The Heavenly Table

33

AT THE EDGE of a sandbar along the Scioto River, Eddie Fiddler was sitting cross-legged on a blanket he had stolen off a clothesline in Waverly, staring at the black water streaming by a few feet away. Johnny was lying beside him, humming in his sleep. The boy was debating once again about whether or not to take off before the old fucker got them in big trouble, or somebody from back home saw him making a fool out of himself. Thanks to Johnny, half the people in Meade had already witnessed that. After the man at the Whore Barn demolished the banjo, Johnny had stayed shit-faced for several days, woefully claiming that his music career was over with, but as soon as they ran out of liquor, he began to panic. “I’ll be goddamned,” he said, drawing on all of his inner strength, “if I’m gonna let some two-bit goon destroy everything I’ve worked for!” Within a couple of hours, he’d come up with a new routine. Now Eddie danced and beat on a tin can with a spoon while the old man blew the harp and sang songs. It was humiliating — they sounded even worse than before — but somehow they got by. Shopkeepers got in the habit of tossing them a nickel just to get them to move on down the street; groups of soldiers looking for a good laugh were sometimes worth a quarter or more, especially if they were drunk themselves; once they were even offered two dollars to perform in a saloon, only to find out too late that the owner had provided all of his customers with rotten eggs to throw at them. Eventually, though, the police ran them out of town, and they had headed south to Waverly.

Eddie straightened out his legs and leaned back on his elbows as he recalled how he had ended up in such sorry straits. It all started the day he killed his mother’s cat and his father had made him return Tom Jones to that little sex maniac Corky Routt. It was all his fault, Eddie figured; well, at least to an extent. After taking the book back and complaining that he hadn’t been able to find even one dirty thing in it, Corky had told him to forget about that baby shit, that he had something a thousand times better than that now. “What do ye mean?” Eddie had asked. “Those Nesser girls over in Slab Holler,” Corky replied. “They’ll fuck a man silly if he brings their pappy something to drink.” And so he had spent the next two weeks thinking about what that would feel like. Finally, he couldn’t stand it any longer, and he’d waited one night until his parents went to bed, then slipped off with two jars of Ellsworth’s wine. As long as he was back home before sunup, he assured himself, nobody would be the wiser. He was trying to get his nerve up to knock on the Nessers’ door when out of the woods came an old man carrying a banjo over his shoulder and singing “The Ol’ Black Cat Shit in the Shavings.” He was short and rail-thin with an egg-shaped goiter sticking out of the side of his neck and a head of wild gray hair badly in need of a trim.

“What ye got there?” the man had asked when he saw him standing in the shadows near a pile of firewood a few feet beyond the porch. Thinking that he was the girls’ daddy, Eddie had passed him the jar of wine. He watched the man drain it in two long gulps, then smack his lips and reach into his back pocket for a pint of blended whiskey. He uncorked the bottle, then stuck out his hand and said, “My name’s Johnny. What they call you?”

“Eddie Fiddler.”

“I reckon you lookin’ for some woolly jaw, ain’t ye?”

“Well, I…I…” Eddie stuttered.

“Don’t worry,” Johnny said. “I’m good buddies with the old man. I’ll get ye fixed up.”

“Oh,” the boy said. “So you ain’t their pap?”

“What! Hell, no. If’n them little bitches was mine, I’d have done killed them all. I don’t see how ol’ Harold stands it, some of the shit they pull.” He took a sip from the bottle, then handed it to Eddie. “Which one ye want?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” Eddie said. “I ain’t never been here before.” Then he tipped the bottle up and had his first taste of whiskey.

“Well, if it was me, I’d take the one they call Spit Job. She’s still got a tight one, or at least she did the last time I came through here.”

“Where you from?” the boy asked, passing the bottle back.

“Nowhere special,” Johnny said. “Here and there. I’m on my way to Meade to see that army camp, but figured I’d stop by here first and get my dick wet.”

“You going to join up?”

Johnny laughed. “Shit, do I look like a fuckin’ soldier? But I am a-thinkin’ there might be some money to be made there.”

“How’s that?”

“Playin’ music,” Johnny said. “All’s I got to do now is find me a partner.”

Within an hour, Eddie had fucked Spit Job behind the woodpile and was headed for Meade with Johnny. They passed within a mile of his house, but the whiskey made the whole world glow that night with wondrous possibilities, and he couldn’t bear the thought of it ending so soon. He told himself instead that a day or two wouldn’t matter, but then it seemed like every time he was ready to go back home they somehow got hold of another jug and he was off to the races again. Then Spit Job had hitched a ride into Waverley last week, acting as if she wanted to be with him, and that made it harder than ever to leave.

Tonight, though, everything seemed hopeless. They’d spent the entire evening singing and dancing, and hadn’t even made enough coin to buy a pint of the cheapest stuff. Then Spit Job had ridden off with a couple of rough-looking farmhands, three-hundred-pounders with hands nearly the size of his head, and he and Johnny had finally given up and walked down to the river. It was an awful feeling, being sober and imagining what those two bulls were doing to her in the bed of their truck. Johnny had warned him about her, but Eddie truly thought that all she needed was someone to pay some attention to her, who wasn’t talking filth to her all the time and only trying to get in her pants. The hell with her, he thought, and with Johnny, too. Even if he had to walk all the way, he could be home in a day. Of course, his parents would both be pissed, especially his mother, and there would be a lot of bitching and questioning the first few days, but eventually they’d get over it. Nothing they could dish out, he figured, would be any worse than this.

He was just getting ready to take his leave when a rusty clattering Ford came bouncing down the lane and stopped close to the sandbar, maybe thirty feet from where they were lying. When the driver shut the engine off, Eddie reached over and shook Johnny awake, pointed at the vehicle visible in the moonlight. They listened for a minute to a man and woman talking loudly in drunken voices. Then the doors swung open and the pair emerged from the car unsteadily and climbed into the backseat. “That dirty dog,” Johnny said. “He gonna get him some.”

The man’s name was June Easter. He was a former butcher who had cut the pinkie finger off his left hand while trimming out some chops, and had subsequently lost his nerve for the knife and become a baloney salesman. Now he just went around the countryside peddling other men’s meat in a frayed, fat-smeared suit that, on a hot day, smelled faintly like a corpse. He lived out of his car most of the time, and knew a hundred different spots where he could park for the night. Usually, if business had been good that day, he’d pick up some broken-down bar floozy to spend the night with; and tonight it was a redhead with a beer belly whose name escaped him, though he was fairly sure he’d fucked her a time or two before. After he got her naked and stretched out in the backseat, he pushed his pants down and started ramming her like he was trying to bust something loose inside. Eddie and Johnny listened to them go at it for several minutes, the woman’s head banging against the door and the man huffing and puffing like an old steam engine. Then suddenly, the seat stopped squeaking and one of them let out a groan and everything turned quiet.

After a few minutes, Johnny slipped up to the car cautiously. Looking in on them, he saw the baloney salesman lying on top of the woman with his pants gathered down around his ankles. They were both passed out. He reached inside and moved his hand around until he found the wallet in the man’s back pocket, and then discovered a nearly full fifth of gin and half a roll of some sort of lunchmeat in the front of the car. He and Eddie took off up the rutted road and went a mile or so before they stopped and looked through the billfold. There was nearly twenty dollars inside, enough to keep them drunk for a week. They spread their blanket under a tree and drank the gin and gorged on the meat and carried on until dawn. When they came to that afternoon, they walked back to Waverly to buy another jug and see if Spit Job was ready to do some more dancing.