On Sunday they left the apartment around noon and drove to the top of Reub Hill and down the other side. He made a left into a muddy lane and stopped when they got to the trash dump at the end. “How do you know about this place?” Sandy asked. Before Carl came along, she had spent more than a few nights getting screwed back here by boys she didn’t care to remember now. Always, she had hoped that if she put out for this next one, he’d treat her like his girlfriend, maybe take her to one of the dances at the Winter Garden or the Armory, but that had never happened. As soon as they got a nut, they were done with her. A couple of them even took her tip money and made her walk home. She looked out her window and saw, lying in the ditch, a used rubber stretched down over the top of a Boone’s Farm bottle. Boys used to call the place Train Lane; from the looks of things, she figured they still did. Now that she thought about it, she had never been to a dance in her life.
“Just saw it when I was out driving around one day,” he said. “Reminded me of that place in Iowa.”
“You mean with the Scarecrow?”
“Yeah,” Carl said. “Ol’ California, here I come, that cocksucker.” He reached across her and opened the glove compartment, grabbed the .22 and a box of shells. “Come on, let’s see what you got.”
He loaded the gun and set up a few rusty tin cans on top of a soggy, stained mattress. Then he walked back to the front of the car and fired off six shots at thirty feet or so. He knocked four cans over. After he showed her again how to load it, he handed the gun to her. “The fucker goes a little to the left,” he said, “but that’s okay. Don’t try to aim so much as point, like you’d do with your finger. And just take a breath and squeeze the trigger as you let it out.”
Sandy held the pistol in both hands and sighted down the barrel. She closed her eyes and pulled the trigger. “Don’t shut your eyes,” Carl said. She fired off the next five rounds as fast as she could. She put several holes in the mattress. “Well, you’re gettin’ closer,” he said. He handed her the box of shells. “You load this time.” He pulled out a cigar and lit it. When she hit the first can, she squealed like a little girl who’d found the prize Easter egg. She missed the next one, then plugged another. “Not bad,” he said. “Here, let me see it.”
He had just finished loading the gun again when they heard a pickup coming fast down the lane toward them. The truck stopped with a lurch a few yards away, and a middle-aged, gaunt-faced man got out. He wore a pair of blue dress pants and a white shirt, polished black shoes. Probably been stuck in church all morning, sitting in a pew with his fat-ass wife, Carl thought. Getting ready to eat some fried chicken now, take a nap if the old bag would shut her mouth for a few minutes. Then back to work in the morning, hard at it. You had to almost admire someone who had the wherewithal to stick with something like that. “Who gave you permission to shoot out here?” the man said. The rough tone of his voice indicated he was none too happy.
“Nobody.” Carl looked around and then shrugged. “Shit, buddy, it’s just a dump.”
“It’s my land is what it is,” the man said.
“We’re just getting in some target practice, that’s all,” Carl said. “Trying to teach my wife how to defend herself.”
The man shook his head. “I don’t allow no shooting on my land. Hell, boy, I got cattle over in there. Besides that, don’t you know it’s the Lord’s Day?”
Carl heaved a sigh and cast a look at the brown fields that surrounded the dump. There wasn’t a cow in sight anywhere. The sky was a low canopy of endless, immovable gray. Even this far out of town, he could detect the acrid smell of the paper mill in the air. “Okay, I get the hint.” He watched as the farmer headed back to his truck, shaking his gray head. “Hey, mister,” Carl suddenly called out.
The farmer stopped and spun around. “What now?”
“I was wondering,” Carl said, taking a few steps toward him. “Would you mind if I took your picture?”
“Carl,” Sandy said, but he waved his hand for her to keep quiet.
“What the hell you want to do that for?” the man said.
“Well, I’m a photographer,” Carl said. “I just think you’d make a good picture. Heck, maybe I could sell it to a magazine or something. I always keep my eyes peeled for fine subjects like yourself.”
The man looked past Carl at Sandy standing beside the station wagon. She was lighting a cigarette. He didn’t approve of women who smoked. Most of them he’d known were trash, but he figured a man who took pictures for a living probably couldn’t get anything decent. Hard to tell where he had picked her up. A few years ago, he’d found a woman named Mildred McDonald in his hog barn, half naked and sucking on a cancer stick. She had told him she was waiting on a man, just as casual as anything, then tried to get him to lie with her in the filth. He glanced at the gun Carl was holding in his hand, noticed that his finger was still on the trigger. “You better go ahead and get out of here,” the man said, then started walking fast toward his truck.
“What you gonna do?” Carl said. “Call the law?” He glanced back at Sandy and winked.
The man opened the door and reached inside the cab. “Hell, boy, I don’t need a crooked sheriff to take care of you.”
Hearing that, Carl began to laugh, but then he looked around and saw the farmer standing behind the door of the truck with a rifle pointed at him through the open window. He had a wide grin on his weathered face. “That’s my brother-in-law you’re talking about,” Carl told him, his voice turning serious.
“Who? Lee Bodecker?” The man turned his head and spit. “I wouldn’t go around braggin’ about that if I was you.”
Carl stood there in the middle of the lane staring at the farmer. He heard the squeak of a door behind him as Sandy got in the car and slammed it shut. For a second, he imagined just raising the pistol up and having it out with the bastard, a regular shootout. His hand began shaking a little, and he took a deep breath to try to calm himself. Then he thought about the future. There was always the next hunt. Just a few more weeks and he and Sandy would be on the road again. Ever since he’d heard the Republicans talking in the White Cow, he’d been thinking about killing one of those longhairs. According to the news he’d seen on the TV lately, the country was heading for turmoil; and he wanted to be around to see it. Nothing would please him more than to watch the whole shithouse go up in flames someday. And Sandy had been eating better lately, was starting to fill out again. She was losing her looks fast—they never had gotten her teeth fixed—but they still had a couple of good years left. No sense throwing that away just because some stupid-ass farmer had a hard-on. As soon as he made his decision, his hand stopped twitching. He turned and started toward the station wagon.
“And don’t ever let me catch you back here again, understand?” Carl heard the man yell as he got in the front seat and handed Sandy her pistol. He looked around one more time as he cranked the engine, but he still didn’t see any fucking cows.
31
OCCASIONALLY, IF THE LAW GOT TOO ROUGH or the hunger bad enough, they would head inland, away from the big water that Theodore loved, so that Roy could find some work. While Roy picked fruit for a few days or weeks, Theodore sat in a lonely grove of trees or under some shady bushes waiting for his return every evening. His body was nothing but a shell now. His skin was gray as slate and his eyes weak. He passed out for no reason, complained about sharp pains that numbed his arms, and a heaviness on his chest that sometimes made him puke up his lunch meat breakfast and the half fifth of warm wine that Roy left him every morning to keep him company. Still, every night, he’d try to come alive for a couple of hours, attempt to play some music, even though his fingers didn’t work too well anymore. Roy would walk around their campfire with a jug trying to get some words started, something from the heart, while Theodore listened and picked at the guitar. They’d practice their big comeback for a while, and then Roy would collapse on top of his blanket, worn out from the day’s work in the orchard. He’d be snoring within a minute or two. If he was lucky, he’d dream about Lenora. His little girl. His angel. He’d been thinking about her more and more lately, but sleeping was as close as he could get to her.