Nightwoods (3 page)

Luce decided not to read them again until she could appreciate them more. Some far day when she had become a better person and could feel something besides stinging anger that her beautiful, gentle sister had not protected herself more carefully against a world of threat.

CHAPTER
  2

B
UD WAS A HANDSOME MAN
, at least in the retrograde style of the expired southern fifties he still loved so much. High cheekbones, sideburns, upturned collars, and a forelock shaped into a perfect comma down his forehead with a two-fingered swipe of Royal Crown pomade. Bud was nobody’s real name. Sometime in youth, a deluded soul had considered him a friend and dubbed him Buddy Buster.

He had a criminal record by the time he was barely a teenager, caught shoplifting a coat pocket of yellow Sun 45s from a dime store. From his first day in high school, Bud kept a small-caliber pistol in his locker, mostly to impress girls and to insinuate himself into the company of bullies and roughnecks. He was successful on both fronts. At fourteen, in an era when it was daring to show up at a party with a beer or two, Bud once arrived with three cases of Schlitz in a stolen car. He announced his presence by cutting a doughnut in the front yard and then jumping out and popping the back end to reveal seventy-two can lids studded into a trunkful of crushed ice, reflecting the porch lights like the crown jewels of a minor country. Which made Bud the hero of everyone except the kid whose parents were gone for the weekend.

And so on, through his youth. Bud endured several bouts of probation and then served nearly two years on a breaking-and-entering charge, made worse because he was carrying his pistol when arrested. The low-security teenager prison was fenced barely stronger than a poultry yard, but Bud chose to serve his entire term. It didn’t do him much good, though. He might as well have skipped out. Nearly all the anxious psychological counselor had to recommend was that Bud learn to defer immediate gratification and find a hobby. Such as listening to jabber from overseas on a shortwave radio. Bud said, How about shooting rats at the dump with a shotgun pistol? But that didn’t seem to qualify, and not only because shotgun pistols were illegal for some obscure reason. It was more like a mind problem, to be marked down on the counselor’s notepad and held against you if you summed up the wrong answer. Like when the counselor delved into your habits of using a public toilet, such as do you flush with your foot and use your elbow to open the door? If yes, woe unto you. You’re crazy. From now on, all the doors of opportunity will be rigged to slam shut in your face.

After his release, Bud scrabbled for some years. Short-time jobs and larceny. Selling various forms of dope, kind of as a sideline to pumping gas. And then he got a job with the railroad in the capital city. For a time, he actually drew a paycheck every Friday. He told people he was a railroad bull, but his friend Billy was the bull. Bud had been demoted after only a week. He couldn’t be relied upon to kick the asses of hoboes, and not because he was unwilling. It was a matter of prudence. First day on the job, he came up against a big fullback-looking bum who was not the least intimidated by Bud’s nightstick and company badge. Bud immediately panicked and ran away, knowing he was overmatched and about to take a beating. And then, soon after, the thing that lost him his position was going too far with a frail old man who’d been riding the rails since the stock market crash in ’29. Knocking the man down with his stick and then kicking him with railroad boots past the point of consciousness. After that, Bud’s job became more custodial. Pushing a broom, hosing concrete aprons, dumping small containers of garbage into larger containers. His greatest responsibility was using a big Tin Man oil can to lube metal parts that rubbed against each other around the boxcar couplings.

During that strange time of normal employment, he met a pretty young widow with bad judgment and two little children. Nobody who knew Bud considered violence to be his main calling as a criminal. Various forms of theft and violations of substance codes were his specialties. So it was a surprise when Bud married Lily and then soon killed her.

AS A CHILD
, Bud was made to attend a church where the preacher spent most of his time at the pulpit talking about Christ’s wounds and Christ’s blood. The message was clear. Blood mattered above all else, the sacred shedding of it. The rest of Christ’s life—his actions, his pithy sayings, his love—became incidental compared to the dark artery offering that covered the globe. Some Sundays the preaching was pitched so fervent and descriptive that little Bud couldn’t shake slaughterhouse images out of his mind until the next morning. Which meant dark hours of nightmares interrupted by long sweaty periods of terrified hovering wakefulness until dawn broke on Monday.

