Just Like That Read online

  He read the hand right. The locals left us alone and the tension settled down and we had us a few beers, checking out the talent. There was some uglos but there was some good ones too, some that smiled back, gave us a look.

  Along about the third or fourth round he finally got around to it.

  “It’s your girlfriend. isn’t it? Why we’re doing this, why we’re sitting here in cotton country instead of over at the North Star on State?”

  I admitted it was. “Yeah. I got it pretty bad, Bud.”

  “Must be. You’re still on parole, aren’t you?”

  He knew I was.

  “And you didn’t even call in to quit your job, did you, homeboy? I know you didn’t get permission from your P.O. t’do this. Fuck, man,” Bud said, shaking his head admiringly. “You’re a gen-u-wine twenty-four carat fuckup. You’re gonna be back there with Dusty and who’s gonna save your ass this time? Was it that Donna, that redhead I seen you with at the Three Rivers Festival? Big tits she’s proud of?”

  I cleared my throat, took a swig of beer, tried to look at him but couldn’t quite make it.

  “Yeah. I even tried to take the pipe, man. Some shit, huh?” I was embarrassed as soon as I said that. I don’t know why I did, except we were like brothers and I figured if anyone could understand, Bud could.

  “You’re shittin’ me.”

  “No.” I thought again about the last few days. “I got me this room at Motel 6, you know the one out on Coliseum Boulevard, out towards Harvester. By Azars. The one has the titty bar behind it. Three days. Sat around in my skivvies with the TV off and the shades down. Didn’t know if it was day or night most of the time. Didn’t do nothin’ but sit there and eat Jack Daniels and chocolate doughnuts. Did a bottle a day. Fuck, I don’t do a bottle a week.”

  “So, how—”

  I grinned, or tried to. “All I can say is I can’t shave with my Norelco now. Fucking cord’s busted. You got a razor I could borrow maybe?” I rubbed my neck. It was still sore. Then, I did laugh. “I paid a lot of money for that damn thing. You’d think the cord’d be stronger! Think the warranty’s good on something like that?”

  I looked at him and took a deep breath.

  “I was gonna do it again, do it till I got it right, only I laid there awhile on the floor thinking that now I was gonna have to go out and buy something stronger, a rope, and I started to wonder what places were still open had rope for sale on a Sunday and then I wondered that if I was to find such a place would they take a check ‘cause I only had a couple of bucks in cash left and then I remembered I would have to go back to my apartment ‘cause that’s where my checkbook was—I could see it in my mind, sitting on the dresser and then I thought—what the hell am I doing? If it is this much trouble then the hell with it! I would much rather spend my time doing something more fun that took less effort. So I did. I got up and turned on the TV. I didn’t think about leaving town then—that’s the honest to God truth. I did that this morning, driving over to Harvey’s, but I might have started to think about it last night while I was lying there thinking about what a fuckup I was at killing myself, who knows? Anyway, here I am and here we are and what do you think of that? No, don’t answer that. I just want to get drunk and see if we can get laid. I already forgot about what’s-her-name.

  “Donna.”

  “Yeah. Whatever.” We both laughed.

  “Pussy’s pussy.”

  Yeah, there was that—Bud was right, but then again he was wrong. I’d always thought that too—pussy was pussy—all cats look alike in the dark—all that shit—and mostly that’s true, I guess, but Donna...well, Donna was...well, different. I can’t think of a better word.

  It was all kinds of things, me and Donna. The way she fucked. She screwed you like you and her were the last two motherfuckers on earth and if she coulda got to pick who she was gonna get to play Adam and Eve with it wouldn’ta been nobody else but you. That kind of shit.

  She all the time was making you think. This is a good one. This is pure Donna. One time we’re vegging out in bed, Sunday morning, the papers spread all over the bed and us, and out of nowhere she says, “You ever notice that all the people who park in handicapped spaces drive Cadillacs?” I mean, who thinks of that kind of shit? Not me.

  “Yeah,” I said, coming back. “Being handicapped must pay good.”

