Free Sailor & Lula by Barry Gifford Page A

peanut?”
    â€œWhen you talk pretty to me.”
    Sailor laughed. “That’s easy enough. I mean, it don’t come hard. Back at Pee Dee all I had to do to cheer myself up was think about you. Your big grey eyes, of course, but mostly your skinny legs.”
    â€œYou think my legs is too skinny?”
    â€œFor some, maybe, but not for me they ain’t.”
    â€œA girl ain’t perfect, you know, except in them magazines.”
    â€œI been makin’ do.”
    â€œCan’t see where it’s harmed you none.”
    â€œI ain’t complainin’, sweetheart, you know that.”
    â€œI think most men, if not all, is missin’ an element, anyways.”
    â€œWhat’s that mean?”
    â€œMen got a kind of automatic shutoff valve in their head? Like, you’re talkin’ to one and just gettin’ to the part where you’re gonna say what you really been wantin’ to say, and then you say it and you look at him and he ain’t even heard it. Not like it’s too complicated or somethin’, just he ain’t about to really listen. One might lie sometime and tell ya he knows just what you mean, but I ain’t buyin’. ’Cause later you say somethin’ else he woulda got if he’d understood you in the first place, only he don’t, and you know you been talkin’ for no good reason. It’s frustratin’.”
    â€œYou think I been lyin’ to you, Lula?”
    Lula stayed quiet for a full minute, listening to the heavy hum of the V-8.
    â€œLula? You there?”
    â€œYeah, I’m here.”
    â€œYou upset with me?”
    â€œNo, Sailor, darlin’, I ain’t upset. Just it’s shockin’ sometimes when what you think turns out to not be what you think at all.”
    â€œIt’s why I don’t think no more’n necessary.”

    â€œYou know, I had this awful, long dream last night? Tell me what you think of it. I’m out walkin’ and I come to this field. This is all in bright color? And there’s all these bodies of dead horses and dead children lyin’ all around. I’m sad, but I’m not really sad. It’s like I know they’re all gone to a better place. Then a old woman comes up to me and tells me I got to bleed the bodies so they can be made into mummies. She shows me how to make a cut at the sides of the mouths of the corpses to drain ’em. Then I’m supposed to carry the bodies over a bridge across a real beautiful river into an old barn.
    â€œEverything’s really peaceful and lovely where I am, with green grass and big trees at the edge of the field. I’m not sure I got the strength to drag the bodies of the horses all that way. I’m frightened but I’m ready to do it anyway. And I’m sorta cryin’ but not really sad? I can’t explain the feelin’ exactly. So I walk to the rear of this huge grey horse. I go around to his mouth and start to cut him. As soon as I touch him with the knife he wakes up and attacks me. The horse is furious. He gets up and chases me across the bridge and into and through the old barn. Then I woke up. You were sleepin’ hard. And I just laid there and thought about how even if you love someone it isn’t always possible to have it change your life.”
    â€œI don’t know what your dream means, sweetheart,” said Sailor, “but once I heard my mama ask my daddy if he loved her. They were yellin’ at each other, like usual, and he told her the only thing he ever loved was the movie Bad Men of Missouri , which he said he seen sixteen times.”
    â€œWhat I mean about men,” said Lula.

SURVIVORS
    â€œNo, Marietta, I haven’t found ’em.”
    â€œMaybe they ain’t in N.O., Johnnie. They could be dead in a ditch in Pascagoula, Missi’ppi, by now. Or possibly Lula’s barefoot and pregnant in Pine Bluff, Arkansas, and that horrible Sailor