You Only Get Letters from Jail (21 page)

When the band started playing, we turned our chairs to face the dance floor, and the volume went up suddenly, so that we had to lean in close to each other in order to hear. I held Leeanne's hand, and every so often Chuck would get up from the table and there would be drinks again, and Vivian was always the first to put down an empty glass.

After a while, Chuck took Vivian out on the floor, and they danced to a fast song, and then a slow song, and then half of another fast song before Vivian stopped him and pulled him back in our direction. Her face was pink and there was something about the color high up in her cheeks that made me have to look away from her. Leeanne was smiling, but I could tell that she was using the last of her strength to hold it there.

“You like to dance?” Vivian asked me. She had to lean in close to my ear so that I could hear her, and when she spoke her breath was warm on my skin and she held her mouth close even when I turned toward her and it was as though I could feel her breath in other places on my body so that my hands started sweating and I had to nod instead of answer.

“I'm really glad you two wanted to come out with us,” Chuck shouted into my other ear. “I'm really happy.”

I smiled and nodded and he gripped my shoulder and pulled me toward him. “I hope you two will stay around awhile. You know? We wouldn't mind that.” Tiny drops of spit landed on my cheeks while he talked to me, but I kept my hands in my lap. His teeth were stained from tobacco, but his eyes were shiny and his hand was tight against me. “Maybe we could rebuild that 406 V8,” he said.

Vivian grabbed my hands out of my lap and pulled me to my feet. I didn't realize I was drunk until I stood up, and then I had to wait for the floor to settle underneath me before I could walk away from the table. Vivian led me out to dance, and I tried to say no and smile, but she wouldn't let go of my hands, and once we were out on the floor, we were swallowed by the other people dancing around us, and I realized that the only way out was through.

“You know how to two-step?” she asked.

I shook my head. Vivian put her cheek against my shoulder and we shuffled around together. I felt her mouth on my ear. “How old is she?”

I thought I recognized the words to the song. The band was covering something that I'd heard before but I couldn't remember the name. “I know this song,” I said.

Vivian pulled her cheek away from my shoulder so that she could look at me, and even though she was smiling, there was something about the set of her jaw that didn't let her lips slide all the way off her teeth.

“How old is she?” she said again.

I looked over Vivian's shoulder toward our table, but the lights were too low and there were too many people
between us and them. “She's nineteen,” I said. “She'll be twenty in August.”

Vivian's mouth was back against my ear. “Bullshit,” she said.

I felt something stir in my stomach and I thought it might be the combination of dancing and whiskey and steak and beer, but the buzz in my head went quiet and I kept moving my feet. “Yeah,” I said, “she is. People always think she's younger.”

“It really isn't any of my business,” Vivian said. “I just know what I see, that's all, and I'm not usually wrong.” She shifted her weight against me and we turned toward the band. “I just see that you haven't got rings on your fingers and I don't think it'll be too much longer before she busts and you have another mouth to feed. It doesn't seem to me like either of you should be wandering too far from home.”

Part of me wanted to give in to her arms, drop my shoulders, and rest my head against her chest so she could hold me until all of the weight lifted and the lies evaporated from my skin like sweat. “I love her,” I said.

A steel guitar started up and it was one of those songs that was either fast or slow, depending on the dancer, and Vivian held me in my place and we stayed locked on the floor. She pulled me around in a tight circle and she was strong.

A man in a wide hat danced close to us, and he leaned in and said something to Vivian that looked like “black car,” but I couldn't hear and wasn't sure. She laughed and pushed him away.

“He's got a dirty mind,” she said to me. Her hands were tight around the tops of my shoulders, and I could smell her against me, her drinks and her perfume. The skin on her neck was white and blank and tight. “I want you to come over to the house and go through Deacon's things. There's a whole lot in there I think you could use—shirts and pants, and a couple coats. Some of that expensive cologne he just had to have,” she said. I opened my mouth to refuse her, but she put a finger to my lips. Her hand was dry even though the room was hot as an exhaust pipe and I was sweating through my shirt. “I've been wanting to get rid of it all, but you know how fathers are—they can't give up what belongs to them.”

The dancing had become a habit, like Leeanne's hand across her belly, and I wasn't aware that my feet were still moving until I looked down at the floor. “I'm sorry for your loss,” I said, but I felt like saying it quiet was the only way to say it, and when I could tell that she hadn't heard me, I didn't feel like saying it again loud.

Her fingers were playing with my hair where it rubbed the collar of my shirt. “You oughta get this cut,” Vivian said.

We turned one more rotation and then the lights went up and the drums rolled the music to a stop. The band announced its break and the floor cleared so the crowd could shift to the bar.

“I want you to come down to the house and we'll go through those boxes in the morning,” she said. She took my hand in hers so that we could weave through the crowd.

There were more drinks, and more dancing, and at some point I could no longer feel my feet or my face. When Leeanne's good mood finally wore out like a fan belt, I told Vivian that it was getting late, and together we got Chuck to agree that it was time to go.

We were silent in the car, all of us pressed together for warmth until the heater could catch up and take the fog off the windows. I had turned the corner to drunk and was trying to hold myself upright in the backseat next to Leeanne. Once we hit the parking lot, Chuck had decided to drive, and from what I could tell from my one good focused eye, he was doing all right despite the fog and the dark and the turns I could not see coming.

“I hate this stretch of road at this time of night,” Vivian said.

“Why do you have to say that? Why even think it?” Chuck rubbed the back of his hand against the bottom of the windshield so that he could clear what the defroster couldn't reach.

“What's wrong with the road?” Leeanne asked.

They were quiet in the front seat, and then Chuck cleared his throat and turned the heater down to cut the roar from the fan. “Go ahead, Viv. You started it,” he said.