  Then she said something else, added to what we started and we had this whole conversation going—funny-ass shit. Half an hour we go on. Talking with her was like talking to another guy, a brother or something. She never needed any of that bullshit fake-ass crap most girls seem to crave, have to always be telling them their eyes were like diamonds, shit like that. We lay there, rapping like a couple of buds and it was even better because you sure can’t roll your buddy over and take one. Not me, anyway. It was like having a pard only ten times better because you had the sex too and the sex was only the best I ever had. But that was Donna. She had this other side too, not so good.

  “Why’d you break up with her?”

  Because of my dad, I thought, but I didn’t tell Bud that. I didn’t want to bring up the funeral, even think about it. I didn’t tell him about her stabbing Patsy either or about the baby she aborted.

  “I don’t know. Lots of reasons.”

  That was it. We didn’t talk any more about it. I didn’t want to now that it was out and Bud didn’t bring it up again. About an hour later we hooked up with some honeys, couple of dishwater blondes, and walked ‘em back over to the motel along with a bottle and some ice we got from the bartender and had us some fun with the girls, only Bud caught the clap from his as we found out four days later when he took a very loud piss. My equipment worked just fine, thank you, and that made me feel a whole lot better about the future. The whole time we was doing the end-to-end buffet I only thought about Donna once or twice.

  Funny. What I did think about was my dad. That was all the time happening—out of nowhere, for no reason, I’d be thinking about my father and wishing he was there, see me in action. See what a cocksman his number-one boy was. That was just nuts, the way that always happened, thinking about my pappy, me a grown man and all. I wonder if other guys think about their fathers when they’re pulling a job, a robbery, or going down on some gal. Right. I’m the idiot has the father ghost always popping up at the dumbest times. I wonder what the shrink back at Pendleton would think of that.

  Don’t even say it.

  CHAPTER 4

  That wasn’t the end of it with those good ol’ boys we’d run into earlier back at the Blue Pony. I shoulda known better. About an hour after we put the girls out, said our goodbyes, I just got my peepers quieted down when this soft rap rap rap came at the door.

  Bud was snoring away, or at least putting a good show on to make it look like he was, so this looked like another job for Super Sucker, which would be me. At first I tried to ignore it, but the knocks got louder and I thought I heard a woman’s voice. Being as the girls had been gone awhile and this was a vacation, meaning all the pussy I could get was one of the main goals, I padded over in my skivvies and opened the door a crack.

  It was that bleached blonde from the bar. The one who waited on us.

  “Yeah?” I said. “I bet you got a case of beer in your car and no opener. Come to borrow a church key from your friendly visiting yankee? How close am I to a right guess?” She giggled, which was the effect I was after. Lots of guys got the wrong idea about how to get in tight with the women. Most of them think it’s got something to do with looks or money or some horseshit like that. I’m not saying those things don’t help, but what really gets a woman to lay down with you is to tickle her funny bone. You hit that bone on her and she’ll take care of the bone on you. That’s why I was never without a wisecrack. Lots of prettier dudes than me didn’t get half the poon I ended up with by accident. A woman who laughs feels generous and there’s only one thing of value any of them got and they know it. That’s the biggest secret there is on making it with the o
pposite sex. Look at the gals cracking up when the bars close and I’ll lay any odds you want that the guy they go home with is the guy making ‘em giggle. See, a guy who has the right kind of humor is going to be a fun guy in the hay. Why? Because he’s confident and that’s the trait they’re really crazy for. A guy who hasn’t got the right kind of attitude about himself is going to go around acting all kind of serious-like. Women sense this, just like they can also sense that a guy who’s loosey-goosey and keeps ‘em in stitches is one cocky, sure-of-himself sonuvabitch...and that’s the guy they want to have over to their double-wides.

  I don’t think all this, except in kind of a shorthand way, when I see her standing outside our door, but I’ve been down this road so much I kind of already feel all this between us and it doesn’t take but a second for this knowledge to kick in and show in the way I act.

