Dirty Work (7 page)

He didn’t want us to meet him in town when he came home from the pen the first time. He didn’t want our reunion to be held in a bus station. He caught the bus but when he got to town he got a taxi to bring him home. I think Mama was glad of that. But Max didn’t know what to do. Didn’t know how to act. Daddy kept wanting him to sit in his lap, and he kept going, but after a while he’d get down. He wouldn’t hardly open his mouth. Finally what he did was sit down on the floor and put his arm around Daddy’s ankle. Just sat there holding his ankle.

I guess Max was five or six when he came home. I was eleven or twelve.

He was drunk when he killed that guy. I wish he hadn’t done it. Maybe things would have been different. Or better.

I guess he was drunk on every major fuckup he made. Except for the last one. And it wasn’t even his fault.

T
alk a minute then he’d hush a minute. Talk a minute then hush a minute. Like he wasn’t here but half the time. I started to ask him one time if he knowed his face was all scratched up. What I figured, he’d done been in a car wreck. Was how come they had him in here, probably, too, was probably treating him for the car wreck.

But it look like they wouldn’t let him be driving if he was gonna pass out. Don’t look like they’d even let him have a license. I wouldn’t want to be meeting somebody coming down the road passed out. Might run over you.

Was about to get the hunger on me. They come in then down at the far end of the ward. I asked him was he gonna
eat anything but he just shook his head. He was steady sucking that beer. Finished that one and put it under his pillow. Which I ain’t got nothing against a man drinking in the morning if he want to.

Have to lay here every morning and watch them give everybody else their breakfast before they give me mine. Don’t take long, though. Ain’t many left. So many done passed away. Only new ones we had in a while was from Beirut. Had one from Grenada but he went home, too. Home to his Lord.

Talked to him some. Little old private. Course they give him some medals one time and made him a meritorious promotion to lance corporal. Jumped him two grades all at once. He was machinegunned too. Only he was shot all through the body. Kept having leaks inside of him. They’d sew up one and it would last a while and then another one would bust and they’d rush him down to surgery and sew it up. He hovered between life and death for three weeks before they brought him up here. He said his insides was about like a old bicycle innertube. Shit blood all the time. They kept him high was the only way he could stand it. Would come over here and pull his wheelchair up beside my bed and do card tricks. And would juggle, too. He come over here one night and we got to drinking beer and he got about half drunk and started juggling three Budweiser bottles and kept them going a while. He was from Port Angeles, Washington, and he would have been twenty if he’d lived one more day. Lance Corporal John Davis Williams, USMC. Semper fi, bro.

They come on down with my breakfast. Every morning I have me three over easy with two sausage patties and two strips of bacon and one piece of country ham, and two orders of homefries with just a little ketchup and two glasses of milk and one OJ. Don’t let em try to give me no coffee. Done been burnt too many times. Could probably let it cool off and sip it with a straw. But they ain’t got time for that shit.

I waited until they fed me and then I told him to go on and tell me what he was fixing to tell me cause it wasn’t gonna be long before they come in here to mop the floor and stuff and change sheets.

I told him I knew he was scared and everything and it was a strange place for him to wake up in but everything would be all right and would be even more all right when dark come. I told him to talk to me. I told him I knew where he was coming from.

“W
ell, hell. I might as well. Her name’s Beth. It was raining, I know that. It just had started. I’ll just tell you what happened from the start. My daddy died about six months ago. I think I told you we used to farm. I started picking cotton when I was six years old. Back in the old days. You remember them old days? Back when they paid two cents a pound? Hell, you know how it was, you’re from down there in the Delta. It’s flat, ain’t it? We’re up in the hills. It’s a lot different, I guess. The ground ain’t as good. We haven’t got two hundred million years of dinosaur shit up there.

“I don’t usually talk this much. I usually don’t have
anybody to talk to. I’ve got a lot of books. I’m a big reader. Plus I like movies. That’s about all I do, read and watch movies. When I’m not passed out.

