“Can you go back to prison?” she said.
“If I left that shell and my print is on it. It might not get me time here, but it could be enough for my P.O. to have me sent back to Louisiana.”
When I saw her expression and realized the casual tone of my voice, I also realized something about the impropriety of speaking out of one’s own cynical experience to people who are not prepared for it.
“Buddy thinks he’s just trying to turn on the butane and get me to jump,” I said.
“Pat Floyd will put you away,” she said.
The seriousness of her voice made something drop inside me.
“Well, you said he wasn’t a hillbilly cop.” But the detachment that I wanted to show in my voice wasn’t there.
“What do you plan to do?”
“Nothing. What the hell can I do? I can sweat this fat man or run, and if I run, I have another three to pull in Angola for sure. I figure I’ll hang around and let Gordo Deficado do his worst.”
“He can do it, Iry.”
“I’ve known some bad men, too.”
She poured some of her beer into my glass and lit another cigarette from my pack.
“I’ve got to roll, kiddo. I’ve burned up too much of your evening,” I said.
“Buddy will need a ride home tomorrow. There’s no point in making two trips.” She looked away from me, and I saw the nervous touch of her finger on the cigarette.
“I don’t want to cause an inconvenience.”
“Oh, shit,” she said, and stood up from the couch and turned off the lamp on the table. In the darkness, she paused momentarily, listening for a sound from upstairs, then began to undress. She unsnapped her blue jeans and pushed them to her ankles, then pulled off her denim shirt and tried to reach for the back of her bra. In her hurried movement, with the glow of the kitchen light against her white stomach, she looked like an embarrassed contortionist in front of an audience of dolts.
My heart was beating, and I felt the heat come into my face when I looked at her bare legs, her white line of swollen stomach above the elastic of her panties, and her wonderful soft breasts pressing against her bra. I looked up the stairs, where my friend was asleep after his day of dissipation, and before I could reflect on whether my quick glance was a matter of concern for Buddy or personal caution for myself, I looked back at Beth again and felt all the weak ache of two years stiffen into an erection.
I rose uncomfortably from the couch in a bent position and unfastened her bra, and she turned toward me and put her arms around my neck as though she wanted to hide her huge white breasts. I pulled her close, with my face in her hair, and kissed her ear and ran both my hands over the small of her back, down inside her panties and over her butt and thighs. I felt like a gorilla bent in an ugly position over a pale statue. I smelled her blue-black hair, her perfume, the dried perspiration on her neck, her breath, and I felt the backs of my thighs start to shake.
She took her arms away and slipped her panties down over her thighs, then stepped out of them.
“Sit on the couch,” she said.
Her body was silhouetted like a soft white sculpture in the glow of light from the kitchen. I undressed and sat back on the couch, and then she moved over me. She moaned once in her woman’s fecund way, her eyes widened, and she spread her fingers across my back.
Then I felt it grow inside of me, too early and beyond any attempt at control, and when it burst away in that heart-twisting moment, she leaned forward and held my head to her breasts as she might a child’s.
In the morning we all had breakfast at the kitchen table, and the sky outside was blue and clear over the elm and maple trees, and the sun shone brightly through the window. The two boys were talking happily about a football game at school, and Beth turned the hash browns and eggs in the skillet as though she were fixing breakfast on any ordinary morning. But I could feel the tension in her whenever she looked toward me and Buddy at once. He was badly hungover, his hand shaking on his cigarette, the eyes puffed and dim and still focused inward on some barrel of snakes out of yesterday. His plate went cold in front of him, and finally he dropped his cigarette in his coffee and rested his forehead on the palm of his hand.
“Boy, I really got one this time,” he said.
I didn’t want to look at him, because I not only felt an awful guilt toward him but also that sense of primitive victory in making a cuckold out of a rival, particularly one who was coming apart while you had it all intact.
“Try some tomato juice,” Beth said.
“You got any ups? Or some of those diet pills will do it,” he said.
“Don’t take anything else,” she said.
He remained with his head in his palm and breathed irregularly.
“Do you have a hangover, Daddy?” the younger boy said.
Buddy got up from the table without answering and walked duckfooted to the icebox. He opened a can of beer and then began looking through the cabinets.
“Where the hell is that bottle of sherry you keep?” he said.
“Don’t do it, Buddy,” she said. “Just let it work out your system and you’ll be all right this afternoon.”
“Give me the sherry and don’t tell me how to survive the morning.”
She took the bottle from under the sink, and he poured a glass half full of it and then filled the rest with beer and broke two raw eggs into it. He sipped the glass slowly at the table, with his head bent over, holding the glass with both hands. Five minutes later the color began to come back into his face, and his hands stopped shaking.
“Man, that’s a little better,” he said. “That whiskey must have had shellac in it. I haven’t had an eggbeater in my head like that since I sniffed some transmission fluid in the joint.” He looked up at Beth, then shook his head. “OK, I know, wrong reference. But, man, somebody must have stuck an enema bag full of piss in my ear last night.”
That’s great, Buddy, I thought.
Beth told the boys to put on their coats and go outside.
“All right, all right, I got a speech defect about bad language,” he said. “But they hear all that shit at school. You don’t have to put earmuffs on them when they’re in the house.”
The table was silent, and Beth made a point of not looking directly at either one of us.
“How did I get upstairs last night? You must have dragged me up there by my heels.”
“You floated up there like a balloon,” I said.
“I feel like somebody worked me over with a slapjack. What did you do to me, partner?” He fixed one watery blue eye on me over his cigarette, and I flinched inside.
“I had to use force on you a little bit after you started taking off your clothes in the street. That wasn’t too bad in itself, but after you threw those flowerpots through the neighbor’s window, I had to do something to keep both of us out of the bag.”
His face tensed momentarily with hangover fear and disbelief. Then he drank from the sherry and beer and stared back hard at me with his cigarette between his lips.
“Son, you are a dirty bastard to put your hungover partner on like that,” he said, and I saw Beth’s hand relax on her coffee cup.
But I couldn’t quite forget his lingering, watery blue eye and the probe that it had made. Buddy had a way of knowing things that it was impossible for him to know, and I never was sure if the gift came from the fact that possibly he was crazy or if in his cynicism about human behavior he simply intuited, with a great deal of accuracy, what bad things some people would do in certain circumstances.
He finished the glass and took another beer from the icebox.
“Let’s get it down the road,” he said. “Didn’t you say the old man wants us to finish the fence line down to the slough?”
I blinked inside again, because he remembered exactly, almost to the word, what I had told him before we carried him up to bed.