at Jewel and they both laughed.
She not as hard as he did, though.
Elgin could see the root of doubt in her eyes, could feel her loneliness in the way she fiddled with the menu, touched her cheekbone, spoke too loudly, as if she wasn’t just telling Elgin and Blue how Perkin had mistreated her, but the whole IHOP as well, so people could get it straight that she wasn’t the villain, and if after she returned to Perkin she had to leave him again, they’d know why.
Of course she was going back to Perkin.
Elgin could tell by the glances she gave Blue — unsure, slightly embarrassed, maybe a bit repulsed. What had begun as a nighttime ride into the unknown had turned cold and stale during the hard yellow lurch into morning.
Blue wiped his mouth, said, “Be right back,” and walked to the bathroom with surer strides than Elgin had ever seen on the man.
Elgin looked at Jewel.
She gripped the handle of her coffee cup between the tips of her thumb and index finger and turned the cup in slow revolutions around the saucer, made a soft scraping noise that climbed up Elgin’s spine like a termite trapped under the skin.
“You ain’t sleeping with him, are you?” Elgin said quietly.
Jewel’s head jerked up and she looked over her shoulder, then back at Elgin. “What? God, no. We’re just... He’s my pal. That’s all. Like when we were kids.”
“We ain’t kids.”
“I know. Don’t you know I know?” She fingered the coffee cup again. “I miss you,” she said softly. “I miss you. When you coming back?”
Elgin kept his voice low. “Me and Shelley, we’re getting pretty serious.”
She gave him a small smile that he instantly hated. It seemed to know him; it seemed like everything he was and everything he wasn’t was caught in the curl of her lips. “You miss the lake, Elgin. Don’t lie.”
He shrugged.
“You ain’t ever going to marry Shelley Briggs, have babies, be an upstanding citizen.”
“Yeah? Why’s that?”
“Because you got too many demons in you, boy. And they need me. They need the lake. They need to cry out every now and then.”
Elgin looked down at his own coffee cup. “You going back to Perkin?”
She shook her head hard. “No way. Uh-uh. No way.”
Elgin nodded, even though he knew she was lying. If Elgin’s demons needed the lake, needed to be unbridled, Jewel’s needed Perkin. They needed security. They needed to know the money’d never run out, that she’d never go two full days without a solid meal, like she had so many times as a child in the trailer park.
Perkin was what she saw when she looked down at her empty coffee cup, when she touched her check. Perkin was at their nice home with his feet up, watching a game, petting the dog, and she was in the IHOP in the middle of a Sunday when the food was at its oldest and coldest, with one guy who loved her and one who fucked her, wondering how she got there.
Blue came back to the table, moving with that new sure stride, a broad smile in the wide swing of his arms.
“How we doing?” Blue said. “Huh? How we doing?” And his lips burst into a grin so huge Elgin expected it to keep going right off the sides of his face.
Jewel left Blue’s place two days later, walked into Perkin Lut’s Auto Emporium and into Perkin’s office, and by the time anyone went to check, they’d left through the back door, gone home for the day.
Elgin tried to get a hold of Blue for three days — called constantly, went by his shack and knocked on the door, even staked out the tree house along I-95 where he fired on the dogs.
He’d decided to break into Blue’s place, was fixing to do just that, when he tried one last call from his trailer that third night and Blue answered with a strangled “Hello.”
“It’s me. How you doing?”
“Can’t talk now.”
“Come on, Blue. It’s me. You okay?”
“All alone,” Blue said.
“I know. I’ll come by.”
“You do, I’ll leave.”
“Blue.”
“Leave me alone for a spell, Elgin. Okay?”
That night Elgin sat alone in his trailer, smoking cigarettes, staring at the walls.
Blue’d never had much of anything his whole life — not a job he enjoyed, not a woman he could consider his — and then between the dogs and Jewel Lut he’d probably thought he’d got it all at once. Hit pay dirt.
Elgin remembered the dirty little kid sitting down by the drainage ditch, hugging himself. Six, maybe seven years old, waiting to die.
You had to wonder sometimes why some people were even born. You had to wonder what kind of creature threw bodies into the world, expected them to get along when they’d been given no tools, no capacity to get any either.
In Vietnam, this fat boy, name of Woodson from South Dakota, had been the least popular guy in the platoon. He wasn’t smart, he wasn’t athletic, he wasn’t funny, he wasn’t even personable. He just was. Elgin had been running beside him one day through a sea of rice paddies, their boots making sucking sounds every step they took, and someone fired a hell of a round from the other side of the paddies, ripped Woodson’s head in half so completely all Elgin saw running beside him for a few seconds was the lower half of Woodson’s face. No hair, no forehead, no eyes. Just half the nose, a mouth, a chin.