I nuzzled in her hair and felt her warmth and solid-ness, felt myself filling up again with life and soul and everything that was good.
But I knew it wouldn’t last.
Damn me, I knew it wouldn’t last.
Part Three
28
When I awoke, I was disoriented. The world had been spun around and my bed had shrunk during the night. I started to call for Ann when I realized where I was. On the outskirts of Pasadena, Texas, at Jim Bob’s house in the spare bedroom. Jim Bob was upstairs and Russel was asleep on the couch in the living room.
I sat on the side of the bed and scratched my head and thought about coffee. Last night seemed like a dream, a bad dream. We had left LaBorde about midnight, and I had fallen asleep in the backseat of the Red Bitch, awakening as if from a violent mugging.
I remembered sitting up in the seat of the car as we went over the Ship Channel bridge and seeing the water and ships out there and later the foundries as we entered Pasadena. There was something grim and alien about those places with their smokestacks chugging dark, stinking loads to the sky, and every time I saw those foundries, especially at night when great spurts of fire shot skyward from tall, narrow pipes to mix with the foul smoke, I was reminded of Dante’s Hell. I thought it must be dreadful to work at those foundries, out there in all that heat and smoke and stink, those chemicals and boilers constantly cocked for disaster.
The thought of all that put me back down in the seat, and I drifted off to the sound of Jim Bob and Russel talking about old times, their words losing meaning, becoming a drone, having an effect on me not too unlike a mother’s cradle song. When next I understood a word, it was Jim Bob tugging my shoe and calling my name, trying to get me awake.
After that I remembered carrying in my little bag and Jim Bob’s house being large and lonely and smelling of dust. The room he put me in was not so large, and it had a little bed and a tiny air conditioner that strained frantically to put some cool into air that had been dead for days.
Now it was morning and I was awake and it was damn near cold and I had a stomach that wanted breakfast, a body that wanted coffee, and a brain that was trying to put together exactly how I had gotten myself into all of this and why.
I looked at my watch. Ann and Jordan were not up yet. Another hour and they would be going through the morning routine and Jordan would be spilling his first glass of milk for the day. Damned if that didn’t suddenly seem endearing.
Most likely Ann would wake up mad at me and stay mad all day. She had agreed to let me go and had given me therapeutic sex the night before, but in time she would get mad again. She’d think about Russel and how foolish I was, and she’d be hot as those pipes at the foundry that shot out the fire.
James and Valerie would run the shop well enough, but James would moon over Valerie’s ass something disgraceful. He might do it so much he wouldn’t count change right.
Maybe Jack the mailman, with Russel gone, would start throwing the mail again.
I got up and stretched and felt the worse for it. I put on my clothes and went out into the hall and through the living room where Russel was lying awake, looking at the ceiling, smoking a cigarette.
“You too?” he said.
“Just got up,” I said.
“I couldn’t sleep,” he said.
“I slept, but it wasn’t worth a damn. I guess I dozed too much in the car. I don’t do so good after midnight anymore.”
“Older you get, the worse it gets,” Russel said.
“If it can get any worse than this,” I said, “you might as well kill me now.”
Russel threw the covers back and stood up. He had on pale gray shorts with a triangular design down the inseam; his belly hung over the waistband as if slowly melting. His arms, back and shoulders were covered with gray hair and his face looked long and creased with lines. His chest seemed to have fallen in like the roof of an old house and his posture was bad. Only his arms and hands looked strong. It was as if old age, mad as hell, had crept upon him during the night and climbed inside his skin.
“Let’s find some coffee,” Russel said, lighting a cigarette.
He slipped on his clothes and coughed some smoke and we staggered along to where the living room quit and became the kitchen. Russel found a Mr. Coffee, and after rummaging through the cabinet, a can of Folger’s and some filters.
“Maybe there’s something to eat in the fridge,” he said.
I went over and looked in the refrigerator and found some thick bacon wrapped in wax paper and some eggs. I put the stuff on the counter and got some bread out of the bread box and put it in the toaster and chased down a frying pan. I opened up the bacon wrapper and put all the meat in the frying pan and started stirring it with a spatula.
“Best way to cook that is naked,” Jim Bob said. I turned and there he was wearing his jeans and no shirt, that stupid-looking chicken on his chest, his big feet bare and awkward looking without his boots.
“Naked, huh?” I said.
“Yep,” Jim Bob said. “Get a little hot grease popped on your balls and you learn to turn that fi turn thre down.” He came over and turned my fire down and took the spatula and went to moving the bacon around. “How’d y’all sleep?”
“Not too good,” I said, “but it wasn’t the accommodations. I just had a lot on my mind.”
“Same here,” Russel said.
“That’s too bad. I slept like a hog on ice.”
We ate breakfast and the bacon was great. Best I’d had in years. I asked Jim Bob about it.
“Came from my hogs,” he said. “I raise the squeally fuckers. I’ll take you out and show them to you after a while. Got a wetback takes care of them for me. I get these eggs from a fella down the road. Got his own chickens and he doesn’t let them peck shit, but then he don’t put them in no boxes and force-feed them neither.”
“What about Freddy?” Russel asked abruptly.
“We go check on him,” Jim Bob said.
“We’ve got to find him first,” I said.
“No problem. New phone book just came out, and since he’s new in town he’s bound to have a phone. I mean, he ain’t Freddy Russel no more. He’s got a new life and new name and the FBI has given him a new past.”
Jim Bob got up and went over to the phone book and opened it. “There’s a lot of Fred Millers in here, but that ain’t no sweat neither. We’ll check the old phone book and look and see which Fred Miller has been added to this new listing.”
Jim Bob put the open phone book on the table and went away and came back with another phone book and opened it. He put it on the table beside the new one and compared. “Here we go,” he said. “Only one new Fred Miller in the book, and now we’ve got his address.”
“You’re sure it’s him?” Russel said.
“Sure enough,” Jim Bob said. “We’ll check it out.”
“Too easy,” I said. “I’d never have thought of that.”
“That’s why I’m the fucking detective and you build frames,” Jim Bob said with a sly smile. Then he turned to Russel. “You going to try calling him, Ben?”
“He’s probably at work,” Russel said.
“You’ve got to do it sometime,” Jim Bob said. “We’ve gone this far, you might as well go the whole hog.”
“I think I’d like to sort of look in on him without him knowing. I just can’t pick up the phone after twenty years of not even trying to answer letters his mama wrote or writing him or anything.”
“Just doing it would get it over with,” Jim Bob said. “In the long run, I think that would be the easy way.”
“I guess it would for you,” Russel said. “But he’s my boy and I haven’t treated him like he was anything to me. He may not even know I’m alive or care. I just couldn’t do it straight out.” align="l“All right,” Jim Bob said. “We’ll spy on him some until you get your nerves up.”