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“Actually, today is Bobby’s birthday,” she continued. “We have to leave a bit early and drop off his present at the rally.”
“Bama—” Weldon began.
“It’ll take a few minutes. You can stay in the car,” she said to him.
He made a face and looked away into the shadows. A moment later Clemmie passed our table.
“Go up and ask Vic to join us, would you, Clemmie?” Lyle said.
She began clearing paper plates off the glass-topped table as though she hadn’t heard him. Her breasts looked like watermelons inside her gray-and-white uniform.
“Clemmie, would you please tell Vic all our guests are here?” Lyle said.
“I got to live on the other side of the wall from that nasty old man. That don’t mean I got to talk to him,” she said.
Lyle’s face reddened with embarrassment.
“Maybe he doesn’t want to come down. Leave him alone,” Weldon said.
“No, he’s going to come down here and eat with us,” Lyle said. “He’s paid for whatever he did to us, Weldon.”
“You don’t even know that it’s him,” Weldon said.
“Do you want me to go up there?” Drew said.
Good ole Drew, I thought. Always letter-high and right down the middle. She stood by the bar, her weight resting on one foot, her thick, round arms covered with tan and freckles.
“No, I’ll do it,” Lyle said.
“Why do you keep stirring up the past all the time?” Weldon said. “If it’s not moving, don’t poke it. Why don’t you learn that?”
“Have another beer, Weldon,” Lyle said.
“Lyle, this is your craziness. Don’t act like somebody else is responsible,” Weldon said.
Lyle got up from his chair and walked across the lawn toward the garage apartment.
“Lord h’ep me Jesus,” he said to no one in particular.
Later, he came back down the stairs. Then, a few minutes later, the man who called himself Vic Benson stepped out the door and walked slowly down the stairs, a shaft of late sunlight breaking across his destroyed face.
He wore a frayed white shirt that was gray with washing and creaseless shiny black trousers that were hitched tightly around his bony hips. People glanced once at his face, then focused intensely on their conversations with the people next to them. He was smoking a hand-rolled cigarette without removing it from the corner of his mouth, and the paper was wet with saliva all the way down to the glowing ash. His eyes made you think he was being entertained by a private joke. He stopped by the edge of the patio, threw his cigarette into a flower bed, and picked up an empty glass off the bar. Then he knotted up a handful of mint from a silver bowl and bruised it around the inside of the glass.
“What you having, suh?” the black bartender asked.
Vic Benson didn’t reply. He simply reached over the bar, picked up a bottle of Jack Daniel’s and poured four fingers straight up.
Lyle rose from his chair and stood beside him awkwardly.
“This is Vic,” he said to Bama and his brother and sister.
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“Glad to meet you,” Vic said.
Drew’s and Weldon’s eyes narrowed, and I saw Drew wet her lips. Weldon stuck an unlit cigarette in his mouth, then took it out.
“I’m Weldon Sonnier. Do you know me?” he said.
