He was undemanding in his attitude toward Jamie Sue. She could buy anything she wanted and go anywhere she wanted. The best care possible was available for her child. Her driver, Quince, would probably lay down his life for her. A wave of her hand, the tinkle of a bell, a touch of her finger on the house speaker system could summon any type of domestic or security personnel she wanted. There were implicit understandings about her and her husband’s sexual congress and the number of times a month they entered into it, but it was never he who initiated it. She left her bed and came to his of her own accord, usually in the dark, just before sunrise, when she woke hot and disturbed and filled with longing from a dream she would never tell him about. She didn’t hold back when she made love with Leslie, but she did it with her eyes closed, thinking of the man in the dream, thinking perhaps just momentarily of the terrible trade-off that had made her despise herself and wonder if her soul was forfeit.
Then she would lie beside him, her naked body damp under the sheets, his hand in hers, and try to convince herself there was redemption in charity and that maybe even in committing sin, she had brought a degree of happiness into a blighted man’s life.
It was in moments like these that she saw into another corner of Leslie’s soul. She wondered if, inside his veneer of gentlemanly manners and self-deprecating humor, he had found ways to mock and injure her. Worse, she wondered if his cynical statements were made with forethought and in contempt of her poor education and background. In the predawn hours of the morning after the revival on the res, she had gone into Leslie’s bedroom and undressed and gotten in bed beside him. After they had completed their particular form of lovemaking, he had disentangled himself from her and lay quietly in the gloom, staring at the ceiling, his breath as audible as wind whistling in a dry pipe.
“Is everything all right, Leslie?” she asked.
“I was curious about your rotund friend.”
“Who?”
“Purcel is the name, isn’t it? I bet he’s a ton of fun to bounce around with.”
She started to speak, but he turned on his side and touched his finger to her lips. “I have a question about the way you keep your eyes shut even though the room is dark.”
“Leslie, don’t.”
“Tell me, when you’re going at it, really outdoing yourself, do you secretly feel you’re on top of a giant crustacean?” he said.
Then she knew that the man lying next to her believed in and respected absolutely nothing, and, if confronted with his nihilism, would probably ask her why it had taken her so long to figure that out.
AT NOON SHE had Quince drive her and her son to the café on Swan Lake. She carried her son on her shoulder and got a high chair from the waitress and set the little boy inside it, then ordered a grilled cheese sandwich for him and a buffalo burger for herself. After Quince ordered, Jamie Sue called the waitress back and asked her to bring a gin gimlet from the saloon next door. “Would you like something from the bar, sir?” the waitress said to Quince.
“Just the food I ordered. Water is good,” he replied, tapping his nail on the water glass that was already full.
After the waitress was gone, Jamie Sue said, “You can have a beer if you like.”
“Thank you just the same, Miss Jamie.”
“I’ve never seen you drink.”
“I’m hired to drive y’all. That means with a clear head. You know that alcohol stays in the bloodstream for three weeks?”
“No, I didn’t know that. But you’re a loyal employee, Quince.”
“That’s a fine compliment coming from you, Miss Jamie.”
She let the personal nature of his remark pass and looked out onto the lake. She could see the wind cutting long V’s in the surface, and Swan Peak rising into the clouds, blue-black against the sky, as sharply delineated as the edges of a broken razor blade. Her gimlet glass was frosted with cold when the waitress brought it, and she drank it empty in three swallows, the gin sliding down inside her like an icicle starting to melt. The food had not been placed in the serving window that separated the kitchen from the counter area, and she called the waitress back and ordered another gimlet.
“Miss Jamie, I heard about you in Miss’sippi, long before I went to work for the Wellstones. I listened to your music on a station up in Tennessee. The jukebox up at the café had a couple of your songs on it,” Quince said. “People played them all the time. People said you were as good as Martina McBride.”
“Yes?” she said.
“Liquor always messed me up. I’d have these blackouts and wake up with spiders crawling all over the room. I’d have memories that didn’t make any sense. That’s what I was trying to say. A lady like you don’t need to-”
“You shouldn’t worry about me, Quince. We’re all doing fine here. Has Mr. Leslie said something about me? Are you troubled in some way?”
His face blanched. “No ma’am, I mean he didn’t say anything to me. I ain’t a bedpost, though. I hear things. I’m supposed to look out for you.”
Quince kept talking, trying to undo his ineptitude, but she heard nothing else of what he said, as though his lips were moving beyond a piece of soundproof glass. The waitress brought her the gimlet, then came back with their plates. Jamie Sue cut the little boy’s grilled cheese sandwich into small strips that he began eating with his fingers, smiling with a mouthful of toasted bread and yellow cheese. She let her own food grow cold on the plate and drank from her gimlet and looked out on the lake and thought about a scene many years ago in a little town in Texas at the bottom of the old Chisholm Trail.
It was a historical place in ways that nobody cared about. The most dangerous gunman in the West, John Wesley Hardin, had grown up in Cuero, right down the road. Bill Dalton’s gang used to hide out there after robbing trains and banks. The biggest herds of cattle ever assembled were put together there and trailed across the Red River, through Indian territory, all the way to the railhead at Wichita. The Sutton-Taylor feud, probably the worst outbreak of violence in the postbellum South, began with the rope-dragging and murder of a cowboy on her grandfather’s ranch.
In reality, she did not care about these things. When she thought about the town where she had grown up, she thought in terms of images and faces rather than events, of kind words spoken to her, of a time when she believed the world was an orderly and safe place where she was loved and one day would be rewarded because she was born pretty in a way that very few little girls were pretty.
Her father, an oil-field roustabout who was barely five feet five, had left one lung at Bougainville and had fixed the other one up with two packs of Camels a day. But he and his wife, a woman born without sight, had opened up a hamburger joint and for five years had made a living out of it and a truck patch they irrigated with water they hand-carried in buckets from a dammed-up creek. Each noon during the summer months, except Sunday, when they attended an Assembly of God church, Jamie Sue’s mother fixed her grilled cheese sandwiches in the café kitchen and let her eat them with the customers at the counter. Every day she drank a Triple X or a Hires root beer with her sandwich, and was the darling of the cowboys and pipeliners and long-haul drivers who frequented the café. Then her father took his last trip to the cancer ward at the U.S. Navy hospital in Houston and died while smoking a cigarette in the bathroom.
The hamburger joint became a video store, and Jamie Sue and her mother lived on welfare and the charity of her grandfather, who owned the remnants of a dust-blown ranch that was blanketed by grasshoppers and filled with tumbleweed and dead mesquite trees. The grandfather cooked on a woodstove and had no plumbing. If a person wanted to bathe, he did it in the horse tank. If he wanted to relieve himself, he did not go to the outhouse, or at least one that would be recognized as such. The “outhouse” consisted of a plank stretched across two pine stumps. The disposal system was a shovel propped against a scrub oak.