pokin’?”
“I reckon so.”
“Who you want?”
Billsy thought for a moment. “This time I want a gal with teeth.”
THE DOOR to cabin two swung open to reveal Suzy Kathell, long-waisted and long-faced, fifty years old with orange hair. Swaying in a lime green negligee, she held a drink and a cigarette in one hand and tugged him into the light with the other. “Hello, opportunity,” she said, and laughed like a horse. “How the hell you doin’?”
Ralph stared at her bodice. “All right.”
“How’s your bashful brother?”
“He’s all right, I reckon.”
“Is your mother still kickin’?”
“Naw. She died.”
“She did? When was that?”
“This morning.”
She turned her head at an angle. “Well, damn it to hell, you need some cheerin’ up,” she said, shucking her negligee.
Ralph was near senseless from the moonshine, and it took a while for the woman to get finished with him. After it was over, he said, “Would you come live with me on salary?”
She gave his face a playful slap. “Hell, that almost sounds like a proposal. Or will I have to do Billsy too?” She guffawed at this, blowing smoke in his face.
“Do us or not, we need a woman out at the place.”
Suzy Kathell took a sizzling drag on her Picayune. “Lambchops, I don’t think you can afford help like me. Plus I done tried domestic bliss before and it didn’t work out. I like my fancy drawers and my automobile I can drive anywhere I want. You got a automobile out at your place?”
Ralph admitted that he didn’t even have a road.
She gave his stubbly cheek an enormous pinch. “Sweetie, you straight in the back, you got all your teeth, and you got that scary look that drives dumb women off their nut. You look around good and you’ll have that old cookstove hot in no time. Now if you’ll put your clothes on and excuse me, I got to call my next case.”
THE BROTHERS SAT in the bar and drank from the same jar of shine. “I think my eyeballs is switched sockets,” Billsy said.
Ralph reached over and jerked a button off his brother’s shirt pocket and threw it at him. “Wake up and listen.”
Billsy looked stricken. “Who’s gonna sew that son of a bitch back on?”
“How much is that racehorse worth you took over in Carencro?”
“I got no idea. I think they said a thousand dollars.”
“That LeGrange man paid you to take it?”
“Yeah.”
“Could you grab it back?”
“Hell no, that black devil bit me six times. It was like dancing with a wolverine evertime I fooled with him.”
“But you could just steal it back, and he wouldn’t say nothin’ because it’s stole by him in the first place.”
“Then what, sell it?”
“Yeah. Back to him.”
“That’s crazy. Who’d buy something that was his in the first place?”
“That’s the beauty of it. It never was his.”
Billsy took a sip, hoping the drink would clear his head. “Why not just blackmail the son of a bitch?”
“There’s something about havin’ that physical thing in your own hands. Something you want that somebody else could wind up with. That’s what drives ’em up a wall.”
“Well, I ain’t going after that horse. I couldn’t sleep for a month after that job. Thought I had rabies.”
“Come on.” Ralph batted him on the shoulder, knocking off his fedora.
Billsy bent down to pick it up. “You want to resteal something, you ought to think about that kid.”
The chair under Ralph cracked its knuckles. “I done thought about it. Just don’t know how to make that deal work.”
“That job was good money.”
Ralph bent over the table and took another drink. He spread his arms out onto its surface as though it were a giant wheel he was trying to stop from turning. “That job cost me my dog.”
Billsy straightened up and composed himself, as if he knew he had to be careful. “That was some dog.”
“I took a step, that dog took a step. We’d sit out in the woods, he’d come up and bite the flies out the air if they was buzzin’ too close to my head. He’d eat bees before they got a chance to sting me.”
“He was the only pureblood in the family.”
“Sometimes I’d wake up in the night and look around the bed. If the moon was in the window I’d see old Satan’s big eyes in the room lookin’ my way, kind of the color of pine sap, keeping watch on me.”
“I remember him killin’ that pit bull that come at you.”
“That Cincinnati son of a bitch,” Ralph mumbled into the table. “How many policemen you reckon they got in Cincinnati?”
Billsy squinted over at the barmaid, who was wiping glasses with her shirttail. “I’d bet a thousand. They got paved streets and automobiles. Telephones on ever street corner.”
“Damn telephones. If it wasn’t for them, a man could get away with most anything.”
The barmaid called over. “If he’s about to puke, haul his ass outside.”
Billsy looked around for the voice. “He ain’t sick. He’s my brother.”
She didn’t laugh. “Billsy, you drunker’n a rat ridin’ a ceilin’ fan. If he pops off, you got to clean it up.”
“Aw, he’s all right. Give us another drink.” He felt his shirt pockets. “And we out of cigarettes.”
“Don’t sell ’em.”
“Aw, sweet thing, you don’t want us to smoke in here? Scared it’ll make you smell worse than you do?”
The barmaid spat in a glass and rubbed it hard. “You’ll smoke enough after you’re dead,” she told him.
THE NEXT MORNING they woke up and stumbled around in the sunshine outside the big house trying to detoxify, hungry as refugees, smelly and stunned with headache. Ralph fired a big heater in the house and warmed up water for a bath in the galvanized tub. After, he found some tins of sardines in the cupboard and a block of moldy cheese, and at table his head began to clear.
“Tell you what,” he said to Billsy, who was seated across from him in the kitchen with his shirt off, little horns of hair rising from his shoulders. “You stay here and tend the still and keep an eye on things. I’ll go up the country and check out that kid.”
“Leave me money for some eats.”
“All right. That bundle of shingles we fished out the river you could nail up on the roof. It leaks pretty bad.”
“You never complained before. Said it sounded like a waterfall in your sleep.”
“Well, we never found them shingles before, did we? Everything’s getting slimy with mold and the floor’s warped up.”
“I’ll take a look at it.” Billsy pinched up a sardine out of the tin and ate it, sucking his fingers.
“I’ll pack my glad rags. Them light wool pants we got from that laundry in Scotlandville. White shirts and a
