All the Dead Lie Down Page 5

  Sarah Jane holds her hands out toward the fire. The heat feels good; it eases the tension that has been building up inside her. She pictures the bottle of wine in Lufkin’s bag. She imagines the warmth of it sliding along her tongue and down her throat. She anticipates the flush in her skin, the glow in her blood, the numbing buzz in her brain as it begins to work its magic. She hopes there is enough of it—two bottles or three—and that they won’t have to share it with Tin Can, who doesn’t care much about drinking anyway.

  Lufkin pulls from the bag a cellophane-wrapped package with a steak in it. He shows it to the women. It’s a T-bone, thin, but with lots of marbly fat running through it. Sarah Jane’s stomach flutters in anticipation and she tries to remember when she ate last. “You been Dumpster-diving?” she asks Lufkin, who is pulling another steak out of the bag.

  “Paid for ’em,” he snaps. “See, date’s right here on the package, woman—not even close to the expiration.” He is annoyed because she has broken his mood. He likes to play roles and pretend they are all something they are not. Sometimes she goes along with it, and sometimes she doesn’t.

  Sarah Jane takes a step back and from lowered eyes watches Lufkin’s profile, his long, bony nose and thin red mouth just visible in the nest of his long black beard, which is streaked with gray. She is checking to see if he is more than annoyed. Not that he’s ever done more than speak sharply to her, but she’s wary. You have to be on your guard around men. She’s seen this one beat up other tramps who did nothing more than walk too close to his bottle. But that happened when he was drunk. And drunk or sober, he’s never turned that anger on her. She pictures her carving knife, all sharp and shiny, wrapped in a black sweatshirt at the bottom of her canvas bag, the bag she always carries with her. He has never tried to do her any harm. And he better not.

  “Win the lottery?” she asks him.

  “Yeah, the labor pool lottery. Prize was I got to dig post holes for eight hours, no break. This yahoo carried me out to a farm in East Bum-fuck in the back of his pickup. Dog sat up front with him in the air conditioning.”

  Sarah Jane smiles. “Dog probably smells better.”

  Lufkin tears the wrapping off the steaks and hands them to Tin Can, who receives each one with a look of reverence and sets it carefully on the grate across the top of the barrel. “Pay was all right,” he says, “eight bucks a hour. Course, that fuckin’ Squint takes the first ten bucks.”

  “Squint,” Tin Can says, hugging the cat in close to her chest. She always closes her eyes and scrunches her face up at the mention of his name. Sarah Jane is not sure what happened, but it must’ve been bad. When Tin Can was released from the State Hospital, she stayed at Squint’s camp, the Patchwork Pit, for a while. Now she refuses to set foot south of the river for fear she might get too close to the camp.

  “I don’t like him,” Tin Can says. “You stay away from him, Lufkin.”

  “Can’t avoid him,” Lufkin says through tight lips, “if you need day gigs. You want to score in the day labor cage and stay alive, you pay Squint. That’s the way it is.”

  “It isn’t fair,” Sarah Jane says. She has reason to hate Squint, too, and to know you can’t cross him. “It pisses me off—him making money off you digging post holes.”

  Lufkin turns away from her. “Pisses me off too. But you don’t give Squint his cut, Roylee and them’ll slice you a new asshole for sure.” He pulls a newspaper out of the grocery sack and hunkers down next to the barrel so he can use the firelight to read by. Somehow he manages to get a newspaper every day and he reads it all, even the obituaries. Such a waste of time. The paper looks the same every day, year in and year out—the same old crap—big headlines that don’t make a rat’s ass of difference to anyone. Like those endless football games passive old slack-jawed Harold used to watch on TV. He never noticed they were just showing the same plays year after year. Never noticed much of anything.

  Sarah Jane rummages in her bag for her Camels. Thinking about Harold ruins the good mood she was feeling. That’s what happens when you look in the rearview mirror. She shakes a cigarette part way out and grabs it with her lips, putting the pack away quickly so she won’t have to offer it around. She leans over the fire to light it, takes a deep first drag way deep down in her lungs, and looks down at the shallow water in the creek. Near the bridge a spiky red reflection in the water looks like a spill of crimson paint, or her own bright blood.

