“Oh,” Barbara said, with a slightly raised head and knowing look. “Sure. Of course. But my shift here isn’t over for another hour-and-a-half. I was hoping you could wait around till then. Oh, I suppose, you could unload Eric’s stuff. I can take it up to the house when I get off — ”
Eric drew in a breath. This was the first he’d heard of the later appointment. He was sure Mike had just invented it.
Mike flexed his shoulders in a kind of over-relaxed way he sometimes got. “Can’t you tell me where it is? I don’t mind running it up before I go — ”
Eric felt his mother tensing again and dropped his arm from her waist. From the way he had stopped his sentence, probably Mike felt it too.
“Well, it’s a little complicated. My place is back in the woods and the road doesn’t go there straight — ”
“Mrs. Jeffers?” From his booth, lanky Dynamite looked over. (Yes, they were the guys he’d sucked and tongue-fucked in Turpens. Till now Eric had been assuming — hoping — that a direct look would reveal them as guys who looked — and dressed — like the ones back in the truck stop john. But Dynamite had called his mother “Mrs. Jeffers…”!) Dynamite said: “Me an’ Morgan’s goin’ that way now — we know where you live. We come there every mornin’ for your garbage.” (They were Barbara’s garbage men…!) “It’s on the way to the Dump.” Now Dynamite nodded toward Mike. “Your feller there can follow me on up. We’ll help ’im unload. Then he can drive down over the bridge and get on the highway — you know: at Exit Forty-Six. We’ll bring the boy back here — this is our day off. We ain’t got nothin’ else to do.”
Shit grinned at Eric — and from somewhere Eric found the presence to smile back. And was hit with a memory: only half the teeth were left in either Shit’s or in Dynamite’s mouth — something Eric’s tongue knew, as it knew their foreskins’ elasticity, the force of their erupting semen. (How did you look that good with half your teeth gone?) It was purely oral data, from purely oral pleasure…
“Oh, Dynamite — uh, Mr. Haskell.” (And Barb knew his name…!) Barbara blinked. “Mike, can’t you stay a couple of hours? Or for a while, anyway — Mr. Haskell, I can’t ask you and your nephew to go out of your way like…”
For two-and-a-half years — three, actually — Eric’s world had held lots of public sex. Often he’d spent hours a day at it. Whether at his grandmother’s in Hugantown, at Mike’s in Atlanta, or at Barb’s in Florida, coming home and behaving as if those hours did not exist was adamantine habit. But under the ceiling fans in the Lighthouse Coffee, Egg & Bacon on the Georgia shore, Eric intuited that his world had become much smaller.
Barb was saying: “Morgan, Mr. Haskell — that’s very nice of you. Really. But, Mike, I was hoping we could make a day of it — ”
“Come on, Barb.” Mike sounded petulant and irritable, as he hadn’t at any time on the drive down. “You didn’t say nothin’ to me before about stayin’. I bought Eric down — I got a car full of his stuff. You wanna let me leave it off here?” Mike looked around, the way (Eric thought) someone in a room with a known murderer might glance around for exits. “Or up at your place?” he repeated. “You got your car outside. If you want, I can repack his stuff now so you — ”
From his booth Dynamite laughed. “Unless he brought just a knapsack or a duffel bag, I can tell you, it ain’t gonna fit.” With a foreknuckle, he pushed aside the spotted curtain at the booth’s back beside the wall’s CD player, leaned over, and glanced out. “All what you got piled up in the back seat of yours ain’t gonna get in that thing Mrs. Jeffers got. And if you got more of his stuff in the trunk — Hey, we got the pickup. We’ll put the tarp down. It won’t get messed. I mean, Mrs. Jeffers has a pretty small car — ”
Barbara was actually swaying, and rubbing her hands together, which nervousness, Eric knew, would make Mike that much more anxious to leave.
“Yeah, I know.” Mike looked around. “Her Honda. That’s why I said I’d take it out there.” He looked up, blinking.
The way they could grate on each other was as familiar to Eric as Barbara’s laughter, as Mike’s repeated tags and tales. Because it was outside anyone’s control, though, Eric felt upsurging frustration.
“Well, yes,” Barbara said, “but I — ”
Then, with surprise, Eric realized: frustration, yes. But he was not terrified by it, as, two, three, five years ago, he would have been. Only annoyed…
Standing up from the booth, Dynamite frowned at Morgan —
— who flapped both broad hands on the table edge to push himself up and step out, looking as happy as Barbara herself when she’d first seen Eric.
“All you got to do is follow behind us.” Taller Dynamite looked back at Barbara, reached up and rubbed a thumb knuckle under his nose, while Eric thought: These guys are all hands and feet! “We promise not to lose him, ma’am. Come on. When we get there, Mrs. Jeffers, you want us to take it inside for you?”
“Well, if you put his things out on the porch…” Again Barbara looked around, as though hoping someone else would offer assistance. “That’s going to be Eric’s…room.” (Clem had started putting juice glasses on a shelf and didn’t seem about to suggest an hour off.) “I mean, the door’s open…There’s a bed out there. I put sheets on it already. But, really, I can’t ask you to do — ”
“You don’t gotta ask, Mrs. Jeffers.” Dynamite started across the floor among the tables. “We’d do it anyway. Come on. Once we get his stuff in there, your feller here can be on his way and we’ll bring your boy back and have that sociable cup of coffee. At home I let Morgan do the coffee making — ’cause he do it better than I ever learned. But the Lighthouse brew is pretty decent, I guess — enough to make these fellas come back and risk their kidneys on another cup.” Three or four customers laughed. Dynamite chuckled at his own joke, nodded toward another coffee drinker — a black man, Eric noticed — then reached the door.
A little hysterically Eric thought, I was just suckin’ off these guys in a fuckin’ men’s room, less than an hour ago…! Then, at once, the situation didn’t seem dangerous or hysterical or menacing at all, but, well…funny! Looking after them, Eric laughed. “Come on, Dad,” he said, only a little too loud. “They’ll show us, Barb.”
Shit walked past, giving Eric an even bigger grin. Then the two were out the screen, that chattered and banged closed, unslowed by the piston at the top, supposed to keep it from slamming. “We’ll be back,” Eric called.
Mike said, “So long, Barb. You and Eric’ll have a good time, now. I know you’ll have a good time together down here,” and stepped toward the door. “I’m really sorry I can’t hang around some.” And Eric realized his father wouldn’t see his mother again this visit — and had planned it that way.
Eric followed his dad to see Shit and Dynamite climbing into their pickup, cab forward in the corner. “Don’t worry, now,” Dynamite called, without looking. “You just follow us. We’ll get you there.”
As Eric stepped from the door, out on the water, beyond the postage-stamp lot, a wave broke to sputtering foam, aglitter across green sea beside them, advancing shoreward with the inexorability of distilled time itself. As Eric reached the bottom step, it vanished under the shoal, and, as he put runner to gravel, he heard it roooosh the shingle. (Thirty yards out, another wave gathered.) He thought: