For some the night was not over. In a gathering of the drunk and happy Glen sat nursing a glass of straight whiskey and brooding over the remains of his food, barely touched on a red china plate. It was a catfish place with open-air tables but the rain had driven everybody inside. Music was playing loud but he barely heard those laughing voices and those country tunes of heartbreak and loss. He drank the whiskey and stared at the table. The cheap watch said it was 10:30 and he knew it was time to be moving out.
He got up from the booth none too steady and went to stand at the bar. Faces surrounded him, wide smiles and cracked teeth and missing teeth and it seemed that everybody in there was having a good time that hadn't rubbed off on him. He drank some more of the whiskey. Time was slowing down. He watched the second hand on a dusty clock hanging on the wall.
It was still raining outside. He could hear it on the windows and the roof. The storm had moved in bringing with it lightning and crashes of thunder that he could hear pealing outside the cinder-block walls of the joint. The smell of fried catfish hung over everything. It was on his clothes, his skin. He was drunk enough now to be able to start feeling
bad about taking the money from his father and to wonder if it was still a good idea to go over and try to see Jewel.
He drained the glass and rapped it on the counter. The barman came down and refilled it, and he paid. The air seemed to be cooling, the outside night pressing in. His mood kept swinging. He wanted to be in her bed, see her face, touch her skin. Breathe in the stillness with her lying naked beside him, the rain coming down. Then he'd start feeling there was nobody to turn to, just like the way it had been after Theron died in all his blood. That long period of grief when he felt that he might go out of his mind from having to remember it over and over every day and knowing that his good strong brother was lying under six feet of dirt and wilted flowers and that the rain would fall on him and the sun would burn down on him and that his spirit would move lost in this world maybe forever, rootless and drifting, watching them, hovering around the edges of the house and the yard where he felt him many times and did not want to feel him anymore.
His mother had never blamed him. She had just borne it, carried it around with her. Her grief was so deep and personal she could never share it with anybody, not even his father. And he had watched them drift farther and farther apart until they were no more than strangers who had to live in the same house, take meals together, raise him and Randolph for the good of them. And always Bobby too, the outside child, standing on the outside edges looking in.
The lights seemed to dim in the place for a moment. Talk waned, the jukebox skipped, then something hummed and the lights came back on bright and the music picked up and people started laughing and talking again. He sipped his whiskey and looked at his watch. It was getting late. If he was going he needed to go now. But something still held him back. He didn't know what she would say if he went back now. So much time had gone by. There would be those questions again and he knew there
were no answers he could give her that would satisfy her. He knew she'd probably already made plans but they weren't his plans. It was too soon, and too much had happened. She probably wouldn't put up with much more because all the promises he'd made had not been kept. She might not even let him in this time. Not unless he made some more promises.
“Hey Glen,” a voice said. He turned his head to see who'd spoken so nicely. A woman was standing there and he didn't recognize her. Red hair, tight jeans, a pair of bright red lips. A fuzzy sweater that outlined her small pointy breasts.
“You don't remember me, do you?”
He smiled with effort, waved his whiskey at her with a vague motion of both agreement and indifference.
“Not right off. You look a little familiar.”
She grinned and moved up closer and lowered her voice.
“Well I hope I do. Maybe you just don't recognize me with my clothes on.”
He searched his memory with nothing coming and then a dim bulb came on deep in the besotted depths of his brain. He pointed to her. “Linda?”
“Brenda. You a little drunk, ain't you?”
“I ain't sober, that's for damn sure. Don't want to be. Come on and let me buy you a drink.”
She got up next to him and she smelled good. She never stopped smiling. He signaled the bartender and suddenly he stood before them.
“What you want?” Glen asked her.
“Tom Collins.”
“Gimme another one too,” he said to the bartender.
The bartender turned away to make the drinks and she put her hand on his forearm. Pink nails with cheap rings garnishing her fingers. She had on a lot of makeup and eye shadow. A whore's disguise.
“So,” she said. “I heard you been gone for a while.”
“Yeah. Had to take a little vacation down in the Delta.”
“Well. I've missed seeing you. You back for good now?”
He rattled the ice in his glass and drank some more of the whiskey. It was watery now, tasted flat.
“Yep. I'm home to stay. Gonna straighten up and fly right.”
“Oh yeah? I remember when you didn't use to. I done been married and divorced since I seen you. You ought to come on and go out to the lake with me. They having a dance out there tonight. I'll pay your way in.”
The bartender brought their drinks and looked warily at Glen but he didn't notice. He pulled out some money and put it on the bar.
“What time is it?” he said, and then he looked at his watch. It was fifteen minutes till eleven.
“We got plenty of time,” she said. “They don't close till two. We can catch up where we left off if you want to.”
She was still smiling at him and she had moved in closer and put one of her knees between his legs and she was looking into his eyes and rubbing the side of his waist. She lifted her drink without looking at it and sipped it, watching him.
He remembered her now, or at least a smaller and younger version of her laboring beneath him in a motel outside town on Highway 7, dark nights going from the parking lot to the lights outside the room and drinking whiskey at the door, oral acts performed on top of the bedcovers and the way she could pull her knees almost up beside her ears. She had a false nipple low on her left breast and she used to go into a state of near catatonia when the orgasms shuddered through her body.
“I was thinking about going to see somebody,” he said.
“Go see em later. I want to get my hands on you again.”
She moved her hip against him and turned it so that it shielded the
movement of her hand when she reached down and touched the front of him. He started rising up against her fingers. She sipped her drink, gave him her little knowing smile.
“Hell yeah,” he said. “Drink up.”
