Eric sat in the chair, looking at both men either side the table. “What…are you guys sayin’ to each other?”
“I’m sayin’,” Jay said, softly and pointedly, “I don’t think it’s a good idea for him to pull down his jeans, bend over the table, and let you fuck ’im right here with your mama standing at the — Hello, Mrs. Jeffers!” Jay sat up, smiling. “Yeah, we’ll take that coffee, soon as it’s ready.” He turned back to Eric. “You gonna have some?”
Eric twisted around in his seat, to see Barb coming across the café, two cardboard containers in one hand, a cup — for Eric — in the other.
Mex sat back, hit the side of his hand under his nose twice, dropped his hands, made a double rub up his bald belly, then pointed with both hands.
“Mex is saying how that smells real good, Mrs. Jeffers,” Jay announced, tall enough to look over the booth back with one arm across it.
“You’re teaching Eric some of Mex’s sign language?” Barbara asked. “Well, at least he’ll learn something while he’s here.” She set the milky container before Mex, the black one before Jay, then put the third coffee — a regular white crock — on Eric’s table. “I’m going in the back and scrape the griddle off — Coby leaves it in such a mess — then he complains all morning when he comes in. Uggh!” She turned back behind the counter.
“Thank you, ma’am,” Jay called.
Mex signaled silently.
And Eric called, “Thanks, Barb.”
Jay turned back to face the table.
“He can…hear,” Eric said, “can’t he? Mex, I mean.”
“Yeah,” Jay said. “Mex can hear just about as good you and me — if not better.”
“Then why can’t he talk?” Eric looked back and forth between Mex and Jay.
“’Cause some mean motherfuckers tried to cut his damned tongue out when he was a kid, and carved up his larynx with a knife while they was at it.” Again, Jay’s voice dropped. “It’s a wonder he can still suck a fuckin’ dick. Thank God he got across the border — and found this place.”
Eric looked at Mex, who sipped his coffee, looking back with hard, dark eyes, then pointed up to the wall clock.
“Hey,” Jay said. “We gotta get out of here and make another run. Or somebody might start complainin’.” Jay hiked his elbow back and dug into a pocket to pull out a stuffed wallet that looked more like rag than leather. “I keep waitin’ for this place to start chargin’ sixty cents for a cup of coffee like all the places in Runcible. It ain’t subsidized like the Dump or nothin’. Last place for a fifty-cent java. Throw a quarter on that, Mex, for Mrs. Jeffers.”
So Mex went digging in his own jeans and tossed down a silver coin showing a horned bull’s skull above the mountains — Big Sky Country. That was Montana. Earlier in the year, they’d seemed the only quarters you could find in Atlanta.
Jay slid from the booth. “We gotta go — ”
“Can you show me the Gilead Boat Dock?” Eric asked. “That’s where I gotta meet Dynamite on Wednesday.”
Jay looked at him as if he thought perhaps he was kidding about not knowing where it was. “Come on. It’s just down the street.”
Mex got up.
So did Eric. “Barb…?” he called. His mother had finally gone into the kitchen. “I’ll be right back.”
Barb didn’t answer.
He went outside with Mex and Jay.
They walked down pavement, grass, dirt.
“See — ” Jay pointed across a lawn, where a cannon sat off center before a gray building with white trim — “that’s the Post Office.” He turned around. A wooden deck extended over the water. A wooden rail ran across it. To the left a boathouse was painted dark green.
“And this here’s the Gilead Dock.”
Beside it was a lamp post with, near its top, a gray metal shade hanging from a wooden arm. Beside the boards, a roughly painted barge-like boat — white — moved up and down on the water, roped to metal cleats fixed to the dock. “And that’s the scow.”
Mex took a peg out of the gate and lifted it. A series of rhomboidal forms changed their angles as it went up.
“Don’t look like nobody’s here. You still gotta make the trip if you don’t have no passengers?”
Jay chuckled. “The Chamber of Commerce pays us to go back and forth — so if somebody does wanna get from here to there, there to here, there’s a way to do it.”
“Oh,” Eric said. Three gray gulls — one, then two more — soared in, to land on the lamp spar. The sky was gray-blue. Dark green water was rolled and ribbed with waves.
“What are those docks over there?”
“That’s what they call the marina,” Jay explained. The several levels of wooden web wove over the water.
Eric could only see three boats.
“Captain Miller still keeps his fishin’ craft tied up there. The other two are wrecks. I don’t even know who belongs to that one. Hey.” Jay crooked his forefinger and looked at it. “You seen your snot buddy again?”
“Huh? Shit? Oh…well, yeah. At the Lighthouse.”
“I thought you two might get along, back when you was first suckin’ on my finger before. Shit’s been eatin that stuff all his life — first thing I thought of, soon as you started nursin’ on mine. I guess nobody in the Dump ever told him to stop.”
“When we was tongue fuckin’—before, back at the truck stop, me and…Shit. I…did it, with his finger, when he went into his nose like…well, what I did — with yours.” Eric was embarrassed. “It just happened. I wasn’t even thinking.”
“Probably better you wasn’t,” Jay said. “It’s okay during the winter. But sometimes Shit forgets and does it around the summer people — at least he used to.”
“Do you do it…?”
“Nope.” Jay said it flatly enough that Eric was startled. But then he chuckled. “It don’t bother me, though. Fact is, I think it’s kinda cute. That’s always how I been with pretty much everything nasty.” Suddenly he reached out and hooked his elbow around Mex’s neck, and dragged him back against him, the way he’d hugged Eric in the hall outside the john the day before. “Like this piss-drinkin’, shit-eatin’, toe-suckin’ motherfucker.” Mex caught his balance against Jay, and grinned. “We love all that stuff, don’t we, Mex?” Still gripping Mex in a headlock, Jay looked up at the clouds, the gulls. “So at least you got four people you don’t got to worry about offendin’.”
“Four — ?”
“Mex, me, Dynamite, and Shit…” Jay chuckled — and released his partner, who pushed himself upright again, still looking pleased. “Shit got some devilment in him. He likes to have his fun. But he’s a good kid.”
Eric swallowed. “I…like him.”
“Good,” Jay said. “’Cause I got a feelin’ he gonna be after you a lot. Dynamite seen how you and Shit was gettin’ along; that’s probably why he offered you the job. He looks out for that kid.”
“But how did they know I was going to be staying in Diamond Harbor?”
“Same way I did. We all kinda figured yesterday you was probably Mrs. Jeffers’ boy. I told you, Mex and me have a cup or two with her practically every blessed mornin’. She been talkin’ ’bout how you was comin’ for three weeks.” He winked. “So then when you said you was…Eric — ?”
“Yeah, I’d begun to figure you…knew me.”
“Well.” Jay laughed out full. “She ain’t been talkin’ about nothin’ else. Hey — what’s wrong? Don’t worry. Nobody ain’t gonna say nothin’. And Mex here can’t. Why in the world would we wanna do that? That’d be pretty stupid, don’t you think?”