sights, that sort of thing.”
“Bobby, he ain’t going to Australia and you know it. Hell, Blue ain’t never stepped over the county line in his life.”
Big Bobby polished his belt buckle with the cuff of his sleeve. “Well, what you want me to do about it?”
“I don’t know. I’m just telling you. Next time you see him, Bobby, you look in his fucking eyes.”
“Yeah. What’ll I see?”
Elgin turned his head, looked at him. “Nothing.”
Bobby said, “He’s your buddy.”
Elgin thought of the small panties curling out of the dust under Blue’s bed. “Yeah, but he’s your problem.”
Big Bobby put his hands behind his head, stretched in the chair. “Well, people getting suspicious about all the dogs disappearing, so I’m going to have to shut this operation down immediately anyway.”
He wasn’t getting it. “Bobby, you shut this operation down, someone’s gonna get a world’s worth of that nothing in Blue’s eyes.”
Big Bobby shrugged, a man who’d made a career out of knowing what was beyond him.
The first time Perkin Lut struck Jewel in public was at Chuck’s Diner.
Elgin and Shelley were sitting just three booths away when they heard a racket of falling glasses and plates, and by the time they came out of their booth, Jewel was lying on the tile floor with shattered glass and chunks of bone china by her elbows and Perkin standing over her, his arms shaking, a look in his eyes that said he’d surprised himself as much as anyone else.
Elgin looked at Jewel, on her knees, the hem of her dress getting stained by the spilled food, and he looked away before she caught his eye, because if that happened he just might do something stupid, fuck Perkin up a couple-three ways.
“Aw, Perkin,” Chuck Blade said, coming from behind the counter to help Jewel up, wiping gravy off his hands against his apron.
“We don’t respect that kind of behavior ‘round here, Mr. Lut,” Clara Blade said. “Won’t have it neither.”
Chuck Blade helped Jewel to her feet, his eyes cast down at his broken plates, the half a steak lying in a soup of beans by his shoe. Jewel had a welt growing on her right cheek, turning a bright red as she placed her hand on the table for support.
“I didn’t mean it,” Perkin said.
Clara Blade snorted and pulled the pen from behind her ear, began itemizing the damage on a cocktail napkin.
“I didn’t.” Perkin noticed Elgin and Shelley. He locked eyes with Elgin, held out his hands. “I swear.”
Elgin turned away and that’s when he saw Blue coming through the door. He had no idea where he’d come from, though it ran through his head that Blue could have just been standing outside looking in, could have been standing there for an hour.
Like a lot of small guys, Blue had speed, and he never seemed to walk in a straight line. He moved as if he were constantly sidestepping tackles or land mines — with sudden, unpredictable pivots that left you watching the space where he’d been, instead of the place he’d ended up.
Blue didn’t say anything, but Elgin could see the determination for homicide in his eyes and Perkin saw it too, backed up, and slipped on the mess on the floor and stumbled back, trying to regain his balance as Blue came past Shelley and tried to lunge past Elgin.
Elgin caught him at the waist, lifted him off the ground, and held on tight because he knew how slippery Blue could be in these situations. You’d think you had him and he’d just squirm away from you, hit somebody with a glass.
Elgin tucked his head down and headed for the door, Blue flopped over his shoulder like a bag of cement mix, Blue screaming, “You see me, Perkin? You see me? I’m a last face you see, Perkin! Real soon.”
Elgin hit the open doorway, felt the night heat on his face as Blue screamed, “Jewel! You all right? Jewel?”
Blue didn’t say much back at Elgin’s trailer.
He tried to explain to Shelley how pure Jewel was, how hitting something that innocent was like spitting on the Bible.
Shelley didn’t say anything, and after a while Blue shut up too.
Elgin just kept plying him with Beam, knowing Blue’s lack of tolerance for it, and pretty soon Blue passed out on the couch, his pitted face still red with rage.
“He’s never been exactly right in the head, has he?” Shelley said.
Elgin ran his hand down her bare arm, pulled her shoulder in tighter against his chest, heard Blue snoring from the front of the trailer. “No, ma’am.”
She rose above him, her dark hair falling to his face, tickling the corners of his eyes. “But you’ve been his friend.”
Elgin nodded.
She touched his cheek with her hand. “Why?”
Elgin thought about it a bit, started talking to her about the little, dirty kid and his cockroach flambes, of the animal sounds that came from his mother’s trailer. The way Blue used to sit by the drainage ditch, all pulled into himself, his body tight. Elgin thought of all those roaches and cats and rabbits and dogs, and he told Shelley that he’d always thought Blue was dying, ever since he’d met him, leaking away in front of his eyes.
“Everyone dies,” she said.
“Yeah.” He rose up on his elbow, rested his free hand on her warm hip. “Yeah, but with most of us it’s like we’re growing toward something and then we die. But with Blue, it’s like he ain’t never grown toward nothing. He’s just been dying real slowly since he was born.”
She shook her head. “I’m not getting you.”
He thought of the mildew that used to soak the walls in Blue’s mother’s trailer, of the mold and dust in Blue’s shack off Route 11, of the rotting smell that had grown out of the drainage ditch when they were kids. The way Blue looked at it all — seemed to be at one with it — as if he felt a bond.
Shelley said, “Babe, what do you think about getting out of here?”
“Where?”
“I dunno. Florida. Georgia. Someplace else.”
“I got a job. You too.”
“You can always get construction jobs other places. Receptionist jobs too.”
“We grew up here.”
She nodded. “But maybe it’s time to start our life somewhere else.”
He said, “Let me think about it.”
She tilted his chin so she was looking in his eyes. “You’ve
He nodded. “Maybe I want to think about it some more.”
In the morning, when they woke up, Blue was gone.
Shelley looked at the rumpled couch, over at Elgin. For a good minute they just stood there, looking from the couch to each other, the couch to each other.
An hour later, Shelley called from work, told Elgin that Perkin Lut was in his office as always, no signs of physical damage.
Elgin said, “If you see Blue …”
“Yeah?”
Elgin thought about it. “I dunno. Call the cops. Tell Perkin to bail out a back door. That sound right?”
“Sure.”
Big Bobby came to the site later that morning, said, “I go over to Blue’s place to tell him we got to end this dog
