Sailor & Lula (4 page)

Lula tossed her More into the toilet. “You know, there's somethin' I ain't never told you about, Sailor. When I was almost sixteen I got pregnant.”

Sailor rinsed his face and toweled himself off. He turned around and leaned back against the washbasin.

“You tell your mama?” he asked.

Lula nodded. “She got me an abortion in Miami from some old Jewish doctor with the hairiest nostrils and ears I ever seen. He told me after I'd be able to have kids no problem. He did it in a hotel room on the beach and when we were goin' down in the elevator? And I was almost passin' out and cryin' with my mouth closed? Mama says, ‘I hope you appreciate my spendin' six hundred dollars, not countin' what it cost us to get here and back, on Dr. Goldman. He's the finest abortionist in the South.' ”

“You tell the boy who knocked you up?”

“It was my cousin, Dell, done it. His folks used to visit with us summers.”

“What happened to him?”

“Oh, nothin'. I never let on to Mama about Dell bein' the one. I just flat refused to tell her who the daddy was? I didn't tell Dell, neither. He was back home in Chattanooga by then anyhow, and I didn't see the point. Somethin' terrible happened to him, though. Six months ago.”

“What's that, peanut?”

“Dell disappeared. He'd started behavin' weird? Like comin' up to people every fifteen minutes and askin' how they were doin'? And just seemin' real spacey and actin' funny.”

“Actin' funny how?” said Sailor.

“Well, like Mama told me Aunt Rootie—Dell's mama?—she found Dell up in the black of night all dressed and makin' sandwiches in the kitchen. Aunt Rootie asked him what he was doin' and Dell told her he was makin' his lunch and goin' to work. He's a welder? And she made him go back to bed. Then he'd carry on about the weather? Talk about how rainfall's controlled by aliens livin' on earth sent as spies from another planet. Also how men wearin' black leather gloves 'cause they got metal hands are followin' him around.”

“Prob'ly the rain boys from outer space,” Sailor said.

“It ain't so funny now, though,” said Lula. “December, before Christmas? Dell disappeared and Aunt Rootie hired a private eye to find him. He was missin' for almost a month before he wandered back in the house one mornin'. Said he'd been drivin' to work and the next thing he knew he was in Sarasota, Florida, on a beautiful beach, so he decided to stay for a while. The private eye cost Aunt Rootie over a thousand dollars? Then a little while later Dell run off again to someplace and nobody seen him since.”

“He don't sound so crazy to me,” said Sailor. “Probably just he needed to make a change is all.”

“One thing about Dell?” Lula said.

“What's that?”

“When he was about seventeen he started losin' his hair.”

“So?”

“He's twenty-four now. A year older than you? And he's about bald.”

“There's worse things can happen to a man, honey,” said Sailor.

“Yeah, I suppose,” said Lula. “Hair does make a difference, though.”

Sailor and Lula sat at a corner table next to the window in the Forget-Me-Not Cafe sipping their drinks. Lula had an iced tea with three sugars and Sailor had a High Life, which he drank straight from the bottle. They'd both ordered fried oysters and cole slaw and were enjoying the view. There was a nail paring of a moon and the sky was dark grey with streaks of red and yellow and beneath it the black ocean lay flat on its back.

“That water reminds me of Buddy Favre's bathtub,” said Sailor.

“How's that?” Lula asked.

“My daddy's duck-huntin' partner, Buddy Favre, used to take a bath ever' evenin'. Buddy was a stumpy guy with a mustache and goatee and kinda slanty eyes so he looked like a devil but he was a regular guy. He was a truck mechanic, worked on big rigs, eighteen-wheelers, and he got awful filthy doin' it. So nights when he got home he soaked himself in a tub full of Twenty Mule Team Borax and the water turned a kind of thick grey and black, like the way the ocean looks tonight. My daddy would go over to Buddy's and sit in a chair in the bathroom and sip I. W. Harper while Buddy bathed, and sometimes he took me with him. Buddy smoked a joint ever' night while he was in the tub. He'd offer it to Daddy but he stuck to the whisky. Buddy said the reefer come from Panama and that he was gonna end up there one day.”

“Did he?”