  She blows the smoke out.

  The blood she’s lost over the years, she thinks—buckets of it, gallons of it, rivers of it. The red reflection shimmies at her. Every major event of her life was marked by spilled blood. Good lord, if you added it all up—that endless bleeding during her “curse,” as Gramma always called it, and from cut knees and nosebleeds and childbirth, and the blood she’s sold these last three years—if you captured all that blood in one place, it would fill up Waller Creek and maybe even Town Lake. Like those rivers in Egypt that turned to blood in the Bible.

  It’s amazing, really, that she has any blood left at all. Somehow, it just keeps renewing itself.

  Wondering what is making that red reflection in the water, she glances up to find the source. She studies the city lights twinkling all around them until she settles on the red Sheraton sign high above. She takes another long pull on the cigarette, holding the burn in her lungs as long as possible, trying to sear away the memory of that other blood, not hers, but the Howler’s blood that spurted out from Sarah Jane’s knife onto the filthy cement floor in that Houston shelter. It was so easy, like sticking a pin in a balloon, as if that old crazy woman was just a bag of blood, asking for someone to prick her and let it all gush out. To get rid of that ugly image Sarah Jane blows the smoke out and says, “Hey, Tin Can, I ran into a friend of yours today.”

  Tin Can looks up from the steaks. “A friend of mine?” Her big popeyes open wider.

  “Little Bopeep,” Sarah Jane snorts.

  “Who?”

  “That woman, the one who talked to you for her magazine. Molly someone.”

  “Oh, she’s so nice.”

  Sarah Jane shrugs. Tin Can is such a simpleton. She thinks everyone who so much as smiles at her is nice.

  “Where did you see her?” Tin Can asks.

  “At the Big Lady. I was in the can and she came in.”

  Lufkin looks up from his newspaper. “Where was this?”

  Sarah Jane jerks a thumb in the direction of the huge lighted dome ten blocks to the north. “The Capitol. I been hanging out there, copping some A/C. They got this public gallery. Good rest room, too.”

  “What about the library?” Lufkin says. “I thought you was hanging there days.”

  Sarah Jane has just sucked in a lungful of smoke and it fuels her furies, those shriekers and howlers that live inside her chest. They flare up suddenly with a whoosh, like a gas burner; blue flames lick at her ribs and make sweat pop out on her forehead. “Fuckers kicked me out! Said I was sleeping but I wasn’t. Just closed my eyes for a minute.” She leans over and scratches furiously at the scabs on her legs, ripping them open again, making blood ooze down her leg. “Wasn’t hurting anything. Think they own the world.”

  “I know,” Lufkin says. “Those signs that say, “No bedrolls, no blankets, no drinking, no eating, no loitering, no smoking, no camping, no soliciting.’ “

  “No sleeping,” Tin Can adds.

  “No sneezing,” says Sarah Jane, feeling the furies calm down, “no breathing, no farting.”

  Tin Can giggles. “No peeing.”

  “They said I couldn’t come back—ever,” Sarah Jane says. “Who cares? I’ll go to the Big Lady now.”

  “For sleeping they said you couldn’t come back?” Lufkin says with surprise.

  “Well, that. And …” She lets her voice trail off, not wanting to remember the scene.

  “And what?” Lufkin asks.

  “Oh, they hassled me, pushed me around,” Sarah Jane says.

  Tin Can shakes her head
. “Fighting again. Cow Lady, you gotta count to ten. I been telling you. You gotta start countin’ to ten. You been kicked out of almost ever place in town now. Even the Sally.”

  Sarah Jane hates being nagged by this retarded hag. “That writer person,” she says to Tin Can. “I hope she’s paying you for those interviews.”

  “Paying me? No.”

  “Tell her you want to be paid. She looks like she can afford it.”

  “We just talk, Cow Lady. An interview is talking. And a man come and took some pictures, that’s all.”

  “You’re getting ripped off,” Sarah Jane says. “Why do it if you don’t get paid?”

  Tin Can wrinkles her brow with the difficulty of the question. “See, people don’t know how our life is,” she says slowly. “They don’t know.”

