After an hour, with lazy and lingering good-byes, when she came up, Dynamite turned to Barb. “I told your boy he could work with me and Morgan, if he wanted.” And Eric realized Dynamite had saved him from the necessity of lying. “I wrote it down down on a paper there.”
“Why, Mr. Haskell…that’s really…that’s really so nice of you!”
Eric was surprised. But it took some pressure off him.
Dynamite moved to leave the booth. “Course I don’t know if you really want him workin’ on the garbage run — ”
“Barb, that would be great!” Eric started to stand too. “I really wanna do somethin’…you know, physical!”
“Well — ” Haskell stood beside the table, taller than Barbara, Eric, and Shit — “slingin’ garbage sacks is about a physical as you can get — next to diggin’ ditches.”
Looking a little confused, Barb reached over the table for the mostly empty cups. “If that’s what you want to do — ”
“He just gotta show up at the boat dock on Wednesday. That okay for you? It’ll give you a couple of days to settle in — learn where everything is.”
“I don’t think the Harbor’s big enough where he got to do too much learnin’—” Shit scratched his ear — “’less’n he go over to Runcible or Hemmings.”
“I wrote it all out for him,” Dynamite repeated. He and Shit both gave Eric a grin. “All he got to do is show up.” He started out the diner.
Shit said, “So long. See you Wednesday,” and followed Dynamite.
A broad black fellow picked up a leather cowboy hat from the table — the man who’d ordered the heated bear claw — and started out. Some others left too; some new folks came in.
While Barbara was hanging her smock on the wall hook at the side, from the counter edge Clem offered a sudden cascade of apologies: “I’m sorry, honey. You and your fella — back before — looked like you was about to have a disagreement. And that was a big man in here. Black or white, I don’t like to get involved in them things in any way. I ain’t like Dynamite. He ain’t scared of black people — probably ’cause he lives with all of ’em, over in the Dump. He’ll jump into anything — and thinks he’s doin’ good. Sometimes he even does it. But I’ve always kept my own council and let things run on without my interference. For me, that’s the best way. I hope you understand.”
“Oh, that’s all right, Clem.” Barbara looked over her shoulder — she’d changed into a short-sleeved white blouse, with lace at the arms and the collar, which made her look a lot more like Eric remembered her — then turned from the hooks. “It all worked out.” She sighed. “I guess. And Eric’s…here.”
[6] TEN MINUTES AFTER that —
In her seven-year-old Honda, Barbara drove back through the woods with Eric. “Looks like you made some friends. That Morgan — Clem thinks he’s slow…retarded. ’Cause he’s illiterate. She says he can’t even read his name.”
“Oh…” Eric protested, as pine branches swept the window. “He’s all right. He’s…different. That’s all. He’s nice — they both are. Hey, tomorrow, when you go down to work, you wanna let me drive and you can navigate? I mean, I gotta learn where we are sometime.”
Barbara swung the car onto another turn off. “It is confusing the first couple of times, isn’t it? That’s why I didn’t want Mike to do it alone.”
“Yeah, he got lost comin’ in…”
After a breath she said, “Maybe you’ll meet my friend Ron.”
Eric recognized that tone, too: so there was a boyfriend.
And chances were he was black. (Eric recalled Clem’s surprise at Mike. Probably it was because both Mike and Ron — he was pretty sure — were colored.) Clearly Barbara had put off mentioning him until Mike was gone.
Ron would have upset Mike: Eric remembered the stonily grumpy evening with that black guy Barb had been seeing (whose name at this point Eric couldn’t even remember) who had dropped by minutes after Mike had delivered Eric to Barbara’s Florida trailer two summers before.
Eric took a breath — Barbara glanced at him — and thought: There’s got to be another way to live…
Evening settled among the trees. Scrunching down, Eric squinted up through the window to see late sun flicking between leaves, and thought of sunlight in the froth of that wave…
Barbara asked, suddenly: “You have my cell phone number, honey?”
“Mike’s got it,” Eric said. “I don’t.”
“Well, let me give it to you.”
“I don’t have a cell phone.”
“Oh…!” she said, glancing at him, surprised. “Well, you probably should get one. There’s a couple of stores in Runcible — ” from beside a meadow they again entered some woods — “and certainly in Hemmings, at the mall.”
He noticed she hadn’t offered to get it for him.
In the car, Eric pondered something he knew he was going to say, though at the realization his ears began to ring and his knuckles cramped in anticipation. Finally he decided to take three breaths and…do it.
He drew them in, trying to relax. Then he lifted his butt from the seat and went digging in his pocket, filled with his KY, his wallet — and the folded paper.
Pulling the paper out, he sat back, breathing heavier than he should be.
Barbara glanced over. “You okay?”
“Yeah.” It sounded normal. Maybe he could make the rest of it sound that way, too. Maybe after another three — no, six breaths.
At the end of the fifth, Eric unfolded it. And the sixth: “Barb?”
“What?” She looked through passing trees.
“You don’t mind me working with Dynamite and Shit on the garbage run while I’m down here? I thought that would be good, if I had some kinda job — ”
Barbara laughed. “That would be very good,” she said. Then she added, “But, honey, you really shouldn’t call him that. His name is Morgan. I know practically everybody down here does — but he can’t really like it very much. Would you?”
“I don’t think it would bother me — I mean, if they weren’t making fun of me when they did it.”
Barbara drove a little longer. Then she said, “You know you really have grown up…” She glanced at him again. “They get started pretty early in the morning, don’t they?”
“Yeah,” Eric said. “Well, I get up early, too.”
[7] “WHAT WERE YOU thinkin’ about for dinner?” Eric pulled open the refrigerator’s pink door.
“You like franks and beans,” Barb said. “Or you used to. I’ve got both here.”
“I still do,” Eric said. “What were you gonna do with this chicken?”
In its Styrofoam tray, wrapped in plastic, it looked like a pale, chicken-colored hill. Between rubber-covered wires — along a few inches on two of the tines the white covering had torn away — down though the plastic roof of the vegetable drawer, Eric saw blurred tomatoes, the pale rectangle of a celery bunch, tan onions within red strings. (In Texas, Mike’s relatives had smiled over Barbara’s keeping onions in the refrigerator.) Up in the freezer, he already knew, cans of frozen juice and lemonade stood with collars of ice.
Behind him, Barbara said, “I thought we could have that — the chicken, I mean — tomorrow.” (Outside he heard a car — one, he realized, he hadn’t been in.) “I get off at four-thirty, and I could put it in the oven by five or five-twenty.” (The car stopped.) “We could eat around seven — it would be nice if we could do it a little earlier, but that’ll be all right…won’t it? And could you close the door, honey? I don’t want to let all the cold out,” she said, as, in its base, the old pump began to hum.