“What the hell is it to you?”
Puppy sat there for a little bit, rocking the toe of one tennis shoe up and down. Finally he turned to Glen.
“Smart-ass. Me and Daddy got in a fight cause of you yesterday. So don't ask me what the hell it is to me.”
Glen's face was streaked with mud and he gave Puppy an incredulous look.
“What'd you get in a fight with Daddy about?”
“Damn it, I didn't get in a fight with Daddy. Me and Daddy got in a fight with somebody else.”
“Fight with who? What are you talking about?”
“Ed Hall. Right on the goddamn sidewalk uptown. Daddy's laid up in the bed right now. Trying to take up for your sorry ass. And you ain't even worth it.”
Glen set his coffee down and leaned forward in the chair. “Now before I get pissed off why don't you just explain to me what the hell you're talking about?”
Puppy cooled off a little. He scratched at the sand with his foot. “Hell. It wasn't just you. He said something about all of us. And we got into it.”
“Well?”
“Well what?”
“Did you whip his ass?”
“I like to choked the little son of a bitch to death. They took me and Daddy to jail and W.G. fired me yesterday afternoon.”
“Is that what's the matter with your nose?”
“Yeah.”
“Did he hit the old man too?”
“He did one time. He's bruised up a little. Bobby took him home.”
Glen's face clouded up. He sat back in the chair and stared out at something ahead of him, or maybe at nothing. He muttered a few words.
“What?” Puppy said.
“I'm just talking to myself.” He turned his head and fixed Puppy with a steady glare. “Has he been seeing Jewel while I been gone?”
“How the hell would I know?”
“Cause you been here and I ain't.”
Puppy shifted in his chair and patted his leg impatiently. “What would it matter if he had? Best thing for you would be for somebody else to take care of her anyway. You ain't gonna marry her, and if you ain't gonna marry her and you keep messing around with her, it ain't gonna be nothing but trouble.”
“You're just full of advice, ain't you? You and Daddy both.”
“And you're so goddamn hardheaded you won't listen to anybody.”
They sat quietly for a few moments. Glen took another sip of his coffee. “What are you gonna do?” he said.
“About what?”
“About a job. You said he fired you.”
Puppy drew on his cigarette and let the smoke trail out through his nose. He watched a wasp fly into the shop over his head.
“I'll go back to fixin cars. All I got to do is put my sign back out front.”
“How come you quit before? That's what you were doing when I went in.”
“Hell. I couldn't get people to pay me. They run me out of business when they cut off my credit at the parts store. I had to have a paycheck. That's why I went to work for the county.”
“People still owe you money?”
“Hell yeah. Sorry son of a bitches.”
“How much?”
“You mean for everything? Or just labor?”
“For everything.”
Puppy thought about it for a little bit. It had been a while since he'd looked at his books but he knew what Trudy had said. She'd taken bookkeeping in high school. He scratched the side of his jaw.
“About three thousand dollars.”
“You're shittin me.”
“No I ain't either. They always gonna pay you some next week, you know. And next week don't never roll around.”
Glen drank the rest of his coffee and set the cup in his lap. He fanned at a fly circling his face.
“So why you gonna get back into it?”
“Cause. There's money in it.”
“It ain't if they won't pay you.”
“Well. I'm gonna do things different this time. Somebody brings a car in here they're gonna hand me the keys. I'm gonna look at the car and figure up what it'll cost to fix it and call em up and let em know. And then when they come to pick their car up if they ain't got the money they don't get their keys back.”
“Why didn't you do that before?”
“Aw hell. Everybody's got a sob story. You do work for friends. Relatives too, by God. This time it's gonna be different. Have you looked for a job?”
“I went out to the stove factory. That ain't no job.”
“It's a paycheck. Hell, Glen, you got to do something. You got to eat. Why don't you try to get on working construction somewhere?”
“Shit,” Glen said. “I don't know nothing about no construction.”
“Well damn, Glen, you may have to
learn
how to do something. You can't just sit around on your ass and wait for something to come along.”
“I applied for my unemployment.”
“Yeah? And what's that? Twenty dollars a week?”
“Twenty-eight.”
