Molly O put a glass and the beer he ordered on the counter, but Sam shoved the glass away and drank straight from the bottle.
“You look bushed, Molly O.”
“Well, it’s been a long day,” she said as she picked up a couple of dirty cups and headed for the kitchen.
“Your carhop’s really pulling them in, Caney.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Looks like a car auction out there.”
Caney tore a check out of the book and attached it to a bill on the counter.
“Surprising what a good carhop can do for you, huh?”
“Yeah.”
“She must be giving you some special kind of service.” Sam grinned, a lopsided smile to show he knew what was
really
going on, but Caney ignored him.
When Vena slipped inside, trying her best to be unnoticed, Sam swiveled on the stool to give her his “undressing you”
appraisal.
“Say, Vena, I missed you on that bus. And I don’t get much of a kick from riding by myself. But from what I hear, you traded the bus for a horse.” Sam took a long pull at his bottle, then wiped the back of his hand across his mouth. “What’d you all do out there?
Play cowboys and Indians?”
Caney and Vena exchanged a glance, then she went to one of the back tables and bent over her half-finished meal which was growing cold.
Sam drained the last of his beer, then held the bottle up to Vena.
“How about another one of these?”
“I’ve got it,” Caney said, already reaching into the cold case beneath the counter.
“Yeah, Caney, from what I hear, this is about the busiest place in town. Business so good you’ve had to hire on extra help.”
Caney set the fresh beer on the counter, picked up the empty and flipped it into the trash can beneath the window.
“And folks say this place has gone international. A real melting pot.”
“Maybe folks talk too much.”
“That they do, Caney. That they do. Matter of fact, there’s an ugly rumor going around that you hired yourself a gook. But I tell them not to go spreading lies. I tell them there’s not an ounce of truth to that because I know you’re too smart a man to do something that stupid.”
When two middle-aged couples got up from one of the front tables and brought their check to the register, Caney took their money and mumbled, “Good night.” As soon as they walked out the door, Bui rushed from the kitchen with a plastic tub.
“Well, looks like I was wrong, Caney,” Sam said. “Looks like what I heard wasn’t no rumor after all.”
Caney pulled a cigarette from his pocket, keeping his eyes on Sam as he lit it.
“Looks like a gook, smells like a gook, then it must be a gook.”
Sam watched Bui as he cleared the vacated table.
“What’s your name, gook?”
Bui, so intent on his work, so desperate to please Caney, was oblivious to the conversation taking place at the counter.
“Hey,” Sam yelled. “I said, ‘What’s your name?’ ”
Molly O, hearing the anger in Sam’s voice, came to stand in the kitchen doorway, one hand pressed against her chest. Vena shoved back from the table where she had been eating, the legs of her chair screeching against the floor.
Bui, smiling despite the certainty that the man’s question was not prompted by friendliness, said, “My name Bui Khanh.”
“Boy, huh? Well, Boy, looks like you’re doing all right for yourself here in the good old U.S. of A.”
“U.S.A. very good.”
“Yeah, it’s a damned good place ’long as you’ve got a job and people to kiss your ass.”
“Sam, where are you going with this?” Caney asked.
Sam spun, leaned across the counter. “What the fuck you think you’re doing, Caney? What’s that little slant-eyed bastard doing here?”
“Sam, why is it that you—”
“We got boys from this town never came back from Nam. Bill Ott’s boy and that Finch kid. Minnie Harwell’s husband, Frank. So what are you doing with him here, huh? Rubbing our noses in it?”
“Well, Sam, if you’ve got shit on your nose, you might’ve had it stuck in the wrong place.”
Sam’s eyes narrowed as splotches the color of raw meat spread across his cheeks. “We left a lot of good men over there, Caney, and it just might be the gook you got working here fired the bullets that killed them.”
“That goddamned war’s been over for twelve years, Sam. What’s the use of—”
“That mean we’re supposed to love them now? Pat them on the shoulder, give them jobs Americans need?”
“You need a job, Sam? ’Cause if you do, I can probably take you on.”
“What the hell is it with you, Caney? You think because you came back in a wheelchair that you’ve got it all figured out? Well, let me tell you something. We didn’t fight that war just so we could—”
“We? Why, I didn’t know you were in it, Sam. I heard you waited it out up north. We, my ass!”
