Free Joe by Larry Brown

and bumped over the ruts.
     
    “I ain’t gonna get stuck up in here, am I?” the driver said.
     
    “Naw. It ain’t much further.”
     
    They went across a wooden bridge where a creek lay shallow within the banks, an eddy sluggish and brown and studded with stones showing their moss-grown faces, stepping stones for the coons and foxes and possums whose tracks dotted the sandy silt and went up the slopes of young cane, thick and nearly impenetrable, over the slides of beavers crusted with sun and broken open into jigsaw puzzles of hardened mud. Through fields of unnamed bushes and sagging wire, between oaks leaning to form a tunnel of shade, the dusty cab sped rocking and jarring, rocks flying.
     
    “Damned if you don’t live back in the sticks,” the driver said.
     
    “Here it is,” Wade said, pointing. “Just drive right up in there.”
     
    The driver stopped and eyed the iron ruts left by tractors. He shook his head.
     
    “This is far as I’m goin,” he said. “I done come fourteen miles and you said it wasn’t but ten.”
     
    “Hell, you can get up in there.”
     
    “Not in this car.”
     
    He shoved the shift into parking gear and got out. Wade climbed out on the other side and slid his box of scraps and his sack onto the ground. The beer bottles clinked.
     
    “Owe me fourteen dollars,” the driver said. Wade looked at him for a little while and then took the money out of his pocket and counted it. He had four dollars left after he paid his fare. Hebent and stuck it into a sock and straightened. There was a cloud of dust far down in the field traveling along the rows. The driver put the money in his pocket and got back into the car. The old man had already started walking off with his hands empty when he leaned out and said: “You not goin to take this stuff with you?”
     
    Wade turned around and looked at him. “I got somebody can carry it,” he said.
     

Curt Fowler was on his front porch taking the last sip from his last beer. He pitched the can into the aluminum boat that sat beside the porch just as a pickup with a camper bed came over the hill, the tires sucking gently in the mud. The truck slewed slightly as it swung into the yard and came to a lurching halt beside the single tree, where a rope hung. The door slammed and Joe got out and came around the front of the truck with five beers in his hand.
    “What say, Curt.”
     
    He walked up to the porch and sat on the step.
     
    “I knew somebody’d bring me a beer if I set out here long enough,” Curt said. He helped himself to a beer and opened it and started pouring it down his throat.
     
    “You ain’t fishin today, Curt?”
     
    “Naw, hell, water’s too fuckin muddy, it rained like a sumbitch over here last night. You ain’t workin today?”
     
    Joe had on his sunglasses and a pair of knit slacks the color of cream and a new green velour shirt with tan piping around the collar. His shiny black loafers had mud on them.
     
    “My niggers can’t work in the rain. Afraid they gonna melt, I reckon. We’s in a bad place, anyway, and I was afraid we wouldn’t get out so we just come on to the house. It’s been like that near every day. Where’s that sorry-ass brother of yours?”
     
    Curt shook his head. “I ain’t seen him in about two weeks. I reckon he’s gone back to Texas to hang sheetrock. Melba said she don’t even know where he is.”
     
    “I wish to hell I knowed where he is. He owes me some damn money.”
     
    “He ain’t never paid you that yet? Damn. I figured he’d done paid you by now.”
     
    Joe drained the can of beer in his hand and tossed it into the boat, which was fourteen feet long and already three-quarters full of cans. “I can’t catch up with him,” he said. “If you see him, tell him I want to see him.”
     
    “I’ll tell him. What you fixin to do?”
     
    “I don’t know. Reckon Henry and them’s got a game tonight?”
     
    “I don’t know. The sumbitch won’t never