Donald Pollock - The Heavenly Table

Lucas spilled a little into both their glasses and they drank. Then he stretched out on the narrow bed and lit another cigarette. Taking a drag, he patted the empty place beside him, and Bovard thought of the ugly slattern in the hotel room in Columbus. She had done exactly the same thing. Lucas blew smoke rings at the ceiling while he watched the lieutenant fumble with the buttons of his uniform. After dropping his pants, Bovard happened to glance over at the dead actor’s face on the wall, and was suddenly stricken by his merry, eternal gaze. Evidently, the old boy was still having a ball when he had posed for the poster. Bovard stared back at him for a long moment, vaguely wondering if he had been up to this room, too, then stepped unsteadily to the edge of the smelly mattress. Time seemed to slow down, and he thought of Odysseus’s men, drugged by the lotus-eaters. Perhaps, he thought dreamily, if he survived the war by some quirk of fate, he and Wesley could settle down on an island somewhere in the Aegean Sea. They could become simple farmers or fishermen, live in a stone house filled with golden sunlight. He heard Lucas sigh, felt a hand come to rest on his leg. His mouth felt dry, and the last thing he remembered was wetting his lips with his tongue.

In the middle of the night, he awoke feeling as if he had been wrapped in gauze, his head as dull as a wedge of cheese. Lucas had rolled off the bed and lay passed out on the floor. He dressed hurriedly, and then, after taking one last glance around the shabby room, made his way down the dark stairs. He found a cab parked at the corner of Paint and Second, and had the driver let him out a block from the foggy camp entrance. As he sneaked past the three sleeping guards, that stupid song comparing life to a fucking pie started up in his head again, but now it didn’t sound quite so bad. In fact, he was humming it softly to himself a few minutes later when he tripped over a boot that some bastard had left in the aisle of the barracks and damn near broke his neck.

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.