Dirty Work (16 page)

“Anyway. I don’t mean to digress so much. It’s hard
to get to talking about one thing without talking about another thing. But my brother was in my room. So we couldn’t go in there. But she wanted to know what he was doing in there. We were pulled up out on the road in front of my house. So I said Hell, let’s just go see what he’s up to. I didn’t mean to do it. But I was fucked up. Hell, I’m fucked up right now. I wouldn’t be talking all this shit if I wasn’t. But anyway the next thing I knew I had her by the hand and I was leading her across the yard. It was thundering. A bunch of big old black clouds had rolled up. Lightning was flashing way off. We just eased up to the window. The light was on inside, so I knew he couldn’t see us out there. I just wanted to see what he was doing. I didn’t care for him being in my room. Hell, he’s my little brother, I love him. He didn’t ask for everything to be the way it is.

“This is my brother, now. Cuts pulpwood for a living. Loves to fight better than he loves to eat. Inherited that shit from Daddy, I guess. He was laid up in my BarcoLounger with a joint in one hand and a Budweiser in the other, watching
Easy Rider.
I mean he was laid
back.
We just stood there for a minute and watched him. We could see the TV. We didn’t mess with him. We just watched him for a little bit. He was into it, man, I could tell. But I was so glad to be with her. I was so damn happy standing out there with her, holding her hand, looking in at Max. I wanted to take care of her. Protect her. I had all these feelings that I’d wanted to have for so long.

“I mean, I used to hear guys talk all the time. Oh hell,
I fucked so and so. I could never understand how they could tell that shit. I mean, if a girl is going to share something that intimate with you, it’d take an asshole to go out and tell the whole world about it. I whipped a guy bad over that shit one time. There was a girl who used to go to school with us, her name was Mary Barry. Don’t laugh, now. She had great big titties and great big glasses. Like Coke bottles. She couldn’t even hardly see her way around. I mean she had a bad eye problem. Damn, man. This is going way back. Do you want to hear this shit? All right. Well, Mary, now, she was sweet. Had them big humongus jugs. Couldn’t see a thing. Everybody’d help her with her papers and stuff. I used to help her. I was trying to help her on a biology test one day and the teacher said I was cheating on the son of a bitch and gave me a zero. So Mary felt bad, you know, because I got a zero from trying to help her. And she was like smart as hell, she just couldn’t see anything. And there was this bastard named Charles Chilton who started to school with us in the second semester of the tenth grade. His daddy was the plant supervisor at the factory. And most everybody else’s daddy worked at the plant. So he thought he was the supervisor of the school, too. There was a bunch of people wanted to whip his ass, it wasn’t just me. He had all these button-down collars and penny loafers and shit. He had a car. Hell, didn’t none of us have a car. We’d just have to hitch a ride. But that bastard started messing around with Mary Barry. I mean, she was kind of plain, you know? But she had this great body. And I think she’d
had a hard life, she’d been through a divorce with her mama and daddy, and she was sweet. Hell. She used to come over to our house and study with me. Before that bastard got there.

“Damn. Grade school stuff. High school stuff. You lose all these people.

“He had a car, see. A brand new Mustang. He could pick up anybody he wanted to. This was in 1965 or some shit, way back there. Well. We were all down at the Kream Kup one night and saw Mary with this guy. And she was just latching onto him, man, oh it hurt me. I wanted to just kill his ass right there. But I guess you’re scared of money and power at first. Everybody hated his ass. We watched them when they left out. I stood out there for I don’t know how long, man, just thinking about Mary. About how that son of a bitch was probably going to take her off somewhere and fuck her.

“And that’s what he did. Took her off out in the woods somewhere and fucked her. Monday morning he was telling everybody about it. Aw yeah. He told it so much it got back to Mary. I mean her friends were asking her, Did you really do that with him? Something like that, back then, for us, was big time. That was almost unbelievable. People we knew actually fucking. We just couldn’t hardly get over it.

“Yeah. He had to spread it all over the whole school. What he’d done to Mary. I heard the first little rumor of it and it made me sick to my stomach. And I saw her going down the hall, crying, bent over, like she was toting
some weight. She knew everybody was talking about her. I tried to talk to her and she wouldn’t talk. And I knew then that it was actually true, that he’d actually fucked her. I just couldn’t hardly believe it. Sweet little Mary Barry? Had actually opened her legs and let somebody put his dick in her? And of all people, that creep? It just liked to killed me.