Vivian turned in her seat so that she could face us. “This is where Deacon died,” she said.

“On this road,” Chuck said. “In this kind of weather, you know. Rain in the day that goes cold at night so the fog settles in the low spots, but it was nothing new, he'd driven it a million times before.”

Vivian turned and looked out her window. “Did we pass it already?”

I watched Chuck squint against the oncoming headlights, but he didn't look away from the road. “I think it was back there. It was either around that last curve, or the one coming up. I don't remember.” His eyes glanced into the rearview mirror and I couldn't tell if he was looking at Leeanne or me.

“That's terrible,” Leeanne whispered. She leaned her head against my shoulder.

Vivian turned the heater fan to high again so that the noise filled the car and she had to raise her voice to talk above it. “I guess it isn't true to say he died here—he got farther than this. The police said he had managed to walk a good hundred yards from the car before he finally quit.”

There were lights flashing ahead of us and Chuck tapped the brakes so that we slowed and came alongside two cars on the shoulder. There were men standing by the car in front, and even though the hood was wrinkled and the windshield had been busted, and the grill was pushed into the radiator so that all the fluid had poured out onto the road, both of the headlights were still on and shining strong. We could see the deer just beyond the front of the car, its front legs outstretched toward the centerline, the hind end rolled up and twisted at the spine, blood and its insides puddled around it. One of the men waved us on and Chuck swung the car out and crept wide to avoid them.

Leeanne pressed her face into my sleeve and I could feel her breath through my shirt. “I can't look,” she said.

“I think it was a deer that got Deacon,” Vivian said. She was leaning forward in her seat with her cheek against the window. “I think Deacon swerved to miss a deer and he rolled his car. He was the kind of person who wouldn't want to hurt anything.”

The moon came out from behind the clouds and lit the fields and pastures so that the darkness retreated to the hills and I could see fence posts and wire and the white weeds that soaked up the rain. Chuck drove slowly the rest of the way until he made the soft turn and pulled the car near the house. We stood in the driveway and listened to the engine tick and then we moved in different directions. “I will see you in the morning,” Vivian whispered into my ear when I hugged her good night, and I wanted to hold on to her, shuffle my feet in that tight clockwise circle, and go back to the dance floor so that I could hear her now that my head was quiet, and I could tell her that I was fine with what I had and what already belonged to me. An owl called out and we were startled and reminded of where we were headed.

“We're opening the shop late tomorrow,” Chuck said to me as he walked toward his house. “Maybe we won't even go in at all. I'm gonna sleep like the dead, and it's gonna take a hell of a lot more than the alarm clock to wake me up.”

I followed Leeanne up the stairs to the room and then I pulled the covers back on the bed and helped her down, slipped her shoes off for her and tucked her in. “I don't like these people,” she whispered. “I want to leave.”

The window was still open to air out the paint, but the night was cold and it filled the room with a chill that would
probably take a long time to warm. I stood at the window and looked out at the light, the buzzards now gone to roost and replaced by the low shapes of cows on the hillsides. Behind me I could hear Leeanne's breathing turn hollow like a snore, and part of me wanted to press my pillow against her face so that I would not have to hear the sound. Below and beyond us I could see the corner of windows of the main house, the tall shrubs and front door. I could see the mailbox at the end of the driveway, and the road in the distance. I imagined Deacon on that road in this same darkness, and I wondered how close he had really been to making it home.

Me and Elbow Ritchie took the corner from Monroe to Jefferson at an easy forty-five and Elbow went deep with his right foot and dropped the Hurst shifter down a gear so the engine turned to a tight whine as the back end slipped out from under us and we fishtailed onto the other side of the street until Elbow led it back to our side with a relaxed left hand and we spit pavement under fifteen-inch radial slicks. Elbow was just showing off and I knew it, but his birthday had been two weeks ago and he had every right to brag, since his father had bought him a '71 Mach 1 and I was driving a Schwinn. He had pulled up to my house the night of his birthday and hit the horn and the gas and I heard nothing but a 351 four barrel blow exhaust at the curb and I knew that fucker had worn his father down to nothing but a wallet who had spilled out the cash it took to put Elbow behind the wheel of too much car and not
enough brakes and we had barely been home since. Now we were twenty minutes out of school that didn't end for another sixty-five and Elbow had the short end of some backyard green he had paid thirty bucks an ounce for and I was so high I didn't know if our tires were touching the street as we drove through the neighborhood and took the shortcut to get us home. Elbow had this big-ass smile on his face but everything else about him was sharp concentration and competence, because if there were things about Elbow that I didn't trust, his driving wasn't one of them, and he had a way of cocking his arm out the window, holding a cigarette and the wheel, and cranking up the stereo volume all at one time that looked like some ritualistic form of dance. I almost told him that, had my mouth open and was forming the words over the top of Black Sabbath doing “Fairies Wear Boots,” when we hit the cat—nothing more than a black-and-white stone in the street—and I jerked my head out my open window to watch it rebound and spin into the curb and Elbow pulled the cigarette from the corner of his mouth, exhaled, squinted toward me, said something about the paint job, and the Mustang went sixty to zero in a long burn of Goodyear rubber.

It was March and the weather had turned bleak. The sky was milk and there was no warmth in the air even though there had been the threat of sunshine, and we had the windows down mostly because the passenger side didn't roll up all the way and we both got tired of hearing the heavy slapping sound of tire echo if the driver's window
wasn't down to match. There were white and weak pink blossoms in the trees, which still seemed as naked as November, and everything was poised on the edge of a spring that just was not coming. The only movement was the sharp wind that bit through our T-shirts, and the trees, and darker clouds that came in from the west and were the color of heavy aluminum and depression, hammered together above us.