The Heavenly Table(59)
Within an hour, Eddie had f*cked Spit Job behind the woodpile and was headed for Meade with Johnny. They passed within a mile of his house, but the whiskey made the whole world glow that night with wondrous possibilities, and he couldn’t bear the thought of it ending so soon. He told himself instead that a day or two wouldn’t matter, but then it seemed like every time he was ready to go back home they somehow got hold of another jug and he was off to the races again. Then Spit Job had hitched a ride into Waverley last week, acting as if she wanted to be with him, and that made it harder than ever to leave.
Tonight, though, everything seemed hopeless. They’d spent the entire evening singing and dancing, and hadn’t even made enough coin to buy a pint of the cheapest stuff. Then Spit Job had ridden off with a couple of rough-looking farmhands, three-hundred-pounders with hands nearly the size of his head, and he and Johnny had finally given up and walked down to the river. It was an awful feeling, being sober and imagining what those two bulls were doing to her in the bed of their truck. Johnny had warned him about her, but Eddie truly thought that all she needed was someone to pay some attention to her, who wasn’t talking filth to her all the time and only trying to get in her pants. The hell with her, he thought, and with Johnny, too. Even if he had to walk all the way, he could be home in a day. Of course, his parents would both be pissed, especially his mother, and there would be a lot of bitching and questioning the first few days, but eventually they’d get over it. Nothing they could dish out, he figured, would be any worse than this.
He was just getting ready to take his leave when a rusty clattering Ford came bouncing down the lane and stopped close to the sandbar, maybe thirty feet from where they were lying. When the driver shut the engine off, Eddie reached over and shook Johnny awake, pointed at the vehicle visible in the moonlight. They listened for a minute to a man and woman talking loudly in drunken voices. Then the doors swung open and the pair emerged from the car unsteadily and climbed into the backseat. “That dirty dog,” Johnny said. “He gonna get him some.”
The man’s name was June Easter. He was a former butcher who had cut the pinkie finger off his left hand while trimming out some chops, and had subsequently lost his nerve for the knife and become a baloney salesman. Now he just went around the countryside peddling other men’s meat in a frayed, fat-smeared suit that, on a hot day, smelled faintly like a corpse. He lived out of his car most of the time, and knew a hundred different spots where he could park for the night. Usually, if business had been good that day, he’d pick up some broken-down bar floozy to spend the night with; and tonight it was a redhead with a beer belly whose name escaped him, though he was fairly sure he’d f*cked her a time or two before. After he got her naked and stretched out in the backseat, he pushed his pants down and started ramming her like he was trying to bust something loose inside. Eddie and Johnny listened to them go at it for several minutes, the woman’s head banging against the door and the man huffing and puffing like an old steam engine. Then suddenly, the seat stopped squeaking and one of them let out a groan and everything turned quiet.
After a few minutes, Johnny slipped up to the car cautiously. Looking in on them, he saw the baloney salesman lying on top of the woman with his pants gathered down around his ankles. They were both passed out. He reached inside and moved his hand around until he found the wallet in the man’s back pocket, and then discovered a nearly full fifth of gin and half a roll of some sort of lunchmeat in the front of the car. He and Eddie took off up the rutted road and went a mile or so before they stopped and looked through the billfold. There was nearly twenty dollars inside, enough to keep them drunk for a week. They spread their blanket under a tree and drank the gin and gorged on the meat and carried on until dawn. When they came to that afternoon, they walked back to Waverly to buy another jug and see if Spit Job was ready to do some more dancing.
34
AS THE JEWETT Gang slept along the weedy bank of a dried-up stream near Otway, Ohio, a geologist named Arthur Vaughn, originally from New Haven, Connecticut, and now working as a surveyor for a Pennsylvania mining company that was buying up tracts of land all over Kentucky, came across what appeared to be just another deserted homestead, the third in less than a week. For Arthur, each of these places had its own particular sadness—and this one was no exception, as he looked to the right and saw the weather-beaten remains of a little girl’s cob doll protruding from a waste heap—but they also shared a common loneliness, more akin to a long-forgotten graveyard than a spot where people had once lived and worked and loved. However, as he led his pack mule up closer to the house, he realized from the look of the slashed vines around the tumbledown porch that someone else had been here recently. Perhaps this place wasn’t abandoned after all. “Hello,” he called out several times, but got no response. He shaded his eyes with his felt hat and peered through the open doorway. He could see a book lying on the floor near the fireplace. Arthur had brought a copy of Huckleberry Finn with him when he started this assignment, but he had finished it over a week ago and was starving for something new to read. He studied the stomped path through the weeds leading away from the porch to a crude shed. “Hello,” he yelled again. “Anybody home?” He waited a minute, then tied the mule to a termite-riddled post and stepped cautiously inside the house.
When he turned the book over and saw the title, he said, under his breath, “You’ve got to be kidding me.” Then he let out a little laugh. It was one of those trashy dime novels that he and his brother, William, bedridden with the tuberculosis that would eventually kill him, used to read on the sly when they were young. In fact, of all the books that Arthur had sneaked into the sickroom, this had been his brother’s favorite. He swatted the book against his leg, then stood in the middle of the hot room contemplating what remained of the tasteless artwork on the torn and faded cover. A sinister-looking desperado draped in a poncho stood defiantly in the middle of a desert, pointing two pistols the size of cannons at some shadowy figures approaching on horseback in the distance. “The Life and Times of Bloody Bill Bucket,” Arthur said aloud, trying to imitate the overly dramatic voice his brother had sometimes used jokingly when it was his turn to read. “By Charles Foster Winthrop the Third.” Because the doctors had warned their parents that William should avoid all manner of excitement, they had to keep the book hidden behind a loose piece of molding in the closet. And when his brother finally choked to death on his own blood, Arthur had managed to slip it into his coffin without anybody knowing.