Sykes reached into his briefcase and pulled out a small notepad, flipping through several pages. He finally looked up with his eyes and said, “This little ledger was in Si Garrett’s briefcase. Does this look like your handwriting?”
9
REUBEN WALKED BACK through the kitchen screen door carrying a sack of groceries, a carton of Lucky Strikes, and a bottle of Miller beer. His eyes were bloodshot, and his skin glowed with a pasty whiteness, slick from the alcohol, as he slipped by Billy and landed everything on the old wooden counter. Billy had some trinkets he’d found out by the creek laid out on the table, some arrowheads, pieces of old china, a rusted horse bridle, and when the beer landed they all rattled on the planks.
“Where the hell you been?” he asked.
“I’ve been here.”
“Since when?”
“Since two days ago.”
“Where were you before that?”
Billy shrugged. “With Mario.”
“You know that kid’s Italian.”
“I do.”
He nodded and leaned back against the stove. He reached for a box of kitchen matches and lit a cigarette. “Mario, huh?” He squinted those droopy, sad eyes at Billy and said: “I heard you’d shacked up with some whore.”
The words sank like a knife in the gut, and Billy stood and scraped the trinkets he’d collected back into a Hav- a-Tampa cigar box filled with more arrowheads, old bullets, and cracked pieces of china. Last year, he’d found an old bayonet from the Civil War out by the well.
“I don’t want you going around her again. Bert Fuller is one mean sonofabitch. He’d just soon kill you as look at you.”
Billy walked by him and went to his room, locking the door. He had an old baseball mitt under his bed, and as he sat down on his bunk he fired the ball into the sweet pocket over and over until he heard Reuben try the handle. Then Reuben started to bang hard and tell him to open up or he was going to whip his ass, which Billy knew was a goddamn lie.
He stood and unlatched the door and sat back down on the metal bed. The wallpaper was pink and flowered, and drooped and peeled from the summer heat. He looked at his father and waved a fly away from his face.
“Who’s the girl?”
He didn’t say anything.
Billy could smell his breath. It was sharp and smelled like gin and cigarettes, and as he took another sip of beer he tousled his son’s hair – like he did when he didn’t want to talk but only to let him know he was still a kid – and left his room with the door wide open.
Billy stayed there for a while, dropping the mitt and examining the arrowheads and rusted old bits. He studied their grooves and points and thought about them being buried down in the mud for so damn long, and wondered what else was hidden by the creek.
He fell asleep like that until the shadows crept up on the walls and it became a late-summer night and he could hear the whistles and cracks from the back field. At first, he thought Reuben was firing his gun, or someone had come for him. He thought a lot about Johnnie Benefield coming over, and knew if he saw him that he wanted to kill that bastard. Billy thought of the ways. With a rusty knife and with a gun. He thought a lot about knocking Johnnie in the head and old crotch with a Louisville Slugger.
But as he pulled away the sad, yellowed curtains of their old house, he spotted Reuben deep in a cornfield that he hadn’t planted since his father died. He sat on his ass, a hunched figure like a sullen statue, and Billy walked outside, catching some fresh air from the boxed heat.
There was a sizzle and some sparks and a loud whistle and boom. He saw Reuben smoke and stumble from where he sat and affix another bottle rocket into the empty Miller beer.
“Where you get those?” Billy asked behind him.
“Some lady give ’em to me.”
He stood behind his father, looking at his back, the two-tone blue-and-black shirt and wide stance of his legs and cowboy boots. His hair was oiled and pomaded like boys in high school, and although Billy couldn’t see his face he watched as smoke leaked up above Reuben’s head. Then Reuben reached over and touched his cigarette to another bottle rocket.
One started to fizz and smoke without ever leaving the beer bottle, and Reuben laughed and tripped on one knee before pushing Billy a good three feet away as it hissed and burned out. A dud.
“Well, goddamn.”
“I didn’t mean nothin’ about being gone,” Billy said.
“That’s all right,” he said. “I ain’t gonna beat you or nothin’. I ever lay one hand on you? Hell, no, I haven’t. I’ve had enough goddamn beatings from my daddy for ten generations. I ever tell you about this strop he had called the licorice stick?”
“Yes, sir.” Billy had seen the rotting, hard piece of leather hanging from a rusted nail in the smokehouse. He’d never understood why his father kept it there like some kind of trophy.
“I think the sonofabitch enjoyed it. Use to take me and my brother to the shed out yonder.”
“What’d you get at the store?”
“Be careful with those whores,” he said, ignoring the question and getting to his feet, dusting the dirt off his legs. “You know when I was your age, I was so horny I would’ve screwed a snake.”
Billy didn’t say anything.
“Pussy is good, son,” Reuben said. “But it can just about eat a man alive.”
His father reached into his pocket and pulled out a thick Case folding knife and handed it to him. “This was your granddaddy’s. Stick that in your cigar box.”
Billy opened the blade, the unoiled metal hard to pry with a thumbnail but finally coming loose and gleaming back the reflection of his eyes.
Reuben stayed there in the field for a while, and Billy walked back past the empty laundry line and dead peach trees and a rusting, tireless car. And he checked in the grocery bag, placing the bacon and eggs in the icebox and turning on their radio to listen to the late-night radio show out of Birmingham that played “Louisiana Hayride,” featuring Hank Snow and some kid from Memphis named Elvis.
Before he went to bed, the boy looked back out the kitchen window for Reuben but instead saw a massive, crackling fire from one of the old sheds. It was his grandfather’s smokehouse, and the fire inside had grown so hot the red paint crackled and flaked like a snake’s scales. He sprinted down and found Reuben, who didn’t seem fazed at all. He just stood there drinking, two-tone shirt open, with his face and chest shiny from the summertime fire.
He stepped back and wiped his face, black smudges crossed under his eyes and his chin. He laughed at himself.
Billy’s hands and voice shook as he screamed at him, telling him it was gonna burn down if they didn’t get some water. But he was invisible to his father.
“I always hated that fucking place,” Reuben said and threw his beer bottle at the building.
And he tripped and wandered back to the house, grabbed the keys to his baby blue Buick, and sped off into the Alabama night.
THAT SAME NIGHT, JOHN PATTERSON AND I CLOSED DOWN the Elite Cafe. We drank coffee down to the dregs and ate lemon icebox pie, having met right after dinner with our families. We smoked cigarettes and talked little except when joined by the cook, Ross Gibson, who’d just scraped off the grill and shut down. Gibson was an old, wiry man with gray hair in his ears and a grease-splattered apron and white T-shirt. He smoked a lot, tired
