There were cars parked every which way as usual. I towed her through the door. She seemed dead weight, like dragging something that weighed a lot more than it looked. I shoved her in the pickup but going around to my door I stopped.
Bud moved like a bear from the door of his den to a car right in front of my Chevy. He grinned, rested a huge hip on the rear fender. The sheet metal dipped in.
“Let her out now, Jun’er. Be a good boy and let her come out to play with old Buddy boy. Okay, Jun’er?”
And this all quick motion too, sped up, the film sprockets rattling like mad, the machine clattering. I’m terrified, smell myself suddenly, but I’m all scrambled up with the need to do something final to free us for the feast, the happy ending. Something that makes good sense.
I jerked the gun out from under Mary Louise and through the window. I had come to kill him. The frames snapping faster, breakneck speed.
He cussed me, sitting idly on the fender. Then in his bear’s movement he lifted his hip off. Turned to see the people gathered at the door. I looked to see them all open-mouthed. A few took quick swallows of beer. The silver cans caught the parking lot lights.
I said something. Bud moved like a wall, or train, gliding easily toward me, his left hand out. Everything quick and full of things at the same time. Mary Louise blew the horn, held it down until minutes after I’d aimed for his head and then, finally, shot at his-legs, the dust coming up to tangle with his shredded khaki pants. I saw how I’d riddled the car’s fender. A tire hissed. Mary Louise let up on the horn and the people in front of the bar took a couple of steps and stopped again.
I couldn’t look at his face. I couldn’t kill him. I didn’t even pump in another shell. All I could think of was how much I hoped this ended it all. Though it didn’t seem much of an ending to anything important.
When Mary Louise screamed I stared in the dark window in surprise. Her finger jabbed at the windshield and I looked at Bud for the first time just to see him cough and spit in my direction and fall, bounce off my hood, land like a boulder in the floating dust. The single ricocheted pellet. Off the bumper and up through his left temple.
There were color slides. The peckerhead brought them. The bailiff set up the projector and screen. The shiny pointer circled the stuff like chewed newspaper that had dribbled from his head onto the hospital sheet. And I cried.
I lied too. I’d gone to kill him, not just scare him, and I’d chickened out. Junior Jackson, the chickenshit sonofabitch who’d shot at the ground and missed. He’d got two superficial leg wounds, but one of the pellets had come up off the bumper and into his brain. Off the heavy chrome bumper of a blue and white ’57 Ford. Everything since made from shitty metal or plastic. But let’s talk luck, huh? That’s why I cried. Slept in the cell as if I’d died too. Mary Louise didn’t come by. I asked Roger Blake to talk to her for me. The D.A. wanted thirty fucking years. All I wanted was them to brick up the rusty bars and window and let me sleep. In my luckless dreams the shooting expanded so I could try to cram meaning in a thousand pockets of air where nothing happened. In the pickup. At Daddy’s closet door. Between the gun barrel and Mary Louise’s ass. Unlucky stupid bastard. I think only Bud came out prepared. I’m fucked up. Fucked over. She’s stoned shitless. Bud’s the man with his hand out, sliding along the fender. The dented metal popping out without a sound.
But this is the part that lays me out like you’d smacked me with a shovel.
About six days into the trial I’d cried myself pretty dry. After a shitty breakfast and kicking the huge water roaches I’d smashed that night into a pile, I’d change into the blue seersucker Roger Blake had brought me and they’d lead me down. I’d sit but not listen now, the courtroom breezeless, the suit hot, sweat dripping down the small of my back. They put everybody on: the police, the coroner with his lousy slides, everybody else in the Casbah parking lot. Mary Louise, me, the whole nine yards.
But Wednesday afternoon after a supper of hash browns and those link sausages Daddy called donkey dicks, I stretched out, used to the loud racket of the place. Nigras bullshitting one another with a vengeance. Cell doors clanging. The pile of roaches still there and big enough to give you the creeps.
Then Blake shows up and sits on the cot with me. He opens his fat battered briefcase full of legal pads and folders and rolls of Lifesavers and offers me a wintergreen and sits back, his hands across his stomach.
Mostly I’m numb by now. I think that’s why the noise doesn’t bother me anymore. Four weeks in here and I’m numb like a catfish you’d thumped on the head. Waiting for the cold knife up the asshole.
But Blake fidgets and shifts away from the light through my window and edges close to me, his breath a burst of mint the smell of Pepto-Bismol. He’s a good man, I’ve decided. But the busted veins that start on his nose and flare out across his cheeks say he’s got problems, too. I don’t think he’s any too lucky either and that figures in like everything else.
But he whispers something and reaches out to give my knee a tremendous whack and squeeze and then he bellylaughs and I have to sit up closer to get his drift. He talks on now, fumbling through the briefcase, but instead of another mint, he takes out some folders.
“Just be quiet about it. Keep your head down in there a few more days. It’s looking real fine.” And he goes on and on, fidgeting with happiness.
After he leaves I lay down in a state. “You haven’t been listening, paying good attention, looking at the jury like I have, that’s all. I didn’t want to say anything sooner though I noticed it after the business about the penis. Didn’t want to get your hopes up too much.” And he’d whacked me again a couple of times. “We’ll walk on this. Bud Frazer was a sorry bastard. It was almost a community service. Him a snitch for the sheriff, too. Some protection there. I’d guess five years probated. Probated, Junior.” He’d whacked me again, leaned back and crossed his arms over his stomach.
I’ll walk, I keep saying over and over. And toward morning — the moon flying across my high small window — I nodded and stood up for the millionth time. Goddammit, maybe it was all going to work out. I’d shot him by accident and that’ll walk me out of here and with that bastard gone me and Mary Louise’ll do fine. Now I’d feel the kick of the gun and hear the splatter of pellets against the fender and dirt but I’d shrug it off. God works in mysterious ways, Mama’d say.
I paced. Then I’d lay down. I felt light-headed, the man in the story, my stupid fucking life making some sense. If I’d shot the fucker down, they’d toss me in the pen for thirty years. But I had cried real tears too, and pity and mercy and all that stuff was being leveled at me, Junior Jackson. Junior Jackson, not guilty or maybe guilty but probated. He was sure and by full daybreak so was I.
It was a miracle. I ain’t no Pentecostal like Mama but that morning I almost shook with the Holy Ghost and spoke in tongues.
The trial was almost over. Maybe another three days. But that Thursday I didn’t care about anything. I listened more and saw how right he was. The jurors looked kind and sympathetic. I could see all this had been hard on them too. Once I started doodling on a spare yellow pad but like a hawk Blake’s hand swept over and took the pen away. I’d written my name down one side and next to it Mary Louise Jackson. I’d glanced around at her in the corner. All that dope didn’t do much for her wanting sex, but after seeing her there, her hair shiny and long, the light brown of acorns, my dick nudged the hell out of the seersucker.
After supper I listened to the bullshit. I reached around the wall of my cell and took a Kool from the guy next door. Willy’d been in about two weeks charged with car theft. We knew some guys in common, so we talked all sorts of shit. He smoked my Winstons and I smoked his Kools.