It was a bar somewhere between Orange Grove and Pascagoula, one of those places where they charge you nothing to get in and then five dollars for a ten-ounce Schlitz. It was dark. Everybody had on sunglasses but me. My friend had gone off and I didn't know what had happened to him. I knew what I was, though, and I was trying to learn to live with it. I thought if I could just make it through the night, that everything would be sort of okay when the sun came up.
This place sold nude dancing. Just Ts, no As. I said, Well, bring on the dancing girls. I knew I was suffering from alcohol poisoning, and that it had settled in my brain. I could drink one beer and I'd start thinking differently, about everything. This little girl who had not even graduated from high school pranced out on the stage waving a scarf around her
head and stumbling in her high heels. Her poor little titties were about a 32A.
And then like sharks two women glided in on each side of me. The one on the left had dark hair in her armpits. Tremendous titties. I checked them out and drank half of my ten ounces, then eyed the right flank. Blonde, maybe pregnant. Already stroking the inside of my thigh.
Oooooooh. Ooo and 000 and 000. She scratched the head of it like a mosquito bite. She turned her head and yawned and came back beaming. They had nude paintings on the walls, sort of a celebration of sex, which I certainly had nothing against if I could just celebrate a little of it myself.
The little chickadee up on the stage was bent over in my face, revealing all her secrets, but I figured this kid already had two kids of her own at home and a babysitter waiting for her to show up. It made me feel slightly perverted.
“Why don't you buy me a drank?” the one on the left said. “I'd love to have a drank.”
I fumbled around for my money. She helped me peel off three ones and raised her hand. They hadn't even set it on the table when the other one leaned over and said she wanted one, too. So I bought her one. And told her to bring me another beer. I didn't care. I wanted to wake up broke and sober. I figured if I couldn't buy a drink, I couldn't get a drink. We jawed some old shit, it didn't matter what we said. We all knew the score. Their job was to rob me, my job was to pay for the robbery. All night long if possible.
I picked up the blonde's drink and tasted it when she wasn't looking. Grape Kool-Aid. Well, I thought, I don't have to put
up with this shit. She got up and took her drink with her and, I don't know, poured it out or something, then came back all friendly wanting another one.
I'd gotten surly and terse. I was feeling mean. I'd had about all their shit I wanted to take. I figured there were some big dark mean motherfuckers waiting back in the shadows to break my head and roll me when I went to the bathroom. The little beaverette up on the stage had gotten down on her hands, legs spread, pumping that thing up and down. And I just shook my head.
Blonde, she leaned over, sort of stroked my neck.
“You gonna buy me another drank?” she said.
“Buy your own damn drink.”
She looked offended. “Well, honey, if you don't buy me another one I'll have to get up and go.”
I told her not to let the door hit her in the ass. Of course she got all huffy and left. Then I turned on the other one.
“And you,” I said. “You can just get your ass up and go, too. Fucking grape Kool-Aid. You want me to tell you what you can do with your grape Kool-Aid?”
She didn't say anything. She just looked away, and immediately I felt like an asshole. Sometimes I feel like an asshole about ten times a day. But I didn't want to be hustled. There I was, all the way off down on the coast, didn't know how I was going to get back, my friend had gone, and I had less than I'd started out with. Shrimp money. People depending on me, already buying their crab boil and their cocktail sauce. So there was only so much leeway I had. Maybe I could haggle the guy at the boat down, maybe I couldn't. If I spent
their money and then couldn't haggle, I was up Shit Creek. But at that point I wouldn't have minded legging down.
In dark places you can't see much. But on the side of this girl's face sitting next to me I saw something shining down her cheek. And I thought, Well, you asshole, you messed up again.
“Shit,” I said. “I'm sorry.”
She looked around and tried to smile. “It's okay,” she said.
“I didn't mean to be rude to you,” I said.
“It's okay.”
But it wasn't okay. I knew it wasn't okay and she knew it wasn't okay. Here she hadn't done anything but ask for a three-dollar drink of Kool-Aid and I'd tried to run her off.
“Let me buy you a beer,” I told her.
“I can't drink a beer.”
“What? You don't like beer? You got some medical problem?”
