Kings of the Earth: A Novel (10 page)

Preston

M
ARGARET AND
I’
D BEEN
to the movies and we came home late. The night was plenty clear, I remember. There was a big wide moon and a lot of stars. You might be surprised at how few stars you can see in town, compared to what you see out here. Even though Cassius isn’t a big city it’s big enough that the stars have to compete with street lamps and headlights and whatnot. It’s darker out here in the country and the sky seems to light things up more. Anyhow we pulled up and something caught my eye over at the Proctor place.

Creed was in the backyard taking in laundry. Sheets, it looked like. I pulled up by the barn and stopped and put it in park and got out. Margaret stayed. Those boys didn’t keep a wash line up, so he’d strung rope in between the barn door and the rearview mirror of the school bus. Not the busted one on the passenger side, but the other. The one on the passenger side tore off the day it got here and the other one broke not long after that. I think the conveyor picked up a rock and maybe flung it somehow. It was either that or I don’t know what. You’ve got to watch out around a farm. That’s the lesson. The glass is still all over. Regardless I spied him taking in sheets and that wasn’t exactly the usual thing, never mind in the middle of the night, so I stopped and went over to ask him what the holiday was. Those boys never were much for laundry.

He said his brother’d been having trouble holding his water. I thought he meant Audie. That’s what a person would think and I told him so. He said no, it was Vernon. He’d been having the trouble for a while and they were just now getting around to washing out the sheets. They’d got to the point where they couldn’t stand it anymore, and they had to wash them out because they didn’t have money to buy new—not so much as once, to tell the truth, and definitely not on a regular basis if Vernon was going to keep at it. Coveralls they could get a year’s use out of and buy more from Philipson’s in Cassius and then burn the old pair, but not sheets. Not if Vernon was going to have that kind of trouble every night. Creed stood there by the school bus with a look on his face I could see in the dark. Like a man sizing up something he doesn’t much like the appearance of. The start of something or maybe the end of it.

Tom

T
OM WAS NEVER
going to pass for tall, but the low ceiling in the Woodshed gave everybody who came in the door a kind of unconscious stoop and he wasn’t any different. The front room held a long bar with nobody at it or even behind it, and a couple of bowling machines with polished wooden lanes that you lubricated by shaking out some kind of wax from a canister with holes in the lid. It looked like greasy yellow popcorn salt. Instead of balls they used round metal pucks that weighed enough to do some damage. Tom had taken one of them in the eye late one night and he still had a swelling that was beginning to look like it would never go away. The yellow wax stung your eyes, too. He remembered that. He’d had to go in the men’s room and bend over the sink and rinse it out, and then get some ice for the swelling. He never did find out who threw it.

The back room was a bunch of little tables clustered around a low stage covered in Astroturf. The Astroturf was melted in places from dropped cigarettes and it probably amounted to a huge fire hazard, but it was sturdy and it provided good footing no matter what got spilled on it. Sometimes they had a band but not tonight. Once upon a time they’d had strippers on the weekends, but now that was just a fond memory shared by a handful of old-timers, vets of the Second World War who’d come home and gone straight to the Woodshed with visions of Betty Grable in their heads. Every now and then one of the old dancers, a heavyset bottle blonde from somewhere up on Fish Creek, would stop in and get up on the little stage and shake what she still had just for old times’ sake. There were always a few tips in it. Her knees were going fast, though, and conditions had reached the point where she was starting to need help getting up onto the Astroturf. Before long there wouldn’t be anybody left who wanted to give her a hand, anybody left who even remembered those glory days.

REO Speedwagon was cranking from the jukebox and a few regulars were hunched over the tables, working at getting drunk. One of the guys called out to him, calling him
Tommy Boy
, which he hated. It drove him back out into the front room. He settled on a stool and got out his smokes and lit one of them and pulled on it hard. He was pretty sure it made the buzz from the dope he’d smoked on the ride over rise up a little bit, and that was good, but on the other hand it might have been all in his head. He sat knocking his lighter on the bar and Sal came out from the back at the sound of it, thinking somebody out there was impatient.

“Oh. It’s just you.”

“Just me.” Tom drew on the cigarette again. “That’s right.”

“You’re early.” He put a glass under the tap and pulled Tom’s usual.

“Sometimes I like to get a head start.”

“I can see that.”

It was a while before the place filled up. A bunch of college kids on summer break were working the bowling machines. Most of them looked like regular kids out of Cassius High—home from wherever, doing factory work or construction for a couple of months—but two or three of them were all decked out with pressed jeans and those alligator shirts with the collars turned up and they looked like they might have come over from Syracuse or someplace just to see how the other half lived. Tom’s natural inclination was to hate them for that, but he tamped it down. The bar itself was mostly regulars except for a couple of girls at the other end. One of them looked predatory and the other one looked dazed. He’d never seen either of them before, he didn’t think. He drank his beer and watched everything. The jukebox ran through ZZ Top and Van Halen and Wang Chung. That awful “We Are the World” came on but somebody gave the machine a good kick and the needle skipped and the changer pulled up some Elton John instead. Tom didn’t hear any complaints. A couple of men approached the girls and smiled at them and put a little money on the bar. They drank for a while but they all seemed kind of nervous with it except for the predatory girl, who was kind of dancing without getting up from her stool. Tom sat and drank and wished he’d gotten to them first. Watching them a little in the mirror. They were younger than the college kids and he was older all of a sudden. What a world. Time just went by no matter what a person did.

