Elgin just kept plying him with Beam, knowing Blue’s lack of tolerance for it, and pretty soon Blue passed out on the couch, his pitted face still red with rage.
“He’s never been exactly right in the head, has he?” Shelley said.
Elgin ran his hand down her bare arm, pulled her shoulder in tighter against his chest, heard Blue snoring from the front of the trailer. “No, ma’am.”
She rose above him, her dark hair falling to his face, tickling the corners of his eyes. “But you’ve been his friend.”
Elgin nodded.
She touched his cheek with her hand. “Why?”
Elgin thought about it a bit, started talking to her about the little, dirty kid and his cockroach flambés, of the animal sounds that came from his mother’s trailer. The way Blue used to sit by the drainage ditch, all pulled into himself, his body tight. Elgin thought of all those roaches and cats and rabbits and dogs, and he told Shelley that he’d always thought Blue was dying, ever since he’d met him, leaking away in front of his eyes.
“Everyone dies,” she said.
“Yeah.” He rose up on his elbow, rested his free hand on her warm hip. “Yeah, but with most of us it’s like we’re growing toward something and then we die. But with Blue, it’s like he ain’t never grown toward nothing. He’s just been dying real slowly since he was born.”
She shook her head. “I’m not getting you.”
He thought of the mildew that used to soak the walls in Blue’s mother’s trailer, of the mold and dust in Blue’s shack off Route 11, of the rotting smell that had grown out of the drainage ditch when they were kids. The way Blue looked at it all — seemed to be at one with it — as if he felt a bond.
Shelley said, “Babe, what do you think about getting out of here?”
“Where?”
“I dunno. Florida. Georgia. Someplace else.”
“I got a job. You too.”
“You can always get construction jobs other places. Receptionist jobs too.”
“We grew up here.”
She nodded. “But maybe it’s time to start our life somewhere else.”
He said, “Let me think about it.”
She tilted his chin so she was looking in his eyes. “You’ve been thinking about it.”
He nodded. “Maybe I want to think about it some more.”
In the morning, when they woke up, Blue was gone.
Shelley looked at the rumpled couch, over at Elgin. For a good minute they just stood there, looking from the couch to each other, the couch to each other.
An hour later, Shelley called from work, told Elgin that Perkin Lut was in his office as always, no signs of physical damage.
Elgin said, “If you see Blue …”
“Yeah?”
Elgin thought about it. “I dunno. Call the cops. Tell Perkin to bail out a back door. That sound right?”
“Sure.”
Big Bobby came to the site later that morning, said, “I go over to Blue’s place to tell him we got to end this dog thing and —”
“Did you tell him it was over?” Elgin asked.
“Let me finish. Let me explain.”
“Did you tell him?”
“Let me finish.” Bobby wiped his face with a handkerchief. “I was gonna tell him, but—”
“You didn’t tell him.”
“But Jewel Lut was there.”
“What?”
Big Bobby put his hand on Elgin’s elbow, led him away from the other workers. “I said Jewel was there. The two of them sitting at the kitchen table, having breakfast.”
“In Blue’s place?”
Big Bobby nodded. “Biggest dump I ever seen. Smells like something I-don’t-know-what. But bad. And there’s Jewel, pretty as can be in her summer dress and soft skin and makeup, eating Eggos and grits with Blue, big brown shiner under her eye. She smiles at me, says, ‘Hey, Big Bobby,’ and goes back to eating.”
“And that was it?”
“How come no one ever calls me Mayor?”
“And that was it?” Elgin repeated.
“Yeah. Blue asks me to take a seat, I say I got business. He says him too.”
“What’s that mean?” Elgin heard his own voice, hard and sharp.
Big Bobby took a step back from it. “Hell do I know? Could mean he’s going out to shoot more dog.”
“So you never told him you were shutting down the operation.”
Big Bobby’s eyes were wide and confused. “You hear what I told you? He was in there with Jewel. Her all doll-pretty and him looking, well, ugly as usual. Whole situation was too weird. I got out.”
“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 Perkins 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. Blues 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.