Out of the corner of my eye I saw him drape back his denim jacket to make for the handkerchief again. Then I directed my attention back to the road. When my eyes drifted toward Lafayette again, I saw a black semiautomatic pistol resting on his leg. Had never known Lafayette to own the pistol — just the revolver and shotguns, hunting rifles. Knew he couldn’t’ve bought the pistol anywhere legally.
“Why the hell did you bring a gun with you, Lafayette?”
Before he could answer, he suffered another violent coughing episode, this time before he could reach the handkerchief. Traces of blood and phlegm sprayed on the glove compartment. Lafayette’s beer tipped over onto the floorboard. In his fit I grabbed the gun away from him. He didn’t fight me for it. He took out his handkerchief and wiped the dash.
“Shit. Sorry about that,” he said.
I felt the heft of the gun in my hand. “Why the hell did you bring a gun with you this morning?” I asked again.
When he was finished smearing his muck off the dash, he dropped the handkerchief into the empty beer carton, deposited the bottle he’d knocked onto the floorboard in the carton as well.
“Don’t know anymore,” Lafayette said and moved the carton to the backseat. He closed his eyes and leaned into the headrest. “Don’t know. Had my .357 on me as always, Topher.” He pointed at the gun in my left hand. I could tell he was fighting back tears his chest was trying to convulse out of him. “So that white-trash piece of shit was holding that gun on her instead. Didn’t know there was another man in the house, so when his Negro buddy saw me, sumbitch registered his friend’s surprise, moved just as I pulled the trigger.”
Ahead of us an exit sign bounced like a green buoy in the waves of cool air thawing off the highway. I took the exit, turned right on Hacks Cross Road. Power still hadn’t been restored. Truck stops sat squat and dead and empty. The only life, some smoke pillaring from the side of one of the stores. I pulled around. It was 10:45 and we were only ten minutes away from the transplant center. Olive Branch was the next exit down 78. But the beer in my empty stomach reminded me how I hadn’t eaten anything yet that morning. I felt claustrophobic.
A red horse-trailer was parked back behind the truck stop. A gas generator growled power into the trailer, MALONE’S CATFISH AND OTHER FINGER LICKIN GOOD STUFF painted on the side of the truck. Only a few customers were standing in line. I pulled back around the building and parked in a space facing the large panes of glass at the front of the store. The tires nudged the curb. A pay phone stood just beyond the truck grill.
“Shouldn’t’ve told you that,” Lafayette said, then opened his eyes. “Don’t tell Erin.”
“Of course.”
“We there?”
“Sit tight,” I said. “Got to get some food in me. You want something?”
“Probably shouldn’t eat before surgery.”
“But you can drink beer?”
“Just a little something to snack on then. A biscuit, pack of Nabs. Whatever they got.”
Two ladies were working the truck. The black one manned the register and the other one, a Mexican, held a pair of tongs over matching beige Crock-Pots. Both women were wearing hairnets. Not so much the smell of frying catfish wafted from the truck as chorizo and what I recognized as tamales. The first man in line paid and carried away a Styrofoam box. Two customers remained in front of me. The next customer ordered. The Mexican lady with the tongs waited for her coworker to indicate which Crock-Pot. The black lady pointed with three fingers at the one on the right. Aluminum foil draped from the Crock-Pot. The Mexican lifted the lid and produced as many tamales.
Perhaps the pay phone actually worked, fed from lines below the ground, immune to the storm. What would I tell Erin then? That the best possible result today would be the operation going just about textbook and Lafayette living out the five years his new lung might afford him at a retirement home, all while the guilt over having shot Betty continuing to consume him much less quietly than the sarcoidosis had or ever would. Blame laid as much with me for how far this had gone. I ignored what Erin could not see with Lafayette’s first suicide attempt because I still and always would love her enough to harbor some hope of a past revisited despite what all another man, who had not just broken his wife’s heart but had gored it with a bullet, would be wrung through.
My reflection caught in the rear glass window of the quick stop. I needed some time I didn’t have to figure this out. I focused past my reflection and examined the inside of the vacant store. All the usual suspects of quick-stop merchandise were present: junk food and beer, videocassettes and country music and gospel and gospel-country music cassette tapes and CDs. CB radios and wiring, exaggerated antennas and bracket mountings. Several cheap brands of fishing poles hung on the wall.
To hell with the phone. Better I didn’t find out if it worked.
Back behind the wheel I told Lafayette we had some time to kill, that the black lady at the food truck said the store owner’s catfish pond was nearby, a place we could cast a few quick lines in while we ate the tamales. They were selling hot dogs from the other Crock-Pot and I’d bought an opened pack of raw ones to hook on our cheap lines from the quick stop. A couple of miles down the frontage street I made a left onto a narrower gravel road, maneuvered the truck like the lady said her old man sometimes did around the padlocked gate that did not stretch across the entire width of the path, wasn’t met on either side by fencing. Branches slapped and scratched the side panels of the truck.
The path yawned into a cove and a man-made lake of about fifteen square acres sprawled out before us. At the far end two tractors held between them a seine which would drag the length of the lake during harvest. A wire-netted hopper waited at the other end of the lake to lift from the water the catfish caught between the seine and the bank. I parked. Tall pines untouched by the storm darted from the ground around the rectangular perimeter of the lake like the makeshift walls of a medieval keep. There was some cloud cover and from the truck the water looked murky. Lafayette tried opening the door of the truck while balancing the hot dogs on top of the box of tamales in his lap.
“Don’t worry about all of that,” I said, reaching for the food. “I can get it.”
“I ain’t completely helpless yet.” He swung open the door and stepped down and the opened pack of hot dogs slipped off the Styrofoam and landed in the grass. Two of the hot dogs rolled from the plastic. Bits of dirt clung to them. “You can get them,” he said.
We walked to the far end of the floating pier that would retract onto the bank during harvest. Lafayette’s breathing was labored and he set the tamales and his pole on the dock, propped himself up on his knees, and wheezed. When he could manage his respiration he sat down on the pier. I handed him my pocketknife. He cut up one of the hot dogs against the pier and baited his hook. Cast out into the lake. His arm jerked the rod in his hand, the other reeled the slack out of the line. I offered him another tamale.
“Can’t say I’ve had any of these before,” he said.
I told him the first time I’d ever tried them was when Manny, a coworker when I was a produce clerk at the Jitney Jungle, offered me one from his lunch box left over from dinner the evening before.
“They ain’t bad.” Lafayette licked tomatillo salsa from his fingers. “You know? A little different but taste good. You still got that Ruger on you?”
I slipped the gun out of my pants, wanted to tell him I didn’t feel comfortable with him having a loaded gun, but he’d been through enough. “Long as you ain’t fixing to shoot me or you with it.”
He cast the line again. “Would you believe they broke in with only one bullet in that gun?” He swiped a finger across the bandage on his ear. “Used it to pull this here van Gogh what’s-his-face.”