  Mostly, that’s a feeling you can take to the bank, brother, but this time I got to say I was wrong.

  “I happened to see you boys come over here a while ago. Think I might come in?”

  That was a question that only had one answer that fit.

  “You come right on in, pretty lady,” I said, swinging the door wide open.

  Next thing I know, I’m lying flat on my back and the blonde’s in my room...along with two guys who looked kinda familiar. I don’t know which one was the one who kicked the door into my forehead and like to split it in two, but I’d bet even money it was the brown grizzly we’d been talking to earlier. Along with his little greasy partner.

  The noise woke up Bud only Bud wasn’t much help. The big guy had a pistol in his hand and it was aimed right where it would really hurt if it went off accidentally. At Bud. I wasn’t in any imminent danger unless he took a forty-five degree tack.

  “G’night, Ruby,” the little one said. She gave me a shrug like she was almost sorry for setting me up and took a hike, shutting the door behind her.

  Well. This was cozy. Just us four fun-lovin’ young bucks in a motel room in Bumfuck, Tennessee admiring Doofus’s shiny gun. I don’t mind admitting I was a little nervous. Bud, though; Bud was cool. Acted like this sort of stuff happened all the time.

  “Hey, fellas,” he said, swinging his long legs off the bed and rubbing sleep from his eyes like this was a couple of our poker-playing amigos come to roust us up for a game of draw poker.

  “Get dressed, cowboy,” the big one said. “We’re going to take a ride.”

  “We’ve seen your fair city,” Bud said, stretching back on the bed, folding his arms behind his head. “And I don’t think we’d be all that interested in the tour you got in mind.”

  You could see this flustered the moose. I guess he was figuring on me and Bud acting like a couple of sissy-boy yankees and rolling over for him. Truth is, if it had just been me, I’da probably had my clothes on already and been opening the door politely for these guys. You could see Paul Bunyan kind of getting it together in his little pea brain, trying to figure out what to do next, what with this unexpected hitch in his master plan—his eyebrows going down in that little mad V some folks get when they’re upset. Before he could come up with a wrinkle on the plan Bud had just tweaked, Bud eliminated all that brain activity for him. He just kinda reached behind him under the pillow and brought out his own gun. I’d seen that gun before but I had no idea he’d brought it with him. It was a Smith & Wesson Police Special .38 he’d bought off some cop a long time ago in South Bend.

  Mexican standoff.

  The other guy reaches in his pocket and brings out a knife, a move I don’t like all that much as I don’t happen to have a gun under my own pillow. Not that I didn’t think I could take him. The guy looked like a true weenie, following around his big, ugly friend like he was bad his own self, when it was plain as the nose on Barbra Streisand he was not.

  The moose started to open his mouth to say something when Bud just popped him.

  Boom!

  Fucking bullet started whizzing all over the place, skipping first off the guy’s noggin and then the wall and then it ended up in the bathroom, smashing the mirror. Made one hell of a lot of racket for one little ol’ slug.

  When I peeked up over the side of the bed where I’d sort of thrown myself, I didn’t see anybody but Bud who was just lying there on his bunk, looking more pissed off than anything.

  Oh, fuck, I thought. We done killed some guy and the jury’s gonna be all his cousins and brothers-in-law and the like. Our new cellmates were all going to be named Bubba and need extensive dental work. I’d just seen the movie Deliverance and I had a good idea what we were in for. I’d never done time in a Southern prison, but if the movies I’d seen were halfway true to life, I’d take Pendleton any day. Better practice up on my squealing pig imitation.

  Only the guy wasn’t dead. Had blood all over him. All over him and half the room, but he wasn’t dead. He started moaning and trying to sit up and Bud walked over and took the piece out of his hand which he was still holding onto. His partner just lay on the floor where he’d fallen—fainted, I think—and bawled like some woman just found out General Hospital’d been canceled.

  “Here,” Bud says to him and throws over a towel to the guy. “Your mascara’s starting to run, sweetie.” The guy picked it up and actually thanked Bud!