Moving slowly, Sam eased his shoulders forward, laid both arms flat on the counter and curled his hands into fists.
“Mr. Chaney,” Bui said, his voice tight with tension, “I go to home now. Okay?”
Sam turned, eyes locked on Bui. “You going home now, Boy?
Well, you be mighty careful. You have some kind of accident, you get busted up, you’ll be in a hell of a mess. Can’t work, can’t drive, might be you won’t be able to feed yourself or wipe your own ass.
Might be—”
“Mr. Chaney?” Bui began to move toward the counter. “I finish work now and—”
Without warning, Sam grabbed his beer bottle by the neck and swung it toward Bui, but Caney caught Sam’s hand on the back-swing, sent the bottle hurtling through the air and, before it crashed into the Coors sign on the front window, had Sam’s arm pinned to the counter, wrist bent like a chicken wing.
“Now you listen to me,” Caney said, his voice barely more than a whisper. “You mess with him, you’ll have to worry about me the rest of your life. Every time you crawl in some woman’s bed, every time you turn the key in the ignition of your truck, every time you see something move in a shadow.”
Sam, his lips stretched tight against his teeth, eyes squinted in pain, said, “Yeah, what’ll you do, run me down with your wheelchair?”
Caney applied more pressure to Sam’s wrist until it made a popping sound. Sam groaned, sweat beading his forehead.
“Sam. You fuck with him, I’m gonna fuck with you.”
As Caney released Sam’s arm, he shoved him away from the counter. “Now, get your ass out of here.”
The only one inside the Honk who moved before Sam’s truck roared away was Caney. He grabbed his pen and checkbook and went back to paying bills.
Then, without looking up, he said, “Bui, clean up that broken glass.”
*
Vena didn’t know what woke her until she saw the flare of Caney’s lighter across the room. He was sitting at the window, a thin shaft of moonlight slanting across his face.
He didn’t turn as she raised herself to one elbow but kept his eyes fixed on something outside in the dark.
“We knew it would be a hot insertion,” he said. “The four-five-four was pinned down in a valley with the VC right on top of them, so we couldn’t get any artillery in there to clean things up before we landed.”
Caney took a slow drag of his cigarette, the smoke curling toward the windowpane.
“I was in the third Huey, the last in formation, and I could see the first two go in, VC popping them with everything they had.
Antiaircraft, machine guns, grenades.
“The pilot took us in fast. We knew he wasn’t going to set us down, didn’t want to give the VC a target any longer than he had to, so guys started jumping while we were still fifteen feet off the ground.
“Me and the kid beside me had our feet on the skids, just about to jump, when we got hit. Blew the kid’s leg off, right at his knee.
Sliced clean away.
“He leaned forward, watched it fall . . . and when it hit the ground, he pointed to it and yelled, ‘There it is,’ like he thought he might go back and get it.”
Caney stopped talking and smoked a while, the room so still Vena could hear the hiss of burning tobacco at the tip of his cigarette.
“The pilot gave it the juice then and that Huey shot straight up, just like a damned rocket. Three, four hundred feet. He was trying to get us out of there, and he might’ve made it, too, but we took another hit.”
Vena eased off the couch, pulled Caney’s robe around her shoulders, then slipped across the room and sat on the edge of his bed.
“There was this tremendous jolt, threw me and the kid back across the floor, that chopper shaking like hell. Then it flipped over on its side and everything started sailing out. The kid went first, skidded right by me.
“And I remember feeling so sorry for him. He had all that way to fall. All that time to think about it.”
Ash from the cigarette dropped, drifting across Caney’s shirt.
“He was a kid,” Caney said.
He dropped the cigarette into an ashtray and watched until the red embers burned out.
“He was just a kid.”
For several moments they sat unmoving and still. Then Vena reached into the silence and took Caney’s hand, slipping her fingers through his where they rested, framed in a wedge of moonlight.
C
ANEY HADN’T NOTICED that MollyO had stopped wearing her ring, a narrow turquoise-and-silver band she’d always worn on the third finger of her right hand. He didn’t know that when she was home doing dishes or rinsing out her underwear, the ring would slip off her finger and fall to the bottom of her sink. He hadn’t missed it, had no idea she’d put it away in the small wooden jewelry box on top of her dresser.
