At nine o’clock he left his room and went down to the bar. Wayne drew him a beer. ‘Welcome to Adam’s Creek.’ Wayne turned to the two men at the bar. ‘One creek that never runs dry, eh, boys?’ The laughter that followed was routine. The echo of a million other nights.
Jed hadn’t drunk beer since the night he met Sharon, but he didn’t flinch. He raised his glass. ‘It’s good to be here, Wayne,’ he said, and swallowed half of it before he put it down. He made that noise that men who drink beer make, and wiped his mouth on the back of his wrist.
One of the two men leaned over. ‘So where’s all the bibles then?’
‘Bibles?’ Jed said. ‘What bibles?’
‘Ain’t you selling bibles?’ The man had slack cheeks that shook like jelly when he spoke.
Jed smiled and took a risk. ‘I’d sell my sister first.’
Wayne spluttered. He turned and yelled to the woman who was polishing a glass at the other end of the bar. ‘Did you hear that, Linda? He’d sell his sister first.’
Linda took one look at Jed and went on polishing the glass. ‘Wouldn’t fetch much by the look of it.’
Jed raised a grin. ‘What are you drinking, Linda?’
‘I’ll have a beer,’ she said.
He got drunk that night, though not as drunk as he pretended to be. He was a man drowning his sorrows, he’d decided. He was a man drinking to forget. And slowly he let his sorrows spill. He’d seen a hundred funerals. He knew how it was done. Six or seven drinks inside him, he leaned on the bar. ‘I just want to forget her, Wayne.’
‘Who’s that, Jed?’
‘My wife.’
You couldn’t show up in a place like Adam’s Creek without a few questions being asked, Jed knew that, so he’d dreamed up a story. He’d got the idea from a song he’d heard on the radio while he was driving. It was about a wife who’d cheated on her husband, she’d left him for his best friend, and now the man was on the road trying to mend his broken heart. To him it sounded ridiculous, but he thought it was the kind of lie that people might believe. People like feeling pity for people, it makes them feel lucky. Well, he was going to give them the chance, wasn’t he? After being the man who’d sell his sister, he was about to become the man who’d lost his wife.
‘She made a fool of me, Wayne,’ he said. ‘I just want to forget the whole damn thing.’
‘You go ahead,’ Wayne said. ‘She wasn’t worth it. You just go right ahead and forget her.’
And because Jed couldn’t picture the wife who was supposed to have left him, because he had no idea what she looked like, he found himself believing that he was doing a pretty good job.
When, just before closing, Wayne said, ‘So what’s with the top hat, Jed?’ Jed knew what the answer was, and he was drunk enough to carry it off.
Slowly he removed the hat and slowly he looked down at it, his vision blurred by alcohol, but for all anyone knew it could have been tears. ‘This hat?’ he said. ‘This is the hat I wore to my wedding.’
He looked up. There was a big rear-view mirror over the bar so he could see the glances being exchanged behind his back. He could see the pity surfacing.
‘You know, it’s strange, Wayne, but I’ve completely forgotten what she looks like.’ He smiled bravely. ‘It’s almost like she never existed.’ And, looking down again, he felt the weight of Wayne’s hand on his shoulder.
*
A couple of days, he’d said, but he ended up staying in the Commercial Hotel for almost a year. During the first few months he worked with a gang of local road-menders, filling pot-holes on the highway, smoothing cambers, paving the dirt tracks that led to ranches. He spent most of his daylight hours outside. His lean pocked body tightened, turned brown, found a different shape. In that clear air he felt himself settling into his new skin. Some days he didn’t say a word. He just didn’t have any. Words would take longer. Not that anyone noticed. The road-menders were a sullen bunch. Then, towards Christmas, the work dwindled and he was laid off. He took the first job he could find, washing dishes at the Wang Garden, a Chinese restaurant two blocks down the street from the hotel. Lunchtimes and evenings, $4.50 an hour. Shortly after he started at the restaurant he told Wayne that he was moving to Mrs O’Neill’s boarding house on the corner of Main Street and Railway Avenue.
‘How long are you going to stay there?’ Wayne said. ‘A couple of days?’ He laughed so hard, he almost pulled a muscle.
Mrs O’Neill had startled red hair and a face that was like a dried-up river bed. She sat in her front room with the curtains drawn and the TV on and the door ajar. All you could see through the gap was a strip of wall and half a fridge. There were two pictures taped to the side of the fridge: Jesus and Donald Duck. Mrs O’Neill had the sweetest tooth in Adam’s Creek, and Jed won a place in her affections on his very first day by buying her a Rocky Road on his way back from work. He’d just discovered Rocky Roads. Made from peanuts, nougat, and chunks of glacé cherry, and covered in a thick coating of milk chocolate, it was the best candy bar that he’d ever come across. Whenever he passed Mrs O’Neill’s room after that, it was always, ‘Bring me a Rocky Road, would you, Matt, there’s a dear.’ That was the other thing about Mrs O’Neill. She thought his name was Matt. ‘My name’s Jed,’ he’d told her, more times than he could remember, but every time he passed her door she called out,’ Matt, honey, is that you?’ Maybe it was her way of telling him that she knew he was lying. Not about his name, but about everything else. But then, how could she know that? he thought. How the fuck could she know anything with Jesus and Donald Duck taped to the side of her fridge and her brain blended to mush by all that TV? She didn’t know. Nobody knew.
He had a large room on the second floor, with bright-green walls and a tangerine bedspread. The curtains looked like spring, but a spring that had happened somewhere else: all green shoots and rainfall and blossom. There was a plug-in kettle, an electric ring for cooking on, and a Gideon’s bible, for solace. It was from this room that he wrote his first and only communications with the outside world. One weekend he bought two postcards of the Adam’s Creek power station at night (they were the only postcards there were) and sat down at his rickety table by the window with a pen. He wrote the first card to Mitch. He thanked Mitch again for the tattoo and said it was lasting pretty well, considering. He told Mitch to say hello to his old lady. He said the clock in the local post office was busted and maybe Mitch would drop by and fix it sometime. Then he put, ‘But your bike probably wouldn’t make it, would it? Yours, Jed.’ Grinning, he turned to the second card. This would be for Sharon. There were times when he missed her; hers was the only woman’s body that he’d ever known. He remembered surprising her once at work. She’d just got a job at Simon Peter’s, a twenty-four-hour supermarket chain that catered for all funeral needs. Their logo was a yawning grave (a black triangle with the top cut off). Their slogan? OUR PRICES ARE SIX FEET UNDER EVERYBODY ELSE’S. His eyes lifted to the window, but they didn’t see the telegraph wires or the railway tracks or the range of dusty yellow hills beyond. They saw Sharon standing in the plastic-flowers aisle. She was wearing a black nylon coat and a badge that said SHARON LACEY. SECTION MANAGER. Her eyes widened at the sight of him. ‘What are you doing here?’