The first year with Mary Louise, I slept most of the weekends until I decided I might ought to go out with her and try keeping up.
They met me at the back door; Wolf, the old black-and-tan, as slow as Mama.
“Surgery’s the only thing, the doctor says. They’ll cut along here,” she bends gingerly to slide a finger over her kneecap, “and lift it out. Put in a plastic one.”
“Plastic... shee-it.” Daddy’s leaning over the table pecking at a bought apple pie they’ve picked to pieces.
“He was a wild man,” Mama said on the stand. I didn’t look at her then or later. The old man broke down in tears. I think he thought he was on trial for something himself. The Jews, Arabs, nigras had finally finagled him out of his lounger to humiliate him.
“Want some pie?” she’d asked.
Somewhere along the way it had dawned on me that maybe all this would become the moment of revelation like the ends of those parables. Do all this in order to get to the sense of things.
Hmmm, I thought. And went in to take the shotgun, check the shells, walk straight through the house to the front door.
That’s sort of how I went in the Navy. Then the goddamned leg gets worse and worse from all that marching and exercise and fighting them practice oil fires. So this Navy doctor says it’ll be fine and dandy after he opens it up and unpinches something and rotates something else. Shit, I don’t believe in doctors like Mama and I’m already homesick, so I’m out of there in a minute. All the way to Quartzite, Arizona, before they pick me up AWOL. Of course they didn’t just give me a medical. The monkey-suited bastards process me out with a D.D. Junior Jackson, D.D. So I finally did get to come home to work at Beasley’s Shell station, though it was a pretty crooked route.
The peckerhead brought up my run-ins with the law. But it was just the usual kid stuff and I’d never served any time for it. Just warnings and a couple of J.P. fines. Stealing a couple of tires, a tape player — that sort of thing. We’d drink, go to the high school games in town, drink some more and smoke some dope. End up smashing a window and taking tapes, radios, fuzzbusters. Everybody did it. It was more a sport — like hunting deer out of season — than something bad. We stole from each other most of the time.
But I quit it. When I got the job changing flats and mounting tires at the Firestone place, I went cold turkey. Some of the guys said me and Ed was sitting on top a gold mine, but I said no. Besides, I was the one who always got caught — figures — and this job was my only way to stay out of jail.
“She’s trouble,” Daddy’d said, his head level with his toes, looking between them at “Gunsmoke.”
Mama’d shook her head as Mary Louise’d drove off in her Camaro after her first visit.
It’d turn out bad. Trouble. Misery. Out of luck. First the Navy business and a dishonorable discharge. Then coming back to steal. What’d we teach you anyway? Then they’d troop to bed to recharge their last sparks into a smolder.
They were right. I was right, too — I’d thought the same thing when I saw her first inhale dope for a new world’s record. Saw the first boyfriend, Bud, she’d had since moving down from Norman.
But when she opened those long, brown legs what can I say? Nobody asked about that at the trial.
“He was like a wild animal I’m tellin’ you. All tussled hair, eyes wild, bugged out.”
“I don’t know. I can’t rightly say,” the old man kept saying. They must have done some Olympic sleeping the first couple of weeks. I know I did. They’d take me back up — who the fuck did I know who’d make bail? — and the nigras would catcall, thump burning butts at me, jeer. And I’d lay down and sleep and dream luckless dreams. A vacuum that sucked the hours up, shortened my life without refreshing me one bit.
All the shit at the Casbah’s a mess. It wasn’t like the movies. Not in regular motion or slow motion like them Peckinpah flicks. It was in fast motion; more like old Keystone Kop movies or WWI where doughboys scurry past, their legs pumping nine to nothing.
I sat and cried most of the first week of the trial. I was shocked by what had happened at the club. And it was so fast it could replay itself in my head fifty times a minute.
So I thought it over and over while the peckerhead D.A. trotted out everything about my life he could find. The theft charges they’d dropped; Mary Louise’s drug problem. Her and Bud. Poor old Bud Frazer, he’d say, a victim of us sorry white trash — that’s what he’d meant, anyway. And I’d think about it and couldn’t help crying. But not for Bud, you see. Fuck him. Though I was sorry about it all and pretty damned confused. I was crying for Mary Louise, who I glanced at now and then, who sat blank-eyed resting her clean shiny brown hair against the oak paneling. And I cried about my bad luck.
Toward the end of the week, Roger Blake began putting on people who knew Bud; people from South Carolina even, and they had some stories to tell. Bad-assed wasn’t the half of it.
“You’d seen him at the Casbah Club before?”
Old decrepit Mickey Cotter’d drank with us a hundred nights there. “Yes sir.”
“How’d he act in there? How’d he treat people?”
“Shit!”
The judge leaned over quickly and spoke to Cotter.
“Sorry, your honor.” He scratched his fuzzy chin and talked on.
I replayed the scene.
All the way back into town I’d argued with myself like them angels sitting on your shoulder — the good one and the bad one.
Way back in my mind I kept thinking that this would end it all somehow. I’d take her home, wash her face with a cold washrag like I’d done before, and put her to bed. Maybe I’d pull up her t-shirt and run a finger over her wide pink nipples.
The twelve-gauge shotgun bounced on the seat but I only heard it. I didn’t look at it at all. It was really for protection. Just in case, that’s all. I sweated and the air rushing in the rolled-down window only made me stickier. Dried in a film on my greasy face. I smelled myself, my body odor strong from the day’s work. But stronger than that by now.
But all this went fast as I rolled up in the parking lot at dusk, jumped out, went in and sat down at their table, ordered a beer and looked away for a time before I jerked my head around and told Bud to take his arm from her neck, the fingers of his left hand — crowded with nugget rings — squeezing her tight nipple. Houston Oilers, the t-shirt said, and I stared at the message.
Objections would interrupt me a little, you know. The peckerhead kept harping about me going all the way to Mama’s to get the gun. He wanted thirty years at least, Roger Blake kept saying. But my witnesses just talked about Bud. Someone said you’d need a couple of shotguns for him. You couldn’t find a single friend. None of his sheriff buddies talked. Homewrecker, ruined lives, tattooed penis, belligerent.
Belligerent, shit. I’d wipe my eyes, glance at Mary Louise who sat staring straight at the space just over the white-faced clock. Here like the TV shows. Perry Mason. Except this was less real. Everything seemed too soft. The tabletop gave a little. I sank too deep into the oak chair. The paper tissue the hardest surface anywhere around.
“Oh, I seen him do awful things to people at the bar. Cuss’em. Taunt ’em. Shove ’em around like he owned the place. Beat the... hell out of ’em in the parking lot.”