Mr. Stroud had yelled from the front of the Firestone store, over some cutouts of Richard Petty. The two women customers behind him and to his left open-mouthed. Ed, the other underpaid employee, standing up under a car on the rack as I skidded past, burning rubber. His eyes bugged out. Where I have a limp, he has a twisted, smaller-than-a-twig right forearm. He tucks tools in the bony crook. Together we hobble, gimp around the place. That story another example of my luck. Up under a car at Walker’s Sinclair over by the tracks when I was just sixteen and the jack decides to let down. Simply spews out fluid in a long spurt and drops the fucking Buick across my shin. Sixteen and the makings of a gimp. Some quack at the county hospital working by the hour patched me up. A couple of okay years and then it starts hurting like a bastard right after I get in the Navy.
I’m driving past the road to the dump, gimpy leg aching, and I reach down to rub it. What do you think it all means? I’m asking. First I keep reeling it around over and over. Then I blurt it out to the noisy Chevy cab — coffee cups rattling, cigarette packs slithering from side to side on the dash. But I don’t even smoke. I don’t take the time to light up. Now that shows you the state I’m in.
“Why that day? That particular time?” Roger Blake asked me on the stand. But I don’t know. I’d had enough bad luck. But I didn’t mention luck. I kept that to myself. “You’d been married a little over two years?” “Yes sir.” “She’d been Bud Frazer’s girlfriend before your marriage?” “Yes sir.” Marriage, I’d thought. Shit on that.
“Hey, come on by for a beer when you get off, okay?” she’d said as soon as I’d answered the phone. I’d tucked the greasy receiver under my chin.
Ed had scuttled past, edged by me, his little arm clenching a ratchet and some extensions. Me and Mary Louise had been up late the night before fighting. She’d been high on something. Some pills he’d gotten her. She’d come in at three. But just a week before, she’d sworn no later than nine or ten from now on. Just a few free hours, she’d said, after she finished work at the Catfish Castle. Free hours, she called them. Shit on that too.
“You’re takin’ those pills again! Don’t lie to me, Mary Louise.” I raised my voice and Ed looked away, scampered back up under the Cougar; he was used to all this. “Goddammit, you promised you’d stop. You said you’d leave him alone!” I swallowed to stifle a whine.
The house was always a mess. We’d argue and then drink. Bud would drop by to talk. He was from South Carolina and he’d served time for murder and assault and other shit. Mary Louise told me about his tattoos once. Even about the one on his dick — a dozen arrows that swelled into rockets. She’d laughed and snuggled up to me and said she was all mine now but those tattoos of his are hilarious. Are, I kept thinking. She’d said are.
The prosecution wanted to take out the part about the arrows but the judge decided not to. Twenty-four eyes batted when Roger Blake said penis over and over.
“Hey, boy.” She’d given Bud the phone or he’d taken it. I heard her laughing in the background. Some band was warming up at the Casbah Club.
“Come on by and I’ll buy you a couple. We’re havin’ a fine time already.”
“Sounds like it.”
“Huh?”
“I thought you were going to leave her alone.”
He was big and moved like a bear or one of them sloths at the zoo. He went to sheriff department picnics. He drove a truck for Gulf Freight Lines. And he scared everybody shitless.
“Come on by and we’ll party. Come on.”
“You said you’d leave her alone. You said you would.”
The band tuned up some more and Mary Louise buzzed something into the receiver. Bud laughed right into it for a minute. Then I listened to the band playing “Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain” out of key and awful-sounding on the phone.
“Suit yourself, you little motherfucker.”
“Let me talk to her, Bud. Put her on.”
“Oh, Bud,” she laughed, and then, “Come on, you old asshole. We’ll have a good time. Bud’ll buy.”
Remember all them examples in church? I’d come into Big Church, as Mama called it, from Sunday School and there were these stories the preacher’d tell. The very same plane this guy missed crashed not ten minutes after he’d missed it. Somebody’d gone from whiskey to heroin, his life on the skids. But one afternoon, as he’d laid dirty and lonely and sick on an overdose, he’d watched a trail of ants on the floor. Helping share the burden of a breadcrumb. And he’d seen his own need for other people’s help.
Everybody always understood something. Everything fit together and made sense at the end. Explained the car wreck, the alcoholic’s whipping his wife, the sparrow falling from the sky. That and them parables. The Good Samaritan finally helped that hurt guy; the prodigal son’s daddy fixed a feast for him. Everything sorted itself out. A whole lifetime of sin, uselessness, bad luck was cleared up, explained, paid for, worked out in a minute flat.
A man came to sing once. His face eaten totally away by acid from an exploding battery. Not till that explosion had he really valued life. And later, faceless, he’d praised God for the moment of revelation. He’d warbled out “Oh, why not tonight?” his skin plastic and tight.
“Mary Louise, you leave there right now. You hear me?”
“But Bud brought me.”
“Don’t argue, dammit! You get someone else to take you home. You promised...”
She hung up. Or Bud did. She testified he did. But who knows about that? She’s back heavy into drugs already. And I got a letter from her lawyer yesterday talking about divorce, getting the mobile home and everything else. Sure, why not? What everything else?
I sort of lied. What else could I do? I said I was in a blind rage. Yeah, he’d been tearing my home apart. Yeah, he’d been supplying my wife with drugs. Yeah, I did suspect they’d been having sex. Shit, she soaked her underwear every night in the kitchen sink. I smelled him on her skin. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I was afraid of him. That’s the whole truth there. He was a scary fucker. Solid. Big. Tattooed. Somehow friends of the cops. Dangerous. Fill in the blank about him. And only use bad words.
But it wasn’t blind rage. It was too jumbled up for just that simple answer. But I knew the peckerhead wanted the maximum he could get — thirty years, or so Roger Blake had said. I knew I had to play up the passionate rage part, leave out the stuff about bad luck.
I drove up to Mama’s gate and turned off the engine. I caught my breath for the first time. But I didn’t leap out and up the steps. Nope. I settled back and shook out a Winston and lit it and sucked it deep.
Junior Jackson. That’s me. Junior luckless, meaningless Jackson. Crippled by a falling car. What’d Mama used to say...? “Jun’er, don’t hold them magazines over your eyes to read, somethin’ll drop out and blind you... stick right in your eyeball.” Good start, huh? “Don’t lean back in the chair, Jun’er, it’ll break and ram a piece up your spine. Damaged for life.”
Oh sure, blame your mama and daddy, right? But how about the old man? Fell off a log truck at thirty, crushed a shoulder, spends the rest of his life in a little pain, sitting in front of the TV in his vinyl lounger saying “It’s ever’ dog eat a dog out there.” “The world’s a fucking mess, Jun’er.” And later even more fuel. “What’s that shit about them Arabs and Jews?” Arabs and Jews. Nigras on the dole. Mama’d hobble in, her knees locked from arthritis — Arthur, Daddy called it — and they’d shake their heads over TV (when I was little it had been the radio; neither could read much). And when things got real bad they’d both sleep. Take to their beds if the car broke down, the well pump needed new packing, something had eaten her pullets. Living at home, I’d do the same. Until finally, after twelve, fourteen hours of silence with only the faucets dripping, the wind blowing across the eaves, one of us would crawl out of bed, make a pot of coffee, force his thoughts on the problem, wake the others up.