“He was pretty bad to drink. Hell, I’m pretty bad to drink myself. That’s probably why I’m in here, drinking too much. I have these seizures more often if I’m drinking. I can’t hardly get through it straight, though.”

I thought for a while they might send me down to prison and I remembered wondering if they’d let me stay in the same cell with him. I mean for stabbing Matt Monroe. I kept wondering if they’d have a uniform with stripes in my size.

Finally they didn’t do anything to me. Matt didn’t come close to dying or anything. By about an inch. I guess if I’d killed him they’d have had to do something with me, but I don’t know what. I guess they could have waited until I got grown and then sent me off.

But even with the way things happened, I imagine my mama would have shot the first son of a bitch who stepped in our yard to get me.

“Hell, they’ve been talking about maybe doing an operation on me for a long time. I don’t know how many times I’ve passed out. A bunch. At one time I kept up with it. I had a logbook. How long I stayed awake, what time I passed out, what time I woke up. What were the circumstances when I passed out. But it got to be too much trouble. I started seeing how much time I was losing. All
that did was just depress me. I was depressed enough already. So I just quit doing it.

“It’s best to just not think about it. I mean it doesn’t do any good. Hell, I’m happy enough. Nobody messes with me. Of course some people are scared of me. Little kids especially. I guess I hate that worse than anything. I don’t get out much in the daytime. Usually just at night. I don’t see my mother and my brother too much. I don’t hide from them. I’m not hiding from them. I’m just staying in my room.”

She’s on a big death kick. Has been ever since Daddy died. Wants to join him. She lays in her room every night and prays to die. She thinks if she prays hard enough, God’ll let her die. Or make her die. You can’t talk any sense to her. So finally I just quit. I just started staying in my room all the time. Max can’t do anything with her. And when he gets off from work he doesn’t want to listen to that shit. You can’t blame him. It’s a wonder he hasn’t moved out. Both of us are probably stopping him from finding him a woman to marry and moving out and starting a family of his own.

Asking God to take her. How does anybody even know what God is? Other than love. I told her one time to look at it like this: Say you live off in the woods somewhere, like this tribe they found a while back. And you live a pretty good life, don’t murder or rape anybody, and then die. And you’ve never had a chance to receive the word of God just because the missionaries never could find you.
Do you think God is going to send you to hell just because you were never allowed the opportunity to read a Bible? I said Hell, what if you couldn’t even read? She didn’t know how to answer that.

“Daddy started drinking a lot worse after I came back in the shape I’m in. We lost our place. He’d got us to where we had over two hundred acres. Now we’ve got two. He got deeper and deeper in debt. They finally foreclosed on him. It’s just a bunch of shit.”

H
e closed up on me again. Just turned his head away. Just get to going good and he’d hush. Eyes would roll away from me and you could tell he was thinking about something else.

It didn’t matter. Maybe he just didn’t want to talk while they was mopping the floor and all. We didn’t talk then. Aw I spoke to Hazel and them while they was cleaning up and changing bed sheets and all but he wouldn’t let them change his. Said he hadn’t been on them long enough to need changing.

I didn’t know what was the matter with him. But finally they left and he started talking again. After he got him another beer he did.

“I
don’t know how many nights ago this was now. I don’t know how long I’ve been out. But I was in there in my room trying to read. The power was off and it was so hot you couldn’t stand to stay in there. Couldn’t even run the fan without the generator, and I was out of gas.

“I’ve got one of these little Honda generators. The power goes off so much, I bought one. I ran me a pipe through the wall to take the exhaust outside. I got tired of watching a movie and having the power go off. It’s pretty neat. You can hook your TV and your VCR into one outlet and the little sumbitch’ll just sit there and hum. Tell TVA to get fucked.

“Well, she was in there in her room, moaning and all. Praying to die. And Max came in. He goes into her room every night to check on her. And I mean she was just screaming and moaning and praying God to die until I got tired of listening to it. So I just climbed out the window and went down the road to the beer store. I usually just climb out the window instead of walking through the house. If I walk through the house and they see me, they try to talk me into coming out of my room. So it’s easier to just climb out the window. No muss, no fuss. That way they don’t know if I’m busy being passed out in there or what.

