steal my car?”
“No. Now reach in there, real easy, and hand me all your clothes. Underwear, all of it.”
“Come on, man,” Billy said. “What the hell you doin this for then?”
“Because I don’t like you,” Lester Ray said.
Neither of them moved. “Now!” Lester Ray said. Both of them scrambled around in the car, gathering up their clothes. They handed the bundle to Lester Ray.
“Now get back into the car. Go back to fuckin if you want to. But don’t get out for another half an hour. You understand that, don’t you?”
“Yes, sir,” the girl said, climbing back into the car.
“Shit,” Billy said. “If I find out . . .”
“You ain’t gonna do nothin, piss-ant,” Lester Ray said. “And if you report this to the police, I’m gonna come lookin for you.”
After they were back in the car, Lester Ray walked back up the road toward his house. He passed a place where some old tires were burning and he tossed their clothes onto the fire. He laughed out loud.
He would never feel sorry for himself again. Not since those days when he didn’t know any better, when he was a little boy and thought his mother had run off because of him, and he would never see her again and there was nothing he could do about it. Maybe she had. Run off because of him. But now he knew it didn’t really matter why she had left but simply that she had. His daddy had told him a thousand stories, all different, about what she was like, who she was and where she must have gone—Key West, Mobile, a whorehouse in Memphis, on and on—and his daddy would cry and moan and cuss her for the sorry bitch he said she was until he passed out, sometimes face down on the old secondhand Formica table with his arms flayed out to the side, like he was trying to fly down through the surface of the table.
His daddy’s name was Earl Holsomback, and the two of them lived on that same sandy unpaved street that Lester Ray had walked down on his way to the turn-around on the river. It was a rented house, unpainted, two rooms and a kitchen, with a narrow falling down porch, little more than a stoop, on the front. There was paltry furniture; Lester Ray slept on a settee in what they called the living room, while his father had the bedroom where there was an ancient iron bed that had once been painted a gold color, to look like brass, with a mattress that they had found in the city dump where it had been discarded, probably by some rich man in town who had not even gotten the good out of it. Lester Ray did not sleep in the bed on any of his father’s many long absences—when Lester Ray had no knowledge at all of his father’s whereabouts, nor what he might be doing—because his father had pissed the mattress and the dingy sheets so often and so thoroughly that Lester Ray could hardly stand to walk into the bedroom, it stank so much. He was content with the settee, anyway, though it was almost too short for him. He was content with a lot of things, because he knew he was just biding his time until he could leave, until he could get some kind of car or motorcycle, anything, and go in search of his mother. That was the driving force of his young life: finding his mother.
His father was at home when he got there. He sat at the kitchen table in a shabby sleeveless undershirt, Pabst Blue Ribbon cans scattered all over the tabletop.
“Where the shit have you been?” his father said.
“I might say the same thing to you,” Lester Ray said. His father had been gone for two months. He would do that, just suddenly pop up and act like he’d been down to the store for a loaf of bread when he had just disappeared without a word one day to stay away months at a time.
“Don’t get smart with me, boy,” he said. “You got any cigarettes?”
“No,” Lester Ray said, though he knew his father could plainly see the package of Camels rolled up in his T-shirt sleeve. But his father didn’t see them; he was so drunk that his eyes were opaque and watery, and he just sat there, staring at the beer can in his hand. Looking at it like he was surprised to see it, that he had never seen it before. Maybe he was so blind drunk that he hadn’t even known he was holding it until he caught sight of it. What was the use of drinking it if you didn’t even know you were doing it?
“Git yourself a beer,” his father said, and Lester Ray crossed over to the ice box and pulled out a Pabst. He popped the top and sat down, taking a long sip. The beer was ice cold.
“You didn’t tell me where you been,” his father said.
“Like it’s any of your business,” Lester Ray said.
“I’m your daddy, boy,” he said.
“You ain’t nothin but a fuckin drunk,” Lester Ray said.
“No, I’m a fuckin drunk and your daddy,” his father said.
“You think that makes any difference?”
“Not a whole lot, no.”
He didn’t know how old his father was, but he looked like a very old man. He was losing his hair, the bald spot spreading outward from his crown, and he only had a few teeth left, one on the bottom in the front, so that his cheeks caved in and his lips formed a single narrow line above his chin. He was so thin he looked like a skeleton. “Git me another one, will you?” he said, and Lester Ray went back over to the ice box and pulled out another Pabst and opened it. He handed it to his father.
“Where you been?” Lester Ray asked.
“Down to Panama City,” his father said, “had me a job cuttin grass on a golf course.”
“And you got fired for drinkin on the job.”
“Story of my life, ain’t it?” his father said. He leaned back and drained about half the beer. Then he looked at Lester Ray. “I’m headin over to Crestview when I sleep this here off,” he said. “Know a feller over there.”
“Well, I might not be here when you get back,” Lester Ray said. “This time.”
His father laughed. It was a low chuckle, deep down in his throat, and he seemed to choke on it, losing his breath. When he righted himself he hacked and coughed up a wad of phlegm, which he spit onto the floor. “Still think you’re goin lookin for your mama, huh? Boy, you better just give that up.”
“Never,” Lester Ray said.
“I’ve done told you, she was a whore, hooked up with a bunch of gypsies come through, ain’t no tellin where in the hell she’s at now. She had road dust in her veins. Couldn’t set still. She’s halfway round the world, far as I know.”
“I don’t care,” Lester Ray said. “If you’d just tell me her name . . .”
“She didn’t have no name. She was . . . what you say? . . . unusual. She was unusual. She wasn’t born outta no woman, I’ll tell you that.”
“You’re full of shit,” Lester Ray said.
“Naw, now, she was . . . peculiar. Is all I’m sayin.”
“You been tellin me this shit since I was old enough to understand what you were sayin,” Lester Ray said. “You’re so full of shit you need a bucket to tote it around in.”
“That
