Taft Read online

  She nodded. Her apron was as clean as when she put it on in the afternoon. I wondered if she even bothered changing them each day.

  "Well, I asked her. She said she was twenty."

  "She's no twenty," Rose said. "She may not be sixteen, but she's no twenty."

  "She's doing a good enough job for her first day. I guess I might as well give her a chance." I was counting on Rose to say I should let Fay go for her own good, but she didn't.

  "She maybe needs the work," she said. She looked at me like she does when she's finished talking. Rose wasn't very good at getting in and out of conversations. She just seemed to start and stop whenever she felt like it. I never knew what I was supposed to say. I went all the way to the door thinking she was going to tell me something else, but she didn't.

  In the winter we put out trays of hot snacks over Sterno cans to draw the customers in for happy hour, but that meant they all filled up on chicken wings for dinner and by the time seven o'clock rolled around and the drinks went back to full price, everybody cleared out, happy and well fed. The tables looked like chicken graveyards. Little bones everywhere. Cyndi was back at her magazine, looking up every now and then to see if any of the stragglers needed anything. Fay was at the bar, talking to a skinny boy who was leaning hard against a chair. The boy was stoned rather than drunk, you could tell that from his eyes. The way they were standing, bending towards each other, whispering, the way she reached in to turn the collar of his jacket out, I figured it was her boyfriend, though she didn't look like the kind of girl who would have him for a boyfriend. None of my business. It wasn't until I was all the way down near their edge of the bar that I saw how much they favored, the shape of their faces, their eyes. Fay looked up and gave me a pretty smile. "This is my brother," she said, and put her hand on his arm. "This is Carl."

  I introduced myself and shook his hand, which was so cold to the touch that it gave me a start.

  "Cold outside?" I said.

  He looked a little embarrassed and made his hands into a cup, then blew inside. "Getting that way."

  "Get your brother a cup of coffee," I said to Fay, but she didn't go anywhere. She just stared at me. I was beginning to see a pattern here. She just stared until you came up with the answer she was looking for. "Unless you'd rather go on home. There's nobody around. Go on home if you want."

  "That would be okay?" she said.

  I told them to go on and she said how glad she was for the job and thanked me for being nice to her. "I hope I didn't mess up too much," she said.

  "You were fine."

  "I can come back tomorrow then?"

  She wasn't even sure she had a job. "Same time," I said.

  Carl didn't look as good once he let go of the chair, so they linked arms on their way to the door, like sweethearts. Whether he was older or younger than her, I couldn't be sure. Kids were ageless to me. She waited until they were just outside the double glass doors to take her hat out of her pocket and pull it down tight over her ears. It made me look away, though I don't know why.

  IF FRANKLIN came home, I'd take time off. I'd be off for as long as he could stay, since the way I saw it I had about a year built up in overtime. Cyndi could run things okay. I could check in, unless Franklin and I decided to go over to the Ozarks to go fishing. Not that I knew anything about fishing, but I didn't see how it could be so hard. The time was going to come when I would be away from the bar, simple as that. I'd been thinking about putting Wallace on more anyway, and Fay, it hadn't been a week and already she was getting things down. She was smart, that one, and all the customers liked her because she had a sweet way. Mr. Tipton, the dishwasher, called her Little House on the Prairie. "I want Little House on the Prairie to bring me my iced tea," he said to me. "She knows how to fix it. Not like that Cyndi. She always remembers how many sugars I like."

