“Oh. A matter of honor. Well, things have been slow.”
“Don't tempt fate, Eddie,” Dugan warned. “This is a Friday, and it's been too quiet for too long.”
At that moment, Trainor strode into the room, a white bandage raked gloriously down from under his campaign hat across his forehead, a patch over one eye, aviator sunglasses covering both. “
Mustang Mike!
” Eddie declared under his breath. “Charlie, I have to agree. I suddenly got a
real
bad feeling about this.”
It was like kneeling before God, only it was wrong to think of God that wayâworse than backsliding, it was blasphemy. But he could see himself kneeling and being overwhelmed, the sleek belly in front of him glistening with just the lightest moisture, a smell like sweet autumn overpowering him as he clasped the dark shapelessness he could feel but couldn't see. Fingers gliding through his hair, over his ears, caused him to shudder as he plunged his face into a labial abyss and inhaled its entire essence into his being.
“Winthrop!” Lizzie shrieked, interrupting his reverie.
Winthrop Reedy stood on the brake pedal. Lizzie flew forward, grabbing the dashboard with both hands, blond ponytail flying. THUNK! A foot came down in the middle of the hood of their Firebird, followed by soiled pant legs and then the unshaven face of a man, his fingers spread over the hood, holding him in a tremulous crouch while he peered uncertainly through the windshield at Winthrop and his wife, his eyes bloodshot like a hound's. In an instant, the man leaped off the car and charged
across the remaining three lanes of South Charlotte Street, arms flailing. Stunned, Winthrop watched him vanish down the alley between Poteat's Pawn & Loan and Beulah's Salon of Beauty.
“What the hell?” Winthrop wondered aloud, then suddenly repeated with a bellow, like the delayed report of a cannon. Throwing the car door open, he stumbled to his feet and began to examine the damage.
Two hatless, uniformed Damascus police officers ran up. “Which way did he go, Winn?” one panted.
Winthrop thrust a finger toward the alley, and the officers took off, hands out to stop traffic. “What about my car?” Winthrop called.
“Wait for us!” the officer hollered back.
“Oh, Winthrop, just look at it!” Lizzie cried, standing in front of the car. Other cars had slowed, and their occupants were looking, too. It was their prize possession, the Firebird, black with orange and red flames outlined in yellow flowing back over the hood and along the sides. Right in the middle of the flames, just in front of the air scoop, was a big depression where the man's foot had landed. “Just look!” Lizzie wailed, and he did, already knowing that what was worse by far than the dent were Lizzie's features, all red and swelling with pent-up emotion. She never used to be like that. She was tough. She'd be pissed, maybe, but she wouldn't cry over it.
But then nothing was like it used to be.
“Cub'll straighten it out, honey,” Winn said. Just believe me, he prayed. He wanted the hell out of there.
“You okay, Winn?” someone called.
“Sure am, thank you now. Friday night's starting early.” Yes, Friday night, October 6 of 1972. Where had the summer gone? Where had his life gone? Winthrop gave the fellow a wave, because he was good old Winthrop Reedy of Reedy's Mobile Home Sales, do you a fair deal, only twenty-seven years old and a real comer. Once upon a time, two months or so ago, he would have relished this accidental opportunityâany damage was nothing compared to the collateral benefit he'd get out of telling the story and having others tell it. He'd loved such occasions. But now the last place he wanted to be was parading his ass in the middle of the main street of Damascus, North Carolina, under all those orange mercury-vapor street
lamps, the whole world looking on. He felt all confused. “Lizzie, honey, let's go down over the hill yonder, where those blue lights are flashing. I'm sure the boys'll be back in a minute, and we'll get this straightened out.” He put a hand on her shoulder, but she jerked away, her face contorted.
“Were you daydreaming again?”
He waved his hands downward to hush her. “Honey ⦔
“Don't you honey me! Winthrop Reedy, I swear if I hadn't shouted, you'd have squashed that man flat! Then where would we be? I don't know you anymore.”
