I sent Qualls to Columbia after a bunch of medicine for my lab. He kept tryin to buy it all at the same drugstore. Like I specifically told him not to do. He’d get turned down and go on to the next drugstore. Druggists kept callin the law and callin the law. By the time they pulled him over it looked like a fuckin parade. Cops was fightin over who had priorities. He had the whole backseat and trunk full of Dudafed and shit. He rolled over on me and here they come with a search warrant. I’m out on bond.
I can’t stand this.
I guess you’ll have to, Emile said. Look, for what it’s worth I’m sorry for you. And damn sorry for her. But I can’t help you. Nobody can. You want to run time back and change the way things happened. But time won’t run but one way.
I can’t stand it. I keep seeing her face.
Well.
Maybe I’ll go back out there to the funeral home and see her.
Maybe you ought to keep your crazy ass away from her daddy. You’ll remember he’s a cop.
I have to keep moving. I never felt like this. I never knew you could feel like this. I can’t be still. It’s like I can’t stand it in my own skin.
Emile didn’t say anything. He looked away. To the window where the night-mirrored glass turned back their images like sepia desperadoes in some old daguerreotype.
You still got that tow bar or did you sell it?
What?
I’m fixing to get that car. Aimee’s car. Pull it off down by the river somewhere.
This is not makin a whole lot of sense to me.
They wouldn’t let me in out there, they won’t even let me in to see her body. I went and looked at her car. Her blood’s all in the seat. On the windshield. It’s all there is of her left in the world I can see or touch. I aim to have it.
Get away from me, Emile said.
Aimee had turned up at his place at eight o’clock in the morning. The Jeepster still slept, it took the horn’s insistent blowing to bring him in the jeans he’d slept in out onto the porch and into a day where a soft summer rain fell.
Her battered green Plymouth idled in the yard. He stood on the porch a moment studying it. In the night a spider had strung a triangular web from the porch beam and in its ornate center a single drop of water clung gleaming like a stone a jeweler had set. The Jeepster went barefoot down the doorsteps into the muddy yard.
He was studying the car. Trying to get a count on the passengers. He couldn’t tell until she cranked down the glass that it was just Aimee. He stood with his hands in his pockets listening to the rhythmic swish of the windshield wipers. The dragging stutter of a faulty wiper blade.
I need a favor, she said.
It had been awhile and he just watched her face. She had always had a sly, secretive look that said, I’ll bet you wish you had what I have, know what I know, could share the dreams that come for me alone when the day winds down and the light dims and it is finally quiet. She was still darkly pretty but there was something different about her. The grain of her skin, but especially the eyes. Something desperate hiding there in the dark shadows and trying to peer out. She already looked like somebody sliding off the face of the world.
I don’t have a thing. I’m trying to get off that shit.
Really?
I’ve had the dry heaves and the shakes. Fever. Cramps and the shits. Is that real enough for you? Oh yeah, and hallucinations. I’ve had them. I may be having one now. I may be back in the house with baby monkeys running up and down the window curtains.
She made a dismissive gesture, a slight curling of her upper lip. Will you do me a favor or not?
Is Escue all out of favors?
I’ve left him, I’m not going back. He’s crazy.
No shit. Did a light just go on somewhere?
He stays on that pipe and it’s fucked him up or something. His head. You can’t talk to him.
I wouldn’t even attempt it.
I don’t understand goddamn men. Live with them and they think they own you. Want to marry you. Eat you alive. Jimmy was older and he’d been around and I thought he wouldn’t be so obsessive. Sleep with him a few times and it’s the same thing over again. Men.
The Jeepster looked away. Blackbirds rose from the field in a fury of wings and their pattern shifted and shifted again as if they sought some design they couldn’t quite attain. He thought about Aimee and men. He knew she’d slept with at least one man for money. He knew it for a fact. The Jeepster himself had brokered the deal.
What you get for taking up with a son of a bitch old enough to be your daddy.
I see you’re still the same. The hot shit macho man. The man with the platinum balls. You’d die before you’d ask me to come back, wouldn’t you?
You made your bed. Might as well spoon up and get comfortable.
Then I want to borrow a gun.
What for?
I’m afraid he’ll be there tonight when I get off work. He said he was going to kill me and he will. He slapped me around some this morning. I just want him to see it. If he knows I’ve got it there in my purse he’ll leave me alone.
I’m not loaning you a gun.
Leonard.
You’d shoot yourself. Or some old lady crossing the street. Is he following you?
He’s broke. I don’t think he’s got the gas.
I hope he does turn up here and tries to slap me around some. I’ll drop him where he stands and drag his sorry, woman-beating ass inside the house and call the law.
Loan me the pistol. You don’t know how scared I am of him. You don’t know what it’s like.
The loop tape of some old blues song played in his head: You don’t know my, you don’t know my, you don’t know my mind.
No. I’ll pick you up from work. I’ll be there early and check out the parking lot and if he’s there I’ll come in and tell you. You can call the cops. You still working at that Quik Mart?
Yes. But you won’t come.
I’ll be there.
Can I stay here tonight?
You come back you’ll have to stay from Escue. I won’t have him on the place. Somebody will die.
I’m done with him.
The Jeepster looked across the field. Water was standing in the low places and the broken sky lay there reflected. Rain crows called from tree to tree. A woven-wire fence drowning in honeysuckle went tripping toward the horizon, where it vanished in mist like the palest of smoke.
Then you can stay all the nights there are. He said.
The murmur of conversation died. Folds in the General Café looked up when The Jeepster slid into a booth but when he stared defiantly around they went back to studying their plates and shoveling up their food. There was only the click of forks and knives, the quickstep rubber-soled waitresses sliding china across Formica.
He ordered chicken-fried steak and chunky mashed potatoes and sting beans and jalapeno cornbread. He sliced himself a bite of steak and began to chew. Then he didn’t know what to do with it. Panic seized him. The meat grew in his mouth, a gristly, glutinous mass that forced his jaws apart, distorted his face. He’d forgotten how to eat. He sat in wonder. The bite was supposed to go somewhere but he didn’t know where. What came next, forgetting to breathe? Breathing out when he should be breathing in, expelling the oxygen and hanging on to the carbon dioxide until the little lights flickered dim and dimmer and died.
He leaned and spat the mess onto his plate and rose. Beneath his T-shirt the outlined gun was plainly visible. He looked about the room. Their switchblade eyes flickered away. He stood for an awkward moment surveying them as if he might address the room. Then he put too much money on the table and crossed the enormity of the tile floor and went out the door into the trembling dusk.