  Of course, hiring Fay turned out to be more like hiring Fay and Carl. He showed up every night towards the end of her shift to pick her up and take her home, but it was no accident that he always got there too early. Not that anyone minded him. He took a little table near the kitchen that nobody ever sat at and did his best to keep to himself. If anyone had the time, Carl was always happy to spend it with them, but he never kept you there forever. He liked to make comments on the weather or the size of the crowd. He was always polite. He drank coffee that he paid for, even when I told him he didn't have to. He liked to make himself useful. When Cyndi dropped a glass he was right there with the dustpan and broom without anyone having to ask, and one night, a Thursday when we got busy for no reason, he went back and washed dishes for a couple of hours. He was tickled with the money I gave him. "I'd do it for free," he said. "I take up space here all the time." I put ten dollars in his shirt pocket and he went right back into the kitchen to tell Rose, who I guess he'd made friends with while he was washing. He got on with everybody. That's the kind of kid he was, no enemies. He liked to talk to me about music, not that I ever told him I played. He said that before Fay got the job, he'd never even heard of James Brown.

  "Back where I come from," he said to me, "all they sing about is Jesus. You'd be amazed at all the different ways there are to sing about Jesus."

  As far as the drugs were concerned, some nights Carl was messed up and some nights he wasn't. I could tell, having spent my life in bars, in Memphis, with musicians. I had plenty of reasons to know about these things. I appreciated the fact that he was careful not to make his condition known. Nights he wasn't straight he showed up later and sat quietly at his table, keeping his eyes down, waiting for Fay to get ready to go. As far as I could tell he was still playing the field, he didn't have a drug of choice. Some nights it was harder for him to keep quiet than others, but he did it. I used to watch him, trying to figure out what was making his heart beat. The more I saw of him, the more he reminded me of Fay, the way he sat, how he held his back straight, the way his voice went up towards the end of a sentence. Fay was hard working, nervous, always looking to please. Carl moved slow, stayed quiet, was always looking to please.

  "You don't mind him," Fay asked me, her hands full of dirty glasses she was unloading on the bar.

  "Carl? No, he's fine."

  She looked relieved. At first I wondered if she'd caught on about his problems, but I didn't think so. Girls like Fay, such things never crossed their minds. "He doesn't know a lot of people. At the house"—she stopped and tried to find a way to put it—"he isn't so comfortable where we live. But he likes it here."

  "Maybe he should find a job," I said, not meaning that he was a deadbeat, but that it might give him something to do.

  "Oh, he's got a job," she said. "He works in our uncle's drugstore after school."

  "High school?"

  She looked uneasy then. She ran her finger around the edge of her tray. "Yeah," she said.

  There were stupid people looking after these children. Whoever let this boy in a drugstore had no idea of his nature. Then Fay put her hand around my wrist, around the cuff of my shirt. She held it tight and what surprised me more than anything was my first thought, which was, I wish it wasn't winter here. "Tell me again that you don't mind him," she said.

  "I don't."

  She took her hand away and she smiled at me. "He's a real good kid," she said.

  Carl and Fay were the brother and sister in the fairy stories, the pretty white babies holding hands in the forest. Everything in the world was waiting to eat them up. This was not the job I was meant for, looking after other people's children, not when mine was in Miami. I thought that there was maybe one more year that I'd be able to get to Franklin, and then he'd change so much and I'd be so far away we'd wind up not knowing each other at all. Then maybe he'd be coming into some bar at night where guys with time would treat him kindly. I shook my head, like that could shake a thought out. I wasn't going to think that way.

  "Hey Carl." I went over to his table to check on him. Fay could see me going over there and see I liked him fine.

  "Hey,"
he said. He kept his eyes down, steadying himself. He was trying to stop himself from tapping out a rhythm on the tabletop, but he couldn't.

  "You having a good night?" I sat down over a chair turned backwards.

  "I'm having a good night," he said. He looked at me and nodded and I nodded back at him. He was speeding just a little. I remember a guy named Jimmy who played the drums better than me because he knew how to speed this way, just a little bit, just enough to make him faster but not out of his mind. Jimmy's hands tapped out 4/4 time on everything they touched. Women went crazy for him. Jimmy's mouth was always dry and I went and got Carl a glass of water. This was not my responsibility.

  "Thanks," Carl said, and took it down in one clean swallow. He touched his fingertips to his lips. "If you need me to do anything," he said.

  "Everything's under control."

