AllFreeNovel
Share Us
"Bubba…"
"What?"
"Would you please get me a drink?"
"All right," he said, taking the thermos and a chilled glass out of the icebox. "I wonder what I pay Clarence for. I damn near have to show him a diagram just to get him to dust."
He poured from the thermos into his wife's glass, then put it in front of her. He continued to look at her with an exasperated expression on his face.
"Look, I don't want to get on your case all the time, but how about not filing your nails at the table?" he said. "I can do without nail filings in my food."
She wiped the powdered filings off the glass top with a Kleenex, then continued filing her nails over the shoe box.
"Well, I have to go. It was nice meeting you," I said.
"Yeah, I got to pack and get on the road, too. Walk him out to his truck, Claudette. I'm going to make some calls when I get to New Orleans. I find out somebody's been causing you problems, I'll cancel their act. That's a promise. By the way, that bartender better be out of town."
He looked at me a moment, balancing on the balls of his feet, then cocked his fists and jerked his shoulders at an angle as quickly as a rubber band snapping.
"Hey!" he said, grinned and winked, then walked back out the patio toward the circular staircase. His back was triangular, his butt flat, his thighs as thick as telephone posts.
His wife walked with me out to my pickup truck. The wind blew across the lawn and flattened the spray fr
om the sprinklers into a rainbow mist among the trees. Gray clouds were building in the south, and the air was close and hot. Upstairs, Bubba had turned on a 1950s Little Richard record full blast.
"You really don't remember me?" she said.
"No, I'm sorry."
"I dated your brother, Jimmie, in New Orleans about ten years ago. One night we went out to visit you at your fish camp. You were really plastered and you kept saying that the freight train wouldn't let you sleep. So when it went by, you ran outside and shot it with a flare pistol."
I suddenly realised that Bubba's wife wasn't so uncomplicated after all.
"I'm afraid I was ninety-proof-a lot of the time back then," I said.
"I thought it was funny."
I tried to be polite, but like most dry alcoholics I didn't want to talk about my drinking days with people who saw humor in them.
"Well, so long. I hope to see you again," I said.
"Do you think Bubba's crazy?"
"I don't know."
"His second wife left him two years ago. He burned all her clothes in the incinerator out back. He's not crazy, though. He just wants people to think he is because it scares them."
"That could be."
"He's not a bad man. I know all the stuff they say about him, but not many people know the hard time he had growing up."
"A lot of us had a hard time, Mrs. Rocque."
"You don't like him, do you?"
"I guess I just don't know your husband well, and I'd better go."
"You get embarrassed too easy."
