“Want a Coca-Cola, darlin’?” he said. “Ice-cold.”
“No, thank you,” she said.
There was a shine in his eyes. He was shaved, his black hair trimmed, his face fine-boned and tanned and unwrinkled. “Bet you don’t remember me.”
“You don’t look familiar.”
“I knew Boyd. Your husband. I drove with him a couple of times. In Baton Rouge.”
She waited for him to offer his sympathies. Instead, he grinned. “I’m glad I run into you. I owed Boyd some money. Eighty dollars, to be exact. My name is Randy Armstrong. When I was driving, they called me the Bogalusa Flash.”
“That’s where you’re from?”
He seemed not to hear her. He took out his wallet. “Sorry about what happened. It’s part of the reason I gave up stock car driving. I’ve got thirty dollars here. I’ll have the rest tomorrow.”
“That’s very nice of you.” She took the money from his hand, her fingers touching his palm.
The next morning she went about her chores, feeding animals, serving food under the tent where the roustabouts and the operators of the rides ate. In two days they would be loading the animals onto a train and the carnival rides on trucks and heading for Grand Junction. Randy and his two friends were at one of the tables. He winked at her. “Payday today,” he said. “I ain’t forgot.”
She shared a small round-cornered aluminum trailer with an Indian woman named Greta who sold jewelry and T-shirts and smoked two packs of cigarettes a day and drank half a bottle of cough syrup every night before going to sleep. That evening Bailey served the tables under the tent, then sat down and ate by herself and watched the sun set on the cliffs and the green river and the cottonwoods, the air filled with the music from the carousel and the shouts of teenagers on the rides, the evening sky turquoise and printed with the lights of the Ferris wheel and the Kamikaze.
She saw no sign of Randy and his friends. Not until late the next night, when the lights were clicking off on the rides and the game booths, and the roustabouts were starting to take down the Kamikaze. Randy tapped on her trailer door and removed his hat when she opened it. He handed her a fifty-dollar bill. “I didn’t get my check cashed till today. Let’s get a taco before they give it to the hogs. I ain’t kidding. A pig farmer buys all this slop they been feeding people at five dollars a plate.”
“If it’s slop, why do you eat it?” she said.
“It’s finger-licking-good slop.”
She went with him to the taco stand, and he got two plates free from the concession operator, and they sat on a wood bench and ate the tacos.
“Ever been to Grand Junction?” he said.
“No,” she replied.
“I know the hot spots. Dancing and all.” He grinned with innocent self-satisfaction. “Eat up. I got to check on them two boys I live with. Then we’ll take a walk up in them cliffs, catch the last of the sunset.”
They went to his trailer, a big one that had curtains on the windows and an air cooler on top. His friends were sitting in folding chairs outside, enjoying the breeze.
“I got to get something,” Randy said.
“What?” she said.
“An ice-cold root beer.” He stepped inside, then motioned her in as though wanting to share a secret. He closed the door behind her. “I got some chocolate cake in here that’ll break your heart, if them two out there ain’t ate it all.”
“We’d better be going if we’re going to see the sun set,” she said.
He took the cake out of the refrigerator. The shelves were almost empty except for a bottle of bulk wine. The cake was small and had not been cut. He sliced it in half and pared off a thick chunk and put it on a paper plate with a plastic fork and handed the plate to her. “Give it a try. They got twelve-step programs for people that take just one bite. I got to wash my hands.” He held them up as though that proved what he planned to do.
She put a small piece on the fork and eased it onto her tongue. It was good. Minutes later, she heard the toilet flush and the faucet squeaking. He came out of the bathroom wiping his hands on a paper towel. “I’m ready for a chunk of that my own self. But first—” He opened the refrigerator again and lifted out the bottle of bulk wine. “I have one glass a night. Just one. To prove I control it, that it don’t control me.”
“You had a problem with it?” she said.
“Not no more. I’m my own man, not like them sobriety people always whining about it, know what I mean?”
“Not quite,” she said.
He looked at her empty plate. “You munched it down. Want some more?”
“No, thank you. Could I use your bathroom?”
“You betcha. I just douched it with a little air freshener.”
“Pardon?”
“Don’t pay me no mind.”
She stepped inside the narrow confines of the bathroom. After she relieved herself, she tried to rise from the toilet seat and seemed to melt inside. She felt as though the tendons in the backs of her knees had been severed. Her hands and arms and vocal cords were useless. Spittle ran in a string off the corner of her lip.
Randy opened the door. “You all right, little lady? Here, get up. That’s it. Walk with me. That’s right, baby. Everything is gonna be all right. Lie down on my bed and let me get your shoes off. Relax, the Bogalusa Flash is on the job.”
Through a haze, she saw his two friends appear behind him. He shoved them back out the door. “Wait your turn,” he said.
She woke at dawn, rolled up in a ball by her trailer, shivering in the dew. She pulled herself up on her knees. The strap of her hand-tooled leather purse was tangled around her neck. Her clothes and skin and hair stank of the wine she remembered someone forcing over her teeth and down her throat. She stumbled into the trailer and got sick in the bathroom.
“What happened to you?” said Greta, the woman she lived with.
Bailey sat in a chair and wiped her face with a washcloth, then opened her purse and took out her wallet. The thirty loose bills Randy had given her earlier and the fifty-dollar bill he had given her later were gone. She pulled aside the curtain on the back window and gazed at the empty spot where Randy’s trailer and diesel truck had been parked. “I think I need to go to a hospital.”
“Hospital?” Greta said. “ ’Cause you got drunk?”
A dog with mange was defecating in the bare spot. After it scratched dirt over its feces, it limped away, one of its back legs obviously injured.
“That’s what they’ll say, won’t they? That I got drunk.”
“We’re carnival people, girl. It ain’t an easy life.”
Her head lay sideways on the pillow, her eyes looking into mine.
“What’s the rest?” I asked.
“The show went to Grand Junction that same day,” she said. “Randy and his friends weren’t there.”
“You didn’t call the cops?”
“Seventeen, drenched in wine, smelling of vomit? That would have given Bubba and Joe Bob a good laugh.”
“What happened down the track?”
“It was August, the end of the season. We were up by the Indian res in western Montana, at the foot of the Mission Mountains. I remember ice in a waterfall high up on the mountain. The ice looked like teeth.”
“Those guys showed up?”
“They were already there. Greta parked us about a hundred yards from them. I had almost made my peace with what they did.”
“Greta didn’t give you any advice?”
“She was a Lakota. She said, ‘The way of the world ain’t the way of Wakan Tanka.’ That meant you were on your own.”
“What happened to those guys, Bailey?”