Free Joe by Larry Brown Page B

yard leaned in the open window of the truck to further detain this visitor, this rare company. “Let me ride up town with you,” he said.
     
    Joe looked at him, his eyes unreadable behind the dark glasses, his hand on the key and his foot on the clutch.
     
    “You got any money? I ain’t gonna buy your damn beer all night long.”
     
    “Oh, I got some money,” he said. “I got a check I can cash.”
     
    He was already opening the truck door and sliding in. There were three packs of cigarettes on the dash and a little cooler in the floor. He slammed the door and sat there, ready for takeoff.
     
    “Let’s see it,” Joe said.
     
    “What?”
     
    “Sumbitch, if you ain’t got no money you ain’t goin with me.”
     
    Curt set his beer in the floor and did a quick frisk of his pockets, grabbing himself all over with spread fingers.
     
    “It’s in the house,” he said. “Let me run get it.” He got out and started across the yard. “Wait on me!” he yelled back.
     
    Joe sat shaking his head, thinking: Fuckass around here all evening waiting for him to get ready to go.
     
    After a minute, Curt stuck his head out the screen door and said: “You got time for me to shave right quick?”
     
    “Hell naw. You come get your ass in if you’re goin. I’m fixing to leave.”
     
    He mashed the clutch and cranked the truck and revved the engine. Curt came flying out the door with a fresh shirt flapping around him, an envelope in his hand.
     
    “I got it,” he panted. He got back in and said: “I’m ready now. I got to stop somewhere and cash it, though.” He picked up his beer and reached into his shirt pocket. “Goddamn. Left my fuckin cigarettes in the house. Wait on me just a minute.”
     
    He opened the door and Joe let out on the clutch. They went rolling through the yard.
     
    “Wait a minute. I got to get my cigarettes.”
     
    “Just smoke some of mine. They’s some up on the dash.”
     
    Curt grabbed a pack and closed the door as they moved through the yard and down the driveway and out onto the road. Joe looked at his watch.
     
    “Don’t start no shit and expect me to finish it, now. What kind of a check you got?”
     
    “It’s a goverment check,” said Curt. “I can get it cashed anywhere. Grocery stores’ll cash em.”
     
    “What you doin with a government check? What are you drawin from the government?”
     
    “Aw, it’s Mama’s. I always cash hers for her.”
     
    “How much is it?”
     
    “A hundred and thirty dollars. It’s a pension check.”
     
    “Pension.”
     
    “Yeah.”
     
    “Your mama draws a hundred and thirty dollars a month?”
     
    “Yeah. Plus, she draws Social Security and welfare, too.”
     
    “What’s she doin lettin you have it?”
     
    “She don’t know I got it.”
     
    Joe shook his head. They went up the gravel road with the rich red mud squishing under the tires. Curt kept up a running commentary, expansive now with the promise of more beer and a night on the town. The woods thinned and opened up into green hills dotted with horses and cows and cultivated land gleaming wetly under the weak sun trying to break through the clouds. Tarpaper shacks and shabby mobile homes, actually no more than campers, lined the road, the yards full of junked autos and stacked firewood overgrown with weeds and pulpwood trucks with the windows smashed out and the rear ends jacked up and propped on oil drums, El Dorados with mud halfway up the sides parked before porches of rough sawmill lumber. Here and there were school buses fixed up with furniture and beds on the inside, the awnings made of splintered fiberglass, and new brick homes within sight of firetraps where carports were cluttered with dogs and three-wheelers and washing machines.
     
    They turned onto the blacktop, and mud began slapping off the tires onto the undersides of the wheelwells. The bottomland lay untilled and dark with water, the brown rows of the past year’s crop still standing