13
THREE MEN WERE SITTING AT A TABLE drinking beer when Bodecker entered the Tecumseh Lounge. The dark room lit up with sunlight for a brief moment, casting the sheriff’s long shadow across the floor. Then the door swung shut behind him and everything settled into gloom again. A Patsy Cline song came to a sad, quavering end on the jukebox. None of the men said a word as the sheriff walked past them toward the bar. One was a car thief and another a wife beater. They’d both spent time in his jail, waxed his cruiser on several occasions. Though he didn’t know the third man, he figured it was just a matter of time.
Bodecker sat down on a stool and waited for Juanita to finish frying a hamburger on the greasy grill. He recalled that she had served him his first whiskey in this bar not so many years ago. He’d chased after the feeling he’d gotten that night for the next seven years, but never found it again. He reached in his pocket for one of the candies, then decided to hold off. She laid the sandwich on a paper plate along with a few potato chips she scooped out of a metal lard bucket and a long pale pickle she forked from a dirty glass jar. Carrying the plate to the table, she set it down in front of the car thief. Bodecker heard one of the men say something about covering up the pool table before somebody got sick. Another one laughed and he felt his face begin to burn. “You quit that,” Juanita said in a low voice.
She went to the register and made the car thief’s change and took it back to him. “These tater chips are stale,” he told her.
“Then don’t eat ’em,” she said.
“Now, darling,” the wife beater said, “that ain’t no way to be.”
Ignoring him, Juanita lit a cigarette and walked down to the end of the bar where Bodecker sat. “Hey, stranger,” she said, “what can I get—”
“—and by God if her ass didn’t drop open like a lunch bucket,” one of the men said loudly just then, and the table erupted into laughter.
Juanita shook her head. “Can I borrow your gun?” she said to Bodecker. “Those bastards been in here since I opened up this morning.”
He watched them in the long mirror that ran behind the bar. The car thief was giggling like a schoolgirl while the wife beater mashed the potato chips on the table with his fist. The third man was leaned back in his chair with a bored expression on his face, cleaning his fingernails with a matchstick. “I could run ’em out if you want,” Bodecker said.
“Nah, that’s okay,” she said. “They’d just come back later wanting to give me some more grief.” She blew smoke out of the side of her mouth and half smiled. She hoped her boy wasn’t in trouble again. The last time, she’d had to borrow two weeks’ pay to get him out of jail, all over five record albums he’d stuck down his pants at the Woolworth’s. Merle Haggard or Porter Wagoner, that would have been bad enough, but Gerry and the Pacemakers? Herman’s Hermits? The Zombies? Thank God his father was dead, that’s all she could say. “So what can I do you for?”
Bodecker gazed for a moment at the bottles lined up behind the bar. “You got any coffee?”
“Just instant,” she said. “Don’t get many coffee drinkers in here.”
He made a face. “That stuff hurts my stomach,” he said. “How about a Seven-Up?”
After Juanita set the bottle of pop down in front of him, Bodecker lit a cigarette and said, “So Sandy ain’t come in yet, huh?”
“Ha,” Juanita said. “I wish. She’s been gone over two weeks now.”
“What? She quit?”
“No, nothing like that,” the barmaid said. “She’s on vacation.”
“Again?”
“I don’t know how they do it,” Juanita said, lightening up, relieved that his visit didn’t seem to have anything to do with her son. “I don’t reckon they stay any place fancy, but I barely make enough here to pay the rent on that ol’ trailer I live in. And you know damn well Carl ain’t paying for none of it.”
Bodecker took a sip of the pop and thought again about the phone call. So it probably was true, but if Sandy’s been tricking for over a year, like the bitch said, why in the hell hadn’t he heard about it before now? Maybe it was a good thing he had taken the pledge. The whiskey had evidently started turning his brain to mush. Then he glanced over at the pool table and considered other things he might have been careless about the past few months. A sudden cold chill swept over him. He had to swallow several times to keep the 7-Up from coming back up. “When she coming back?” he asked.
“She told Leroy she’d be home by the end of this week. I sure hope so. The tight ass won’t hire no extra help.”
“You got any idea where they were going?”
“It’s hard to tell about that girl,” Juanita said with a shrug. “She was talking about Virginia Beach, but I just can’t picture Carl sunning himself by some ocean for two weeks, can you?”
Bodecker shook his head. “To tell you the truth, I can’t picture that sonofabitch doing anything.” Then he stood up and laid a dollar on the bar. “Look,” he said, “when she gets back, tell her I need to talk to her, okay?”
“Sure, Lee, I’ll do that,” the barmaid said.
After he walked out the door, one of the men yelled, “Hey, Juanita, have you heard what Hen Matthews been saying about that big-headed bastard?”
14
A CAR DOOR SLAMMED in the parking lot. Carl opened his eyes, looked across the room at the flowers and fruit on the wall. The clock said it was still early morning, but he was already covered in sweat. He got out of bed and went to the bathroom, emptied his bladder. He didn’t comb his hair or brush his teeth or wash his face. He dressed in the same clothes he’d worn for the past week, his purple shirt, a baggy pair of shiny, gray suit pants. Sticking the film canisters in his pockets, he sat on the edge of a chair and put his shoes on. He thought about waking Sandy up so they could get a move on, but then decided to let her rest. They’d slept in the car the past three nights. He figured he owed her that, and besides, they were going home anyway. No reason to hurry now.
While he waited for her to wake up, Carl chewed on a cigar and took the army boy’s wad of money out of his pocket. As he counted it again, he remembered a time the year before when they were cutting across the lower end of Minnesota. They were clinging to their last three dollars when the radiator on this ’49 Chevy coupe they were traveling in that summer blew a hole. He managed to temporarily seal the leak with a can of black pepper he carried for just such an emergency, a trick he’d heard about at a truck stop one time. They found a hick gas station a mile or so off the highway before it busted open again, ended up spending the bigger part of a day waiting around while some grease monkey with a pack of Red Man hanging out of his back pocket kept promising to fix it as soon as he finished a tune-up his boss wanted done yesterday. “Won’t be long now, mister,” he told Carl every fifteen fucking minutes. Sandy didn’t help matters any. She parked her ass on a bench right outside the garage door and filed her nails and teased the poor bastard with glimpses of her pink underwear until he didn’t know whether to shit or go blind, she had him so tore up.