Donald Pollock - The Heavenly Table

“Wonder why he calls himself Sugar, if that ain’t his real name?” Cob asked. “That seems kind of dumb to me. How’s anybody supposed to know who he really is?”

“Well, maybe he don’t like…” Cane started to say, but then he stopped. He looked over at Cob, at his cowboy hat and the red bandanna tied around his fat, sweaty neck and the pistol hanging at his side. He was the spitting image of the drawing on the last wanted poster they had seen, the one the store clerk had carried. Jesus Christ, why hadn’t he thought of that before? By the time Chimney found the bowler and made it back up to the road, Cane was in the process of changing their names and working on a line they could use. From here on out, he announced, at least until they crossed the border, he and Cob were Tom and Junior Bradford from Milledgeville, Georgia, and Chimney was their cousin, Hollis Stubbs. They were on their way to Canada to find an uncle.

“That’s it?” Chimney said. “Seems a little thin to me.” He set the bowler between his horse’s ears.

“We need to keep it as simple as possible. That way there’s less chance of screwing up.”

“What brought this on?”

“Something Cob said about the colored boy. I should have thought of it before.”

“You must be startin’ to slip if you got Cob giving you advice,” Chimney said.

“We got to change our looks, too,” Cane said, ignoring him. “Get rid of those cowboy hats and the neckerchiefs. And stick your pistols in your saddlebags.”

“You mean all of them?”

Cane stopped and considered for a few seconds. “No, you’re right. Maybe we better each keep one handy just in case.”

As they got ready to leave a few minutes later, Chimney said, “I still don’t feel right about you takin’ that shot away from me. I need to keep in practice.”

Without a word, Cane grabbed the bowler off the horse’s head and tossed it to the ground a few feet in front of them. “Go ahead then, have at it.” Chimney smirked a little and pulled out his Smith & Wesson. Every time he fired, the hat skidded and tumbled a little farther down the road. He didn’t stop until the gun was empty. “There, ye satisfied?” Cane asked.

“I don’t know,” Chimney said, as he dug some bullets out of his pocket to reload. “But I reckon it’ll do till something better comes along.”

CRAWLING ON HIS belly until he reached the woods, Sugar then ran for another quarter of a mile or so before collapsing behind a fallen tree. He stayed there barely moving a muscle for over an hour. At one point he counted six shots being fired, and he hoped that maybe the motherfuckers had killed one another before one of them picked up his bowler. Finally, he got up the courage to sneak back to the field to look for it, but it was nowhere to be found. He kicked at the weeds and cursed his bad luck. The finest hat he had ever owned and now some sonofabitch dressed like Billy the Kid was going to take a dump in it.

He made his way through the field and back up the bank. Yellow-winged grasshoppers flew up in front of him. He hadn’t gone but a few yards down the flat road when he came upon the remains of the bowler, still smoldering a little around the edges of the bullet holes. Goddamn them! What kind of sick sonsofbitches would do something like that? He would have given anything just then, even the rest of his time on earth, for the chance to slit that skinny ferret-looking bastard’s throat with his razor. Or, if not that, at least to be shacked up for the night with a whore and a bottle and a good dinner. He didn’t think that was asking too much out of life. The thought of it swept over him like a tempest, driving him half insane, and he flung his arms about in frustration and anger. As his rage mounted, he thought again about his people in Kentucky, that poor bunch of God-fearing, Hallelujah-shouting, ass-kissing sharecroppers. Not once had they ever given him credit for anything. Everybody was against him, even his own mother. And when she finally kicked him out, he had made his way across the Ohio and headed for Detroit, telling them all when he left to go fuck themselves, that he was going to get a job building those fancy motorcars everyone was talking about, and bragging that the next time they saw his black ass, he’d own a whole fleet of them, one for each day of the week. Not only that, he’d have a white man for a chauffeur, and another just to keep them shined up and ready to roll at a moment’s notice.

That had been over a decade ago, and he had lasted exactly two weeks working for Mr. Ford. With his first paycheck, he had bought a cheap suit and a toothbrush and went out for a drink. Five days later, he woke up sick with a hangover in a damp basement room curled up next to a woman he’d met in an after-hours club out celebrating her fifty-seventh birthday. She gave him the first blow job of his life that morning while he chewed on a piece of the tough flank steak she fried him for breakfast; and he realized, as he watched her gray head bob up and down in his lap, that with as many women as there were in a city the size of Detroit, a young man could get by without hitting a lick if he wasn’t too particular about what he laid with at night. He had stayed with her two months, until he’d spent every last dime she had saved up for her old age, and then he had moved on to a friend of hers whose husband had just died of a heart attack. Over the years he had pretty much stuck to the same strategy, squeezing all he could out of them, and then finding some excuse to leave as soon as they started hinting around that he needed to find a job. But then he met Flora, a pretty woman in her forties with an appetite for young bucks and a big, round ass like two ripe pumpkins fitted together. She made good money managing a laundry over on Beacon Street for a white man, and Sugar decided that maybe it was time to settle down. Every evening for the next eight months she came home to a clean apartment and supper cooking on the stove, and he thought everything was going just fine until one night she appeared in the kitchen with a long-legged, freckle-faced boy who couldn’t have been more than fifteen or sixteen years old. “Who this?” Sugar said as he set out the plates on the table, thinking it was probably another one of her goddamn relatives looking for a free meal or a corner to sleep in.

“This here be Winston,” she said. “He’s my new man.”

“Your what?” Sugar said, whirling around to look at the boy again, standing there with a cocky grin on his face. “What you talkin’ about, woman?”

“Look, honey, I ’preciate all this moppin’ and tater peelin’ you been doing, but truth is, I got no use for a maid.”

“Maid! I’ll show you a goddamn maid.” He took a step toward her, brandishing a fork in his hand.

“Oh, no, you won’t,” she said calmly. “You’ll be packing your fuckin’ clothes and gettin’ out, that’s what you be doing. And just in case you think you goin’ to start some trouble, you better look out the window first. All’s I got to do is say the word and they’ll be in here on you like stink on shit.”

Sugar stepped over and pushed the curtain back. A pair of squat, burly men he’d seen a few times at Leroy’s, a gin joint he and Flora frequented on Saturday nights, were standing on the steps looking back at him. One was tapping a truncheon against his leg as if he were keeping the beat to some song in his head, and the other was peeling an apple with a pig-sticker. Jesus Christ, she was serious. He turned and looked at the brown gravy simmering in the skillet, the pork chops stacked on the platter in the middle of the table. “But why?” he asked, his voice now sounding almost plaintive.

“To be honest, I need somethin’ with a little more pep when I crawl under the covers at night, that’s all.”