Ben Stroud - Byzantium - Stories

“So that girl at the snow-cone stand,” Jimmy said when the waitress left. “Beth. Last weekend I was at this party and her friend got me into a room and pulled down her pants and was like, ‘Fuck me,’ and so I did. And then Beth comes into the room all like, ‘What are you doing fucking my friend on my little sister’s bed?’”

“What’s this got to do with Angela?”

Jimmy blinked at me. “Nothing. I just needed to clear out my own shit. Beth’s the one I want and she’s just mean to me.”

The waitress returned, and plates and silverware clattered onto our table. Jimmy gave the woman his wide grin, said thanks, and sliced the end off his omelet and shoved it into his mouth.

“So,” I said. “You’ve got food in you now.”

“Oh, yeah, sweet little Angela. We go back.” He forked in more omelet. “Her brother throws big parties in Pine Tree. I was at one last night and she told me you loved up on her.”

I poured syrup on my waffle, let it pool over the edges.

“She said, hey, you know this guy, I think he works where you work, he felt me up in the parking lot, and I said I bet he was gentle, and then she said she was about to piss her panties and went in the bathroom. She had her frogs with her after some guy had snuck in her room and tried to lick them.”

“Did she tell you why she’s been ignoring me? Because she’s been ignoring me.”

Jimmy shrugged. “She’s always been one of those secret shy girls. You know, you think she’s all cool talking but then she gets spooked.” He licked mashed omelet off his lips. “I can tell you something, though. She’s primed. I’ve got a nose for it. You need to get your finger wet.”

He held his own finger up and danced it in a slow twirl. I slid down in my booth. Its seat was stitched with duct tape, the stuffing a memory, and the coils pushed back like they wanted to spring me out.

“It’ll be you or somebody else, and if it’s you you’ll hook her.”

A dizzy tingle skittered up my nerves. I darted an eye to the tables around us, empty except for one, a guy with a trucker’s beard and a folded-up newspaper. Jimmy’s plate was empty now, speckled with yellow grease and jalapeño seeds. On my own plate my waffle remained untouched, a soggy moon.

“We should go,” I said, and Jimmy turned his twirling finger at the waitress and asked for the check.

AT THE OAK RANCH DEVELOPMENT we drove past staked-off lots of plowed-over red clay and cul-de-sacs of two-by-four pine skeletons until we came to a small herd of near-finished houses. A second tornado, in the same storm, had touched down here, but it was smaller than the one in our town and had only scraped along the empty streets, tearing up roofs and breaking windows. Jimmy did his routine with the head roofer, a guy in a clean buttoned shirt and matching ball cap stitched with his company’s name. The man looked at the two of us, smiled, and told us he’d keep his twenty.

“Fuck him,” Jimmy said. He climbed up onto the bed and flung the pallet as far as he could from the house. “He wants to lug them, we’ll make him lug them. Get over there.”

I didn’t mind losing the twenty. Unloading the shingles on the ground was faster than putting them on the roof, especially once you got into a rhythm. It was four thirty now, and since Jimmy’s revelations at the Waffle Shoppe I’d had to do several of the slow-exhale exercises I’d learned in seventh-grade gym.

I hustled to the pallet. Jimmy threw the shingles down and I lined them up as they fell, pulling back as the next bundle soared toward me. Our bodies turned into simple, timed machines, I let my mind float to The Hangout. I wasn’t asking Angela if she wanted a Mountain Dew, I was just buying it for her, showing her nobody knew her like I did. Then I was telling her about living in the world with tornadoes. Her face was pointed toward mine, lips soft and open and sugared from her drink. If the stuff about the tornado didn’t work, I’d tell her I knew where the old man had died and that I could take her there, anything to get me with her. I wondered if she’d be wearing the same bra. The one before had been this thin cotton, with a useless bow between the cups that I wanted to untie and keep in my pants.

“Shit!” Jimmy yelled.

I looked back. A bundle of shingles was mid-air, meteoring toward me. I’d faltered out of rhythm, and the bundle’s corner caught my side, a deep punch beneath my ribs, then spun to the ground. I bent over, held my breath as tears gathered at my eyes and a bruise knuckled to life beneath my skin.

“Fucktard,” Jimmy said. “You awake?”

“Yeah,” I said.

“Then go pick those shingles up.”

The bundle had ripped open, silver shingles fanned out. Ignoring the throbs around my kidney, I scooped the shingles together and dumped them on the pallet. Jimmy hurled the rest of the shingles down and I fenced my brain, kept it away from that bow, and didn’t break the rhythm. By the time we were finished and sitting in the truck my side only ached a little and I was feeling pretty good. We’d get back just after five and I could still be showered and at The Hangout by six.

Jimmy drove us down McCann, then 31. No more wandering, we were headed directly home. Honks blared around us from the highway as Jimmy told me about some show he’d watched where wolves captured people’s souls. In the rearview mirror I saw we’d forgotten to tighten one of the straps. It whipped out off the side of the truck like a devil’s tail.

TEN MINUTES AFTER FIVE and the yard was already dormant, that sweet time when the start of the next day was at its farthest. The sun hung high above the far sheds, a lone white dot. The other trucks had been pulled in for the night, angled one next to the other, like children put to bed, and I had to get out and unlock the gate. As I swung it open I thought about Angela and my hand and how the two would soon join.

I had gotten the gate wide enough for the truck when a door slammed, echoing out into the yard and jostling the image of me and Angela in The Hangout’s parking lot. I looked around, caught Mike shooting toward me from the office, and at the sight of him my stomach flipped over on itself like a badly turned pancake. His face was red, and his throat made a grinding noise, like some possessed person in the movies. I clung to the gate and heard Jimmy brake the truck behind me.

Mike’s glare jumped from me to Jimmy and back again before he got his throat to working. “You took the wrong dadgummed shingles to the wrong dadgummed house! I just got a call from Greenhills. The customer came out of her house and looked up and what did she see? Chestnut shingles. What did she order? Silver Lining.”

I stood there, my fogged brain not computing what this meant for me, The Hangout awaiting.

But after another quick bout of throat grinding, Mike said, “You want to keep this job, you better get out there right now and fix it.”

The little hopes I’d been tending popped and crumpled beneath my skin. We’d have to load new shingles for the Longview house, then get the shingles we’d dropped there and take them to Greenhills — we wouldn’t be done until eight, and by then it’d be the Jasper guy with his arm around Angela, getting his hands wherever he could, making dates to see her in Nacogdoches.

“How about early tomorrow—” I began, but Mike turned his red face on me and I swallowed whatever else it was I was going to say. Jimmy started bitching, then gunned the truck and told me to come on. I gave him my chained-dog look, like just step closer and I’ll maul you. All the hours I’d gotten through and we’d fucked up before we even knew it. Good-bye, Angela. Then I dragged myself around the front of the truck and up into the cab. I mean, Jesus, but it would take a dozen tornadoes to get me the life I wanted.