“He was blowing his shit in the lunchroom about two days later, about how he’d fucked her. And I guess I just went crazy. I was sitting right across the table from him. And he started talking about all the pussy he’d been getting lately. I remember what he had on his plate. Mashed potatoes and peas, and fried chicken. Son of a bitch. I pushed his face right down in those peas and mashed potatoes. Bastard knew better than to talk about her like that. And he thought he was gonna box when he got up. Had those mashed potatoes and peas all over his face. I just totally detested the son of a bitch. Because of Mary. What he’d done to her. God, she was so sweet.

“They finally had to pull me off of him. They liked to kicked me out of school over it. That was two years before I enlisted, I think.

“There’s some sorry motherfuckers in the world, Braiden. They’re just laying out there waiting. I ain’t no angel myself. But damn I don’t know why people don’t know how to act. I’m too much of a hothead anyway. I’ve always been bad about doing something before I thought about it.

“But I didn’t get mad at Max for being in my room. Hell, it was okay. I knew he had a lot of stuff on his mind and
didn’t know what to do. I mean about Mama and all. So we just left him in there. He never even knew we’d been there. We just left. Went riding around.

“I started telling her about my mother and my brother, about how I couldn’t talk to them. I know they can’t stand the way I am, but they act like it’s worse on them than it is on me. Hell, that’s crazy. I mean, how do they think
I
feel? I’m the one that’s got to wear it around. That’s the main reason I started just staying in my room. They wanted me to go back to the hospital and have some more work done on my face. What they really wanted was for me to have that operation. But the doctors never could decide what they wanted to do. And I didn’t want to do it anyway. I never wanted to be in a hospital again. I know in a way I’m lucky. At least I can still see and hear, I’ve got my legs and arms, I can walk and talk and get around. You’d swap places with me, wouldn’t you? Right.

“They didn’t know what to say when they first saw me. I don’t know but that it might have been harder on Daddy than anybody. He knew there wasn’t anything he could say that would make me feel better. So he didn’t say anything. He just started drinking worse. And he was already drinking bad enough. I was no teetotaler either. But we never drank together. We never swapped any war stories. You’d think we would have, but we didn’t. Most of the stuff I heard him tell was long ago. He didn’t want to talk about his shit, and I didn’t want to talk about mine. I never even saw the guys I was with the day I got hit again. I wrote letters to some of them. There was one black guy I
knew from Detroit. Tommy Joiner. Little bitty guy. Could box like a motherfucker. He’d been boxing all his life and got drafted. Don’t think the marines can’t draft you. They can. In wartime they can. He was out of the Kronk gym, where Hearns came from. And all he thought about was getting out and turning pro. He’d won over sixty amateur bouts, a lightweight. They put a little more weight on him at Parris Island. I think he could have made it as a pro. He had a hell of a left hook. And fast, God he was fast. I remember the first time I saw him. He was straight, now, he was all God and country. Tried to keep his brass shined and his boots clean. He was standing in line in front of me one day, one morning, they were frying eggs for us. We hadn’t had a fried egg in a while. This guy behind him was telling him to hurry up, hurry up, like Tommy was holding the line up. Hell, Tommy was just waiting on his eggs like everybody else. We had our little mess kits and everything. This sumbitch kept on talking his shit. And the cooks were going as fast as they could, had about fifty eggs going at one time. They were hollering out what did you want, sunny-side-up or over-easy or what. Tommy hollered out he wanted him three over-easy. This guy told him to hurry up again, he was holding the whole line up. Old Tommy just turned around and looked at him. But the guy just kept on. Finally he said something about goddamn choicey niggers. Tommy didn’t even know me. He just leaned around the guy and said, How about holding this for me? Handed me his mess kit and his fork. He hit that son of a bitch and dropped him like he was shot. I
stepped out of the way and let him fall. He knocked over about three tables, a bunch of hash browns fell on the ground and all. Anyway they busted Tommy down to private because the guy he hit was a corporal. He was just a PFC. And he wouldn’t start any shit with anybody. He could damn sure finish it, though.

