“Things ain’t been good for me.”
“I understand your circumstances, but you still got a debt due, and me and Jones went a long time without mentioning it. This car will cover it, and I’ll call it square. I didn’t want to call it square, the car wouldn’t be enough. It would be the car and then some.”
Sunset could see it pained Bill more than the pain in his foot to lose that car.
“I voted for Sunset for constable when you wanted me to.”
“You voted for a nickel an hour raise,” Marilyn said.
“Ain’t there another way?” he said.
“You can pay the money you owe me instead of the car.”
“Damn,” Bill said.
“Did you think I forgot about you owing the money?”
Bill grinned. “Kind of hoped you had.”
Marilyn shook her head. “Nope.”
“I could still pay it out.”
“It’s past time for that. You can pay me half of it now, or you can give me the car. That’s as good a deal as it gets.”
“I ain’t got even a quarter of it. Times are hard. You’re giving me the Jesse James.”
“No, I’m giving you a chance to pay your debt, and actually come out ahead.”
“What if I don’t?”
“That’s why I brought the constable. I have the papers you signed for the debt in my car.”
“You don’t know if I paid Jones any.”
“I know the contract you signed said there would be a receipt for every payment you made. I haven’t got any receipts. Want to show me yours?”
“You’d have me arrested?”
“I would.”
“Oh, hell,” Bill said, as if he were being magnanimous. “Take the damn car.”
When Bill crutched the keys out to them, along with the title, which he signed over, Marilyn handed the keys to Sunset.
“It’s yours,” Marilyn said.
“You didn’t tell me the car was for her.”
“Didn’t need to,” Marilyn said.
“Are you sure, Marilyn?” Sunset said. “I mean, it’s a good car.”
“It sure is,” Bill said.
“That’s why I want you to have it,” Marilyn said. “You need it. You can’t be depending on someone else all the time. What if Clyde quit?”
“I don’t know what to say.”
“Say thanks.”
“Thanks, Marilyn.”
“I don’t want her to have it,” Bill said.
“Why’s that?” Marilyn said.
“Well, I know she’s constable, but she ain’t really.”
“Yes, I am,” Sunset said. “Really. And if you hadn’t paid your debt to Mrs. Jones, I’d have arrested you.”
Bill looked as if he could eat glass.
“It really bothers you a woman has this job, doesn’t it?” Sunset said.
Bill crutched back to his porch and his rocking chair. When he settled into it he began to rock furiously, as if he might rock himself off the porch and on out of East Texas, a place where women became the law and hoodwinked him out of cars for money owed.
“Good enough,” Marilyn said. “You drive it home, Sunset. Tell Karen I’m going to come get her soon, take her to the picture show over in Holiday.”
“Sunset’s done been there,” Bill said from the porch. “That’s where she saved that nigger.”
“You’ll be happy to know he was lynched,” Sunset said.
“Already heard. And you’d have saved a lot of trouble if you’d done let them go ahead and do it while he was in Holiday. I reckon he ate some meals over in Tyler. He wasn’t worth that, even if he only got bread and water.”
“I’d shut up if I were you,” Sunset said. “Don’t forget you’re talking to the law.”
“I ain’t talking law business. I’m just talking. Y’all go on, now. You got what you wanted.”
Bill rose from the rocker, stood tall on his crutches, worked his way into the house, let the door bang.
Sunset had learned to drive when she was a kid working on the farm, before she got the sniff on what her male foster parent had in mind for her. Then she ran off and didn’t drive much after that. She drove for Pete once in a while, but not often, just when he really needed something done. He didn’t like to see a woman drive, especially his woman, and the idea that she could drive, that she might drive away, was not a comfort to him. He liked her handy, as he liked to say, which meant under his roof and under his thumb, trapped like a rat in a shoe box, no air holes.
So as she drove, the window down, the wind blowing her red hair as if fanning a blaze, she felt a kind of glory rise up in her. The flesh on her neck and cheeks flared as if bellows were beneath her skin, pumping up heat from coals she thought dead, and her skin seemed to lick at the air, and the taste of it was sweet, and she felt strong, her bones suddenly of iron, and along she drove, the dust rising up, some of it coming through the window, making her cough, sticking to the sweat on her face, but she didn’t mind. Didn’t mind at all, because there was a fine fire in her and it made her comfortably warm even in the not so comfortable East Texas heat, and out the window she saw the world no longer in the dusty whites and grays of the road, but in the bright greens of the pines and the cedars of the forest and the blues of the sky and the bouquets of Indian paint-brushes and bluebonnets and buttercups and sunflowers and all manner of wildflowers that fled out of the woods and stopped at the edge of the road as if on parade, saw all this as the roar of the car startled bright bursts of birds when she made curves too fast, and in that good moment she felt as if she was the queen of all she surveyed.
Sunset drove the black Ford to her tent, and when Clyde, who was still sitting in a chair out front, saw her, he stood up, walked out to the car to greet her.
“You steal it?” Clyde said through the open driver’s window.
“No, I let a drunk man feel my tittie for it.”
Clyde gave her a shocked look, and she laughed, told him how she had come by the car, telling it while she sat with her hands on the wheel, her head against the seat, turned slightly so she could speak to Clyde, doing it that way so she could feel her car.
“Hell, you can fire me now you got a ride.”
Sunset climbed out of the car and closed the door. “Don’t be silly, Clyde. I couldn’t do without you. You’re my right-hand man. And speaking of my left-hand man, where is he?”
Karen came out of the tent. Her hair was combed and she looked way too neat and clean for just getting up. She said, “Whose car?”
“Ours. Courtesy of your grandma.”
“Really?”
“Really.”
“Oh, heavens,” Karen said. “Our very own car.”
Karen came over to look at the car and Sunset went to the water pump and washed the dust off of her sweaty face. She pulled her hair back to do it, and when she turned her head to let the water run over her face, she saw Clyde looking at her, and the way he looked, it was so sweet, and she thought, Oh, hell, don’t