Around eleven Reed showed up. Reed was his last name. His first name was Karl but he never went by it. He’d been too cool to hang out with Tom in high school, but things were different now. Now he sold real estate in Cassius and Verona and sometimes over here at the beach, and even though he’d made some money he’d never figured out how to grow up. He’d peaked in high school—when he’d quarterbacked the football team and gotten the head cheerleader and all the usual what have you—but that was that and he was still stuck in it even though it was all over, even though it was half a dozen years ago and he was going to fat and losing his hair and coming to places like this to check out the women and score a little dope from Tom Poole, whom he’d never even condescended to greet in the hallowed halls of Cassius High.

Tom liked it. All those years Reed had had something he’d wanted—a lot of things he’d wanted, come to think of it—and now the shoe was on the other foot. “Hey, buddy,” he said when Reed came in. The way a person says it who isn’t your buddy and doesn’t want to be. Just relishing the sound.

“Hey.” Sal brought Reed a beer. There was an empty stool next to Tom’s and he took it. Tom lit a cigarette and Reed looked at the pack and raised his eyebrows as if he’d never seen anything so terrible. “You still smoking those?” he said. “They’ll kill you one of these days.”

“Thanks for the input.”

“I’m just saying.” He leaned back in his stool and made himself comfortable, acting like he was still first-string on the varsity team or something. Like anybody still cared or even knew. Old habits.

“I hear you. And I’ll tell you what. I’ll quit smoking the minute you lay off the cheeseburgers.”

Reed sucked it in a little and smiled. “It’s the munchies, man. I got nobody to blame but my favorite dealer.”

Which got the attention of the college kids over at the bowling machines.

“Sure,” said Tom. “Everything’s always my fault.” He raised a finger and Sal brought him another beer. He waited until Sal was gone and then he lowered his voice a little. “I don’t deal, anyway. There’s dealing and then there’s growing. Two completely different things.”

Audie

T
HE BED SMELLED LIKE HER
. It was nice and cool after a hot day and it smelled like her and it smelled like the wind and it made me think about how she used to hang the sheets out before she went on ahead. It made me remember. I told Creed and he said if I wanted to lay down someplace that smelled that way every night then it was up to me to do the wash. This time though he did it and he took all the credit for it. I thought it was just as much Vernon’s doing but I didn’t say. Not the washing I mean but the need for the washing. Creed wasn’t happy while he was at it and Vernon said he’d do it himself when he got done feeding the pigs if he was going to be so finicky about his bed linens but Creed didn’t let him. He told him it couldn’t wait. He told him it had to be done right then and he did it himself and then he stayed mad at Vernon.

Tom

S
OMEHOW THE GIRLS
at the end of the bar got wind of things and shook off the two men who’d been buying them beer all night. They worked their way down to the end of the bar where Tom and Reed were sitting. The one still looked kind of dazed and the other one still looked kind of like she wanted to bite somebody, but the beer was starting to push them both toward a kind of woozy middle ground. They were beginning to look like anybody else. Tom asked could they buy them a couple of drinks and Reed laughed and said maybe they ought to card them first just to be on the safe side. You had to be nineteen. Ha ha ha. The way he said it gave Tom the creeps. Like Reed was some kind of dirty old man, which would make him a dirty old man too. The college kids were still working the bowling machines and the ferocious girl kept looking over at them. It made Tom kind of angry and a little bit sad at the same time. He blamed it on the beer. Dope didn’t play that kind of games with your head.

The dazed girl had taken one of his cigarettes and was lighting it off a little votive candle that she’d taken from a table in the other room. She put her face up near his, and over the music from the jukebox she asked him what kind of games he was talking about in particular.

He looked at her like she’d just read his mind.

She blew smoke out the side of her mouth and asked again. This dazed-looking girl who had read his mind and couldn’t have been more than seventeen if she was a day. When he didn’t answer right off she pulled on the cigarette again and let the smoke leak back out while she said that even though he maybe hadn’t meant to say it out loud she’d heard him anyway. She had ears like an elephant. Her father always said so.

He said he hadn’t meant anything by it. Then he said her ears didn’t look all that bad, they sure as hell didn’t look like the ears on any elephant he’d ever seen, and he pushed her hair back behind one of them with his finger. The dazed-looking girl smiled at him and asked if he was sure he hadn’t meant anything when he’d said what he’d said about dope. Seeing as how she sure could use a little.

Tom checked and saw that his buddy Reed was doing less well with the ferocious-looking girl, which he decided was just too damned bad. It was about time Karl Reed got used to living in the real world.