At grown-up Bud’s new happy church that Lily made him go to, they talked about Jesus all the time, but never about Jesus’s blood. That would be embarrassing for this tame bunch of worshippers. Their church featured an arched stained-glass window picturing Jesus standing on green grass in a glowing yellow light beam against a blue sky. Jesus was sad-eyed and pretty, with his arms spread and his palms upraised, long yellow hair flowing to his shoulders and long white robes flowing to his white feet. Little children and lambs and other youngster livestock flocked around him.

For Bud, that vision was unsatisfactory. Disgusting, really, in its cartoonishness. For Lily’s benefit, Bud condensed whatever leftover inner religion he had into a bleeding heart tattoo covering the outer face of his left biceps. Fairly painful to receive and impossible to remove. Also a big artistic disappointment, since he had imagined it highly anatomical, but it came out more like a valentine.

Even at that, the tattoo accorded in some pleasing way with his necklace, a big black fossilized shark tooth. On their honeymoon, Lily had found it at low tide down at Surfside and had it wound in silver wire to hang on a leather thong against his sternum. The tooth was millions of years old, but you could still cut your finger on the serrated edges, which Bud did while the tattoo still wept, sealing his thinking about their harmony. Jesus’s blood and some big black-eyed shark reddening strange waters. Both expressing the exact same reality. The meaning of the necklace could be summed into one useful idea—adapted from the possibly true fact that sharks die if they stop swimming forward—useful for every single misstep in life. Move on. And the meaning of the tattoo was equally brief, and no argument about it. Everybody dies.

Now, Bud too had drawn considerable blood. He wasn’t always proud of it, and though he hadn’t actually confessed, things seemed pretty cut and dried in regard to his guilt. In jail awaiting trial, he noticed that everybody treated him like he was a terminal case. So before the court date, he wasted time trying and failing to get his mind right for sitting down in the big chair with a smirk on his face and sucking down a deep breath of gas.

BUD AND LILY HAD
become a bad match immediately after the hot courtship ended. In short order, Bud realized marriage was not always going to be a fun time. Lily was not his dream lover anymore, not by a long stretch. Her children could pass for normal back then, but they were still a constant irritant. How could romance prevail with them always needing something contradictory to romance, such as ass wiping and nose blowing?

It could not, was the short answer.

Also, Lily owned her house outright due to the horny grocery-store-manager first husband who knocked her up with twins, then up and died before they were even born. It chapped Bud’s ass to live in another man’s house, even a dead one’s. Troublesome too that Lily had her own money. Some from the dead husband and some from work. She was a beautician. The State had issued her a license to cut and color hair, and she had an arrangement with an older woman down the street to watch the kids during Lily’s work hours at the beauty shop.

Bud’s strongest argument rested on the fact that he was the man, and therefore Lily should put the house in his name and quit her job. But it got nowhere, especially since Bud’s weekly check from the railroad wouldn’t at all cover the bills. Pulling a third of his weight was the best Bud could do, which seemed about right to him, give or take. Still, it irked him when Lily headed out mornings into the wide world looking pretty in her tight white beautician outfit and white crepe-sole shoes like she was in the medical profession. Most days, she would put her lipstick on and blot it with a rectangle of Kleenex and throw it in the toilet and walk out. There it would float, unflushed, a perfect red print of her mouth for Bud to take a piss into.

And even more irksome, her hints in conversation with others that what she brought home was so much more than he did. But the two sums drew a little closer if you subtracted tips, which, Bud reasoned, was like taking charity. He told Lily to quit letting rich blue-haired grannies palm her a bill on their way out the door. It was demeaning for her, and even worse for him. Like he was married to a whore.

Lily said, No, I won’t quit taking tips. I earn them. It’s how the job works. You don’t have to eat the groceries I buy with them.

