Cold in July

28

When I awoke, I was disoriented. The world had been spun around and my bed had shrunk during the night. I started to call for Ann when I realized where I was. On the outskirts of Pasadena, Texas, at Jim Bob’s house in the spare bedroom. Jim Bob was upstairs and Russel was asleep on the couch in the living room.

I sat on the side of the bed and scratched my head and thought about coffee. Last night seemed like a dream, a bad dream. We had left LaBorde about midnight, and I had fallen asleep in the backseat of the Red Bitch, awakening as if from a violent mugging.

I remembered sitting up in the seat of the car as we went over the Ship Channel bridge and seeing the water and ships out there and later the foundries as we entered Pasadena. There was something grim and alien about those places with their smokestacks chugging dark, stinking loads to the sky, and every time I saw those foundries, especially at night when great spurts of fire shot skyward from tall, narrow pipes to mix with the foul smoke, I was reminded of Dante’s Hell. I thought it must be dreadful to work at those foundries, out there in all that heat and smoke and stink, those chemicals and boilers constantly cocked for disaster.

The thought of all that put me back down in the seat, and I drifted off to the sound of Jim Bob and Russel talking about old times, their words losing meaning, becoming a drone, having an effect on me not too unlike a mother’s cradle song. When next I understood a word, it was Jim Bob tugging my shoe and calling my name, trying to get me awake.

After that I remembered carrying in my little bag and Jim Bob’s house being large and lonely and smelling of dust. The room he put me in was not so large, and it had a little bed and a tiny air conditioner that strained frantically to put some cool into air that had been dead for days.

Now it was morning and I was awake and it was damn near cold and I had a stomach that wanted breakfast, a body that wanted coffee, and a brain that was trying to put together exactly how I had gotten myself into all of this and why.

I looked at my watch. Ann and Jordan were not up yet. Another hour and they would be going through the morning routine and Jordan would be spilling his first glass of milk for the day. Damned if that didn’t suddenly seem endearing.

Most likely Ann would wake up mad at me and stay mad all day. She had agreed to let me go and had given me therapeutic sex the night before, but in time she would get mad again. She’d think about Russel and how foolish I was, and she’d be hot as those pipes at the foundry that shot out the fire.

James and Valerie would run the shop well enough, but James would moon over Valerie’s ass something disgraceful. He might do it so much he wouldn’t count change right.

Maybe Jack the mailman, with Russel gone, would start throwing the mail again.

I got up and stretched and felt the worse for it. I put on my clothes and went out into the hall and through the living room where Russel was lying awake, looking at the ceiling, smoking a cigarette.

“You too?” he said.

“Just got up,” I said.

“I couldn’t sleep,” he said.

“I slept, but it wasn’t worth a damn. I guess I dozed too much in the car. I don’t do so good after midnight anymore.”

“Older you get, the worse it gets,” Russel said.

“If it can get any worse than this,” I said, “you might as well kill me now.”

Russel threw the covers back and stood up. He had on pale gray shorts with a triangular design down the inseam; his belly hung over the waistband as if slowly melting. His arms, back and shoulders were covered with gray hair and his face looked long and creased with lines. His chest seemed to have fallen in like the roof of an old house and his posture was bad. Only his arms and hands looked strong. It was as if old age, mad as hell, had crept upon him during the night and climbed inside his skin.

“Let’s find some coffee,” Russel said, lighting a cigarette.

He slipped on his clothes and coughed some smoke and we staggered along to where the living room quit and became the kitchen. Russel found a Mr. Coffee, and after rummaging through the cabinet, a can of Folger’s and some filters.

“Maybe there’s something to eat in the fridge,” he said.

I went over and looked in the refrigerator and found some thick bacon wrapped in wax paper and some eggs. I put the stuff on the counter and got some bread out of the bread box and put it in the toaster and chased down a frying pan. I opened up the bacon wrapper and put all the meat in the frying pan and started stirring it with a spatula.

“Best way to cook that is naked,” Jim Bob said. I turned and there he was wearing his jeans and no shirt, that stupid-looking chicken on his chest, his big feet bare and awkward looking without his boots.

“Naked, huh?” I said.

“Yep,” Jim Bob said. “Get a little hot grease popped on your balls and you learn to turn that fi turn thre down.” He came over and turned my fire down and took the spatula and went to moving the bacon around. “How’d y’all sleep?”

“Not too good,” I said, “but it wasn’t the accommodations. I just had a lot on my mind.”

“Same here,” Russel said.

“That’s too bad. I slept like a hog on ice.”

We ate breakfast and the bacon was great. Best I’d had in years. I asked Jim Bob about it.

