Esther bagged the groceries while Clyde stood around, flushed with embarrassment. In the faces of the other shoppers he saw pity. “Think that stuff’ll be okay for an hour or so?”
“What?” Esther said. “All this was on special today, Clyde. Prices are a-fallin.” Esther squealed like a bat and punched buttons on the register until it popped out with a ding. She tore off a receipt that showed a grand total of nothing. “See?” she said.
Clyde shook his head. “Whiskey alone’s ten. Cigarettes too.”
Esther lowered her shaking voice. “It was on . . . special. Now, don’t make me have to call the manager on your perky little butt.”
Clyde remembered what remained of his driving pay and slapped it on the scale. Twenty bucks. “I appreciate it,” he said. “But I don’t need no handouts. I’ll come back with the rest.”
Esther threw up her hands. “You’re more honest than I am and I been born again!”
Clyde went into the bright outdoors. All those vehicles like hard candy in the sun. He searched his truck but didn’t find the wallet. This was the last thing he needed, the last goddamn thing. On the way back he pulled off at Ekland Field and walked in the grass among the empty beer cans and bottles and cigarette packs and dry food wrappers. He picked up a beer bottle and threw it over the fence. It skidded across the baseball diamond. He heaved another at the bleachers. It went high, but the next one smashed into a million pieces. Clyde yelled, “Bull’s-eye, motherfuckers!” He broke three more the same way before his shoulder started hurting. Then he drove to his uncle’s.
Since his visit last week, Willie had repainted the deck that wrapped the trailer, a deck he’d built himself two summers after he broke his neck. He had only one working arm and walked slow as a turtle leaning on a rubber-tipped cane the pharmacy had sold him for ten times what it was worth. Out on the deck now with a cigarette, Willie raised his good hand, seeing Clyde pull in.
“Uncle Willie,” Clyde called. John Wayne, Willie’s fourteen-year-old bird dog, lifted his droopy head to eyeball Clyde through a milky cataract film. “How you doing?” Clyde said. Willie made a thumbs-up; he couldn’t nod anymore. On the deck, Clyde waved the GPCs. “Got your food,” he said, waving the whiskey. “And your water.”
“I thank you.”
Clyde put them down on the raw pine table next to his uncle. “This is new.”
“S’morning,” Willie said, running his thumb along the edge with a hand that was dried up, tanned to leather, its thumbnail black from some missed impact. “You all right?” Willie said, turning at the waist to look in Clyde’s direction.
“Yeah, why?”
“You’re fidgeting.”
“Oh.” Clyde squinted at the yard. “Lost my wallet.” Willie began the difficult chore of reaching into his back pocket. Clyde said, “That ain’t what I’m sayin, Uncle Willie, come on.”
Willie let the wallet open, dug out a twenty, and slapped it down. “I don’t want no back talk neither. More where that came from too, if you need it.”
Clyde sighed and picked up the bill. It was fresh from the bank. Willie had already given him grocery money last week and Clyde had already spent it. “Probably just left it at home this morning.”
Willie worked to open the cigarette carton and slip out a fresh pack. “Smokin and drinkin are two occupations that are almost gettin to be more trouble than they’re worth. I don’t know what this country’s coming to; half this is tax.”
Clyde watched Willie get the pack open, pinch a cigarette in his teeth, and light it all with the one hand. He exhaled a cone of smoke out the one working channel of his nose across a moustache that was yellow down one side and light brown down the other. When the cigarette was finished, Clyde helped him into the house and put some hot dogs in water on the stove. Looking out back he saw the shooting range he’d built out there years before. He made a pot of coffee for the week and decided why the hell not? “Mind if I fire off a few rounds while the wieners are cooking?” he called from the kitchen. It had been almost a year since he’d discharged a weapon.
“Let me alert the neighborhood watch,” Willie said, and Clyde heard him punching buttons in the tan tabletop phone.
Clyde huffed. “Your property,” he said, loud enough for Willie to hear. Going out to get his Colt from the truck, Clyde burned all over again with anger about the run-in he had the first time he shot a gun in his uncle’s yard. Willie’s neighbor to the west had come running over like the place was on fire, waving his arms, screaming about how dangerous this was. Dangerous? You ever even held a gun? Why was it that the people pitching shit fits about what you were up to were always the ones who knew the least about it? Hell, before firing a single shot Clyde had built a large berm at the back edge of Willie’s yard. Beyond it was a field of twenty acres, and this complainer’s property bordered that on only one side. He said he had pets, a family, a wife with the jitters. He would sue, goddamn it. When Clyde didn’t immediately throw down his weapon and beg forgiveness, the neighbor said, “You’re an asshole,” which still made Clyde spit whenever he remembered it. And that was four years ago. Clyde was the type to hold a grudge.
The Colt was fully loaded and Clyde fired all six shots in a minute, reloaded watching the distant field, and came back to the house. These days guns were for Clyde like cigarettes and whiskey for Willie: a habit that was getting too damned expensive to maintain. Clyde brought in their supper and set up the trays. On the TV, a pretty blonde in a low-cut red, white, and blue dress was singing her guts out. Clyde poked his uncle and nodded at the screen. “What do you think, Uncle Willie?”
Willie chewed his hot dog, eyes on the screen. “What do I think about what?”
Clyde pointed. “What it’d be like to screw her?”
Willie swallowed his food, it looked like it hurt. “Mm,” he said, drinking beer and dimpling the can in his fingers. Pa-tink. “Probably about the same as screwin any woman, I reckon.”
Before Clyde could even get halfway across the yard his mom saddled him with chores. In the last light of day he unrolled the hose and sprayed the sunbaked bird dirt off the house. Birds liked to roost on the top of the sign that turned his childhood home into a constant advertisement for his mom’s shop: Pretty Lady, it read in giant letters the color of Pepto-Bismol. Christmas lights that hadn’t been lit in months circled the sign. With half of Mrs. Twitty’s clientele dead, near death, or moved out of state, it didn’t make sense to pad the wallets of the electric company’s CEOs. Clyde sometimes wondered what sleeping behind that big pink sign half his life had done to his manhood. He yanked and the roller spun, squeaking. A length of hose bucked on the lawn. Lightning bugs drifting in the gray stillness pulsed.
Clyde was just going in when he heard a horn out on the road. A Plymouth Fury ran past, packed with people. “I tawt! I tawt! I tawt I taw a putty tat!” they yelled in unison.
“Fuck off,” Clyde growled, opening the front door, which was always jammed and required both hands and feet to open. Clyde’s last name had plagued him all through school. Thanks to these aging burnouts, it still did.
Except for a piece of mail from the IRS that was addressed to him, Clyde dropped the rest on the table inside the door, adding to a growing pile no one wanted to face. During his time with Longarm, and for a good while after, the mortgage had been paid in full and on time. It was only in this last year that they’d struggled, sometimes sending in less than the minimum due. But Clyde’s feeling was, We’re still trying, we haven’t given up like most people, don’t count us out.
Clyde took the IRS letter into the tiny salon where his mom sat, in one of her two shop chairs, her head capped by the milky plastic drier. Smoke from the cigarette in her puckered lips swirled about her frosted hair, making it look like a smoldering fire. Clyde tore the letter open and resisted the urge to rip it to shreds when he read