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 cheek. 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 Perkins 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 OK?”
“All alone,” Blue said.
“I know. I’ll come by.”
“You do, I’ll leave.”
“Blue.”
“Leave me alone for a spell, Elgin. OK?”
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.
Thing was, Woodson kept running, kept plunging his feet in and out of the water, making those sucking sounds, M-15 hugged to his chest, for a good eight or ten steps. Kid was dead, he’s still running. Kid had no reason to hold on, but he don’t know it, he keeps running.
What spark of memory, hope, or dream had kept him going?
You had to wonder.
In Elgin’s dream that night, a platoon of ice-gray Vietcong rose in a straight line from the center of Coopers Lake while Elgin was inside the cabin with Shelley and Jewel. He penetrated them both somehow, their separate torsos branching out from the same pair of hips, their four legs clamping at the small of his back, this Shelley-Jewel creature crying out for more, more, more.
And Elgin could see the VC platoon drifting in formation toward the shore, their guns pointed, their faces hidden behind thin wisps of green fog.
The Shelley-Jewel creature arched her backs on the bed below him, and Woodson and Blue stood in the corner of the room watching as their dogs padded across the floor, letting out low growls and drooling.
Shelley dissolved into Jewel as the VC platoon reached the porch steps and released their safeties all at once, the sound like the ratcheting of a thousand shotguns. Sweat exploded in Elgin’s hair, poured down his body like warm rain, and the VC fired in concert, the bullets shearing the walls of the cabin, lifting the roof off into the night. Elgin looked above him at the naked night sky, the stars zipping by like tracers, the yellow moon full and mean, the shivering branches of birch trees. Jewel rose and straddled him, bit his lip, and dug her nails into his back, and the bullets danced through his hair, and then Jewel was gone, her writhing flesh having dissolved into his own.
Elgin sat naked on the bed, his arms stretched wide, waiting for the bullets to find his back, to shear his head from his body the way they’d sheared the roof from the cabin, and the yellow moon burned above him as the dogs howled and Blue and Woodson held each other in the corner of the room and wept like children as the bullets drilled holes in their faces.
Big Bobby came by the trailer late the next morning, a Sunday, and said, “Blue’s a bit put out about losing his job.”
“What?” Elgin sat on the edge of his bed, pulled on his socks. “You picked now —now, Bobby —to fire him?”
“It’s in his eyes,” Big Bobby said. “Like you said. You can see it.”
Elgin had seen Big Bobby scared before, plenty of times, but now the man was trembling.
Elgin said, “Where is he?”
Blue’s front door was open, hanging half down the steps from a busted hinge. Elgin said, “Blue.”
“Kitchen.”
He sat in his Jockeys at the table, cleaning his rifle, each shiny black piece spread in front of him on the table. Elgin’s eyes watered a bit because there was a stench coming from the back of the house that he felt might strip his nostrils bare. He realized then that he’d never asked Big Bobby or Blue what they’d done with all those dead dogs.
Blue said, “Have a seat, bud. Beer in the fridge if you’re thirsty.”
Elgin wasn’t looking in that fridge. “Lost your job, huh?”
Blue wiped the bolt with a shammy cloth. “Happens.” He looked at Elgin. “Where you been lately?”
“I called you last night.”
“I mean in general.”
“Working.”
“No, I mean at night.”
“Blue, you been” — he almost said “playing house with Jewel Lut” but caught himself— “up in a fucking tree, how do you know where I been at night?”