The Narrows(76)

He realized he was fading in and out of consciousness behind the Camaro’s steering wheel. Maybe he’d had a bit too much to drink after all. He rubbed his eyes then flipped on the Camaro’s radio and located a hard rock station out of West Virginia. A few people stood huddled together beneath the awning of the tavern, smoking cigarettes. Donald Larrabee wasn’t among them, and he feared he might have missed him come out already.

An hour earlier, Ricky had been shooting pool, minding his own business, and in a rare state of complacency bordering on a good mood when Larrabee ambled over and complained that he’d been hogging the pool table all night. “As long as I’m paying, I’m playing,” Ricky had responded coolly. But then Alvin Toops came over and told him that the tables were on a rotating basis unless it was league night. Alvin Toops was a big son of a bitch, with a shaved head and tattoos on his neck. He kept a shotgun beneath the bar and had threatened Ricky with it on more than one occasion. “See?” Alvin said, waving an arm at the other two tables. “Look how nice everyone else is sharing.”

Ricky didn’t like the condescending tone of Alvin’s voice. He might have even told him so if Alvin’s brother, Jimmy Toops, hadn’t risen from his stool at the bar. Jimmy owned a towing company and junkyard. Ricky knew better than to mess with some bastard who could hook up your ride when you weren’t looking.

“Come on, Codger,” Alvin went on, making a face as if he were tasting something sour. “Cut me some slack here, will ya?”

So Ricky cut Alvin Toops some slack. He cut Donald Larrabee, that whiny little bitch, some slack too…by not shoving his boot heel up his ass. He’d dropped his pool cue and paid his bar tab while hastily chugging down the last of his Yuengling, then shoved out into the night while the eyes of the men at the bar hung on him like fishhooks. All the regulars had been there, watching the scene unfold and no doubt hoping for a little entertainment in the form of a bar fight—Elmer Watts, Delmo Dandridge, the Kowalski brothers, Flip the Drip, Lombardo, Davey Kingfield, the lot of them—and Ricky knew what they were thinking. Oh yes, he did. They were thinking, That * Codger can’t do shit ’less he wants to wind up back behind bars. The poor bastard’s easy meat now.

Yeah? Well, that was bullshit. He wasn’t easy meat for no one.

Nonetheless, following his release from Jessup, he hadn’t come straight back to Stillwater for just that reason—to avoid confrontations with the local hillbillies and rednecks who thought they could give the Codger kid a few shoves without getting shoved back. They were wrong, of course—Ricky had never let anyone take advantage of him like that and he didn’t plan on starting now—but he had had no real desire to jump back into that mess right away. Instead, he spent a few months living on his own in Cumberland, renting a small room in a boardinghouse and paying his rent with money he withdrew from his grandmother’s bank account.

But like all good dogs, he eventually came back home. In the time he’d been gone, which had been about a year and a half, Stillwater had dried up considerably. Even if he’d wanted to snare a job, even a part-time gig, his choices were woefully limited. He wondered what the hell brought him back to this shitty little town after all, aside from a free roof over his head and the luxury of leeching off his grandmother. He couldn’t come up with any answer except for the most obvious—a dog like him knew nothing other than the master who whipped him. Everyone goes back to what they know, no matter how horrible and pointless and static it all is. There was a strange sort of mundane comfort in predictability.

Ricky blinked and rubbed his eyes just as he saw Donald Larrabee pushing his way past the clot of smokers beneath the tavern’s awning and hobbling down onto the uneven pavement of the parking lot. He looked drunk and Ricky wondered just how long he’d been sitting in his car, waiting for the fool. As Ricky watched, Larrabee meandered over to one section of the parking lot where, presumably, he looked for his car. When he couldn’t find it, he unbuckled his pants and released a potent arc of urine onto the tire of a green Chevy van. After shaking off, he buttoned up his jeans and staggered back across the lot to where his sad little two-door Civic sat beneath a darkened lamppost. Ricky watched the headlights come on. A long while passed before the Civic pulled out of the space. Larrabee pulled a wide arc around the lot, nearly clipping the front fender of an old Buick Skylark in the process, before emptying out onto the road. Ricky watched the Civic’s taillights flare briefly before the vehicle chugged forward into the dark.

Ricky followed.

One-on-one, he’d teach the motherf*cker to embarrass him in public. He’d teach him, all right.

When both cars crossed the intersection at Highland and Gracie, Ricky shook out a Camel from the pack he kept wedged in the visor and lit it. He was feeling pretty upbeat now. The Civic continued up Gracie, and Ricky followed. They were the only two cars on the road at this hour and in this part of town—where the barns were all unoccupied and dilapidated monstrosities, and the radio signals fuzzed in and out—but if Donald Larrabee realized he was being followed he did not show it in the casual, sloppy way in which he drove.

The right side of Gracie Street sloped down toward the Narrows. Ricky peered out the passenger window and down at the silvery concourse of water that snaked through the valley, and he marveled silently at how high the water had risen. With another storm on the horizon, he wondered just how much Stillwater could take.