“I don't know, honey. I lost track of him after Daddy died, but Buddy was a pretty determined type of man, so I imagine he'll make it eventually if he ain't already.”

“Where'd you get high first, Sailor? You remember?”

Sailor took a long swig of his High Life. “Sure do. I was fifteen and Bobby Tebbetts and Gene Toy—my half-Chinaman friend I told you about?—we was drivin' Bobby's '55 Packard Caribbean to Ciudad Juarez so we could get laid. Bobby'd been down there before when he'd been visitin' some family in El Paso, and he and a cousin of his went over to Juarez and got their peckers wet for the first time. Gene Toy and I got
Bobby to talkin' about it one night and we just decided on the spot to get up and go get it done.”

“That's an awful long way to go,” said Lula, “just to get some pussy.”

“We was only—let's see, I was fifteen and Tebbetts was seventeen and a half and Gene Toy was sixteen. I had my first taste on that trip. At that age you still got a lot of energy.”

“You still got plenty energy for me, baby. When's the first time you done it with a girl who wasn't hookin'?”

“Maybe two, three months after Juarez,” said Sailor. “I was visitin' my cousin, Junior Train, in Savannah, and we were at some kid's house whose parents were out of town. I remember there were kids swimmin' in a indoor pool and some of 'em was standin' around in the yard or the kitchen drinkin' beer. A girl come up to me that was real tall, taller than me, and she had a real creamy complexion but there was a interestin' star-shaped scar on her nose.”

“Was it big?”

“No. About thumbnail size, like a tattoo almost.”

“So she come up to you?”

“Yeah.” Sailor laughed. “She asked me who I was with and I said nobody, just Junior. She asked me did I want a beer and I held up the one I was holdin'. She asked me did I live in Savannah and I said no, I was visitin' family.”

“She know them?”

“No. She looked right at me and run her tongue over her lips and put her hand on my arm. Her name was Irma.”

“What'd you say to her then?”

“Told her my name. Then she said somethin' like, ‘It's so noisy down here. Why don't we go upstairs so we can hear ourselves?' She turned around and led the way. When she got almost to the top step I stuck my hand between her legs from behind.”

“Oh, baby,” said Lula. “What a bad boy you are!”

Sailor laughed. “That's just what she said. I went to kiss her but she broke off laughin' and ran down the hallway. I found her lyin' on a bed in a room. She was a wild chick. She was wearin' bright orange pants with kind of Spanish-lookin' lacy black stripes down the sides. You know, them kind that doesn't go all the way down your leg?”

“You mean like Capri pants?” said Lula.

“I guess. She just rolled over onto her stomach and stuck her ass up in the air. I slid my hand between her legs again and she closed her thighs on it.”

“You're excitin' me, honey. What'd she do?”

“Her face was half pushed into the pillow, and she looked back over her shoulder at me and said, ‘I won't suck you. Don't ask me to suck you.' ”

“Poor baby,” said Lula. “She don't know what she missed. What color hair she have?”

“Sorta brown, blond, I guess. But dig this, sweetie. Then she turns over, peels off them orange pants, and spreads her legs real wide and says to me, ‘Take a bite of peach.' ”

Lula howled. “Jesus, honey! You more than sorta got what you come for.”

The waitress brought their oysters and slaw.

“Y'all want somethin' more to drink?” she asked.

Sailor swallowed the last of his High Life and handed the bottle to the waitress.

“Why not?” he said.

“I'll drop Mama a postcard from somewhere,” said Lula. “I mean, I don't want her to worry no more than necessary.”

“What do you mean by necessary?” said Sailor. “She's prob'ly already called the cops, my parole officer, her p.i. boyfriend—What's his name? Jimmy Fatgut or somethin'?”

“Farragut. Johnnie Farragut. I suppose so. She knew I was bound to see you soon as you was sprung, but I don't figure she counted on us takin' off together like this.”

Sailor was at the wheel of Lula's white '75 Bonneville convertible. He kept it steady at sixty with the top up to avoid attracting attention. They were twenty miles north of Hattiesburg, headed for Biloxi, where they planned to spend the night.

“I guess this means you're breakin' parole, then?” said Lula.

