The mood had gotten almost holy and eerie.
Cruthers began talking.
“I could sleep and make myself little but I always woke up the second anything anybody in range. I could smell them, my nose wake me up. I was on that tree crotch and had me a good limb with my honey and I start fucking her. They come over a hill five black pajamas in a row across like they was hunting rabbits. I blow all they heads off. Then I let myself down and each and every one I stomp they balls. But one of them a teenage girl just the top of her head blown back. I commence giving it to her mouth when I hold her up by the shoulders. That was the best I ever had.”
The room was as quiet as a tomb. Only Cruthers’s voice was going and the cat never moved. This must have been going on a long time. Cruthers finished the story and went in the kitchen to make himself another drink. There were going to be a lot more stories.
I looked down to Bandini and he was staring at the floor with a smile. His eyes were wet and he was in a hypnotic region.
“Feel the turning and the twistings of all that, how Cruthers got there and the dispossessed without any mission but this rendezvous with a boy from Water Valley, Mississippi, and the gun he sleeps with in a tree, making love to it sixteen thousand miles from home. Nothing could stop it, nothing.”
I was stunned by the new deep voice of Bandini, and this whole language.
When I looked at him again I believe he had forgotten I was in the room. He smiled just slightly and I could see how deeply in love he was.
Taste Like a Sword
WHY ARE YOU ALIVE? THEY ASK ME.
It’s not the first time these two have been in here at that table almost in the street window there as you see. They march in and sit, light up, you bring them over that narrow plastic menu and they say Hello again. Why are you alive? The hateful thing is he looks just like me, the other one who doesn’t talk much. But he searches my face for the answer, intent. Why are you alive? But he smokes and smokes, my old brand when I was a smoker. Their bicycles both lean together almost on the glass outside. I thought at first they were Mormon, that I was the only outlet for whatever meanness they had. But that wasn’t so. They are no church.
Even a monkey can imitate life, the speaker says. Other creatures can be taught to make the gestures of a man. I saw a chicken in South Carolina once could count change, which you barely have to do. But you’re coming along nicely. You’ve got the worthless café doper down almost exactly right.
The one who looks too much like me seems in a hurry with his glances, like, When are you going to get out of my way, out of everything’s way, I wonder? The other says, It would seem nature gets lonely for moving life. God must be so lonely, such a party guy. Just something that treads by as an example, and you were elected for this space.
He points to this area of the café and makes both his hands walk across the tabletop. They could be two starfishes on a stage. You’re not even a decent hole, he goes on. Why aren’t you a woman? Then you might give some good man fifteen minutes’ peace.
It’s sort of a scandal you’re a male, yes. For godsake do something about your face. We’re eating here. Then he whispers: Where did you get the hair, where was that borrowed? I suppose to you your hair is somehow tragically significant and those shorts with your weenie legs and high-laced booties. Have you just come down off the mountain, dear friend, stamping out a forest fire, or have you just licked them with your spit and furred tongue? The other one just watches pale and with tired eyes like me. His clothes look like he bought them somewhere pricey though.
I think he will rise up and become me, absorb me, he is impatient for my space, is my feeling. But that must also mean there’s something good about me he has to have, and my silence leaves me in a superior position. He seems very tired from watching. I’d think he’s watched me at home too some way. The days keep going by and he just about has had it, is the feeling.
Across the room near the bar kneels Minnie Hinton. That same man is back at her table ordering his expensive whiskeys. Everything he does is costly. I believe he is a doctor going to law school in his Mercedes convertible. Something about the law and medicine and some field where you just sit on your butt being smart for high pay, as I understand. I believe there is a broomstick far up him. I sense the end knob of it is about at his Adam’s apple in his throat in there. He moves off the axle of this long stick in him. He is short with square shoulders, square face, and some gray curls in his black hair like somebody near a condo pool looking sidelong at lesser creatures with open contempt. Thirty years ago where he lives they would call a pad. The disdain of this man is thick, is the feeling, with Minnie knelt there in front of him. He is moving ahead, always moving, down from his townhouse on the square and he resents he’s on the ground with the others and having to walk where they walk, is my sense. It is my personal persuasion that he is taking it up the butt but he is frightened by this fact, he the doctor. You see others of his kind taking it up the butt and they trot around with a combination of fear and disdain, somebody on their trail, they have the best drugs, they must be quick. Minnie kneels down before him. She wrings her hands looking into his face. His face is quiet, almost without expression, but his mouth is moving all the time, whispering, you can barely hear anything over here with the crowd. He must know this. From him there is a long hiss that never quits.
Once you are tuned into the hiss you can define it clear as a bell out of the casual buzz of the whole eatery. This is eatery and bar both and they have good music at night, but I’m jealous of the musicians and it hurts to listen to them having fun. I like the bad bands better, the ones with stupid humor and little talent. They make me feel at home and I might stay through midnight even after waiting tables all day. The girl followers of bad bands are my kind too. They like it bad and true talent frightens them. They will go home with you sometimes not expecting anything and pull apart their poor clothes and fall to love like simple honest mechanics who’ve been prepaid for repairing a part. Then afterwards you just walk around with a slight crush on each other and maybe never even see them again except on the arm of a new loser but giving you a smile like everything is understood and cruising in its right orbit.
But Minnie’s companion, who pays high for this act, is not casual. Things intended and designed pour out from him without stop, and it is the same Minnie, the goddess of this place and introduced to strange life by poverty, who fractures you in her quietness. She’s almost on her knees but I suppose actually in a crouch before his knees with his hands on each like a priest speaking his best sermon. But she is pitched close to the attitude of the outright kneel.
Slut tramp whore rimsucker harlot Ford Escort blow job, he keeps going on as she listens calmly. Hag bitch scum. In the whisper, hardly a breath between.
Yes sir, she says.
Right as hell you swallow it all. Gutter lizard.
Yes sir.
Right now, come and die bitch, right now. Get off and die. I’ll keep on while you’re dead.
Then he shows just a flick of his rock-hard eyes down at Minnie’s face. In that second you can see very sadly how much he wants to be her.
Netherson. I never meant to meet Netherson, who once for a whole week had nothing to eat in Amarillo, Texas. He slept in a park in Amarillo and played checkers for food with people better than he and always lost. The cops would come by rousting him from the park and other hard beds under trees near water. He was too weak to do much but sleep but he couldn’t even finish a nap. The cops had his number, and he was black as a further kicker. He is something of a legend here, having missed many meals back then in his questing youth. He hit the road with absolutely nothing, which those who write about it never really do. He never had a dog companion. He was just himself and bone needy all over the West, Northeast, Midwest, and South, where he finally stopped when work opened. Netherson as a barman is a black zombie. He is moved by nothing, but he seems to be called by something, a voice is persistent in his forehead, you can almost see it in the wires of his temples. He is called away, he’s not standing here, not looking at you. Some believe he’s a god, especially the girls, he’s somebody long ago crucified now back to show you his hands, the ones pushing the drink to you, no expression in his face, nothing.