Chris Offutt - Kentucky Straight - Stories

Porter came inside and slipped an arm around Sue’s waist.

“You coming, honey?” he said.

“Where to?”

“Wherever.”

Sue stared at Everett, and Everett nodded.

“He’s my brother, Porter,” she said. “My best brother.”

“Good pool player, too,” the riverman said. “Your all’s family sure grows them good.”

“Only him.” Sue tugged Porter’s arm. “Come on, let’s go to Rocksalt.”

“I don’t know, honey. Night like this, we might wake up in the pokey.”

“I don’t care,” she said. “They ain’t got a woman’s jail and they won’t put me in with men. I can do what I damn well want. I’m freer than any man I ever met.”

They left the pool hall laughing. Dead gnats and ashes littered the worn felt on the table. Quentin mopped blood from the floor.

“If the cue ball goes off the table,” Everett said, “when’s it no good?”

“Out of play, you mean?”

Everett nodded.

“When it hits the floor,” Quentin said. “Cue ball’s like me — alive till it’s down.”

He continued mopping the pale spot in the dirty floor. Tomorrow night it would be covered with grime again. Everett had never seen the pool hall clean, just mopped in patches that never overlapped.

“What’ll you take for that stick?” Everett said.

“It’s yours.”

“I’ll pay you.”

“You put more quarters in these tables than any man on the creek. Take it and hush up about it.”

Everett held the cue, a standard stick like a million others, pale yellow with a brown butt. He tore away the taped paper bearing his name, crumpled it, and dropped it into a bucket. He watched the paper trying to unfold. It didn’t quite make it, stuck in tobacco spit.

“I’m leaving here,” he said.

“Comes a time, son. Comes a time. I stood gone nine years once.”

“But you came back,” Everett said.

“It ain’t the same as it is here.”

“I know it.”

“You will,” said Quentin.

Everett plugged in the jukebox and pressed L-8. Boxcar Willie told him about the Rockies, the Great Salt Lake, and the Navajo. Quentin flicked snuff at a bucket, ringing loud in the empty room. He lifted his cap and rubbed the bald rectangle on top of his head.

“Go on,” he said, “if you’re going to.”

Everett stared at him, nodded once, and left. He strapped the gun rack in his rear window and placed the cue stick in the slots. The shadowy hills crowded the road as he drove away. At the mouth of his hollow, he stomped the brake, bounced up the dirt road, and parked beside the hog pen. He studied the fifty in the cab’s dim light. It was Grant. He remembered a grade school teacher saying that Grant was a drunk. Everett stepped out of the truck and moved his hand along the fence until he found a barb. He twisted the bill around the wire, each time forcing the metal sliver through the paper. His father would find it in the morning. The picture even looked a little like him.

From the blackness of the pen came a gruff snort. If Sue could do whatever she wanted, so could he. He unlatched the narrow gate and worked it through the mud until he made a small opening. The runt could go if it wanted to. It would probably get killed on the road, but it would die here anyway. He drove slowly out of the hollow, the pool cue rattling in the gun rack. At the blacktop he headed west, trying to imagine living in a world without hills.