Jewel left Blue’s place two days later, walked into Perkin Lut’s Auto Emporium and into Perkins office, and by the time anyone went to check, they’d left through the back door, gone home for the day.
Elgin tried to get a hold of Blue for three days — called constantly, went by his shack and knocked on the door, even staked out the tree house along I-95 where he fired on the dogs.
He’d decided to break into Blue’s place, was fixing to do just that, when he tried one last call from his trailer that third night and Blue answered with a strangled “Hello.”
“It’s me. How you doing?”
“Can’t talk now.”
“Come on, Blue. It’s me. You OK?”
“All alone,” Blue said.
“I know. I’ll come by.”
“You do, I’ll leave.”
“Blue.”
“Leave me alone for a spell, Elgin. OK?”
That night Elgin sat alone in his trailer, smoking cigarettes, staring at the walls.
Blue’d never had much of anything his whole life— not a job he enjoyed, not a woman he could consider his — and then between the dogs and Jewel Lut he’d probably thought he’d got it all at once. Hit pay dirt.
Elgin remembered the dirty little kid sitting down by the drainage ditch, hugging himself. Six, maybe seven years old, waiting to die.
You had to wonder sometimes why some people were even born. You had to wonder what kind of creature threw bodies into the world, expected them to get along when they’d been given no tools, no capacity to get any either.
In Vietnam, this fat boy, name of Woodson from South Dakota, had been the least popular guy in the platoon. He wasn’t smart, he wasn’t athletic, he wasn’t funny, he wasn’t even personable. He just was. Elgin had been running beside him one day through a sea of rice paddies, their boots making sucking sounds every step they took, and someone fired a hell of a round from the other side of the paddies, ripped Woodson’s head in half so completely all Elgin saw running beside him for a few seconds was the lower half of Woodson’s face. No hair, no forehead, no eyes. Just half the nose, a mouth, a chin.
Thing was, Woodson kept running, kept plunging his feet in and out of the water, making those sucking sounds, M-15 hugged to his chest, for a good eight or ten steps. Kid was dead, he’s still running. Kid had no reason to hold on, but he don’t know it, he keeps running.
What spark of memory, hope, or dream had kept him going?
You had to wonder.
In Elgin’s dream that night, a platoon of ice-gray Vietcong rose in a straight line from the center of Coopers Lake while Elgin was inside the cabin with Shelley and Jewel. He penetrated them both somehow, their separate torsos branching out from the same pair of hips, their four legs clamping at the small of his back, this Shelley-Jewel creature crying out for more, more, more.
And Elgin could see the VC platoon drifting in formation toward the shore, their guns pointed, their faces hidden behind thin wisps of green fog.
The Shelley-Jewel creature arched her backs on the bed below him, and Woodson and Blue stood in the corner of the room watching as their dogs padded across the floor, letting out low growls and drooling.
Shelley dissolved into Jewel as the VC platoon reached the porch steps and released their safeties all at once, the sound like the ratcheting of a thousand shotguns. Sweat exploded in Elgin’s hair, poured down his body like warm rain, and the VC fired in concert, the bullets shearing the walls of the cabin, lifting the roof off into the night. Elgin looked above him at the naked night sky, the stars zipping by like tracers, the yellow moon full and mean, the shivering branches of birch trees. Jewel rose and straddled him, bit his lip, and dug her nails into his back, and the bullets danced through his hair, and then Jewel was gone, her writhing flesh having dissolved into his own.
Elgin sat naked on the bed, his arms stretched wide, waiting for the bullets to find his back, to shear his head from his body the way they’d sheared the roof from the cabin, and the yellow moon burned above him as the dogs howled and Blue and Woodson held each other in the corner of the room and wept like children as the bullets drilled holes in their faces.
Big Bobby came by the trailer late the next morning, a Sunday, and said, “Blue’s a bit put out about losing his job.”
“What?” Elgin sat on the edge of his bed, pulled on his socks. “You picked now —now, Bobby —to fire him?”
“It’s in his eyes,” Big Bobby said. “Like you said. You can see it.”
Elgin had seen Big Bobby scared before, plenty of times, but now the man was trembling.
Elgin said, “Where is he?”
Blue’s front door was open, hanging half down the steps from a busted hinge. Elgin said, “Blue.”
“Kitchen.”
He sat in his Jockeys at the table, cleaning his rifle, each shiny black piece spread in front of him on the table. Elgin’s eyes watered a bit because there was a stench coming from the back of the house that he felt might strip his nostrils bare. He realized then that he’d never asked Big Bobby or Blue what they’d done with all those dead dogs.
Blue said, “Have a seat, bud. Beer in the fridge if you’re thirsty.”
Elgin wasn’t looking in that fridge. “Lost your job, huh?”
Blue wiped the bolt with a shammy cloth. “Happens.” He looked at Elgin. “Where you been lately?”
“I called you last night.”
“I mean in general.”
“Working.”
“No, I mean at night.”
“Blue, you been” — he almost said “playing house with Jewel Lut” but caught himself— “up in a fucking tree, how do you know where I been at night?”
“I don’t,” Blue said. “Why I’m asking.”
Elgin said, “I’ve been at my trailer or down at Doubles, same as usual.”
“With Shelley Briggs, right?”
Slowly, Elgin said, “Yeah.”
“I’m just asking, buddy. I mean, when we all going to go out? You, me, your new girl.”
The pits that covered Blue’s face like a layer of bad meat had faded some from all those nights in the tree.
Elgin said, “Anytime you want.”
Blue put down the bolt. “How ‘bout right now?” He stood and walked into the bedroom just off the kitchen. “Let me just throw on some duds.”
“She’s working now, Blue.”
“At Perkin Lut’s? Hell, it’s almost noon. I’ll talk to Perkin about that Dodge he sold me last year, and when she’s ready we’ll take her out someplace nice.” He came back into the kitchen wearing a soiled brown T-shirt and jeans.
“Hell,” Elgin said, “I don’t want the girl thinking I’ve got some serious love for her or something. We come by for lunch, next thing she’ll expect me to drop her off in the mornings, pick her up at night.”
Blue was reassembling the rifle, snapping all those shiny pieces together so fast, Elgin figured he could do it blind. He said, “Elgin, you got to show them some affection sometimes. I mean, Jesus.” He pulled a thin brass bullet from his T-shirt pocket and slipped it in the breech, followed it with four more, then slid the bolt home.
“Yeah, but you know what I’m saying, bud?” Elgin watched Blue nestle the stock in the space between his left hip and ribs, let the barrel point out into the kitchen.
“I know what you’re saying,” Blue said. “I know. But I got to talk to Perkin about my Dodge.”
“What’s wrong with it?”
