He’d never bothered asking Blue about any of this. That never worked. Blue just shut down at times like that, stared off somewhere as if something you couldn’t hear was drowning out your words, something you couldn’t see was taking up his line of vision. Blue, floating away on you, until you stopped cluttering up his mind with useless talk.
One Saturday, Elgin went into town with Shelley so she could get her hair done at Martha’s Unisex on Main. In Martha’s, as Dottie Leeds gave Shelley a shampoo and rinse, Elgin felt like he’d stumbled into a chapel of womanhood. There was Jim Hayder’s teenage daughter, Sonny, getting one of those feathered cuts was growing popular these days and several older women who still wore beehives, getting them reset or plastered or whatever they did to keep them up like that. There was Joylene Covens and Lila Sims having their nails done while their husbands golfed and the black maids watched their kids, and Martha and Dottie and Esther and Gertrude and Hayley dancing and flitting, laughing and chattering among the chairs, calling everyone “Honey,” and all of them — the young, the old, the rich, and Shelley — kicking back like they did this every day, knew each other more intimately than they did their husbands or children or boyfriends.
When Dottie Leeds looked up from Shelley’s head and said, “Elgin, honey, can we get you a sports page or something?” the whole place burst out laughing, Shelley included. Elgin smiled though he didn’t feel like it and gave them all a sheepish wave that got a bigger laugh, and he told Shelley he’d be back in a bit and left.
He headed up Main toward the town square, wondering what it was those women seemed to know so effortlessly that completely escaped him, and saw Perkin Lut walking in a circle outside Dexter Isley’s Five & Dime. It was one of those days when the wet, white heat was so overpowering that unless you were in Martha’s, the one place in town with central air-conditioning, most people stayed inside with their shades down and tried not to move much.
And there was Perkin Lut walking the soles of his shoes into the ground, turning in circles like a little kid trying to make himself dizzy.
Perkin and Elgin had known each other since kindergarten, but Elgin could never remember liking the man much. Perkin’s old man, Mance Lut, had pretty much built Eden, and he’d spent a lot of money keeping Perkin out of the war, hid his son up in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, for so many semesters even Perkin couldn’t remember what he’d majored in. A lot of men who’d gone overseas and come back hated Perkin for that, as did the families of most of the men who hadn’t come back, but that wasn’t Elgin’s problem with Perkin. Hell, if Elgin’d had the money, he’d have stayed out of that shitty war too.
What Elgin couldn’t abide was that there was something in Perkin that protected him from consequence. Something that made him look down on people who paid for their sins, who fell without a safety net to catch them.
It had happened more than once that Elgin had found himself thrusting in and out of Perkin’s wife and thinking. Take that, Perkin. Take that.
But this afternoon, Perkin didn’t have his salesman’s smile or aloof glance. When Elgin stopped by him and said, “Hey, Perkin, how you?” Perkin looked up at him with eyes so wild they seemed about to jump out of their sockets.
“I’m not good, Elgin. Not good.”
“What’s the matter?”
Perkin nodded to himself several times, looked over Elgin’s shoulder. “I’m fixing to do something about that.”
“About what?”
“About that.” Perkin’s jaw gestured over Elgin’s shoulder.
Elgin turned around, looked across Main and through the windows of Miller’s Laundromat, saw Jewel Lut pulling her clothes from the dryer, saw Blue standing beside her, taking a pair of jeans from the pile and starting to fold. If either of them had looked up and over, they’d have seen Elgin and Perkin Lut easily enough, but Elgin knew they wouldn’t. There was an air to the two of them that seemed to block out the rest of the world in that bright Laundromat as easily as it would in a dark bedroom. Blue’s lips moved and Jewel laughed, flipped a T-shirt on his head.
“I’m fixing to do something right now,” Perkin said.
Elgin looked at him, could see that was a lie, something Perkin was repeating to himself in hopes it would come true. Perkin was successful in business, and for more reasons than just his daddy’s money, but he wasn’t the kind of man who did things: he was the kind of man who had things done.
Elgin looked across the street again. Blue still had the T-shirt sitting atop his head. He said something else and Jewel covered her mouth with her hand when she laughed.
“Don’t you have a washer and dryer at your house, Perkin?”
Perkin rocked back on his heels. “Washer broke. Jewel decides to come in town.” He looked at Elgin. “We ain’t getting along so well these days. She keeps reading those magazines, Elgin. You know the ones? Talking about liberation, leaving your bra at home, shit like that.” He pointed across the street. “Your friend’s a problem.”
Your friend.
Elgin looked at Perkin, felt a sudden anger he couldn’t completely understand, and with it a desire to say. That’s my friend and he’s talking to my fuck-buddy. Get it, Perkin?
Instead, he just shook his head and left Perkin there, walked across the street to the Laundromat.
Blue took the T-shirt off his head when he saw Elgin enter. A smile, half frozen on his pitted face, died as he blinked into the sunlight blaring through the windows.
Jewel said, “Hey, we got another helper!” She tossed a pair of men’s briefs over Blue’s head, hit Elgin in the chest with them.
“Hey, Jewel.”
“Hey, Elgin. Long time.” Her eyes dropped from his, settled on a towel.
Didn’t seem like it at the moment to Elgin. Seemed almost as if he’d been out at the lake with her as recently as last night. He could taste her in his mouth, smell her skin damp with a light sweat.
And standing there with Blue, it also seemed like they were all three back in that trailer park, and Jewel hadn’t aged a bit. Still wore her red hair long and messy, still dressed in clothes seemed to have been picked up, wrinkled, off her closet floor and nothing fancy about them in the first place, but draped over her body, they were sexier than clothes other rich women bought in New York once a year.
This afternoon, she wore a crinkly, paisley dress that might have been on the pink side once but had faded to a pasty newspaper color after years of washing. Nothing special about it, not too high up her thigh or down her chest, and loose — but something about her body made it appear like she might just ripen right out of it any second.
Elgin handed the briefs to Blue as he joined them at the folding table. For a while, none of them said anything. They picked clothes from the large pile and folded, and the only sound was Jewel whistling.
Then Jewel laughed.
“What?” Blue said.
“Aw, nothing.” She shook her head. “Seems like we’re just one happy family here, though, don’t it?”
Blue looked stunned. He looked at Elgin. He looked at Jewel. He looked at the pair of small, light-blue socks he held in his hands, the monogram JL stitched in the cotton. He looked at Jewel again.
“Yeah,” he said eventually, and Elgin heard a tremor in his voice he’d never heard before. “Yeah, it does.”
Elgin looked up at one of the upper dryer doors. It had been swung out at eye level when the dryer had been emptied. The center of the door was a circle of glass, and Elgin could see Main Street reflected in it, the white posts that supported the wood awning over the Five & Dime, Perkin Lut walking in circles, his head down, heal shimmering in waves up and down Main.