“Nah,” Theodore said. “I ain’t got no music in me today.”
“You sick?”
“I don’t know,” the crippled boy said. “It’s like there’s never no letup.”
“Want one of them oranges the trucker gave us?”
“Hell no. I’ve et enough of them damn things to last me till the Judgment Day. They still give me the shits.”
“I could drop you off at the hospital,” Roy said. “Come back for you in a day or two.”
“Hospitals, they worse than jails.”
“Want me to pray over you?”
Theodore laughed. “Ha. That’s a good one, Roy.”
“Maybe that’s what’s wrong with you. You don’t believe no more.”
“Don’t start in on that shit again,” Theodore said. “I’ve served the Lord in various capacities. And I got the legs to prove it.”
“You just need some rest,” Roy said. “We’ll find us a good tree to sleep under before dark.”
“It still sounds mighty nice. Them passing out coffee for dessert.”
“Jesus, you want a cup of coffee, I’ll go get you one. We still got some change left.”
“I wish we was still with the carnival,” Theodore sighed. “That was the best we ever had it.”
“Yeah, well, you should have kept your hands off that kid if that’s the way you feel.”
Theodore picked up a pebble and threw it in the water. “It makes you wonder, don’t it?”
“What’s that?” Roy asked.
“I don’t know,” the cripple said with a shrug. “Just makes you wonder, that’s all.”
25
IT WAS A COLD FEBRUARY MORNING in the early part of 1966, Carl and Sandy’s fifth year together. The apartment was like an icebox, but Carl was afraid if he kept knocking on the landlady’s door downstairs about turning up the thermostat, he might snap and strangle her with her own filthy hairnet. He had never killed anyone in Ohio, didn’t believe in shitting in his own nest. That was Rule #2. So Mrs. Burchwell, although she deserved it more than anything, was off-limits. Sandy woke up a little before noon and headed for the living room with a blanket draped over her narrow shoulders, dragging the ends of it through the dust and dirt on the floor. She curled up on the couch in a shivering ball and waited for Carl to bring her a cup of coffee and turn the TV on. For the next several hours she smoked cigarettes and watched her soap operas and coughed. At three o’clock, Carl yelled from the kitchen that it was time to get ready for work. Sandy tended bar six nights a week, and though she was supposed to let Juanita off at four, she was always running late.
With a groan, she sat up and stabbed out her cigarette in the ashtray and flung the blanket off her shoulders. She turned off the TV, then shivered her way to the bathroom. Bending over the sink, she splashed some water around in the bowl. She dried off her face, studied herself in the mirror, tried vainly to brush the yellow stains off her teeth. With a tube of red lipstick, she made up her mouth, fixed her eyes, pulled her brown hair back in a limp ponytail. She was sore and bruised. Last night, after she closed up the bar, she let a paper mill worker who had recently lost a hand in a rewinder bend her over the pool table for twenty bucks. Her brother was watching her closely these days, ever since that goddamn phone call, but twenty bucks was twenty bucks, no matter how you looked at it. She and Carl could drive halfway across a state on that much money, or pay the electric bill for the month. It still irked her, all the crooked shit that Lee was into, and then him worried about her costing him votes. The man told her he would fork over another ten if she’d let him stick the metal hook up inside her, but Sandy told him that sounded like something he should save for his wife.
“My wife ain’t no whore,” the man said.
“Yeah, right,” Sandy shot back as she pulled down her panties. “She married you, didn’t she?” She’d held on to the twenty the whole time he pounded her. It was the hardest she’d been fucked in a long time; the old bastard was definitely going for his money’s worth. He sounded like he was going to have a heart attack, the way he was grunting and gasping for air, the cold metal hook pressed against her right hip. By the time he finished, the money was wadded up into a little ball in her hand, soaked with sweat. After he backed away, she smoothed it out on the green felt and stuck it inside her sweater. “Besides,” she said, as she walked over to unlock the door and let him out, “that thing ain’t got no more feeling than a beer can.” Sometimes, after a night like that, she wished she was back working the morning shift at the Wooden Spoon. At least Henry, the old grill cook, had been gentle. He’d been her first, right after she turned sixteen. They had lain together on the floor of the stockroom a long time that night, covered with flour from a fifty-pound bag they had knocked over. He still stopped by the bar once in a while to shoot the shit and tease her about rolling out some more pie dough.
When she came into the kitchen, Carl was sitting in front of the stove reading the newspaper for the second time that day. His fingers were gray with ink. All the burners on the stove were lit and the oven door was open. Blue flames danced behind him like miniature campfires. His pistol lay on the kitchen table, the barrel pointed toward the door. The whites of his eyes were laced with red veins, and his fat, pale, unshaven face looked like some cold and distant star in the reflection from the bare lightbulb hanging over the table. He’d spent most of the night bent over in the tiny closet in the hallway that he used as a darkroom, coaxing life into the last of the film he had saved back from the previous summer. He hated to see it end. He’d nearly cried when he developed that last photo. Next August was a long ways off.
“Those people are so screwed up,” Sandy said as she searched inside her purse for the keys to the car.
“Which people?” Carl asked, turning another page of the paper.
“Them ones on TV. They don’t know what they want.”
“Damn it, Sandy, you pay too much attention to those fuckers,” he said, glancing at the clock impatiently. “Hell, you think they give a shit about you?” She should have been at work five minutes ago. He had been waiting all day for her to leave.
“Well, if it wasn’t for the doctor, I wouldn’t watch it anymore,” she said. She was always going on about the M.D. on one of the shows, a tall, handsome man whom Carl was convinced must be the luckiest bastard on the planet. The man could fall down a rat hole and climb out with a suitcase stuffed with money and the keys to a new El Dorado. Over the years that Sandy had been watching him, he’d probably performed more miracles than Jesus. Carl couldn’t stand him, that fake movie star nose, those sixty-dollar suits.
“So whose dick did he suck today?” Carl said.
“Ha! You’re one to talk,” Sandy said, as she pulled on her coat. She was sick of always having to defend her soaps.
“What the hell does that mean?”
“It means whatever you think it means,” Sandy said. “You were in that closet all night again.”
“I’ll tell you what, I’d like to meet up with that sonofabitch.”