“He was the one they usually sent down in the tunnels. I was lucky. I was too big to get down in them. Whenever we’d find one, we’d stop and they’d get Tommy to go down. The lieutenant would let him have his pistol. Most of the time there was nobody home. But they’d leave little greetings and stuff for whoever went down. They’d wire a grenade to go off in your face or something like that. Or if they were going to leave it, dig a punji pit and cover it up. Shit on them sticks. It gave me nightmares thinking about going down in one. He wasn’t scared, though. He wouldn’t say anything about it. He’d just strip off his gear and take the forty-five and head on down. Lots of days nothing happened. You couldn’t ever tell where the other openings were for sure and you had to watch in case somebody popped up shooting. Just like that one you were talking about. Some would come up in a hootch, some would be out in the edge of a field. Some days we’d hear that forty-five pop down there in the ground. Tommy’d finally come up and the lieutenant would say, Anybody home? Tommy’d just grin. Give him his pistol back. They was home but they wasn’t expecting company, he’d say.

“I was telling her all this stuff while we were riding around. We were drinking beer. It was nice. But she asked
me whatever happened to Tommy and I had to tell her. He got killed in a tunnel, finally. That’s what I heard back when I wrote. A guy named Miller answered my letter. He said they’d been out on a patrol while I was in the hospital and found a tunnel. They stopped and Tommy went down. And something blew in just a second. They waited a while and let the smoke clear and then sent somebody else in. He’d crawled over a wire just inside the entrance that was rigged to a grenade. They had to gather him up and ship him home to his mama. He’s in the picture. Putting me on the helicopter. Tommy.

“You about to go to sleep? Oh. You were so quiet I thought maybe you were asleep. Hell, I’m just talking. Just about drunk.

“I didn’t want to bore you. I know I’m talking too much. I talked to Beth for a long time. I told her everything.

“We didn’t want to run Max out, he looked like he was having a good time. He has to put up with Mama so much. And she wanted to go park somewhere, so hell, I told her Let’s pull off down in Moore Creek. So we got back in the car and drove down there, pulled off in there and stopped. It was dark as hell. Just barely could see her next to me. We kissed a little was all. Nothing heavy. We were still talking. Hell, I figured we had all night.

“She wanted to know some more about my daddy. And I didn’t know how much to tell her. He was the kind of person who wouldn’t take any shit off anybody. I mean none. If you said something smart to him you’d better be ready to whip his ass or have yours whipped one. Cause
that’s all there was to it. If you popped off to him you were fixing to fight. His temper got him into trouble. That and his drinking.

“See, he killed a guy when I was little. And he stayed in the pen five or six years for that. And he was on probation for several years after that. He didn’t have enough money to start back farming full time. He’d just get little jobs wherever he could. People don’t forget it when you kill somebody. So things were kind of rough for us. I mean one thing just leads to another. We were poor as hell, man, I’m not lying to you. We had to work at whatever we could. And one thing he was good at was picking cotton. He’d been picking it all his life. They picked it every year down at Parchman. He was one of the top field hands down there. And he’d hire out every fall to pick for folks around home. That was one job he could get because he was so fast.

“So we were working for this man one year. Daddy’d been out of the pen for a few years, I guess. And I could pick a pretty good bit myself so I went with him.

“There’d been a few times when he’d been in jail for fighting. They’d done told him if he didn’t straighten his ass up they were going to send him back to Parchman for a while. And hell, he’d try. Mama would sit him down and talk to him. And he’d go along good for a while. Then he’d get ahold of a little money. He’d go buy groceries and then he’d buy a bottle with what was left. Then the law would drive out to the house and tell Mama they had him in jail again. That was the way things were going then.

“This guy we were working for, Daddy didn’t much like him. I don’t know what there was between them. It rubbed him the wrong way to have to work for him, but we needed the money so he went on and did it. And you just didn’t see many white people picking cotton. Most of them were black. People moved around then, picked cotton wherever they needed them.

“So we were working for this guy. His name was Norris. I guess he was about the same age as Daddy. Maybe a little older. He’s dead now. Turned a tractor over on him snaking logs out a couple of years ago. He’s the one who got Daddy sent back to the pen.