“Came from my hogs,” he said. “I raise the squeally fuckers. I’ll take you out and show them to you after a while. Got a wetback takes care of them for me. I get these eggs from a fella down the road. Got his own chickens and he doesn’t let them peck shit, but then he don’t put them in no boxes and force-feed them neither.”

“What about Freddy?” Russel asked abruptly.

“We go check on him,” Jim Bob said.

“We’ve got to find him first,” I said.

“No problem. New phone book just came out, and since he’s new in town he’s bound to have a phone. I mean, he ain’t Freddy Russel no more. He’s got a new life and new name and the FBI has given him a new past.”

Jim Bob got up and went over to the phone book and opened it. “There’s a lot of Fred Millers in here, but that ain’t no sweat neither. We’ll check the old phone book and look and see which Fred Miller has been added to this new listing.”

Jim Bob put the open phone book on the table and went away and came back with another phone book and opened it. He put it on the table beside the new one and compared. “Here we go,” he said. “Only one new Fred Miller in the book, and now we’ve got his address.”

“You’re sure it’s him?” Russel said.

“Sure enough,” Jim Bob said. “We’ll check it out.”

“Too easy,” I said. “I’d never have thought of that.”

“That’s why I’m the fucking detective and you build frames,” Jim Bob said with a sly smile. Then he turned to Russel. “You going to try calling him, Ben?”

“He’s probably at work,” Russel said.

“You’ve got to do it sometime,” Jim Bob said. “We’ve gone this far, you might as well go the whole hog.”

“I think I’d like to sort of look in on him without him knowing. I just can’t pick up the phone after twenty years of not even trying to answer letters his mama wrote or writing him or anything.”

“Just doing it would get it over with,” Jim Bob said. “In the long run, I think that would be the easy way.”

“I guess it would for you,” Russel said. “But he’s my boy and I haven’t treated him like he was anything to me. He may not even know I’m alive or care. I just couldn’t do it straight out.” align="l“All right,” Jim Bob said. “We’ll spy on him some until you get your nerves up.”

“You make it sound like some kind of showdown,” Russel said.

“Well,” Jim Bob said, “in a way, ain’t it?”

Russel nodded. “What say you take us out there to look at those scrawny hogs of yours, Jim Bob?”

“If you guys promise not to diddle them,” Jim Bob said, “they’re kind of shy.”

· · ·

So we went out and looked at these hogs of Jim Bob’s, and he must have had twenty, plus some piglets. They were huge things, white and big-eared and Jim Bob said they were called Yorkshires.

The hogs were housed in a roomy, air-conditioned building that had a flap door so they could go out into a big, fenced enclosure if they wished. There was the ripe smell of dung and urine in the air, but it wasn’t bad. The hogs were raised clean, and Jim Bob said the wetback, Raoul, came around once a day and changed the bedding and checked the water connections and made sure there was feed in the automatic feeders. When the hogs got fat enough, Jim Bob sold them, saving one for his own freezer, and some for breeding stock; now and then he replaced his boars and litter sows with younger more sexually ambitious swine he bought and brought in, so his bloodline wouldn’t foul, as he put it.

Out behind the hog house, he showed us a big wood and chicken-wire cage full of soiled hog bedding. “That’s my compost pile,” Jim Bob said. “Me and Raoul pull this crap out of the hog house and stack it here and let it heat up, and come spring it’s broken down and ready to spread. I hire this colored fella I know, Henry, to bring his mules over and bust up my land. Then me and Raoul, when he hasn’t been sent back to Mexico for a while by the Immigration, spread it around and plant early as we can. Pig shit, if composted right, can grow anything. Raoul keeps saying he’s gonna try putting a pussy hair out there and growing him a woman, but the only pussy hair he can get hold of is his wife’s and he damn sure don’t want another one of her.”

We walked down behind the compost pile and out into Jim Bob’s garden. We went between rows of corn with stalks nine feet high and bright green. There were mounds giving birth to squash plants with white pattie squash on them big as the crown in a cowboy hat. There were thick tomato vines staked on six-foot poles, and the strong, fine smell of the tomatoes was enough to make your nose hairs twitch. The tomatoes were firm as hardballs and red as a wound. Jim Bob picked us each one and we walked along the rows eating the warm, juicy tomatoes and marveling at the cucumber vines that ran renegade throughout the garden with cucumbers on them that Jim Bob said were “as big as Big Tex Dildoes.”

When we got to the far end of the garden, we turned left and walked around the edge of it, then started back between a row of turnip greens. The greens were thick and green and looked more like Venus flytraps than turnip greens. By the time we were out of the garden and heading back toward the house, I felt as if we had been expelled from the Garden of Eden.