That kind of heartless remark, and the general misery of their marriage, was what lit a fire under Bud’s ass, so that before long he got ambitious and came into some money. One afternoon, Bud and his railroad friend, Billy, were smoking reefer and listening to the radio and bitching about their jobs when they should have been working. And out of nowhere Billy proposed a simple break-and-enter deal. Some rich guy he had done a little work for a while back. Surely his house would have enough pawnable stuff—watches and jewelry and silverware—to pay a couple months’ expenses and leave ample pocket money while they pondered their futures.

Bud had sort of halfway sworn off felonies. Teenager prison was bad enough, and he sure didn’t want to do time with big boys. But it would only be this once, and they’d be careful.

Except Billy’s guy was into some shady commercial real estate dealings or other lofty half-legal commerce demanding cash transactions. Stashed in his dresser drawer, alongside his wife’s jewelry and a fancy wristwatch, was a size 12 shoe box filled with stacks of money. And a few days after their job, Billy’s guy turned up floating in a big lake ten miles north of town, which was a puzzler and sort of sad, though not a major cause of concern.

The shoe box held bundles of bills, all tapped into strict rectangles and banded. Altogether, they stacked nearly to the box lid. The top layers were mostly worn ones and fives and tens. So at the moment they found it, they thought it was nothing more than a little lagniappe to the job. But later, when they dug to the bottom, they found that the final layers were perfect stacks of new hundreds wrapped in red bands.

Billy drove, so Bud counted a stack. That one little half-inch fucker was ten thousand dollars. Who would have guessed?

The first thing they did was go raise hell for a couple of days, and when Bud finally got home, he was still thoroughly drunk and exhausted. Lily, of course, took advantage of the situation and set right in on him. Where had he been? Drinking, obviously. Then she started cataloging all the ways he was worthless.

On fool impulse, as his most potent available argument against Lily, Bud stuck his hands into his coat pockets and pulled out the many bundles of hundreds and threw them on the bedspread. If you were honest and stupid, you worked a couple of lifetimes for that kind of money, doled out by the hour in pocket-change amounts by asswipe bosses.

Lily riffled through a few stacks and then began questioning where they all came from, because she knew for sure he’d never earn that kind of money, no matter if he lived as long as Methuselah.

Bud stretched out grandly on the bed among his winnings, his hands behind his head and a satisfied look on his face, saying nothing. Very shortly, unfortunately, he dozed off or passed out, one. When he woke late the next day, the money was gone and the room started spinning whenever he moved his head. Try to stand and the whole world tipped at a severe angle to gravity. He found himself banging against walls and knee-walking on the way to the toilet.

After a couple more rough days while his head cleared and his appetite came back, he started asking questions regarding the whereabouts of his money. Being cool, since he couldn’t exactly snatch it back and hang on to it now. He was the very bird that threw it out there on the chenille, trying to be the big man. And then gave Lily the gift of his unconsciousness, plus two additional vomit-dominated days, for her to plot and hide.

Lily wouldn’t say where the money was. Just that it was safe. She had decided not to get too concerned about where it came from. She wasn’t the one who stole it. For her, it was found money. Her plan was to hoard it. She said it was their security. Use a little to help pay bills every month. Clothes and shoes for the kids. Insurance. Maybe a fairly new used car every few years. Those dreary sorts of things, on and on. It was like a snapshot of how their marriage had sloped down to its present moment. Lily had lost all her fun. Come into enough money to change your life big-time right now, and all she had the imagination to do was hide it and dole it out in dribs and drabs forever.

Over the next days, Bud became resentful. Where had his goddamn money gone? When she was out of the house, he frantically looked in every stupid place she might think was clever, with no success. Then they fought. Which was what they started calling it when Bud gave her a beating.

The first time, Lily was out of work for three days before makeup would cover the bruises. And the fights continued, sometimes just mild and out of habit, and sometimes for blood. One bad night, Lily conceded partway. The next morning, they went to a lawyer and added Bud’s name to hers on the deed to the house, and the lawyer did a fine job of pretending not to notice how her mouth looked, and her left ear, and the way she carried her right arm. The deed wasn’t so important to Bud. His money would buy a couple of blocks of bungalows like Lily’s. It was the principle of the thing.