Cold in July (17 page)

Now it was morning and I was awake and it was damn near cold
and I had a stomach that wanted breakfast, a body that wanted coffee, and a
brain that was trying to put together exactly how I had gotten myself into all
of this and why.

I looked at my watch. Ann and Jordan were not up yet.
Another hour and they would be going through the morning routine and Jordan
would be spilling his first glass of milk for the day. Damned if that didn’t
suddenly seem endearing.

Most likely Ann would wake up mad at me and stay mad all
day. She had agreed to let me go and had given me therapeutic sex the night
before, but in time she would get mad again. She’d think about Russel and how
foolish I was, and she’d be hot as those pipes at the foundry that shot out the
fire.

James and Valerie would run the shop well enough, but James
would moon over Valerie’s ass something disgraceful. He might do it so much he
wouldn’t count change right.

Maybe Jack the mailman, with Russel gone, would start
throwing the mail again.

I got up and stretched and felt the worse for it. I put on
my clothes and went out into the hall and through the living room where Russel
was lying awake, looking at the ceiling, smoking a cigarette.

“You too?” he said.

“Just got up,” I said.

“I couldn’t sleep,” he said.

“I slept, but it wasn’t worth a damn. I guess I dozed too
much in the car. I don’t do so good after midnight anymore.”

“Older you get, the worse it gets,” Russel said.

“If it can get any worse than this,” I said, “you might as
well kill me now.”

Russel threw the covers back and stood up. He had on pale
gray shorts with a triangular design down the inseam; his belly hung over the
waistband as if slowly melting. His arms, back and shoulders were covered with
gray hair and his face looked long and creased with lines. His chest seemed to
have fallen in like the roof of an old house and his posture was bad. Only his
arms and hands looked strong. It was as if old age, mad as hell, had crept upon
him during the night and climbed inside his skin.

“Let’s find some coffee,” Russel said, lighting a cigarette.

He slipped on his clothes and coughed some smoke and we
staggered along to where the living room quit and became the kitchen. Russel
found a Mr. Coffee, and after rummaging through the cabinet, a can of Folger’s
and some filters.

“Maybe there’s something to eat in the fridge,” he said.

I went over and looked in the refrigerator and found some
thick bacon wrapped in wax paper and some eggs. I put the stuff on the counter
and got some bread out of the bread box and put it in the toaster and chased
down a frying pan. I opened up the bacon wrapper and put all the meat in the
frying pan and started stirring it with a spatula.

“Best way to cook that is naked,” Jim Bob said. I turned and
there he was wearing his jeans and no shirt, that stupid-looking chicken on his
chest, his big feet bare and awkward looking without his boots.

“Naked, huh?” I said.

“Yep,” Jim Bob said. “Get a little hot grease popped on your
balls and you learn to turn that fire down.” He came over and turned my fire
down and took the spatula and went to moving the bacon around. “How’d y’all
sleep?”

“Not too good,” I said, “but it wasn’t the accommodations. I
just had a lot on my mind.”

“Same here,” Russel said.

“That’s too bad. I slept like a hog on ice.”

We ate breakfast and the bacon was great. Best I’d had in
years. I asked Jim Bob about it.

“Came from my hogs,” he said. “I raise the squeally fuckers.
I’ll take you out and show them to you after a while. Got a wetback takes care
of them for me. I get these eggs from a fella down the road. Got his own
chickens and he doesn’t let them peck shit, but then he don’t put them in no
boxes and force-feed them neither.”

“What about Freddy?” Russel asked abruptly.

“We go check on him,” Jim Bob said.

“We’ve got to find him first,” I said.

“No problem. New phone book just came out, and since he’s
new in town he’s bound to have a phone. I mean, he ain’t Freddy Russel no more.
He’s got a new life and new name and the FBI has given him a new past.”

Jim Bob got up and went over to the phone book and opened
it. “There’s a lot of Fred Millers in here, but that ain’t no sweat neither.
We’ll check the old phone book and look and see which Fred Miller has been
added to this new listing.”

Jim Bob put the open phone book on the table and went away
and came back with another phone book and opened it. He put it on the table
beside the new one and compared. “Here we go,” he said. “Only one new Fred
Miller in the book, and now we’ve got his address.”