“Shit. I'm gonna go in and get me another cup of coffee. You want one?”
“Naw.”
Puppy got up from the chair and flipped his cigarette out onto the gravel. “I'll be back in a minute,” he said.
He went across the yard and opened the door again and stepped into the living room. All the kids were up watching television and eating cereal, sprawled on the couch or the floor, and they seemed hypnotized by the images on the set, their slack mouths vaguely chewing their food like some memory of eating they once might have had. They were all still in their underwear.
“Why don't y'all put some clothes on,” he said, but he got no answer. He set his cup on the counter to pour some more coffee. He heard a door open and looked up to see Trudy in front of the bathroom in her robe, one finger crooked and moving rapidly to summon him to her. He stepped down the hall to where she was.
“What the hell's he doing here?” she said.
He knew who, but he said it anyway. “Who?”
She glared at him and he guessed he'd put her in a bad mood, waking her up like he had.
“I don't want him around my kids,” she said. “He's a bad influence.”
“He's my brother. What you want me to do, run him off?”
“If you don't, I will.”
A slow burn started inside him as it sometimes did. He spoke very slowly. “He's just having a cup of coffee. He'll be gone after while.”
“He better be,” she said, and she stepped back into the bathroom and slammed the door in his face.
Another fight. He didn't know why they always had to fight. He had almost forgotten the time when they didn't. He was tired of it, God knows he was tired of it, and his whole fucking sorry life with greasy hands all the time and working on some piece of junk or other for somebody, it didn't matter who, looked like he'd always be doing that, always be on his hurting back on gravel reaching up into the dark oily undersides of vehicles skinning his knuckles.
He looked at the cheap wood-grained door for a moment and then
drew back and drove his fist into it and it jumped open to reveal Trudy's big white hips overswallowing the maw of the green commode, where she was perched with her robe up around her waist, her eyes wide open in alarm. She didn't say anything and he could hear her dripping down into the water. He stood there and looked at her.
“Don't say nothing else about my brother,” he said. She didn't move and she stopped peeing. He shut the door and went back up the hall and poured his cup of coffee. The kids were still facing the television.
“I said put some clothes on,” he told them, and when he went out the door they were going toward their rooms.
Glen was still sitting in the chair looking out at the morning when he sat down again. He lowered his mouth to his coffee and sipped at it.
“Why don't you go see Daddy?” he said. “I meant to go check on him but I need to get to work.”
“What are you working on?”
“That pickup there. I just fixed the starter on it and I got to put a new muffler on it. I got to get my sign back out on the road so folks'll know I'm open for business again.”
Glen sat there looking at the ground. “What did he say to you?”
“Who?”
“Ed Hall.”
He wished now he hadn't even told it. He didn't know why he had. It probably wouldn't do anything but stir up more trouble.
“It don't matter what he said. Only reason he said it was cause you run over his kid.”
“So you're blaming me for it.”
“Naw, Glen, I ain't blaming you for it. What good would that do?”
It was quiet for a while. They sat in the chairs with the heat rising around them. Glen looked up toward the trailer and nodded at it. “She still hate my guts?”
“You ain't her favorite person in the world I don't guess.”
“Well,” he said. “She never did like me anyway.” He got up from his chair. “I'm gonna get on down the road.”
“Why don't you go by there and see about Daddy?”
Glen put his hands in his pockets and kicked at a rock. His eyes were red and he looked rough. “I don't know. Hell, he's probably all right, ain't he?”
Puppy took another sip of his coffee. He hated to have to beg him like this. “He's getting pretty old, you know?”
“Yeah, I know.”
“I mean, wouldn't you want your kids to come see you when you get old?”
“Wouldn't make no damn difference to me,” Glen said. “I'm gonna go talk to Jewel.”
“You better leave it alone.”
“Fuck leavin it alone. I'm gonna find out what's going on.”
Glen walked to his car and Puppy got out of his chair. He wanted to say something else to him but he didn't know what it should be. He knew Glen wouldn't listen to him anyway. So he didn't say anything. He just wondered if his own children would visit him when he got old. And if Glen was the one who killed Frankie Barlow. He was pretty sure that he was. He didn't watch his brother leave, didn't see him turn up the whiskey bottle. He went around the side of the shop, trying to remember where he had put that muffler. His hand was beginning to hurt a little.