  Sarah Jane blows out a long stream of smoke. “You think anyone gives a rat’s ass how your life is?”

  Tin Can’s mouth turns downward. “Oh, I don’t know,” she whines.

  “So what do you tell her?” Sarah Jane asks.

  “About how I got to be homeless and all. About collecting cans and selling blood. How MHMR don’t take cats, and the Sally neither.” She looks down at Silky in her arms. “Molly asks about all that. She cares.”

  “If she cares so much, why isn’t she paying you? I bet she’s gonna get paid.”

  Tin Can is quiet for several seconds, thinking it over. “Maybe it’ll help for people to know what it’s like.”

  Sarah Jane knows she should drop it, but she can’t stop herself. “Tin Can, you’re such a dummy. No one who hasn’t been out here can know what it’s like. You’re wasting your time.”

  Tin Can quickly lowers her head and pretends to be examining Silky’s fur. A tear runs down her cheek.

  Lufkin rolls his newspaper up and slaps it down on his knee. “Now stop that!” He stands up. “Know something, Cow Lady? You are a real negative person. And I dump on all that negative shit.”

  “Negative? I’m just saying no one cares about her problems. Or yours. Or mine. So we got to take care of ourselves—that’s all I’m telling her. She’s wasting her time with this interview stuff.”

  Tin Can lifts her head. Her eyes are shiny with tears.

  Lufkin drums the rolled-up newspaper against his skinny thigh. He is about to make a speech. Sarah Jane can see it coming. He says, “What goes around comes around, Cow Lady. Don’t you know that yet?”

  “You say that all the time, and it doesn’t mean shit.”

  “It means you do something to help someone, and later on the universe does something good for you. But it happens in some way that’s a surprise.” He slaps the newspaper hard against his thigh again. “That’s what it means.”

  Sarah Jane lets out a long raspberry. “Fairy tale crap.”

  “See. That’s what I mean—negative, negative,” he says.

  “If wishes were horses, beggars would ride.” Sarah Jane is surprised she has actually spoken this; she usually keeps Mother Goose echoing inside to calm herself, but lately the rhymes seem to be spilling over.

  “Huh?” says Lufkin, looking at her hard. “Who’s a goddamn beggar?”

  She dismisses his anger with a wave of her hand. “What happens to you in this life has got nothing to do with what you did or didn’t do. It’s like …” She searches for the right comparison. “You know that game over at Dirty’s where you’ve got a glass box with all those stuffed toys and you try to pick one up with the claw thing? The toy that gets picked up just happens to be in the way. That’s life. Fate. You get in the way of the claw thing, you get picked up and you got no choice but to go with it.”

  “No, no, no.” He slaps the paper into his palm with each word. “You’re wrong.”

  She didn’t mean to get into this conversation, but now she’s really steaming up. “Like me. Old Harold took up with his secretary, divorced me. Then he took my children away, even though they wanted to be with me. I lost my job at the Chevy dealership. I think I told you—I was overqualified, really—high school graduate, a year of business college. Then I lost my room at the boardinghouse. So I ended up on the street. See, I just happened to be in the way of the claw.”

  “Well, yeah,” Lufkin says. “What I mean—”

  “And you. Look at you, for Christ’s sake. Nine years on the street and you haven’t learned squat. You worked hard as a carpenter, right? Then you had an accident and you hurt your knee really bad and they fired you, right? You got no family and no one else cares, right? So you’re out on the street. Is this because you put bad things into the universe?”

  “I’m just down on my luck right now, but that’s got to change. Look at me.” He thumps the newspaper on his chest. “I got my health. I got friends. I got a trade I used to make twenty bucks an hour at.”

  Sarah Jane opens her mouth to question this but thinks better of it. On the street it’s best not to question people’s lies, especially if you don’t want them to question yours.

  Lufkin is going on: “I’ve been in a slump, sure, but it ain’t gonna last forever. I’m gonna find a job and get me a little apartment.”

  “Maybe. But it doesn’t have anything to do with whether you do good stuff or not.”

  Lufkin is agitated now; he is twisting the newspaper in his hands, rolling it tighter. “I see we need to do a little experiment here.” He points the paper at Tin Can. “Look at your friend there. She’s shivering. You see that.”