“Oh no. I like beer fine. I'd love a beer.”
“Well, hell,” I said. “Then drink one.”
She got sort of close to me then. She leaned over to my ear, so I could look right down that Big Valley.
“They don't 'low it,” she said.
“Don't 'low what?”
She jerked her head. “You know.”
I looked in that direction. Then I saw the mean-ass momma watching us. Black chick, about thirty, medium fro, teeth probably filed to tiny points. Definitely not a vegetarian.
“Listen,” I said. “If I want to buy you a beer, can't I buy you a beer?”
“Well, I don't know,” she said. “They don't like for us to drink.”
She smelled sort of bad. I was crazy and I knew it. Maybe her husbandâif she had oneâshe probably didâwas a shrimper and she shrimped with him in the daytime. Maybe she'd been down in the hot hold all day long shoveling up shrimp with a shovel. I didn't care about any of that. She was a human being. She had the right to drink a beer. Even a drunk knows that.
“Just wait a minute,” I said. I got up from the table and staggered over to the momma. A hard chick. You could tell it from her eyes. No telling what she'd seen or done in her life. I wouldn't have wanted to fistfight her. She could have been pretty and might have been at one time. No more, though. All she was after was money. Money to get the hell away from that dive she'd found herself in.
“Listen,” I said. “I want to buy this girl over here a beer. Do you care?”
She turned a cold pair of eyes on me. Eyes that cut me to my soul. They went up and down me, and stopped on my face. How many had she seen like me? I'd never seen such contempt.
“We don't 'low it,” she said, nearly whispering. But then she leaned over. “But you can buy
me
a drink if you want to, sugar.”
She didn't look bad. She had some huge ones. All I had was shrimp money. I could see the sunshine coming down on my head the next morning while I was trying to find the
Elvira Mulla
or the
Vulla Elmirea
or the
Meara Vulmira
or the
WhatEverltWas.
There had just been whispered, hurried conversations over the phone, and I didn't even like the
people involved. What if the nets had holes in them or the shrimp weren't sleeping?
Well, this chick wasn't bad. She was hard. But I could see that she could be soft. Money softened her. She'd smelled money on me and right away she'd softened. Maybe she'd take me home. I didn't know. But I was so damn lonely, and horny, that I was willing to take a chance on almost anything. Plus, I was drunk.
For a minute there I sort of got the big picture. You back off from anything and get the big picture, you can figure out almost anything if you figure on it long enough. I looked at myself and I thought: Now listen, you got all this money belongs to all these people and you're supposed to take care of it. Now what the hell's gonna happen if you show up without the money or the shrimp either one? What if you just blow all the money, and don't buy the shrimp, and go back home to all those people who've already bought their crab boil and crackers and cocktail sauce? Well, you're gonna have some people pissed at you, that's what.
But, now, think about them. Think about Ed, that son of a bitch, think about him in the first place. Did that son of a bitch ask you if you wanted some shrimp last year when he went off to Pensacola and went deep-sea fishing and didn't catch shit? When he puked in a bar that Milos López once actually got thrown out of? Did that s.o.b. ask you if you wanted him to bring you some shrimp? Hell naw. Fuck
him.
And who's the other one? Ted. That fucking Ted. That bastard. You ought to whip his ass just on general principle. Son of a bitch. Did he ever invite you over to his private bass lake
when they were jerking those ten-pound lunkers out of there? Hell naw The son of a bitch even called the law on some kids.
Now I had to consider all that stuff. I couldn't deal very well with it. She was smiling in my face and I had all that money in my pocket and I wasn't too fond of these fuckers who'd sent me down there to the Gulf to get all their shrimp for them. And all I was trying to do originally was buy a beer for a girl who shook her ass naked in a dark bar where dark people like me stalked their lusts.
“She can't drink a beer,” this chick said.
“Why?” I said. “Listen, goddamnit, I'm getting pissed off at the way y'all treat these girls. What? Y'all own em?”
“Yeah, that's right,” she said. “We own em. They dumb enough to come in here and work, we own em. Buy em and sell em if we get ready to.”
