“I ain't getting up again,” he said, then got up immediately for another beer from the candy case. He brought me back a pack of pigskins and threw them in my lap. The car pulled away.
“Damn niggers,” he said. “Think you ought to wait on em hand and foot. But you look at all this shit. Reason the government ain't got no money right now is cause they shooting it all up in space. What damn good's it do to beat the Russians to the moon? I ain't going to the moon. Ain't nobody in his right mind would even want to go to the moon. I don't
even think they been up there. I think they just took a buncha pictures over in Africa or somewhere.”
I was standing outside the Kream Kup in Oxford the Sunday afternoon Neil Armstrong walked on the moon. We all looked up there. That was before I'd ever had any nooky. But by that afternoon in Mr. Aaron's store, I'd had plenty.
I must have fallen asleep. There was a long period when nothing was said. I tried to raise up and I couldn't raise up. I heard a rhythmic noise. The front door was shut and the lights were off. In my socked feet I could sneak. From behind the curtain behind the counter came the rhythmic noises. They stopped. I peeked.
Mr. Aaron was pulling a big one out of a lady who lived down the road. It looked like he might have hurt her with it the way she was taking on. I was back on the bench conked seemingly out when Miss Gladys Watson came through adjusting her white Dixie Delite uniform. Soon as the door slammed shut I raised up and said: “Who's that?”
Let me tell you something else Mr. Aaron did one time. He had this old dog named Bobo, whose whole body was crooked from being run over so many times. Mr. Aaron fed him potato chips. He'd go out once a day and dump a bag of pigskins or something on the ground and then go back in. As children we'd all sit around in front of the store, on upended Coke cases and such, and wait for a dogfight to occur. This was in the days before pit bulls, when a dog could get his ass whipped and just go on home. One day Mr. Mavis Edwards, an old man who lived across the road, had been sitting
out there with us. But then he went off to the post office to get his mail and left a whole pound of baloney on top of a Coke case. Bobo grabbed it. And was chomping on it when Mr. Mavis came back. Mr. Mavis had been in the war, too, the First World War. He carried a cane and wore a Fu Manchu of snuff spittle. Of course he was incensed. Went to whipping Bobo about the ears and head with his cane. But you could see that the dog was ready to kill for that comparatively juicy snack. I mean, after a steady diet of potato chips, he was eating the waxed paper along with the baloney. Mr. Aaron heard the commotion going on outside. Some other people were fixing flats. The bros who had pulled up beside the gas pumps were afraid Mr. Aaron would shoot them if they tried to pump their own. And we didn't know but what Mr. Aaron might out with his 9MM and burn Mr. Mavis down. Mr. Mavis had sprayed everybody with snuff juice during his exhortations. Mr. Aaron came back to the door and thrust another paper sack at him. “Here!” he said to Mr. Mavis. Then he reared back and kicked the hell out of the dog.
Mr. Mavis took the new baloney and said, “Why, hell, Aaron.” He never darkened the door again.
One time I was up at the store after doing my tour in the service. He always had a soft spot in his heart for the men who toted the guns. I was going to town and asked him if he wanted me to bring him anything back and he said yes, whiskey. I bought it and returned. Miss Gladys came in, ostensibly to buy some flour, and fumblefucked around on the shelves
for five minutes after she saw me sitting there. She left in a huff without making a purchase.
He came around there where I was and sat down beside me.
“Listen,” he said. “Don't be like me. Get old and you won't have nobody to take care of you.”
“Did you not ever want to get married?” I said.
“Nah, hell, wasn't that. They's all married off when I got back.”
I knew better. War had hurt him. He never got the bullets and the bombs out of his head. I know he shot men. He once saw a dogfight over the African desert, with all the action at five thousand feet. He said the American plane that went down left a solid black trail of smoke all the way to the ground, and the whole company sat down in the sand and cried. Then they went out that night and killed a bunch of people. He told me that.
He was drunk by the time he'd told it, and that time I left him asleep on the floor. I locked the door before I left. He wouldn't have let me help him across the road to his house.
