on the far side of the street and squatted beside the creepers and considered their situation.
Wilson got in Buddy’s back pocket and pulled the smokes out and found that though the package was damp from the water, a couple of cigarettes were dry enough to smoke. He gave one to Jake and took the other for himself. He got a match from Buddy’s shirt pocket and struck it on a creeper, but it was too damp to light.
“Here,” Jake said, and produced a lighter. “I stole this from my old man in case I ever got any cigarettes. It works most of the time.” Jake clicked it repeatedly and finally it sparked well enough to light. They lit up.
“We knock on the door, his mom is gonna be mad,” Jake said. “Us bringing home Buddy and an alligator, and Buddy wearing them shoes.”
“Yeah,” Wilson said. “You know, she don’t know he went off with us. We could put him in the yard. Maybe she’ll think the gator attacked him there.”
“What for,” Jake said, “them shoes? He recognized his aunt or something?” He began laughing at his own joke, but if Wilson got it he didn’t give a sign. He seemed to be thinking. Jake quit laughing, scratched his head and looked off down the street. He tried to smoke his cigarette in a manful manner.
“Gators come up in yards and eat dogs now and then,” Wilson said after a long silence. “We could leave him, and if his mama don’t believe a gator jumped him, that’ll be all right. The figuring of it will be a town mystery. Nobody would ever know what happened. Those niggers won’t be talking. And if they do, they don’t know us from anybody else anyway. We all look alike to them.”
“I was Buddy,” Jake said, “that’s the way I’d want it if I had a couple friends involved.”
“Yeah, well,” Wilson said, “I don’t know I really liked him so much.”
Jake thought about that. “He was all right. I bet he wasn’t going to get that Chevy though.”
“If he did,” Wilson said, “there wouldn’t have been a motor in it, I can promise you that. And I bet he never got any pussy neither.”
They pulled the creepers across the road and tipped gator and Buddy onto the ground in front of the porch steps.
“That’ll have to do,” Wilson whispered.
Wilson crept up on the porch and over to the window, looked through a crack in the curtain and into the living room. Buddy’s sister lay on the couch asleep, her mouth open, her huge belly bobbing up and down as she breathed. A half-destroyed bag of Cheetos lay beside the couch. The TV light flickered over her like saintly fire.
Jake came up on the porch and took a look.
“Maybe if she lost some pounds and fixed her hair different,” he said.
“Maybe if she was somebody else,” Wilson said.
They sat on the porch steps in the dark and finished smoking their cigarettes, watching the faint glow of the television through the curtain, listening to the tinny sound of a late night talk show.
When Jake finished his smoke, he pulled the alligator shoes off Buddy and checked them against the soles of his own shoes. “I think these dudes will fit me. We can’t leave ‘em on him. His mama sees them, she might not consent to bury him.”
He and Wilson left out of there then, pulling the creepers after them.
Not far down the road, they pushed the creepers off in a ditch and continued, Jake carrying the shoes under his arm. “These are all right,” he said. “I might can get some pussy wearing these kind of shoes. My mama don’t care if I wear things like this.”
“Hell, she don’t care if you cut your head off,” Wilson said.
“That’s the way I see it,” Jake said.
Fish Night
It was a bleached-bone afternoon with a cloudless sky and a monstrous sun.
The air trembled like a mass of gelatinous ectoplasm. No wind blew.
Through the swelter came a worn, black Plymouth, coughing and belching white smoke from beneath its hood. It wheezed twice, backfired loudly, died by the side of the road.
The driver got out and went around to the hood. He was a man in the hard winter years of life, with dead, brown hair and a heavy belly riding his hips. His shirt was open to the navel, the sleeves rolled up past his elbows. The hair on his chest and arms was gray.
A younger man climbed out on the passenger side, went around front too. Yellow sweat-explosions stained the pits of his white shirt. An unfastened, striped tie was draped over his neck like a pet snake that had died in its sleep.
“Well?” the younger man asked.
The old man said nothing. He opened the hood. A calliope note of steam blew out from the radiator in a white puff, rose to the sky, turned clear.
“Damn,” the old man said, and he kicked the bumper of the Plymouth as if he were kicking a foe in the teeth. He got little satisfaction out of the action, just a nasty scuff on his brown wingtip and a jar to his ankle that hurt like hell.
“Well?” the young man repeated.
“Well what? What do you think? Dead as the can-opener trade this week. Deader. The radiator’s chickenpocked with holes.”
“Maybe someone will come by and give us a hand.”
“Sure.”
“A ride anyway.”
“Keep thinking that, college boy.”
“Someone is bound to come along,” the young man said.
“Maybe. Maybe not. Who else takes these cutoffs? The main highway,
that’s where everyone is. Not this little no-account shortcut.” He finished by glaring at the young man.
“I didn’t make you take it,” the young man snapped. “It was on the map. I told you about it, that’s all. You chose it. You’re the one that decided to take it. It’s not my fault. Besides, who’d have expected the car to die?”
“I did tell you to check the water in the radiator, didn’t I? Wasn’t that back as far as El Paso?”
“I checked. It had water then. I tell you, it’s not my fault. You’re the one that’s done all the Arizona driving.”
“Yeah, yeah,” the old man said, as if this were something he didn’t want to hear. He turned to look up the highway.
No cars. No trucks. Just heat waves and miles of empty concrete in sight.
They seated themselves on the hot ground with their backs to the car. That way it provided some shade — but not much. They sipped on a jug of lukewarm water from the Plymouth and spoke little until the sun fell down. By then they had both mellowed a bit. The heat had vacated the sands and the desert chill had settled in. Where the warmth had made the pair snappy, the cold drew them together.
The old man buttoned his shirt and rolled down his sleeves while the young man rummaged a sweater out of the back seat. He put the sweater on, sat back down. “I’m sorry about this,” he said suddenly.
“Wasn’t your fault. Wasn’t anyone’s fault. I just get to yelling sometime, taking out the can-opener trade on everything but the can openers and myself. The days of the door-to-door salesman are gone, son.”
“And I thought I was going to have an easy summer job,” the young man said.
The old man laughed. “Bet you did. They talk a good line, don’t they?”
“I’ll say!”
“Make it sound like found money, but there ain’t no found money, boy. Ain’t nothing simple in this world. The company is the only one ever makes any money. We just get tireder and older with more holes in our shoes. If I had any sense I’d have quit years ago. All you got to make is this summer —”
“Maybe not that long.”
“Well, this is all I know. Just town after town, motel after motel, house after house, looking at people through screen wire while they shake their heads No. Even the cockroaches at the sleazy motels begin to look like little
