The Heavenly Table(67)

He and the girl kept drinking, and around midnight she puked her guts up in the washbasin. The windowless room filled with her stench, and she dropped to her knees and started crying about leaving her sick baby at home by itself, and shit like that always brought Sugar down. He climbed out of bed and punched and kicked her until she rolled over on the filthy brown rug and farted once before passing out. Her impertinence enraged him even more, and he spread her ass cheeks apart and f*cked her from behind, the salty sweat pouring off him and splattering like raindrops on her broad, bruised back. When he was finished, he wiped himself off in her nappy hair and got dressed. The sour smell in the room was suddenly overwhelming. He slipped down the back stairs with her comb and the money he had paid her in his pocket. Stumbling down an alley, he curled up on a pile of garbage with his bowler and awoke the next morning with his head pounding and his tongue dry as leather. Lying there in the trash, he looked up at a pigeon perched on a wire and swore to God Almighty that he was going to straighten up. And since he was so close anyway, he thought, why not go down to Kentucky and show his folks his new hat? It wasn’t a shiny car driven by a white chauffeur, but it was better than nothing. He could see them now, gathering around and slapping him on the back, asking a million questions, his mother hugging him until he couldn’t get his breath. He had picked himself up and begun walking. Two blocks away, he came across an old man on his knees pulling weeds out of a little vegetable patch and asked him for a drink of water. “Got the dry pipes, have ye?” the old man said, looking at Sugar’s bloodshot eyes. “I ’member what that was like. Why, I used to wake up so thirsty I’d pay ’bout anything for a nice cool drink.”

“I ain’t got no money,” Sugar remembered telling the man.

“Sho you ain’t,” the old man said, nodding his head and grinning, his toothless gums a wet pink that made Sugar queasy all over again. “Spent it all last night, I expect. I ’member when—”

“Can I have a drink or not?”

“Sho you can,” the old man said. “Got a well right there.”

There was a rat swimming around on top of the water when Sugar lifted the wooden top, and the old man scooped it out with a shovel and started beating it to death; and watching him go after it like he did, yipping and bashing and pounding on it like he was getting back at every dirty bastard who had ever done him wrong, made Sugar think about the white woman again. It wasn’t his fault he had gone crazy on her; shit, she would still be alive if Flora hadn’t kicked him out. She was the one to blame, her and that goddamn baby-faced nigger she was f*cking. He watched the old man pick up the bloody gob by the tail and fling it over into a neighbor’s yard, and then he got down on his knees and washed the whore’s smell off his face and drank until his belly felt like it was going to burst. A few minutes later, he was on his way out of town, heading for Kentucky.

That had been just yesterday morning, and now here he was standing in the middle of a lonely road miles away from the old man’s well and staring down at his hat sieved with bullets and flat as a pancake. Insects buzzed madly in the weeds and a bird called out weakly in the heat. He almost wished he had taken the farmer up on his offer. A dollar a day wasn’t much, but at least he’d still have his bowler. He began moving again, feeling the most awful pity for himself. As far back as he could remember, there hadn’t been a day when he wasn’t yearning for something he didn’t have. And that wore a man down after so many years, fighting that feeling day after day without any letup. Why couldn’t he ever be satisfied? Why did he keep f*cking up? Suddenly he stopped and looked up into the sky. “Lawd,” he sobbed, “please, Lawd, I don’t want to live like this no more. I’m not a-lyin’ this time, I swear. I just want to see my folks now. You help ol’ Sugar through this one and I promise you…” He searched his mind for what he could pledge, but he couldn’t imagine what it might be. “I promise you…” he began again, but then he stopped. He had nothing of his own to offer. Even the little bit of money in his pocket was somebody else’s. A murdered woman’s, no less. He was nothing but a bum, a goddamn, worthless bum. Not once in his life had he ever done anything worthwhile. Wiping at his eyes, he took a deep breath to steady himself and continued on.

Before he was around the next curve the cravings kicked in again, and he beat his head with his fists until his nose and lips were bleeding and his clothes soaked with sweat. Exhausted, he dropped his arms to his sides and cast a hopeless look down the empty road. He was completely and utterly alone. “Lawd, ol’ Sugar…” he started to implore again, but then he realized, with a start, what he needed to do to make a clean break from his old life. It was so clear to him now, what he had to pledge. He did have a proper name, had been baptized with it in Finfish Creek when he was but three months old. And from this day forward, he was going to use it again. George. George Milford. Sugar was just some fool nickname a dirty whore had cursed him with, but no more. His pace quickened as the idea took hold. “What’s your name?” he asked himself in a strained, high-pitched voice. “George,” he answered in his own deep baritone, “George Milford.” He repeated this a number of times, letting it wrap around him, the old name salvaged from the past and the saving grace it would surely bring him in the future. He should have been in jail awaiting the hangman’s noose, or, if not that, lying with a bullet in his head back there in that field. But no, the Lord had kept him safe, been keeping him safe all along. Then he stopped and watched openmouthed as the most beautiful sunset he could ever recall unfurled like a richly colored carpet across the sky. He had been staring at it for several minutes before he noticed, off in one corner, a swatch of the golden shore that his mother used to talk about all the time. Dropping to his knees, he was just getting ready to sing the Great Redeemer’s praises when a hornet as big around as his thumb smacked him in the face and drove a black stinger deep into the fleshy tip of his nose; and before he could catch himself, he was clawing at his stinking skin again and screaming curses at Flora and all the other dirty motherf*ckers who had ever done him wrong and begging the Devil for just enough liquor—a drop, a spit, a spoonful—to make his pain, his endless, endless pain, go away, if only for the time it took to get around the next bend.