Life didn’t miss the ring, either, but since he paid more attention to Molly O’s body than anyone else, he should’ve noticed that her slacks were beginning to hang loose across her hips and her blouses looked a little roomy.
Wilma Driver had noticed a change when Molly O’s face started to thin, but she couldn’t quite pinpoint the difference. At first she thought Molly O had bought new frames for her glasses or switched to a lighter shade of makeup, but she finally chalked it up to a new hairstyle which prompted her to call the Hair Shed and schedule a cut and perm.
Bui had too many problems of his own to pay attention to these small changes in Molly O’s appearance, but he did compliment her one day on a new dress she was wearing. He couldn’t have known, of course, that it had been hanging in her closet for three years along with all her other size fourteens.
But Vena had been watching. And she hadn’t missed a thing.
When she first realized Molly O was passing up her morning doughnut and scraping her half-eaten cornbread into the trash, she imagined a New Year’s resolution was at work. And when she saw her cut her meatloaf into small bites and slip the plate back to the utility room, she thought an animal lover was in the making.
But when she saw Molly O, an ardent nonsmoker, snitch one of Caney’s cigarettes, and when she saw her wearing the same stain on the same blouse two days in a row, she knew something more serious than a diet was on her mind.
Vena thought it might be explained by a new stage of menopause, the next step beyond hot flashes, whatever that might be. Depression, maybe. Perhaps the prospect of becoming a grandmother, a subject Molly O hadn’t mentioned lately, had brought on the fear of growing old.
Or maybe, she reasoned, Molly O had gone and fallen in love, but she looked too unhappy for that to be the cause. Or she might be stewing about Caney, though his dark mood had been lifting little by little since the day of the horseback ride.
She could, of course, just be worried about money. After all, who wasn’t?
Finally, though, Vena realized she had no way to know, not her business to find out. And even if she asked, she was certain Molly O would never confide in her.
But she was about to be surprised.
*
When the last of the morning diners had cleared out, Caney reminded Molly O about the bank deposit.
“Do you have it ready?” Molly O asked.
“Yeah, it’s under the register.”
Molly O pulled off her apron, picked up the deposit and grabbed her purse.
“I’m going to stop by Wal-Mart,” she said. “You need anything?”
“Not that I can think of.”
“You mind if I go with you?” Vena asked. “I need to pick up a couple of things.”
“Well, it’s okay with me, but if Caney gets busy . . .”
“Caney, you think you and Bui can manage if I go along?”
“Sure. Nothing going on here.”
“Okay,” Molly O said without enthusiasm, “but we’ll have to be back to help with lunch.”
“I won’t slow you down.”
As they crossed the lot to her old Ford, Molly O said, “My car’s kind of a mess right now. I’ve been buying a few things for the baby.”
“A few things for the baby” turned out to be a plastic baby seat, a diaper bag, a Rubbermaid bathtub, boxes of baby bottles, a bassinet, a sterilizer, stacks of crib blankets, a potty chair, eight deluxe-size packages of disposable diapers and more toys than Santa could fit in his sleigh.
Vena helped shift enough of it to wedge herself into the passenger seat, but only by holding a large plastic duck on her lap.
As Molly O steered the car onto the highway, she said, “I got that duck for fifty cents. You know, you can pick up this stuff at garage sales for almost nothing, but you go to buy it new, it costs a fortune.
“ ’Course, not all of it’s used. I clip coupons for disposable diapers and every time the IGA has double coupon days, I save two dollars a package. It’d make more sense for Brenda to use cloth diapers, but she’s never been one to take the sensible route. I can’t see her washing a dirty diaper in the toilet the way I did. No, I can’t see her doing that at all.”
As the car picked up speed and began to shimmy, a naked rubber doll on the dash bounced off into Molly O’s lap. She was doing forty, driving only a little faster than she was talking, a sudden departure from the past few days when she’d had so little to say.
“I wish now I’d kept Brenda’s things. She had a white baby bed with little gold angels painted across the headboard, and a four-drawer chest to match. And I made curtains for her room, pink with ruffles at the bottom. I got her a music box, too, with a china doll on top that turned around when I wound it up. Played . . . oh, what was that song?”