  "I mean, I'm just sitting here." His feet were tapping and he stopped them. "I'd do anything, if you needed it."

  "It's fine," I said. His hair was too long, not like long hair, just like hair that nobody'd bothered to cut. It fell into his eyes every now and then and he shook his head.

  "Fay, you're real nice to Fay. I appreciate that," he said to me. "She works hard, you know."

  "She does a good job."

  Carl was looking away from me, over to the little stage in the far corner where nobody was. "She likes you. I wonder what my dad would have said about that." He turned back around to me. Fay passed by us, half smiled and disappeared into the kitchen. "I don't mean that disrespectful."

  I didn't know what the hell he was talking about, but I put up my hand to show him no disrespect was taken.

  "It's just something to think about," he said. "You never think your dad's gonna be wrong, but I know what he would have said, and he would have been wrong about this. He wasn't that kind of guy, you know, one of them. He had a pretty open mind. Lots of the guys he worked with at the plant were." He nodded his head towards me rather than say black. "He always treated them equal. Never even thought about it. It's just with Fay, well, when you've got a kid I guess it's always going to be different. I mean, hell, if I didn't know you myself maybe I would have thought the same way. You have any kids?"

  I said I had a kid.

  "Well then, you know what I'm talking about. I shouldn't have said it anyway. Now you're just going to think bad of my dad and you shouldn't. There's not a bad thing to say. I just need to shut up. Shut up shut up shut up." Carl looked at me and then at his hands, which he had to put between his knees to settle down. There was such a look of panic on his face you'd have thought I'd come over just to scare him.

  "I think I'll see if she's ready," he said in a little voice. A rabbit voice. "Is that okay? She can go?"

  "Sure," I said. I still wasn't exactly sure what Carl was talking about. All drug talk was babbling as far as I was concerned. There was no point wasting your energy trying to make sense of it. One thing I was sure of, I was ready to see both of them go. They came out of the kitchen and Fay went to get their coats.

  "You don't need anything else?" she said.

  "Go on home," I said.

  That night coming back to my apartment was the first time I realized there weren't enough places to go. I could have stayed at the bar or gone to another bar that would have been just the same. I could have gone home or to any motel room in the city that had a bed in it. I could have gone and seen Marion's parents, the Woodmoores, who thought of me as family by now, but I could only see them on Sundays after church and even then I gave a phone call for plenty of advance notice. My own parents in West Memphis over the river I didn't see much. There was my brother in Little Rock. Old friends were music friends and that was just sticking a knife in it, not that I didn't do it from time to time. Other people worked for me or I sold them drinks. I thought of the skinny woman with the pale green cigarette box. I thought of her pretty hands and how I would have kissed them just then.

  The next night while I was up in my office filling out orders for booze, Cyndi was down in the bar drinking. I knew it even before I saw her because Elvis Presley was on the stereo when I came downstairs. She'd done it like this before. It was music I might have liked if I lived in another town where it only came on the radio every now and then, but in Memphis Elvis follows you from the minute you're born. All you can do is try your best to keep away from it. She'd put on the Blue Hawaii record, the one she said ruined her, and she sang in her own pretty voice. She didn't try to sing like Elvis, the way most people do when they'd been drinking and somebody puts one of his records on.

  "Turn it off," I said. "You're going to scare the customers away."

  "This is what people come to Memphis for," she said. "Not that whiny crap you listen to." She put one hand flat against her stomach and reached her other arm straight out to the side and stood there like she was waiting for somebody to ask her to dance.

  "You not going to work tonight?"

  "Good of you to ask, sensitive. Yes, I'm working."

  It was seven o'clock on a Friday night, quiet now, but there was a band coming in that would fill the place solid enough to slice by ten P.M. I needed to know how many sober waitresses I was looking at. The customers who were there already were watching Cyndi hard, thinking maybe there would be a little show before the show. Fay kept her distance over by the bar with a weekend waitress named Arlene. Wallace left his stool by the door and went over to join them. It was too early for fights.