“You’re sure it’s him?” Russel said.

“Sure enough,” Jim Bob said. “We’ll check it out.”

“Too easy,” I said. “I’d never have thought of that.”

“That’s why I’m the fucking detective and you build frames,”
Jim Bob said with a sly smile. Then he turned to Russel. “You going to try
calling him, Ben?”

“He’s probably at work,” Russel said.

“You’ve got to do it sometime,” Jim Bob said. “We’ve gone
this far, you might as well go the whole hog.”

“I think I’d like to sort of look in on him without him
knowing. I just can’t pick up the phone after twenty years of not even trying
to answer letters his mama wrote or writing him or anything.”

“Just doing it would get it over with,” Jim Bob said. “In
the long run, I think that would be the easy way.”

“I guess it would for you,” Russel said. “But he’s my boy
and I haven’t treated him like he was anything to me. He may not even know I’m
alive or care. I just couldn’t do it straight out.”

"I'm all right,” Jim Bob said. “We’ll spy on him some until
you get your nerves up.”

“You make it sound like some kind of showdown,” Russel said.

“Well,” Jim Bob said, “in a way, ain’t it?”

Russel nodded. “What say you take us out there to look at
those scrawny hogs of yours, Jim Bob?”

“If you guys promise not to diddle them,” Jim Bob said,
“they’re kind of shy.”

          
· · ·

So we went out and looked at these hogs of Jim Bob’s, and he
must have had twenty, plus some piglets. They were huge things, white and
big-eared and Jim Bob said they were called Yorkshires.

The hogs were housed in a roomy, air-conditioned building
that had a flap door so they could go out into a big, fenced enclosure if they
wished. There was the ripe smell of dung and urine in the air, but it wasn’t
bad. The hogs were raised clean, and Jim Bob said the wetback, Raoul, came
around once a day and changed the bedding and checked the water connections and
made sure there was feed in the automatic feeders. When the hogs got fat
enough, Jim Bob sold them, saving one for his own freezer, and some for
breeding stock; now and then he replaced his boars and litter sows with younger
more sexually ambitious swine he bought and brought in, so his bloodline
wouldn’t foul, as he put it.

Out behind the hog house, he showed us a big wood and chicken-wire
cage full of soiled hog bedding. “That’s my compost pile,” Jim Bob said. “Me
and Raoul pull this crap out of the hog house and stack it here and let it heat
up, and come spring it’s broken down and ready to spread. I hire this colored
fella I know, Henry, to bring his mules over and bust up my land. Then me and
Raoul, when he hasn’t been sent back to Mexico for a while by the Immigration,
spread it around and plant early as we can. Pig shit, if composted right, can
grow anything. Raoul keeps saying he’s gonna try putting a pussy hair out there
and growing him a woman, but the only pussy hair he can get hold of is his
wife’s and he damn sure don’t want another one of her.”

We walked down behind the compost pile and out into Jim
Bob’s garden. We went between rows of corn with stalks nine feet high and
bright green. There were mounds giving birth to squash plants with white pattie
squash on them big as the crown in a cowboy hat. There were thick tomato vines
staked on six-foot poles, and the strong, fine smell of the tomatoes was enough
to make your nose hairs twitch. The tomatoes were firm as hardballs and red as
a wound. Jim Bob picked us each one and we walked along the rows eating the
warm, juicy tomatoes and marveling at the cucumber vines that ran renegade
throughout the garden with cucumbers on them that Jim Bob said were “as big as
Big Tex Dildoes.”

When we got to the far end of the garden, we turned left and
walked around the edge of it, then started back between a row of turnip greens.
The greens were thick and green and looked more like Venus flytraps than turnip
greens. By the time we were out of the garden and heading back toward the
house, I felt as if we had been expelled from the Garden of Eden.

29

“That’s Freddy’s house right there,” Jim Bob said.

It was late afternoon and the bottom of the sky had turned
the color of a burst tomato and the gray was pushing it down and away. But we
could still see where Jim Bob was pointing. We were across the street and about
a half a block down from Freddy’s house. It was just a house. Light pink brick
on a street full of houses built just like it, but some with gray and some with
red brick. The lawn was mowed and I could see the knob of a sprinkler out in
the yard. Freddy watered his grass. I wondered if he had a barbecue grill out
back, and maybe a dog called Boscoe that had his own house with his name
painted over the door.