In a cavern of wood and dim lights he staggered around with her over the floor, bumping other patrons, his feet dragging, a loud band up on a plywood stage and clusters of people at tables along the walls. They stopped serving him and she had to get their drinks. Kissing her in the corner, mauling her breasts with his hands, people watching them, him unaware or just not caring who saw. Finally somebody came over and told them to be nice or leave and they left.
He fell once in the rain but they just laughed about it and she got him back into her car and he reached for her when she got in on her side, pushing her back against the door with the rain coming down and the heat of their bodies and their breath fogging up the windows to where nobody could see in.
She didn't want to there but he locked all the doors and pulled her sweater over her head and got her pants off and they managed it on his side of the car, her head bumping against the headliner sometimes, a cramped and sweaty encounter, their bodies slick and shining in the weak light that came from the front of the club. He rested, drank whiskey from a flask in her purse. She stretched out on the seat and tried to revive him with her mouth. Later he dimly remembered a few minutes here and there of sex and when he woke he was back at the catfish place and she was trying to pull him out of the car, screaming at him. He tried to fend her off with one hand, batting at her, but she dragged him out and he fell in the mud. The rain poured down on him and plastered his hair to the back of his head while he cussed her and tried to get up. It was hard for him to get up. Everybody had left and there was just his car in
the parking lot. He made his way to it and crawled into the backseat and put his muddy head down on the mildewed upholstery. He spoke a last unintelligible plea for something, death or release or maybe just for the rain to stop so that he could find his way to Jewel's. That was the last thing he knew until he woke up in the morning hearing voices. His head badly overripe and feeling swollen, his tongue thick and furred with some disagreeable taste as if somebody had shit in his mouth. He sat up and rubbed his eyes. Two black women in cook's clothes were looking at him.
“That white boy drunk,” one said.
“Shoo,” the other one said. “Look what a mess. He done been crawlin around in the mud.”
“Oh God,” he said, and put his head back down on the seat, trying to ignore the sun that was beginning to fill the car with light.
Jewel woke him just before daylight and stepped from the room in her robe to check on David. He was asleep in his bed, lying on top of the covers. She worked the sheet from beneath him and put it over him and went to the kitchen to put on coffee. When she walked back into the bedroom Bobby was lying back against the pillows. He was smoking a cigarette and looking out the window. He turned his face at her step and she bent over him, kissed him.
“Good morning,” she said.
“Mornin. How you feel?”
She sat down and he scooted over a little for her.
“I feel good. I feel a lot better.”
He nodded and drew on his cigarette.
“He asleep?”
“Yeah.”
“You think he heard anything?”
“Naw. He sleeps like a log. Like you.”
He smiled at her and turned in the bed. “Did I snore?”
“I started to get up and go sleep in the living room one time.”
“Well. I should have gone on home I guess.”
She reached out and put her hand on his stomach. Ran her nails through the black hairs there. “Why?”
“Hell. Mama.”
“I can't tell if she approves of me or not.”
“That don't matter.”
“You got to live with her, though.”
“No I don't.”
She smiled at that, bent down and kissed him again. Then she got up and took off her robe and let him watch her dress. After a while he got up and put his clothes on, got his hat, grabbed the gun in its holster, and by then the coffee had finished perking and he drank a quick cup at the kitchen table. She eased him out the front door and kissed him by the side of the car with the sun just up. He cranked the car and she leaned down to kiss him again and told him to call her.
“I will.”
She turned around and went back into the house and into David's room. He was still sleeping. She sat on the bed for a while watching his face, the soft chin, the hair a little too long, the little dimples on the backs of his knuckles where they lay slack over the sheet. Something had changed now. She wasn't worried anymore. She got up and went into the kitchen to start making their breakfast. The cat came in and sat watching her and she talked to it as if it knew what she was saying.
The top edge of the sun was beginning to rise from the trees on the river. Bobby splashed through holes of water in the road as he drove along. He had to have a shower, fresh clothes, a shave. The rain had drenched the trees and the leaves stood bright and shining and the rows of cotton held long trenches of muddy water, the little creeks he crossed over swirling foam and sticks and sucking at the limbs that trailed down from the banks.
He drove with his hand resting lightly on the wheel and the memory of her giving him a peace he had never felt. He'd slept little but he didn't feel tired. And there were things to do.
It was 6:30 when he looked at his watch and Mary was probably up by now, making biscuits, making coffee. She would already have gone to his room.
He turned off onto his road and the sun kept rising through the windows on the right side of the car. Mist was lifting from the fields and the sun flashed on the weeds still wet from the rain.
He slowed, turned into the yard, and parked the car in front of the porch. He left his keys in it and when he got up to the door it was open. He walked in and found her in the kitchen, standing at the sink and looking out the window.
“Good morning,” he said.
“Morning.”
That was all he got out of her and he couldn't read her mood. She'd probably been worried about him. She always worried about him.
“Is there any coffee?”
“Over there in the pot.”
She kept looking out the window. He set his hat on the table and took off his revolver and put it on a chair. He looked down at the mud on the heels of his boots, saw where he'd tracked it on her nice clean floor. She hadn't noticed. He sat down and took his boots off and then went across the floor in his stocking feet to the corner cabinet and took down two cups.
“Want me to pour you some?”
“I've already had some.”
He put one cup back and poured the other one full of coffee, stirred in some sugar, and reached inside the icebox for the milk.
“What'd you do?” she said. “Work late?” She'd turned around and she didn't look happy.
“Not exactly,” he said, and took the coffee and the milk back to the table with him.
“You sleep at the jail?”
He poured some milk into his coffee and reached inside his pocket for a cigarette. Once he had it lit he looked up at her.
“I spent the night with Jewel.”
“You mean you slept with her?”