Bobby thought he knew every pig trail in the county, but he didn't know this one. The road was more like a path through the woods, shaded and relatively cool, and it sloped up the hill to a clearing where he could see the roof of the trailer in the morning sun. Once they got close he began to see things abandoned by the edge of the road and half reclaimed by creeping vines and nests of briars, old refrigerators and discarded lawn mowers, bedsprings and rotted sheets of plywood, cans buried in leaf mold, piles of bottles, a rusted-out Ford pickup riddled with bullet holes as if people had been shot standing beside it.
His prisoner had not spoken since he'd turned off the main road and Bobby could sense a growing uneasiness in the backseat where he sat with his hands cuffed. He stank. The children had, too, before Mary gave them a bath.
He slowed the car and pulled up over the hill and turned down into what he guessed they called the yard. He stopped in front of the trailer and looked around. Overturned chairs and scattered beer cans. Broken tree limbs were hanging from the roof of the trailer and panes of glass were patched with masking tape. Milk crates and soda bottles and wheel rims and blownout tires. He shut the car off and turned in the seat.
“Just stay in here. You got that?”
The man eased himself to rest against the back of the seat and his eyes were hooded and dark and they mocked Bobby. “I need to get some more clothes,” he said. “You said you'd let me get my clothes.”
“I will. I'm gonna have a look around first. You stay in the car. You hear?”
“I hear.”
“I can always handcuff you to the car if you're thinking about running.”
The prisoner looked away.
Bobby got out and took the keys with him. The sky was beginning to cloud over and a small wind was whistling through the tops of the pines. He stepped around the stuff in the yard and walked over to the door. He looked at the concrete blocks stacked there and went up them cautiously and glanced back once at the prisoner before he tried the knob. It turned stiffly in his hand and he stepped into the trailer.
The first thing that hit him was the smell. Mildew and rot. The floor was buckled and water stains in strange brown shapes had spread out over the ceiling. The furniture was piled high with clothes. It was damp in there and a small puddle of water lay on the floor. He stood in the middle of the living room for a moment. Beneath the couch he spotted something and he went closer and then knelt and reached under it for the thing that lay there. It was a child's shirt, spotted with dried blood. He smelled it but it had no odor at all. He laid it aside and stood back up. There were rooms at either end and he went down the narrow hall with a vague distress consuming him. He didn't want to be in this place, neither as visitor or intruder. He kept thinking of the children.
His boots pressed spots of water from the soiled carpet in the hall and he stopped at the back door to look and see what was out there. A small pane of glass was set into it and he looked through it to a bleary world outside. There was a loose aluminum knob set into the door and he
twisted it. The door was jammed in its frame and he had to push hard on it. The top sagged out but the bottom was hung up on the threshold. He pushed harder and it wobbled open and he let it sway away from the trailer. There was an odd light in the woods out there. He looked down but there were no steps. The ground was two feet below the floor. He left the door open and went on down the hall.
A bathroom with no door was on the left. He studied the rusted tub, the torn shower curtain. A few cans of shaving cream and some shampoo and soap were on the sink. Wet towels were piled up. The commode was leaking and water had pooled around it and run down the hall and he was standing in it. He moved out of there and walked into the bedroom. It was dark in there, the windows shuttered against the light with venetian blinds. A rumpled bed dusted with cigarette ashes, record albums on the floor, and a player set on top of a dresser whose drawers were hanging open. He looked behind the door and the shotgun was leaning there in the corner just where they said it would be. He picked it up. The gun was rusted and the stock was full of scratches. He found the release and pulled down on the slide to see if it was loaded. It was. He pumped the slide three times and the shells kicked out and landed on the floor with small clatters. He stooped and picked them up, turned them over in his hand in the dim light. Birdshot, some green, some red. He put them in his pocket and cleared the action on the gun one more time, looked into the chamber to see that it was empty. Then he put it back where it had been and moved the door over it. He stood there listening but he heard nothing.