He shook his head. Remembered how he’d stood looking through the parted drapes, chickens noisy behind the house, glad his mother didn’t have to be here for this. It had crossed his mind he wouldn’t use the telephone, even if they tried to come in.
“It was one of em,” he said, “got out with a baseball bat.”
“Shit.”
“Stood there awhile. Big fellow.”
“What’d he do?”
“His friends was yelling for me to come out.” Calling him
“Fuck.”
“Then my windshield.”
“Ain’t you got a gun?”
Larry shook his head and Wallace sat there with his mouth open, as if he were unable to fathom gunlessness. “You ought to ride out to Wal-Mart, get you one of them single-shot twelve gauges they got on sale. Bout a buck eighty-nine. I could go with you.” He sipped his beer. “What they do then? Them fellows?”
“Nothing. Left.”
He didn’t tell Wallace the rest, that he hadn’t even minded, once they’d gone. Fixing the light? The windshield? It gave him something to do the next day. When he drove up to the parts house, the windshield like a net hanging in, Johnson behind the counter took his order and said, “Ain’t that your model Ford?” and Larry said it was and Johnson raised his eyebrows and went to the back, helped him carry the windshield wrapped in its brown paper to the bed of Larry’s truck without a word, just stared at the truck that looked like, well, somebody had taken a baseball bat to it.
“Shit,” Wallace said, “bunch of rednecks tried that with me? I’d go out there with my aught six. Hey.”
“What?”
“How come you ain’t got a dog?”
“I’m allergic.”
“I got me a good one. Part pit bull, part Chow? Name John Wayne Gacy? You ain’t never seen a better watchdog. Hates niggers worse than anything.”
“How come?”
“Just smart I guess. One ever comes up in the yard, he bout goes crazy. You ever want to borry him, say the word. We can stake him out here and I dare anybody to come messing with you.”
“That’s all right. It ain’t the black folks that messes with me.”
Wallace finished his beer and crinkled the can and put it in the bag and got another. He sat awhile, drinking, smoking, then started talking about the dogs he’d had before John Wayne Gacy. “One was a little old white bitch named Trixie that got heartworms? Used to walk over the floor and just stop and stiffen up and fall over and lay there on her side awhile with her feet poking out.” He said it was funny as hell until the time she didn’t get back up. Another dog, big brown shaggy one called Pal, some collie somewhere back in his family tree, he was a car chaser, got flattened to a smear by a log truck. Well, Wallace had had, let’s see, five or six dogs killed on the road. Three shot, one by himself (biter), one caught in a trap, one that drunk antifreeze, another one bit by a cottonmouth. “Neck swoll up like a damn goiter.”
“Where’d they all come from?”
“Strays, most of em.” Wallace opened another beer. “Plus I had a slutty ole bitch named Georgia Pineapple? She had puppies bout twice a year so we had a endless stream. Till she died.”
Larry didn’t want to ask.
“Train hit her,” Wallace said. “Anyhow, she had this one litter up under the house one time? We had a busted gas line and didn’t know it, and that dog, she’d lay down there by that leak when it got hot and them damn pups was born by the pipe. Come out all deformed.” He was laughing. “One didn’t have no eyes. Nother one missing its tail. One had its paws all fucked up.”
Larry was shaking his head. “What’d you do with em?”
“Momma said get rid of em so I thew em in a pond. After that I got John Wayne Gacy off a Mexican used to fight him. Come he had such a temper. He used to go out at night and catch armadillos and brang em in the yard, sometimes be two, three dead ones laying there in the morning. Just tore all to hell and back, look like old leather purses strung out over the dirt. Come Momma makes me keep him tied up. That’s something else we got in common, me and John Wayne Gacy.”
“What?”
“I can’t stand a damn armadillo. One of Momma’s boyfriends, pipefitter, he used to call em armored dildos. When I was a boy we used to catch em. Get em by the tail and swing em around. Punt em like footballs. Drown em. Now they say a armored dildo’ll give you leprosy.”
“Wallace.” Larry ready to change the subject. “Tell me the truth.”
“Long as I don’t incriminate myself.”
“You never worked for DIRECTV, did you?”
He grinned and drained the last of his last beer. “Okay, you got me. Truth is, I borrowed that van from Momma’s boyfriend. He’s the one installs them dishes. Give us ours for free. All the pay-per-view channels and ever thing.”
“Did he know you borrowed it?”
“Hell no. Him and Momma went over to the dog track. He ever finds out I took it, be hell to pay, plus interest. Now speaking of dogs, that’s a badass one there,” Wallace said. “A damn greyhound? Fast as hell. You can get one after they retire it from racing? Keep em for pets? But you better be careful. You got a toddler around and it goes running by? That goddamn greyhound’ll chase it down like it’s that little electric rabbit and tear it apart.”
“How come you took the van? Why not just ride your four-wheeler?”
“Hell, man with your rep? I didn’t know if you might not cut me up and bury me out in the woods.” He was smiling. “Naw, I just figured it’d be a good way to, you know…”
“Test the water?”
“Yeah.”
They sat awhile longer. Wallace crinkled his can and put it in the bag with the others. “You sure you ain’t got nothing to drank?”
“Just a Coke.”
“Well. I best get going, then. Once I start dranking, I don’t like to stop.”
He stood, leaning on the post. “You know, Larry, if you want one, I can probably get my momma’s boyfriend to run out here, put you a dish up. Long as you promise not to say I was in his truck.”
“That’s all right.”
“Or I could bring John Wayne Gacy by. Tie him to your post here.”
“Preciate it, no.”
“YOU EVER BEEN MARRIED?” Wallace asked, his next visit.
He said he hadn’t.
“Got you a girl?”
“No.”
“What you do when the ole pecker gets ready?” He made a tight fist and held it up. “You ain’t one of them forty-year-old virgins, are you?”
“No,” Larry said. “I’m forty-one.”
Wallace laughed like it was the funniest thing he’d ever heard, smoke shooting from his nose and mouth.
“Hell,” he said, once he’d caught his breath. “I’m single, too. But it’s a ole gal over in Fulsom? I see her once in a while. Evelyn. One a them on-again, off-again situations.
“But I go up to Dentonville and paint houses with my uncle sometimes. It’s a nigger girl over there I’ll visit now and then. She’s a crackhead and she’ll suck you dry for twenty bucks, fuck your eyes crossed for thirty. Name’s Wanda something another. You drive, we can go over yonder, bust your cherry.”
“Preciate it, no.”
“That’s where I been.”
