That’s how them drinkers are, and it ain’t never they fault if’n they tell it. Hear them say: ‘Don’t never trust no person don’t drink,’ and that’s the silliest thing ever did hear. You better off not to trust them drinkers, ’cause drink is for the miserable. ’Course, that the truth, I ought to be swiggin’ me a gallon jug.”
“Thanks, Rosy. I feel better.”
“Good. Yo’ mama and daddy done went to town with Callie to buy her some school clothes. They say they gonna take you tomorrow. I’m gonna read me some of my magazines, you don’t tell.”
“You know I won’t.”
“All right then. I read the same ones over and over ’cause I ain’t been nowhere to buy none. I got some words I run acrost though, and I don’t know ’em. Marked them so you could help me.”
“Let me see them.”
She pulled a couple from her big bag of a purse, put them on the table, carefully opened them to dog-eared pages. She showed me the words that she had underlined with a pencil. They were words I knew. I told her how to say them and what they meant.
She darted to the living room, kicked off her shoes, lay on the couch, and began to read. Nub climbed up next to her feet, pressed himself to her. She wiggled her toes in his fur.
I looked out at the projection booth. Buster was painting it a fresh green color. It occurred to me he might be the one who painted the fence in the first place. If so, I wondered if he had been the artist who made the paintings of the aliens and such.
I watched him work. Unlike Rosy Mae, he seemed packed with endless energy and in need of a way to burn it off. I wanted to ask him about the paintings on the fence, but didn’t dare. Not after the way he acted.
I crutched upstairs, got my Tarzan book, went outside, and sat on the long porch that faced the drive-in lot. Pretty soon I was lost in Tarzan’s world.
I was near the end of the book when a shadow fell over me. I looked up. It was Buster.
“Stan, think you could get that ole fat gal to get me some lemonade or somethin’?”
“I heard that,” Rosy Mae called from the living room. She had the windows up to let in what wind there was, and the screens certainly didn’t block voices.
“I don’t care you heard it,” Buster said. “I care I get some lemonade or somethin’.”
Rosy Mae appeared at the screen door. “I ain’t got no lemonade, nigger.”
“Whatcha got that I’d want?”
“I got some ice tea, but you ain’t gonna come in the house. Mr. Big Stanley wouldn’t like that.”
“Maybe there’s other things you got I’d want. And they ain’t any of Mr. Big Stanley’s business.”
“Well, you only gonna get ice tea.”
Rosy Mae disappeared into the kitchen. She came back with a large fruit jar full of ice cubes and ice tea.
“This is what you drink out of,” she said. “I don’t want your lips on none of Miss Gal’s dishes.”
Buster took the tea, drank a long draught of it. “Ain’t nothin’ like ice tea for coolin’ you, next to good spring or sweet well water that is. I do like good sweet water. You got any cookies, woman?”
“What makes you think I got cookies I’m gonna give you any?”
“You look like a gal wouldn’t want a man to do without. Something sweet and dark . . . like this tea. Maybe somethin’ sweeter . . . Like a cookie.”
“Like a cookie?”
“You hear me.”
Rosy Mae, still behind the screen, grinned. “It gonna be a cookie, on that you can be certain.”
She went away, came back with a fistful of chocolate chips she had baked the day before. “Now you go on back to work, nigger.”
Buster took the cookies, sat in the chair next to me, eating them, drinking the tea. He said, “Let me tell you somethin’, boy. I kinda got my ways, and they ain’t that good. But I want you to know, I don’t mean nothin’ by ’em.”
“Yes, sir.”
“I’m what you call one moody nigger.”
“Yes, sir.”
“I don’t much care someone gets mad at me, but I don’t want to hurt no one I didn’t mean to, and that’s all I’m gonna say on the matter.”
“Yes, sir.”
“You want to talk now, I’ll talk. I done painted most of my buildin’.”
“No, sir. I don’t believe I have anything to say.”
“Suit yourself.”
He drank his tea, crunched his cookies. We sat in the shade of the veranda and watched heat waves run across the drive-in lot.
Finally, I said, “Did you do the artwork on the fence? The space creatures?”
“I did. I oncet met a man told me he seen one of them flyin’ saucers.”
He crunched another cookie.
“Really?”
“Said he seen a little man too. It was in a place called Aurora, Texas. About 1894. He and some other cowboys seen a big flyin’ thing crash. Now’days they call it a flyin’ saucer. He said he saw this little man that was knocked out of it. Told me this when I was workin’ on the 101 Ranch.”
“Didn’t Tom Mix work on that ranch?”
“How you know about an old movie cowboy like that?”
“My dad.”
“He told you about him?”
“Yes, sir. Did you know Tom Mix?”
“No. I seen him oncet or twicet, but I didn’t really know him. I liked that ranch. They pretty well treated a man same as any other if he could do his job. As for Tom Mix, he was a real cowboy, but one impressed me was Bill Pickett, and I did know him right well.”
I looked blank.
“He was a colored man. Invented bull-doggin’, like you see in the rodeo. But Bill done it with his teeth. He’d leap off a horse onto a bull, bite its lip, take it to the ground. Some folks called him the Dusky Demon.”
It occurred to me we had lost sight of what Buster had originally started our conversation with.
“What about the flying saucer?”
“Well, this fella told me this little body he seen was buried in the graveyard there in Aurora. He described it to me, and I painted it on the fence there like he told it. But the green color, well, I did that ’cause later folks started callin’ them little green men. Fella said he seen the critter, told me it was actually kinda gray-lookin’.”
“You believe that man’s story?”
“Naw, but it’s a good story, ain’t it?”
“How come you didn’t paint more things on the fence?”
“Got tired and shy of paint. Just had the green stuff left.”
“Do you paint at home?”
“Just the shack I live in. Painted it last week.”
“You have a family?”
“Had a wife. Way back in the nations. Indian gal. Pretty thing, if a little stout. She come down with smallpox and died. I had another. A colored girl named Talley. We had a daughter. Talley run off with a lighter-skin nigger and took my daughter, Helen, with her. I gave up on marriage after that.”
“Your wife and daughter live here?”
“Mineola. Helen’s got her a husband and family. Man she’s married to treats her good. Works some kind of way for the railroad.”
“You know a lot about her.”
“I check on her. My grandbabies, they eight and four and two. All boys. I ain’t never seen them but from a distance.”
“Maybe you should introduce yourself.”
“Helen be proud to meet me. She thinks I knocked up her mother and run off, but it was her mother who left,