“You suppose we can talk about this someplace else than in the middle of the street?” He'd dropped his voice to almost a whisper, but he wanted to scream it at her. Still, he couldn't keep some edge out, so now she was giving him the look, like she couldn't trust him, like he might be about to slap her or worse, though he'd never touched her that way and never threatened to. He loved her. “Please,” he managed.
“What's wrong with you?” Lizzie sobbed. He put the car in gear, and they started moving toward the courthouse square at the end of the block. “Winthrop, you've been acting strange ever since this summer!”
“I don't know what you're talking about,” he said.
“You
do
!” She pounded her fist on the dash. The gesture struck him as comic, although he knew better than to laugh. “You haven't shown any interest in anything, I swear. Not the business, not me, not our end-of-summer party. I had to whip you like an old mule to get you to light the barbecue.” She turned to him, her eyes full of tears, but tears of frustration and worry. Lizzie was not a complainer, he knew, nor one to cry at the drop of a hat like a lot of other girls. “Winn, are you feeling okay?” she asked, her voice softening.
“I'm fine, Lizzie.” He reached over for her hand, but he might as well have been holding a stone. She didn't believe him. For a moment, he recalled the day they'd moved into their house, the house smelling newer than even a new car, Lizzie kicking off her shoes and laughing, whooping and racing about when she wasn't hugging him. Her laughter had echoed through the empty rooms, rich, erotic, taunting him, her whereabouts shifting and elusive. He'd found himself wildly aroused but terrified, too, of this person he'd known most of his life, whom he'd gone to high school
with, and junior college, and whom he'd at last married and stepped with into a new world full of promise. He'd wanted to restrain her and calm her down, until his world came back into focus and he could be sure she was still Lizzie.
They had unloaded their old stuff and some furniture Lizzie's parents had given them, along with a baby grand piano. Then other trucks had started to arrive with the brand-new formal living-room suite, and the new kitchen suite, and the guest bedroom suite with the tall four-poster and canopy that would hold the frilly pillows and all Lizzie's old dolls, and the iron grill for the archway leading from the front-door entry to the formal living room, with its stiff couch and chairs and floor-to-ceiling drapes at the tall front windows. The baby grand was in the living room, too. It looked slick, the music sheets always open on it. Even the bushes and pine trees in the yard looked right out of
Southern Living
, which was a couple of notches up from the Sears catalog, because the scenes beyond the windows didn't look fake. Winthrop had been proud of Lizzie's ability to make the house, and him, look right.
He'd finally caught her that day they moved in, stood with his arms around her, feeling her warm, soft cheek against his, watching the sunlight idly probe the soft carpet in the entry. Now everything felt burned-out. I love her! he exclaimed silently, but was bewildered once more. For an instant, he couldn't put a name to “her.”
From the traffic light at the top of the square, they could see the police cars, two of them, parked at odd angles in front of the pool room, just down the hill and across the street from the county jail, their drivers' doors wide open, blue lights flashing. Some of the pool-hall patrons were standing out in front like they were waiting, but there was no law anywhere except at the jail, where Junior Trainor was headed, something like a bandage sticking out from under his hat and across his forehead. Winthrop eased the car to the curb near the cruisers.
“Do we have to stop here?” Lizzie asked.
“They asked us to wait,” he replied, suppressing something like contempt now, which only made him feel worse.
“Yes, but here?” She wasn't looking at the gathering in front of the pool hall. She was staring straight ahead but also down, like she was ashamed.
He dropped his forehead into his hand. “Liz ⦔
“Not here!” She was in control instantly, right through her tears. “You can park somewhere else if you want to talk!”
“For Pete's sake, Lizzie! What is it?”
THONK! The car shook violently.
“He's back!” Lizzie screeched as the man who'd jumped on their hood just a few minutes earlier jumped off their roof. “Winny, he's got a board!” The man wound up with a two-by-four and swung, and the windshield spider-webbed.
“Goddamn sonuvabitch!” Winthrop roared, and spilled out the door, promptly losing his footing when his cowboy boots slid in some kind of sticky puddle. Glass tinkled above his head as the man took out one of their headlights.