  “It just bounced off his thick skull,” Bud said to me. He was down on his knees over the other guy, wiping the blood off his face. Sure enough, that’s what it had done. Tore a neat little divot out of his temple, just in front of his ear, but that was it. It was weird how so much blood came out of such a little skid mark.

  “What we gonna do with ‘em?” I asked. I went over to Snidely who was down to a few sniffles and some wide eyes by now and took the knife from him. Polite little cuss. He not only handed it to me without my having to ask, but he turned it around and gave it to me handle first. I tiptoed over to the window and peeked out the curtain. “You suppose the cops are on the way?”

  “Naw,” Bud said. “We made more noise than that when we was banging these guys’ girlfriends. Little ol’ gunshot ain’t gonna raise any eyebrows. They hear stuff like that all night.” Which was true. Seemed like every half hour since we’d been there we’d heard either firecrackers or .22s popping, amongst the burning rubber left by cars smoking out of the parking lot. This was an active little town. “But, I do think it’s time to move on. You never can tell when the local Smokey might decide to earn his pay and take a look. Especially when the car out front has plates that say ‘Wander Indiana’ on ‘em.”

  Turns out Bud had a heck of a plan. Made both boys take off all their clothes—that was a look the little one gave me when he told them to do that! He musta seen Deliverance, too. That wasn’t what Bud had in mind though.

  He wadded all their clothes up while I packed our gear and checked under the beds to be sure we weren’t leaving anything. We weren’t too worried about the motel owner identifying us, since we’d already taken the usual precaution of using somebody else’s name on the register, along with a license number probably didn’t exist. And this wasn’t a big enough deal to go to the trouble of getting an artist’s rendition out on the APB wires. Long as we could get out of the county, we’d be all right. Unless the big guy died, which didn’t look too likely, as he was acting frisky and all kind of grump by now, telling us under his breath what he’d like to do to us if we’d just give him his gun back.

  About five miles down the road, Bud pulled over and picked up their clothes from the back seat and flung them out into a field of some green stuff that looked like short corn on steroids. Right after them, he threw their car keys. Last thing to go sailing was both the guys’ billfolds, but not until after he took out the cash, which wasn’t much. Eleven dollars in the little guy’s wallet and six in the other one. Bud kept the odd buck, saying since he was the genius who’d masterminded this robbery, he deserved the extra. It wasn’t hardly worth arguing over, so I didn’t.

  All the way down the road we kept laughing until our che
eks hurt, imagining different scenarios the two naked guys back at the motel might be involved in. Especially since they couldn’t just sneak out to their car and drive off. Not only had we taken their keys, but Bud had decided he needed a spare distributor cap and thought theirs might work on my car.

  The good thing about all that business was that our fun with those boys, plus the earlier fun with the girls had pretty much taken my mind off Donna.

  For a while, anyway.

  CHAPTER 5

  My dad. He’s the whole fucking reason Donna and I aren’t together. Well, some of it.

  I got this phone call. Mom. This is two months after I made parole.

  “I tried all day yesterday to reach you,” she said. “Your father passed away, Jake.” She was trying not to cry way it sounded, without much luck. Every other word was a sniffle.

  “I was out,” I said. “Looking for a job. When’s the funeral?”

  I remember looking at my hands to see if they were shaking. They weren’t.

  When we drove up to the funeral home in South Bend I looked at my watch. 1:48 it said in digits. We were supposed to be there at 1:30.

  “Fuck,” I said to Donna. In one way I was glad. I didn’t want to go to my father’s service with a whore. My mother would have picked up on it right away and there would have been something. I just sat in the car in the parking lot, fired up a cigarette. Donna reached over, grabbed my cigarette to light her own.

  “How come we’re not going in?” she said. “How come you’re not a pallbearer?”

  “How come you’re not Miss Indiana?” I said back. She shut up and moved closer to her own window, blowing smoke out the window.

  “Why’m I running this air conditioner when you got the goddamn window open?” I said, when she turned her head.