She gave me a look so hard I said: “Wait a minute. You ain't that hard, are you? You ain't that bad, are you? Why don't you let her have a beer? What's it going to hurt?”
“It's against the rules.”
“What rules?” I said. “Who makes up the rules?” I leaned over close to her and said softly: “Have you ever questioned the rules?”
“You so hot to take somebody out, why don't you take me out?” she said.
What? And maybe get my throat cut? (An anecdote to testify to this madness: The night before, I got pissed off at my friend because he was drunk and I wasn't and I was ready to go and he wasn't, I begged him five or six times too but he wouldn't hear it, he was jumping hot with this beavette, so I
split. Right down the beach to our hotel room. I thought it was only a block and it was like four miles. I had to sit down and rest a few times, and I found out something. At night, that tide goes out. There's no water there. And you wouldn't believe the nasty shit that's lying down there. I mean, dead rotten fish, and Coke cups and stuff, and it doesn't look at all nice with that moonlight pouring down over that slimy sand. And I found out later that it had only been a week before when some guy got his throat cut down there, from ear to ear, on the beach, at night, late like that, probably in the same exact spot I was sitting in. Boy.) But boy I'd wanted me some of this for quite a while, just like every other white man. I almost did a double-flip hotswoon.
“Come on, baby,” she said. “Take a little ride wit me.”
I followed her out the door, the back door, where black guys were muttering in the dark and I couldn't tell if they were shucking oysters or not. She had it parked behind the Dumpster, where the lights didn't shine. When we walked up to that machine, it did. Brand new Henweigh, red, magnesiums on all four sides; she had the Alpine Stereo System. I was almost scared to get in the car with her. But I did.
“I got some cold cognac if you'd like some, baby,” she said, when she had the little jewel purring like a kitten at its mama's titty. She sort of ran her hands up her legs and pulled the dress back.
“Hold on,” she said, and I turned the cognac straight up. Brought it down immediately, wheezing and gasping and coughing, damn near choking to death. She rammed it out of the parking lot and hit second and squealed viciously on the
corners until she hit a straightaway and we must have been doing seventy by then and she downshifted and braked sharply and whipped it around a curve and out onto the street, and then two streets over she pulled in behind a bread truck, and four big black guys jumped out with knives and guns and robbed my terrified ass while she hung out the window on her elbow laughing herself silly, the pee running down her leg, maybe, I guess, saying, Hoo boy, you white boys something else.
Well, it scared the shit out of me, naturally. I felt weak all over for about twelve minutes. But then I got to thinking about it and said to myself, Well, it's gone now, wasn't anything you could do, you still got your hotel room, you can charge some beer on your MasterCard and haul ass in the morning before they check. That and plus I had five one hundred dollar bills folded into a minute thing in the heel of my right sock. I'd just tell my groovy employers that they'd stripped me naked, even looked up my ass. Real killers. So I started walking back up the beach. I'd sobered up a little, what with the robbery and all. I didn't know how I'd get back into North Mississippi and my beloved pine trees. They'd specifically stated that they wanted headless shrimp. Like Captain Mike McDonald and his crew were going to sit back and shuck the fuckers. But that was just the kind of rich ignorance I was dealing with. I wanted to go out on the boat with them. I wanted to pull the nets. I wanted to see what came up from the ocean depths, what unspeakable stuff spilled out when they hoisted it up onto the deck.
But the Cold Nugget beckoned. I could see it from the beach, from the dark water, from the sucking tide sucking further south with each suck. I had to sit down to get out my money. It was good money.
A whole new shift had come one. I settled at a table, my hands trembling just a little. I knew the sister was going to come back a little later, and I didn't know what to do about it. My ass was in a crack. I tried to figure out how much they had taken off me. It was somewhere around three hundred dollars. I had two hundred dollars' worth of coolers in my pickup.
The women were still dancing, except that the junior high shift had come on. I was really starting to feel like a degenerate, and sick with what it all finally came down to. Getting robbed is kind of like getting your ass whipped, in that somebody else has beaten you. It doesn't matter that he's got a gun or a knife, you could have had a gun or a knife too and fought for your money. I decided to go armed from then on, just as soon as I could afford a gun or a knife.