Winthrop rolled onto his belly just as J. B. Fisher and Junior Trainor flew over him, then J. B. was behind the man grabbing his arms, the man hurling his body one way and another, trying to kick Junior, Junior yanking a little canister off his belt, swearing, “Damn you, Ned, you should have stayed in that goddamn coalbin where you belong!”
“Jesus, no! Don't mace him again!” someone shouted. Winthrop glanced under the car to see the two city police officers pounding down the hill toward them.
A howl somewhere between a hound's and a tomcat's pierced the evening. Winthrop scrambled onto all fours. He heard Lizzie wailing in the car, then saw Junior bent over holding his crotch, emitting a sound like “Hawgh, hawgh,” while the little canister rolled down the street. J. B. Fisher was lying on his back on the hood of the nearest cruiser, his Stetson upside down on the pavement. Meanwhile, the man they'd been trying to subdue writhed across the front seat, yanking the hand mike out of the radio on his way by.
“We tried to warn you, Junior,” one of the officers said as he ran up. “Perry here already made that mistake. Macing someone when he's drunk just makes him madder'n hell. Old Ned must've got hold of some real panther piss.”
“Hawgh,” Junior grunted, trying to stand upright.
“You all right, buddy? We called for some more backup,” the officer
said, patting the deputy on the shoulder. “They'll be along right soon. Just wait here.” He took off again in pursuit of his partner, who was already a block down South Charlotte, running right down the middle of the street after a skinny figure a full two blocks in front, who was swinging the radio mike around his head by its cord like a lariat.
“Our beautiful car,” Lizzie sobbed, the sound ripping into Winthrop and tearing his heart out, because he thought he knew what she really meant, even if she didn't.
“Sonuvabitch!” he roared a second time, then charged down the street after the police officers and Ned, whose only mistake had been not sharing the rotgut he'd acquiredâhe no longer recollected whereâwith his coalbin drinking buddies.
It was a sickness, and it was killing him. But he couldn't help himself, not with will power nor prayer nor any of the loved ones and friends in his life who had always given him strength and comfort, especially not his retired father, who held to that measly thirty-seven-dollar-a-week pension like a badge of honor and righteousness. Oh, he had lots of friends, or always thought he had until now, but as he imagined himself trying to explain
this
sickness, he could see them all turning away in horror and disbelief and, above all, condemnation: How could he risk so much when he had so much?
He killed the lights, then turned off the engine of the Ford pickup with “Reedy's Mobile Home Sales, Damascus, N.C.,” lettered in red on the doors. The windows were down, the drumming of the crickets drowning the random human sounds of Willow Runâthe voices, music and televisions. He stared straight ahead at the lighted windows of the mobile home in front of him, so familiar but strange, too, horribly strange, something animate about it in that setting, no longer just an unpeopled commodity, an abstraction. Its momentary hold on him was so palpable he was scarcely
aware of the red convertible parked over to the side, its top down, or of the gleaming black Harley-Davidson crouched on its stand nearby.
Driving down the bypass less than an hour earlier, to their new brick home and all their new things, Lizzie had been silent like a brewing storm. The one working headlight weaving crazily into the sky, he'd struggled to focus through the webbing that was the remains of the windshield, his chest so tight he could barely breathe. At least she'd stopped carrying on about the car. What could they do about it anyhow? Old Ned didn't own a pot to piss in.
It was a good thing she'd stopped wailing, too. Winthrop couldn't stand it anymore. Life had gone elsewhere, and he was going to move with it.
Elsewhere was standing in front of him, a finger sliding down the middle of his belly, down, down, drawing a line slicing him in two. He couldn't see her. He could see only a soft darkness like a cloud, but he knew she was there, could feel the hot press of her breasts against his drenched skin, her right big toe playing gently over the top of his left foot, her knee and thigh undulating against the inside of his legâ¦
.
“Winn!”
Winthrop, sweat pouring off his brow, snapped back to the present just in time to yank the car off the shoulder, back onto the pavement.
“Not enough fun for one night? May as well finish the car off, and us, too.”
“Sorry, baby.” Winthrop wiped his forehead. “I guess I'm a little dazed.”