“You want this or not?”
“Fifty dollar the best I can do.”
“No way, man. Hell with that.” White light leaped into his eyes. “I wouldn’t carry’ this thing across the street for fifty dollars.”
“We don’t hold none with thieving,” Stafford said, loudly triumphant.
“It’s worth one hundred dollars, easy,” Jerry said.
Dandy shook his head. “Not to me.”
Stafford yelped, “Get that stole thing out of here right now.”
Jerry made a small, bitter sound. He put his chin down on his chest, and a tremor, beginning at his hips, shook upward through his chest, shoulders, neck. His eyes became not quite human.
In a soft voice, he said, “Who asking you?” Then, very loudly, “Who asking you?” The sides of his mouth grew wet. “And so damn what?”
He jerked the air conditioner up from the counter. Held it poised. Wheeled left and flung the machine into the old man’s lap. Stafford shrieked as the chair legs snapped off. He slapped against the counter screaming and pitched heavily onto the floor, hands clawing his legs. “They’s broke.”
Jerry flipped the hunting knife from his jacket pocket and slashed backhand at Dandy. The fat man banged himself back against the shelves. Orange boxes slipped thumping into the aisle.
Jerry leaned across the counter, his eyes intent, yellow-tan teeth showing under his mustache. He whipped the knife around, splitting Dandy’s tan shirt. As he slashed, he made a thick, grunting sound. Dandy squealed frantically as a thin, red line ran across the top of his shoulder.
Jerry got over the counter, fell into the aisle. His body felt hot and slow. Hunched over, he moved toward Dandy, knife blade out in front of him, a bright splinter.
Dandy said in a voice full of wonder, “Oh, this is a terrible thing.” His eyes were round. As Jerry moved toward him, he jerked a rack of cans thunderously into the aisle.
Jerry stumbled over a can, fell, hitting one knee. Taking small, quick steps, Dandy shuffled back from the knife. He got to the rear door. His eyes, round in a round pale face, stared past the edge of the door as it whacked shut.
“You better watch,” Jerry yelled. Jerking around, still holding the knife out before him, he darted back along the littered aisle, snatched the cash box from under the counter.
The box, chained to the shelf, snapped out of his hands. Change sprayed into the aisle among boxes and cans and broken glass. He clawed up a five, a one, another one. Dimes glinted among orange boxes. He found a quarter, a ten, two nickels. Urgency choked him.
He swung over the counter in one hard twist. The old man lay contorted against the counter, eyes rolled up, mouth open exposing his dull yellow tongue. He breathed like a compressor. The air conditioner canted across one leg.
Two steps to the door and out. Seven steps long across the crunching gravel, fury in his legs, rage lifting his shoulders. He felt laughter like hot fat boiling in his chest and throat.
He slid behind the wheel. Sue Ann gaped at him, excited, “What’s the matter? What’s the matter?”
“No damn thing.”
The Toyota leaped away spewing gravel. “They tried to cheat me.”
As the car skidded onto the highway, Dandy appeared at the side of the building. His arms were extended and from hands clenched before his face projected the dark snout of a revolver. Then a screen of bushes lashed past, hiding him.
“Cheated me, by God.” His boot rammed the accelerator.
Gray-shaded clouds skated sedately across a pale sky. Beneath the clouds spread calm fields, furred with new light green. From Stafford’s dirty sugar-cube the road was a lean gray strip stretched north past a small housing development, a small store. Beyond the fields rose a sudden hill studded with the brick buildings of A & M College, sober, dull red blocks following the hill’s contours like bird nests along a cliff. Hill and buildings looked neatly peaceful as a European travel poster.
The Toyota hammered north, eighty miles an hour. Wheels jittered on the road. Fields reeled past. The pedestrian overpass swelled toward them, was over them, shrank behind. The car leaped, floated above a small rise, light as blowing leaves.
“Oh, my God, Jerry, what is it?”
Down the road by the lumber yard, a fat yellow truck wallowed onto the highway.
“Oh, Jerry!”
He tapped the brakes, cut left, cut back across an oncoming pickup, the driver’s face shocked.
“Cheated me,” he yelled. Tapped the brakes. They slid through a four-way stop, jerked left. Accelerated past shabby apartments screened by vivid forsythia. On the main highway, he slowed, turned south.
“Jerry, what happened?”
He said, “I made them remember me.”
His eyes were white stones.
Five miles down the road, rolling west at thirty-five miles an hour through streets lined endlessly with small houses. Each had its own yard, its own driveway, its own bush. He yawned, as dull-headed as if he had slept. A black child in a red cap waved at them.
“I was so scared,” she told him. “You looked so funny.”
“How’d I look funny?”
“You just did.”
He gulped beer from a can. “You’re OK, Lu Ann. You’re nuts, but you’re OK. I think you’re fine, you know that?”
“You scared me.”
She looked like no one he had ever seen before. The lumpy face shone with tear smears. The big teeth, the loose dull hair belonged to a stranger. Only her voice was familiar, stumbling, hesitating, the voice of a confused child.
“...please don’t say that. It’s what Daddy said.”
“What?” he asked her.
“He looked at me. He looked at Momma. He said...” The thin voice faltered and shook, unsteady with shame. “Said, ‘You take that dumbnut brat with you, too.’ He said that. My daddy. ‘Take your ugly brat with you.’ He’s in Saint Louis now. I won’t forget him saying that.”
His empty beer can clattered behind the seat. “Open me another one.”
“Am I ugly?”
“You?”
“Yes, am I ugly?”
“Shoot,” he said, “where’s that beer?”
“You don’t have to say I’m pretty. I know I’m not pretty. I know what pretty is, like on television, all shiny like there’s sun on them.”
“You’re all right,” he said, sucking beer.
“But he didn’t ought to say that. Was your daddy nice?”
At last, Jerry said, “He played him some games with us.”
“What like?”
“Held up his two fists all closed together. Says, ‘Which hand’s the candy in, kid?’ So you guessed. You guess wrong — bamo! He fetch you one up the side of the head.”
“That’s awful.”
“Never was any candy. Not in either hand. He tells me, ‘Don’t expect nothing cause that’s what you’re going to get. ’ ” He clattered the empty can into the rear. “That’s right, too. You better know it. Both hands empty, all the time.”
“That’s terrible.”
Her face disgusted him. It was brainless, narrow, and brown, shapeless, the teeth ledged in a loose pale mouth. Now, at last, he remembered her name. “Give me one of them beers, Sue Ann.”
Twenty miles west of Huntsville the highway intersected I-65 South. Between ploughed fields a broad concrete strip undulated beneath a filmy white sky. The Toyota began to eat miles.
“Now we’re going down to Florida,” he said.
“Yea, Florida.” She leaned toward him, fingers closing over his right arm, a disagreeable soft pressure. “You glad you’re taking me to Florida, Jerry?”
“Oh, God, yes.”
“I’m sorry they cheated you.”
“Took that air conditioner in and they say, ‘Why this looks like you stole it, we’re gonna call the police.’ Said, ‘You better leave that old air conditioner here, we’ll call the police.’ ”