Your problem, he’d often said to her in private, is no man can satisfy you in bed so you just want to cut off every pair of swinging balls comes within your reach, but you can’t have mine, you’ll just have to be satisfied with R.W.’s hanging from your neck and all those johns’ stuck somewhere in your craw but don’t come looking to me for the piece of bread to help choke them down.
And Levi’s problem he had no balls in the first place, and a brain about the size of a testicle itself. He’d ruined Earl’s relationship with Maurier down at the fish camp in Pascagoula when he’d kidnapped that new salesgirl he lost his head over and then beaten her up when she tried to run off down the beach. When Earl found out he wired him there, LEVI STOP CAN’T BELIEVE YOU WOULD JEOPARDIZE ALL WORKED FOR TAKE SOME GIRL OFF BEAT HER UP STOP DO NOT LEAVE STOP I WILL BE THERE QUICK STOP EARL. Hauling ass through the blackleaved tunnel of 11 to 49, blowing the shutters off little towns along the way and down the flackity flackity 98 to the dirt road to Maurier’s, dawn just breaking over the Sound, and busting into the cabin, their cabin, he even had to go and do that, and Levi there lying naked on the bed and the goddamn girl tied up in a little kitchen chair in the corner and screaming her head off, wearing just a powder-blue blouse and trying to hide herself with her legs. Maurier in right behind him yelling Cajun patois, took all he had in him not to simply beat the shit out of Levi right then and there — pointed, said, I’ll deal with you later. Levi laughing, crying, couldn’t tell which maybe both. Turned to Maurier, You shut up, too, I’ll have them both out of here in thirty minutes. Don’t never want to see him again! You’ll never see either one of us again, goddamnit. Bon! Finee!
Fairly knocked and wrestled whining Levi into some clothes and shoved him onto a bus in town, gave the driver a ten, drove back to Maurier’s, where he’d padlocked her in the room with the phone removed. Went to the office to pay the bill, Maurier in there fuming. Said, I got to make a phone call first. You pay for it! I’ll pay for it goddamnit. Took out another ten-dollar bill and threw it onto his floor.
— Fred, is Pinkie there. Well where is he. Never mind. What time is it. Seven o’clock. All right. Tell him to be on the corner of 5th Street and 22nd Avenue at ten sharp. Wait on me if I’m not there, I’ll be there around then. I’ll make it worth it.
Put her in the front passenger seat she wasn’t nothing then but a foul mouth on a couple of scratched-up skinny legs and a cigarette he kept burning in her waving hands, where in the hell did Levi find them, floored it after gaining 49 again and headed north. Took about three minutes before she began to realize something about the speed. Seventy, eighty, ninety, topped a hundred straight through Perkinston. Talking slowed, then she got real quiet. Damn near up on two wheels in the hard curve south of Wiggins, she screamed and grabbed the armrest and the dash. Up to then talky enough, You better get me a good job somewhere else is what you better do, I know about you and that woman in Tallahassee, your store down there, you get me something like that, you set me up somewhere or I’ll have your asses, I’ll get you son bitches thrown so deep in jail you won’t never see the light of day I’ll—
— You want to take everything I’ve got because of my fool brother, do you, Earl said. -Well you can take every goddamn thing he’s got for all I care, but you threaten me and you got a whole nother problem, sister.
— You don’t scare me.
— You offer this kind of arrangement to Levi he’ll kill you and you know it, and you think you can just sit here and threaten me, then? Was looking at her and barely got back in his lane to miss a tractor trailer rig barreling by, foghorn blasting, woman screaming You’ll kill us both!
— That may be, but if it happens, happens say in a car crash, won’t nobody be the wiser, you’ll be dead.
— Like you!
— I’ve lived a good life, made money, my family’s secure. You’re just a young woman, got your whole life ahead of you. You want to throw it all away like that?
She rips through a mindless wide-eyed recital of every cuss-word or phrase she knows, goddamn son of a bitch motherfucker dick pussy asshole shit piss cunt prick go to hell! runs through them three or four times in a row, Earl thinking how most had to do with bodily functions, how little they strayed, two about condemnation, one comparison to a dog.
— Well I don’t think that’ll do it, he says. He doesn’t slow up until just outside the city limits, coasts down the highway past the airport and the creosote plant, down 8th into town, turned down onto 22nd and stopped there at the corner of 5th. Sitting there engine idling, girl still breathing hard, staring straight ahead, steaming, finally and mercifully mute. Hands her five one-hundred-dollar bills in plain view.
— This ought to get you to another town and another job.
She grabs it.
— Don’t you think you’re done with me.
He nods to Pinkie standing at the lamppost in his uniform, twirling his nightstick, who tips his hat to Earl, the girl.
— Pinkie here just saw you take that and put it into your purse, he says. -Good friend of mine. He don’t know just what this is. You could be a street whore, for all Pinkie knows. Wouldn’t hurt my reputation much, but you wouldn’t want it on your record. So we got a deal.
She spits a few choice ones, get out, slams the door, walks off. He laughs to himself, lights a Camel, waves to Pinkie, and drives out to the country to cool off awhile. Later over to Levi’s house, Levi in the bedroom lying down, Rae sitting and smoking at the dining table, gives him a murderous look full of sloppy lipstick.
— Don’t look at me, I just saved the damn fool son of a bitch.
— That’s what I’m steamed about.
— Not if you knew what I saved him from.
— I know, all right.
Levi turns off the radio when he walks in, gives him a grin, nothing but an inch or two of tiny teeth bared on the perfectly round ball of his head.
— If you ever pull a stunt like that again Levi I’ll kill you. You owe me five hundred dollars.
— For what.
— Never mind what. For saving your ass from picking cotton at Parchman for the next five years that’s what.
— You give that whore five hundred dollars? Whistles. -You got a cigarette?
Never get that money, he knew, but easier to keep Levi straight if he owes you cash. The memory of it would last a year or two, anyway, things somewhat under control. Before Levi and Merry like bad children cooked up some other scheme to entertain themselves and torment him and Birdie.
Asked himself sometimes why in the hell he never left Birdie for Ann whom he loved and there’s your answer: Might not have been much of a marriage but by God it was his family and a good one compared to anything he’d ever known, and be damned if he was going to give any of those godforsaken Urquharts the satisfaction of seeing him fail at anything.
Wanting to reach a hand out for the ax there in the graying film of his vision, not inches from his eye yet as if across some vast and light-bent field at the end of a long day, piecemeal light scattering the air like mercury from a broken thermometer skittling across the floor.
Habeas Corpus
AS SOON AS Miss Birdie called from the hospital and said Mr. Earl had died out at the lake, Creasie went to her cabin, got her coat, and walked down the driveway to the road. She stood nestled into the leaves of the redtop bushes beside the highway and when she saw the yellow-orange school bus coming she stepped out and flagged it down. It was how she got into town and back on the occasional weekday she needed a ride. All the children raucous in the back so it was the only time she rode a bus and sat up front behind the driver and she liked it. The view was good, with the world swinging by so fast when he made his turns. But she hardly noticed, today. Every so often a little balled-up piece of school paper bounced off the back of her head to the wild chorus of delight behind her but she paid it no mind.