“You guess,” Sailor said. “My parole was broke two hundred miles back when we burnt Portagee County.”

“What'll it be like in California, Sailor, do you think? I hear it don't rain much there.”

“Considerin' we make it, you mean.”

“We got through two and a half states already without no problem.” Sailor laughed. “Reminds me of a story I heard at Pee Dee about a guy had been workin' derrick on the Atchafalaya. He hooked up with a prostitute in New Iberia and they robbed a armored car together, killed the driver and the guard, got away with it. The woman done the shootin', too. She planned the whole thing, she told this guy, only she was followin' a plan laid out by her boyfriend who was doin' a stretch for armed robbery up at Angola.

“They were headed for Colorado and had gone north through Arkansas and then over through Oklahoma and were around Enid when who bushwhacks 'em but the boyfriend from Angola. He'd gone over the wall, went lookin' for his old squeeze, and learned about the armored-car robbery. It'd made all the papers because it was so darin' and ingenious. It couldn't have been nobody but her, he figured, 'cause of the
way it'd been pulled off, and he'd told her the best route to take to Colorado where the cash could be hid out in a old mine he knew about. He never counted on her attemptin' to pull this gig on her own, of course. It was the score he'd reckoned on makin', maybe usin' her, when he got out of Angola. Anyway, he caught up with 'em before the feds did, and blew 'em both away.”

“Nice story, honey,” said Lula. “What on earth made you think of it?”

“They'd made it through two and a half states, too, before the road ended.”

“What happened to the hardcase from Angola?”

“He got caught by the FBI in Denver and sent back to Louisiana to finish his time on the robbery beef. He's supposed to've stashed the armored-car loot in the Colorado mine. The bodies ain't never turned up.”

“Maybe they're buried in the mine, too,” said Lula.

“Could be. I heard this from a guy'd done time in Angola. You hear lots of stories in the slam, babe, ain't many of which float. But I buy this one.”

Lula lit up a cigarette.

“That don't smell like a More,” said Sailor.

“It ain't,” said Lula. “I picked me up a pack of Vantages before we left the Cape?”

“They sure do stink.”

“Yeah, I guess, but they ain't supposed to be so bad for you.”

“You ain't gonna begin worryin' about what's bad for you at this hour, are you, sugar? I mean, here you are crossin' state lines with a A-number-one certified murderer.”

“Manslaughterer, honey, not murderer. Don't exaggerate.”

“Okay, manslaughterer who's broke his parole and got in mind nothin' but immoral purposes far's you're concerned.”

“Thank the Lord. Well, you ain't let me down yet, Sailor. That's more'n I can say for the rest of the world?”

Sailor laughed and shot the Pontiac up to seventy.

“You please me, too, peanut,” he said.

“Life is a bitch and then you marry one.”

“What kinda trash talk is that?” said Lula.

Sailor laughed. “What it says on the bumper sticker up front. On that pickup.”

“That's disgustin'. Those kinda sentiments shouldn't be allowed out in public. Is this Biloxi yet?”

“Almost. I figure we should find us a place to stay and then go eat.”

“Got anyplace special in mind?”

“We oughta stay somewhere outa the way. Not in no Holidays or Ramadas or Motel Six. If Johnnie Farragut's on our trail he'll check those first.”

They passed the Biloxi City Limits sign.

“How about that one?” said Lula. “The Host of the Old South Hotel.”

“Looks more like the Ghost of the Old South,” said Sailor. “We'll try her.”

The lobby smelled of fried-chicken grease and there were three old men sitting on straight-backed chairs under the giant ceiling fan watching
The Oprah Winfrey Show
on a big black-and-white television. All three of them looked up at Sailor and Lula when they walked in. There was a giant leafy potted plant that looked like marijuana next to the TV.

“When I was a kid,” Sailor whispered to Lula, “my grandaddy showed me a photo of his daddy at a reunion of veterans of the Confederate army. These old geezers over here remind me of that picture. If one or two of 'em had long white beards, they'd look just like them old soldiers in Grandaddy's album. According to Grandaddy, by the time that picture was taken just about all the survivors had promoted theirselfs to general.”