  "Did you know," Cyndi said, "that I used to be one of three featured dancers at the Kaanapali Maui Sheraton's grand luau? All the roast pork and mai-tais you can eat for twenty-nine ninety-five." She was still standing there, one hand on her stomach and one hand out. A couple of the regulars clapped and Cyndi nodded at them. Elvis was still singing. Blue, blue, blue, he was saying. Then as slow as it was possible, she raised up one hip. It went farther up than any of us thought it could go and then she lowered it, waited one count and raised the other. She tapped her left foot out in front of her twice, brought it back, and started with the hip again. She was barely even moving, and still there was something almost obscene about it. None of us had ever seen a person move that way before. Both arms came slowly out in front of her and her hands unfolded and waved.

  "Come on now," I said. I had to stop her. It was clear she was showing people more than she meant to, and that she'd regret it once she thought about it.

  Her hands came down as slowly as they'd gone up, and she picked up a stranger's drink from a table and took a long sip. "Bad day," she said.

  "What in the hell kind of bad day is this?"

  "Elvis's birthday," she said absently.

  "Shit, it's not his birthday. I even know when Elvis's birthday is. What's your problem?"

  "Just a regular bad day, then," she said, her voice gone to ice. She finished the drink while the man who'd ordered and paid for it sat and watched her, then she headed off for the restroom. I went and changed the tapes. Maybe it didn't all seem as strange to me as it should have. People in this town had been doing insane things in relation to Elvis Presley for a long time. What bothered me was the thought that Cyndi might not be nailed down too tight. I might not be able to count on her the way I'd wanted to.

  With things starting out the way they did, it didn't turn out to be such a friendly night. The place was busy and the band was more loud than good. Cyndi tied a knot in one side of her skirt, jacking it to the top of her thigh and then giving anybody who looked at her hell about it. I wasn't planning on mentioning it.

  With everything so busy, I don't think anybody but Fay noticed that Carl never showed. The band outstayed their welcome, breaking down into a bunch of drunken half chords they'd written themselves towards the end of the night. By the time we got the place emptied out and straightened up, it was two-thirty and Fay was looking out the window, holding her puffy jacket in both arms. Cyndi walked right past her without saying a word and went on out into the night. She'd had enough time to sober up a little bit, and
it wasn't helping her mood any. I said my good-nights and told Wallace to turn the lights out while I went up to do the night deposit, a job I never liked. I didn't want anybody breaking in and killing me over money that wasn't even mine. On Fridays I was always tired and made some sort of stupid mistake and had to count everything up again. Once I'd been so dead I'd taken the whole thing home in a paper sack, change and everything, and put it in the bed with me. I couldn't sleep, thinking that somebody would find out and say I'd stolen it. God knows, if I had any interest in stealing I could have done years of it there. I zipped it all up in the blue Third National bag and went down through the kitchen to double-check the locks. I saw her standing there in the dark and nearly had a heart attack.

  "God, I'm sorry," Fay said, scared as me. "I thought you knew I was here still."

  We stood across the room from each other, all the chairs turned upside down on the tables. The place always seemed so much bigger when it was empty. Nicer too. A nice bar. "Why are you still here?"

  "Carl didn't come," she said. Her voice was quiet, but I could hear it so clearly. All night I'd been screaming to make myself heard over the noise.

  "So I'll take you home," I said.

  "Then what if he comes here? What if I miss him?" She sounded so nervous, I wondered if she knew more than I was giving her credit for. "I could go home and then he would come here."

  "So then he goes home. Carl knows that somebody'd take you." Carl knew that I would take you. "He wouldn't not come if he thought you were going to be standing around outside."

  She nodded her head. I could see it. My eyes were adjusting to the dark. "That's true," she said.

  Of course, there was almost no chance that Carl was going to be at home, wherever that turned out to be. If he was in a state in which he was still capable of remembering, he would have remembered Fay. "Come on," I said. "We need to go out the back. I've got all this money."