Read Online Big Bad Love by Larry Brown - Free Book Online Page B

Money softened her. She’d smelled money on me and right away she’d softened. Maybe she’d take me home. I didn’t know. But I was so damn lonely, and horny, that I was willing to take a chance on almost anything. Plus, I was drunk.
    For a minute there I sort of got the big picture. You back off from anything and get the big picture, you can figure out almost anything if you figure on it long enough. I looked at myself and I thought: Now listen, you got all this money belongs to all these people and you’re supposed to take care of it. Now what the hell’s gonna happen if you show up without the money or the shrimp either one? What if you just blow all the money, and don’t buy the shrimp, and go back home to all those people who’ve already bought their crab boil and crackers and cocktail sauce? Well, you’re gonna have some people pissed at you, that’s what.
    But, now, think about them. Think about Ed, that son of a bitch, think about him in the first place. Did that son of a bitch ask you if you wanted some shrimp last year when he went off to Pensacola and went deep-sea fishing and didn’t catch shit? When he puked in a bar that Milos López once actually got thrown out of? Did that s.o.b. ask you if you wanted him to bring you some shrimp? Hell naw. Fuck
him.
    And who’s the other one? Ted. That fucking Ted. That bastard. You ought to whip his ass just on general principle. Son of a bitch. Did he ever invite you over to his private bass lakewhen they were jerking those ten-pound lunkers out of there? Hell naw The son of a bitch even called the law on some kids.
    Now I had to consider all that stuff. I couldn’t deal very well with it. She was smiling in my face and I had all that money in my pocket and I wasn’t too fond of these fuckers who’d sent me down there to the Gulf to get all their shrimp for them. And all I was trying to do originally was buy a beer for a girl who shook her ass naked in a dark bar where dark people like me stalked their lusts.
    â€œShe can’t drink a beer,” this chick said.
    â€œWhy?” I said. “Listen, goddamnit, I’m getting pissed off at the way y’all treat these girls. What? Y’all own em?”
    â€œYeah, that’s right,” she said. “We own em. They dumb enough to come in here and work, we own em. Buy em and sell em if we get ready to.”
    She gave me a look so hard I said: “Wait a minute. You ain’t that hard, are you? You ain’t that bad, are you? Why don’t you let her have a beer? What’s it going to hurt?”
    â€œIt’s against the rules.”
    â€œWhat rules?” I said. “Who makes up the rules?” I leaned over close to her and said softly: “Have you ever questioned the rules?”
    â€œYou so hot to take somebody out, why don’t you take me out?” she said.
    What? And maybe get my throat cut? (An anecdote to testify to this madness: The night before, I got pissed off at my friend because he was drunk and I wasn’t and I was ready to go and he wasn’t, I begged him five or six times too but he wouldn’t hear it, he was jumping hot with this beavette, so Isplit. Right down the beach to our hotel room. I thought it was only a block and it was like four miles. I had to sit down and rest a few times, and I found out something. At night, that tide goes out. There’s no water there. And you wouldn’t believe the nasty shit that’s lying down there. I mean, dead rotten fish, and Coke cups and stuff, and it doesn’t look at all nice with that moonlight pouring down over that slimy sand. And I found out later that it had only been a week before when some guy got his throat cut down there, from ear to ear, on the beach, at night, late like that, probably in the same exact spot I was sitting in. Boy.) But boy I’d wanted me some of this for quite a while, just like every other white man. I