“It could be another Fred Miller,” Russel said. “We don’t
know this is Freddy.” There was something almost hopeful in Russet’s tone. I
didn’t know if it was the years that were bothering him or what his son had
become, or what he himself had become. Maybe all those things.

He shook out another cigarette and lipped it, lit it with
his Bic lighter and inhaled, and about a quarter of the cigarette glowed and
went to ash.

“You’re supposed to smoke those, not suck them,” Jim Bob
said. “What you need’s a straw and something to drink. And this is Freddy’s
house. I'll bet my left nut on that.”

“I don’t want your left nut,” Russel said.

“How about my right? I keep it a little cleaner.”

“Ha, ha,” Russel said, and sucked up another chunk of the
cigarette and the ash fell off in his lap.

“Hey, watch the upholstery, and open a goddamn window,” Jim
Bob said. “I feel like I’m in the fucking gas chamber.”

Russel brushed himself and the seat and rolled down his
window and blew a mouthful of smoke out of it. Just watching him do that made
me feel hotter than I was. The air-conditioned air in the car had died
immediately when Jim Bob shut off the engine, and the air outside was only
slightly less stale. At least it wasn’t full of smoke. I rolled down my window
and stuck my head out and took a deep breath. It warmed my throat and lungs and
made me thirsty. When I was finished with that, I pulled my sweaty shirt away
from my back and leaned forward and said, “Now what?”

“Yeah, Ben,” Jim Bob said. “Now what?”

“I don’t know,” Russel said.

“You’re costing Dane money here,” Jim Bob said. “He’s
footing the bill.”

“Nah,” I said, “that’s not the problem. I just want to do
something. I’m getting itchy.”

“I just can’t do it yet,” Russel said.

Jim Bob sighed and rolled down his window. “Maybe you’d like
to drive down to the other end, turn around, see the house from that angle.”

Jim Bob meant the comment sarcastically, but Russel, who
wasn’t fully tuned in, said, “Okay.”

Jim Bob looked back at me and rolled his eyes. “All righty,”
he said, and he rolled up his window and Russel and I did the same. Then he
cranked the car and the air-conditioning panted through it and we went coasting
down the street.

When we reached the dead end, Jim Bob backed the Bitch
around as slowly and carefully as if it were made of eggs, and started back up
the street.

Russel hadn’t even looked at the house when we passed it,
and he didn’t act as if he were going to look this time. He had his eyes glued
straight ahead.

“If we can get the colors of the house coordinated with the
sprinkler knob,” Jim Bob said, “maybe we can buy Freddy some nice lawn
furniture or something. A pink flamingo maybe.”

Jim Bob was going so slow and was so busy giving Russel a
hard time, he didn’t notice the garage door at Freddy’s house going up or the
blue Chevy Nova backing out of it down the short drive at top speed. I barely
saw it, and by the time I yelled, the car was on us. The back of it hit the Red
Bitch on the right-hand rear door, and sent my non-seatbelted self-flying
across the car.

I put my hands on the seat in front of me and straightened
to a sitting position. Jim Bob had killed the engine and was cussing “Goddamn
idiot, I’ll kick, his motherfucking ass.”

“It might be Freddy,” Russel said.

“I don’t give a damn if it’s God,” Jim Bob said, opened his
door and got out.

Russel turned around and looked at me. “You okay, Dane?”

I rubbed my neck. “I think so. But maybe I should yell
whiplash.”

I looked at the car that had backed into us and saw the
driver’s door open and the driver get out. And get out. And get out. He was as
big as King Kong, Mexican, and had a look on his face like he’d eat shit and
sugar before taking a beating from anyone. Jim Bob included.

Jim Bob was almost to the Mexican, but his steps were a
little slower. He stopped about four feet away and cocked his hat back.

Russel rolled down his window, said softly to me, “I’ve been
waiting to see this. I even thought about this in prison. I’ve wanted to see
Jim Bob get his ass kicked all my life. He never has that I know of.”

“Hey, Frito,” Jim Bob said, “ain’t they got no fucking
mirrors in cars where you come from, huh? What the dog-shit is wrong with you,
man?”