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.
THE DON’S CINNAMON
W hen Burke returned to his rooms from his morning visit to the sea baths, Fernandita, his maid, was shaking the bugs out of his mosquito net. He lived in cramped quarters, on the second floor of an old mansion between the wharves and the post office. The mansion’s ground floor was given over to a molasses warehouse, and its top floors had been cut into apartments. Burke occupied one of these, an old bedchamber in the back of the building that was partitioned into three rooms and looked over the harbor. One room served as his bedroom, its neighbor as his small study and parlor, and the third room, barely a closet, was Fernandita’s.
“Your food is on the desk,” Fernandita said, giving the net one more vigorous shake before sweeping the loosed mosquitoes and other insects onto a scrap of newspaper. A skinny, toothless, yellow-skinned woman past middle age, Fernandita was Burke’s only companion in the city.
Inspecting his
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.
THE DON’S CINNAMON
W hen Burke returned to his rooms from his morning visit to the sea baths, Fernandita, his maid, was shaking the bugs out of his mosquito net. He lived in cramped quarters, on the second floor of an old mansion between the wharves and the post office. The mansion’s ground floor was given over to a molasses warehouse, and its top floors had been cut into apartments. Burke occupied one of these, an old bedchamber in the back of the building that was partitioned into three rooms and looked over the harbor. One room served as his bedroom, its neighbor as his small study and parlor, and the third room, barely a closet, was Fernandita’s.
“Your food is on the desk,” Fernandita said, giving the net one more vigorous shake before sweeping the loosed mosquitoes and other insects onto a scrap of newspaper. A skinny, toothless, yellow-skinned woman past middle age, Fernandita was Burke’s only companion in the city.
Inspecting his
Similar Books