“I took a couple of beers with me, hell, it’s about three miles to the beer store. And it was hot as a fresh-fucked fox in a forest fire. I was about out of beer and ice both. Aw hell they told me in the Philippines that they could operate on my head, but it was a chance they might damage me. I didn’t want to take the chance. I’m on hundred percent disability anyway. That’s what I live off of. I just put up with these spells when I have them and wake up later. I wish to hell I knew what happened this time.

“I went around behind the house and looked in her window. I couldn’t tell if she was asleep or not. It was dark in there. I’ve tried to take care of her. Hell, I know it hurts her to not see me, but it hurts her to see me, too. So I just stay in my room a lot. I’ve got plenty to do.

“Night’s about the only time I go out. It’s better for me to move around then. I walk on the side of the road so if I pass out some son of a bitch won’t come along and run
over me in the middle of the road thinking I’m a goddamn dog or something.

“It’s kind of nice not to have to work. It’s nice to have that check coming in every month. I keep myself entertained. That’s about all I do. I guess I was wasting my life until I met her. She’ll probably be here later on. Probably just any time. She hasn’t met my family yet. She’ll come see about me when she finds out where I am. Ill introduce you to her when she gets up here. She’s got a car. She can carry me home.

“What it was, she was working in this store I always go to. And it was like close to midnight when I left the house. I took this shortcut down through this old dry creek, Moore Creek. That’s where we were parked when I had this fit, I reckon. Or whatever I had. That’s the last thing I remember. We pulled down in there so nobody would see us. People go down there and fuck all the time. It’s a perfect place. The road’s not open anymore. The bridge caved in and they never built it back when they built the new road. They just took that curve out of it.”

I remember when it was all gravel. We walked everywhere we went. And later on carrying Max. That was while Daddy was still gone. A few days we hired out to Doyle Edwards to chop cotton and make a little money. Four dollars a day. He didn’t want to pay me four because he said I was too little. And she told him to go up to our place and look and see if there was any grass in our cotton. Bad the way a man, some men, anyway, will try to
take advantage of a woman when her man’s not around. Couldn’t leave Max with anybody. There wasn’t anybody to leave him with. Had to leave him on a blanket in the shade by the creek at the end of the rows.

All day long in that sun. Swinging a hoe. For four dollars. To get something to eat. God.

H
e was talking and I was just looking at him. I kept looking at them scratches on his face. Wondered who put them there. And if he even knowed they was there.

He kept talking about this girl, this girl, and I thought, Man, where you gonna find a woman that would mess with you? Cause I mean his face was messed up big time. Just scar tissue. Places he had hair and places wasn’t no hair. Skin grafts. Aw he had a piece of a face but it wasn’t a real face. Them guys I guess do the best they can with what they got to work with. And he’d done said himself they’d do some more if he’d let them. I guess he’d done
been in and out of VA hospitals so much he didn’t want to see another one.

I guess that was why he never did ask where he was. I guess he figured it didn’t make no difference.

“S
o anyhow I walked on over to the store and drank a beer on the way. I knew it was getting late. They’re not supposed to sell beer after midnight. But I went to high school with this old boy who owns it. He always lets me have it. Well I got over there and he wasn’t there. And it was almost one o’clock. I saw this girl sitting behind the counter, and hell, I didn’t know her. And you know, somebody who looks like me, coming in on her at that hour of the night. Shit, I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t figure she’d let me have it. But I wanted some beer. I was gonna go back home and smoke some dope and watch
One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest.
Watch old Will
smother Jack again. Loved him so damn much he killed him. Which would be a hell of a thing to have to do for somebody. And then when he tears that damn sink out of the floor and throws it through the window. I’ll get high and rewind that last three or four minutes four or five times.

“So I didn’t know what to do. I was just standing out on the front there. She was watching me. I guess she thought I was some kind of a creep. I guess I looked like I was.