  Sarah Jane takes a drag on her cigarette and looks down into the creek. She doesn’t like the direction this is taking.

  “I said look at Tin Can,” Lufkin says in a hard voice she’s never heard from him before.

  Sarah Jane keeps looking down at the water.

  “Oh,” he says, “you gonna be like that, huh? Okay, then. You want one of them steaks I bought?”

  She glances up at him in surprise. This really sucks. She’s sorry she let herself be drawn into this bullshit argument.

  “You want some of the wine I got?” he says.

  She nods.

  “Okay then, you gotta participate in this experiment. This is important. You’re real attached to your cow coat, ain’t you?”

  Reflexively she wraps her arms around herself, holding on to the coat she never takes off, the black and white spotted coat that has given her her street name, the name everyone here knows her by. It is part of who she is now.

  Lufkin nods at her. “Yeah,” he says, “and Tin Can’s just wearing that thin little skimpy shirt, and last winter she got bad pneumonia. Remember that? Well, you got on a sweater under your coat and I know you got some more warm clothes in your bag. So what you need to do here is give Tin Can your cow coat.”

  “Oh, no!” Tin Can says. “That’s her coat. I never seen her without that coat.”

  “That’s what makes it so good,” he says. “She’s gonna give you this coat offa her back, the coat she wears all the time.” He fixes his beady eyes on Sarah Jane and waits.

  Sarah Jane takes a last drag on her cigarette and tosses it into the creek. “That’s nuts. I’m down to the clothes on my back. I got nothing to give.”

  He points a long finger at her. “Yes, you do. And it means more when you ain’t got much. The universe knows it’s more important than some rich guy giving millions.”

  Sarah Jane hates it when men point at her, and, even more, she hates being preached at. Shades of old Harold, always pointing and preaching, holier than thou. “No,” she says.

  “Now come on, Cow Lady. I hate to do this, but if you don’t give her the coat, there’s not gonna be no more wine from me. No steaks neither.”

  The cigarette butt’s floating on the ripply red reflection. “This is so stupid.”

  “Well, maybe it is and maybe it ain’t, but that’s the deal.”

  He reaches down into the grocery bag with both hands and pulls out two bottles by the necks. He holds them out so she can see them. “Thunder Chicken. Fourteen percent alcohol. You wanna share
it, you gotta do this good deed. Take your coat off and give it to Tin Can and say, ‘Wear it in good health.’ “

  Sarah Jane sighs; he’s got his teeth into this and he’s not going to back off. She decides to compromise. “Tell you what—I got a nice black sweatshirt in my bag. It would fit her better. The coat’s gonna be way too long for her.”

  “How’re them steaks doing?” Lufkin says over his shoulder to Tin Can. “They’re smelling mighty tasty.”

  “Almost done,” says Tin Can, poking one of them with her stick.

  Lufkin keeps his eyes on Sarah Jane. “The coat for Tin Can,” he says. “And for me, one of them Camels you got in your bag. I don’t believe you’ve ever offered me a smoke.”

  Sarah Jane unbuttons the coat, slowly. It’s best just to go along. She’ll get it back from Tin Can later when Lufkin’s not around. It’ll just be a loan. Hey, diddle, diddle! The cat and the fiddle. She takes the coat off, wads it up, and tosses it toward Tin Can’s feet. The cow jumped over the moon. Tin Can bends over to pick it up.

  Lufkin is nodding. “Now say, ‘Wear it in good health.’ “

  “Jesus,” Sarah Jane mutters. “Wear it in good health.” She already feels naked.

  “And don’t forget the smoke for me,” he says. “Then we’ll watch to see what the universe does for you.”

  “Fuck-all,” Sarah Jane says as she rummages furiously in her bag for the pack of Camels. Out of the corner of her eye she sees Tin Can putting on the coat, which is so long it nearly covers her feet. The little dog laughed to see such sport. “Fuck-bloody-all,” she says under her breath. “Same thing the universe always does for me.”

  LITTLE BOPEEP FELL FAST ASLEEP,

  AND DREAMT SHE HEARD THEM BLEATING;