The other thing I'm fixing to tell you has a lot to do with what I just told you.
This was years later. Uptown in a bar one night. It was raining so hard I had to make a mad dash from my car to the door, raining so hard you could hardly see how to drive with the wipers going full speed. But I got in there and took my coat off and was glad to be in out of the rain. I was between women, living alone for a while again, and I didn't know how or when I'd find another one. The beer I ordered came and I paid.
There was nothing much going on. A few guys shooting pool and a few older women sitting at tables talking. Then I saw Squirrel at about the same time he saw me. I could tell he was drunk. He got up and started making his way over to me. I sat there and waited for him.
He's a good man. He's worked hard all his life laying brick, but he's had his troubles with the bottle. He's somewhere in his fifties, maybe sixties, I don't know now.
He sat down beside me and we talked for a while. Or he did. With drunks you know you just mostly agree and nod your head a lot. You don't have to worry about carrying the conversation, they'll do it. Squirrel was pissed off. He was ready to go home and he didn't have any wheels, because he'd left his wheels at home and come to town with two of the old guys shooting pool. He was ready to go and they weren't. I didn't want to think about what he was working his way up to. I was in out of that rain, I wanted to stay in out of it for a while.
This boy I knew walked in and asked me what in the hell I was doing in there when they had nickel beer up at Abbey's Irish Rose from 7:30 to 9:30 after you paid a two-dollar cover charge upstairs. I told him I didn't know anything about it. Squirrel leaned over right fast and in close to me and said, “Can you take me home?”
There it is a lot of times. You go out somewhere, just planning on drinking a few beers, and you run into some drunk you've known all your life who doesn't have a way home. You either have to take him home, refuse to, or tell him a lie. Usually I tell a lie. I told Squirrel I wasn't planning on going
on home for a while, which was the truth. He said he understood and wouldn't think of imposing on me. I felt guilty, and I hated for him to make me feel guilty, but I hadn't brought him up there and poured any whiskey down him. And he lived way back up in the woods on a mud road the mailman has to use a Jeep on when it rains. In four-wheel drive. With Buckshot Mudders.
I finished my first beer and got another one, and Squirrel bummed a cigarette off me. I lit it for him, and he started telling me how he'd lost all his money. I wasn't listening that close, but it was something about them driving down to Batesville and unloading some two-by-fours and him asking the man he was working for to loan him a hundred dollars. The guy gave him five twenties, and when they got back to town, Squirrel paid for two fifths of whiskey. I know they were drinking when they went down there, he didn't have to tell me that. He said that left him about eighty dollars, but he said he didn't have it now and it was making him sick. And he wanted to go home.
“Sumbitches drug me off up here and got me drunk and now they don't want to go home,” was what he said.
I hated to hear of his troubles, but I didn't want to drive him all the way back to Old Dallas on those muddy roads in my Chevelle and more than likely slide off into a ditch. He said he wouldn't think of imposing on me. His head was starting to droop. And I was wishing I'd never gone in there. There was no way I could leave without him. He only lived six miles from me.
I always think I'm going to find something when I go out at
night, I don't know why. I always think that, and I never do. I always think I'll find a woman. But if you go out in sadness, that's all you're going to find. It was too quiet in there with him sitting next to me drooping his head, so I got up and put some change into the jukebox. I just had sat down and picked up my beer again when he leaned over and said, “Take me home, Leo. Please, please.”
There wasn't anything else I could do. I couldn't sit there and drink beer with gas in my tank and him saying please to me. All he wanted was to get home and get up the next morning in time to go to work. I knew the other guys would stay until last call, and I knew they had his money. I stared at them but they wouldn't even look at us. I picked up my coat and put it on and I led him to the door. I had to help him down the stairs so he wouldn't fall, and then I had to help him into the car. I had some beer on the back seat, and I gave him one after we got up on the bypass.
Squirrel always talked through his nose. I guess he had a birth defect, a partial palate or something like that, but it wasn't hard to understand him. I think it was easier to understand him when he was drunk. I guess he talked slower then. I know I do.
