One night, a Friday, so there were a lot of drinkers in town that night, he was sitting in his usual booth, where he’d been sitting since three that afternoon, and he had nothing to think about, and no one to say it to, so he started listening to the conversation coming from behind him, where three young guys were sitting over beers and talking about state troopers and cars. A three-piece band had been playing for a while, country and western songs that had been popular about ten years ago. They had quit playing a few minutes earlier, had unplugged their instruments, two amplified guitars and a set of drums, and had headed for the bar. The Hawthorne House was laid out in a common way, a small bandstand in front that could accommodate no more than three musicians and their equipment, a dance floor the size of a kitchen, then along the walls a dozen plastic-covered booths and four long Formica-topped tables between them. At the back there was a bar with ten or twelve stools alongside it. On a Friday or Saturday night all the booths were usually taken and half the Formica tables were filled with drinkers, local men and women as well, and when the band played a danceable tune, eight or ten couples walked onto the dance floor and shoved each other around in approximate time to the music. But when the band took its break, there was a few minutes’ silence, or relative silence, between the band’s ceasing to play and someone’s digging into his pocket for change for the juke box, and in that silence you could overhear conversations in the booths adjacent to yours. The rest of the time you couldn’t hear anything said by anyone other than yourself unless it came from six inches away and was practically shouted into your face.
The music had stopped and the kid behind Claudel had gone on shouting into the faces of the two men sitting with him, men a few years older than he, all three of them wearing mechanic’s uniforms from Steele’s, the local Ford dealer, with their first names on the left breast pocket and Henry Ford’s last on the other. The one talking, or rather shouting, was Deke, and the two he was shouting to were Art and Ron. “Nobody screws over me!” Deke told them. He had long, slack, blond hair that hung in greasy strands thick as twine over his collar, and his forearms wore tattoos, one a heart with a knife plunged into it and the words Born to Love emblazoned above the heart, the other a Confederate flag with the inscription The South Will Rise Again! “Nobody, but nobody, screws over me! I mean it, man, I don’t give a shit how big he is, no goddamn state trooper puts me down!”
The kid’s friends nodded, patiently waiting for the story of how nobody screwed over Deke once, because that’s the way most stories get told when they’re told in person. First the teller sets out his principles, and then he shows you how those principles get enacted in the world, usually by describing some incident or event in his recent past, so that what you end up with is the storyteller’s philosophy of life. If you’d asked him straight out in the beginning to tell you what his philosophy of life was, he probably wouldn’t have been able to tell you, any more than Deke could have. Sure he’d have one, at least he’d believe he had one, but unless he happened to be a professional philosopher, the chances are good he wouldn’t be able to tell you what it was in so many words. And if he was a professional philosopher, the chances are just as good you wouldn’t be able to understand what the hell he was talking about anyhow.
The same thing was happening with Deke. That’s how Claudel looked at it. Deke started telling how the other night he was coming back to town from Concord in his LTD, hitting ninety-two as he left the traffic circle in Epsom, ninety-seven by the time he passed Webster’s Mill Road where Frankie Marcoux was sitting in the dark, just waiting. Deke was a little bit drunk, but not much. He’d been drinking beer at the El Rancho in Concord since seven, and he was feeling ugly because he’d had a little run-in outside the El Rancho when he was leaving with a girl he’d picked up there. The girl turned out to be married and her husband turned out to be waiting for her in the parking lot, and the husband had given the girl hell and had taken her home with him. “Hey, I don’t want some other guy’s wife. Not like that, I mean. To me she was just some broad I picked up at the bar. To him she was his wife and the mother of his kids. So I just says to the guy, ‘Sure,’ I says, ‘take her home where she belongs. Only next time,’ I tell the guy, ‘next time make sure she stays there,’ I says, ‘or maybe the next guy she walks out with won’t be so agreeable.’ You know what I mean?” he asked his friends.
They knew what he meant. Everybody took a pull on his beer, and Deke went on. “So, hey, here I am coming barrel-ass down Twenty-eight past Webster’s Mill Road, and something tells me to check my mirror as I pass the intersection, and sure enough, I see Marcoux pulling out onto Twenty-eight with his blue light flashing and his siren wailing like an alley cat. Anyhow, nobody screws over me. So I jump on the LTD and I’m hitting a hundred and five when I pass Huckins Chevrolet, and just as I’m starting to put some real space between me and Marcoux, I see a goddamn semi, an eighteen-wheeler, for Christ’s sake, slowing to turn off for town, and he’s taking the whole damned road to make his cut, so I start hitting the brakes, right?”
“Right,” Art said.
“Right,” said Ron.
“Right. And pretty soon my ass end is letting go and I start to think maybe I’m going to roll, and I think, Jesus, I start to roll at a hundred and five and they’ll be scraping me off Route Twenty-eight for a week. So I flip the wheel the same direction my ass is heading, bring her under control, at least I stop the slide, except that now I’m heading off the road into that big cornfield about a half-mile beyond Huckins, you know the one?”
Art, Ron, and Claudel, too, knew the one. It was a tenacre, flat cornfield leased by a local dairy farmer, and at this time of year the corn was chest high. There was a shallow ditch between the field and the road, and then the ground was fairly flat and, except for the cornstalks, smooth.
“So I barrel-ass into that goddamn field and I don’t touch the brake or the gas, just let the goddamn car plow through the corn for a couple hundred yards, until it comes to a stop. I had enough sense to flick off my lights just as I left the road, so I was hoping Marcoux had been distracted by that semi jackknifing off the road, like I had been, and that he’d just keep on running down the road after me, while I cool it out in the middle of the cornfield. That’s my plan, anyhow.”
They all waited for him to tell them what had happened, Art, Ron, and Claudel. Show us how nobody screws over you, Deke.
“So I’m sitting there, waiting for Marcoux to flash by with his siren screaming and his blue light flashing, only all of a sudden I hear something that isn’t a siren, it’s a car engine, idling, and it’s right behind me. And there isn’t any blue light flashing, it’s a set of headlights bouncing light off the corn that surrounds me, and I say, ‘Shit, it’s Marcoux.’ And it is, it is that damned strutting sonofabitching horse’s ass, and he’s got me, because the only direction I can move is backward, and he’s sitting there blocking me with his cruiser. He gets out, comes strolling up to my window, says, ‘Hello, Deke,’ real cool, you know, like he’s seen it on TV. ‘Out for your evening spin?’ he asks me. Real funny. ‘Ever think of trying the road, Deke? It’s kinda hard to get much speed up, even in this LTD, when you’re driving through a cornfield.’ ‘Ha ha ha,’ I says to him. I mean, hey, nobody screws over me. You know what I mean?”