“How many times you ever seen me drunk, Leo?” he said.
“I don't know, Squirrel. Not many.”
“You ain't never seen me drunk, have you?”
“Not too many times,” I said. “I think I saw you drunk about six months ago, out there one night.”
“How bout opening this beer for me? I can't get this doddamn thing open.”
I opened the beer for him and then gave him another cigarette. It was still raining and I was dreading that drive up that muddy road like an asswhipping. I knew with my luck, I'd get about five miles up in the woods before I slid off into a ditch, then I'd have to walk all the way out and wake up somebody who had a tractor while Squirrel slept it off in the car. I wasn't just real damn happy thinking about it.
“I been ready to go home for the last three hours, and them sorry sumbitches wouldn't even take me home,” he said.
I told him it was hell to get off with some sorry sonofabitches who wouldn't even take you home.
“I don't mean to impo on you, Leo. You know that. Please, please.”
I didn't feel like talking. Even if I got him home without getting stuck, it would be too late to turn around and go back to town. And there wasn't even anything
in
town. There was no sense in going up there looking for it. The people who were in the bars were just as lost as I was.
“If you just get me to Aaron's. You know Aaron, don't you?”
Well, I knew Aaron. I didn't know what Mr. Aaron would think about me dumping Squirrel on him.
“Yeah, I know Aaron. I imagine he's in the bed asleep by now.”
“You just get me to Aaron's and I'll be all right. I wouldn't think of impoin on you, please, please.”
I told him not to sweat it, that I'd been off with drunks who didn't want to go home, that he was in good hands now. He talked some more about losing his eighty dollars. He said it
made him sick. A dollar was so hard to come by, he said. I clamped my lip shut and drove.
“I was on the front lines at Korea,” he said. I looked sideways at him.
“I didn't know that,” I said.
“Hell yes.”
I listened then, because moments like that are rare, when you get to hear about these things that have shattered men's lives. I knew my daddy never got the war out of his head. When he got to drinking that's what he'd talk about. Mama said when they first got married he'd wake himself up screaming from a nightmare of hand-to-hand combat, knives and bayonets and gun stocks. With sweat all over him like he'd just stepped from water. I listened to Squirrel.
“First night out, they was fifty of our boys got killed. Just cut em all to pieces with machine guns. Half of em my friends. I mean friends like you and me. They wadn't nothing nobody could do. I can't forget about it. I thought about it all my life. Please, please.”
There wasn't much I could do but listen.
“They was this one boy with me in a foxhole one night. He was my old buddy. Been knowing him ever since basic training, Fort Campbell, Kentucky. But then he got away from me and a machine gun cut loose up on top of a hill. He was screaming for me, Help me, Help me, all night long. Them goddamn bullets like to cut him half in two. Wasn't nothing I could do. You know that. I thought about it all my life. Please, please. Next morning he was dead.”
There wasn't anything I could say.
“I come back off the front lines for the first time in three
months. I walked in a tent there and saw this captain standing there. I had a fifth of whiskey in my hand, and he asked me what I wanted. I told him I wasn't looking for nothing but a smile and a kind word. Sumbitch just cussed me and told me to get the hell out. I laid down and cried all night long. I've cried many a night all night long, Leo. Just get me to Aaron's and I'll be all right.”
And Daddy had seen the same things, had marched all the way across Europe, freezing, getting shot at every day, seeing all those people he knew die. Fighting the Germans hand to hand. And waking up yelling, thinking he was back in it with them again. Bayonets and knives.
“Just get me to Aaron's and I'll be all right. Please. I don't want to impo on you. I ain't got no money to pay you, but I'll have some later. I can go home and in five minutes I can have a hunnerd dollars. A hunnerd dollars to me don't mean what it used to. You boys just don't know.”
“You don't want me to take you home?”
“Naw. Just take me to Aaron's. I'll get one of his cars and go home.”
“You don't think he'll get pissed off?”
“Naw. He won't get pissed off. Aaron don't care.”