Free Black Elvis by Geoffrey Becker Page A

the trees made me think of cracks in a windshield. I wondered if weather like this made them shut down completely, or if underneath it all they were still growing.
    Clay was watching television in the living room. "Hey," he said, when I came in.
    "Hey yourself." I stood over him. His cigarettes were on the coffee table, along with a can of Pepsi and a partially completed crossword puzzle. He was in jeans and a short-sleeved shirt that was too big for him and that, it occurred to me, might have been one of my old ones. "You want to get out of here for a while? Go get one of them three-dollar coffees?"
    He grinned, showing teeth as yellow as a horse's. He needed a shave, too. "All right," he said. "You buying?"
    "I am."
    We didn't talk in the car. I found a space right out front of The Coffee Company, fed the meter a couple of quarters, and we went in. He got a cappuccino, and I had a Siddhartha, which the sign translated as "breakfast blend."
    "That's a novel by Hesse," Clay said.
    "I know it." We headed away from the counter and back to an unoccupied sofa that looked like it had come straight from some old lady's attic without any vacuuming in between. He sat on that, and I settled onto a chair opposite. There was a little table in between us. "It's still a dumb name for a cup of coffee." Someone walked past us with a teapot on a tray. "You know what chai is?" I said. "It's the Hindi word for tea . You order chai tea , that's like asking for a sandwich sandwich ."
    We sipped our drinks. The place was relatively quiet—a couple of tables away a grad-student type was clicking away at his laptop. A middle-aged woman was reading a book. Light jazz drifted down from hidden speakers somewhere above us.
    "I think I can guess what this is about," Clay said, finally.
    "What?"
    "Well, when Louise had that trouble with the dishwasher, she called you to come look at it. And you fixed it the next day."
    "Yeah."
    "And you fixed that step out front last fall."
    "I can do a couple of things."
    "You want me to go."
    "It's not me that wants it, exactly."
    "Right. I get it."
    I was thinking how easy this was. He understood the situation. I took another sip of coffee and felt something nice and comfortable kick in, like it does after the first drink of the evening. "So then it's understood? What needs to happen?"
    Clay leaned forward. I could see all the bones in his face. "Lenny," he said. "There is no place."
    "Sure there is. Don't you have a friend you could stay with?"
    His eyes held on to mine. "Junior was my friend. Junior was everything."
    "I appreciate that. But Junior is gone. You knew this was going to happen—both of you did. Didn't you ever talk about it? Didn't you ever plan?"
    "No," he said. "We didn't plan."
    "Well, that wasn't that smart then, was it?"
    "Maybe not."
    "You can't expect my wife to take care of you."
    "I won't bother anyone. She won't even notice I'm there."
    "What are you going to do?"
    "I don't know," he said. "It's something I've been thinking about. There was really just one thing I did up until last week, and that was take care of Junior. Without him, I'm kind of at a loss." He laughed nervously. He had a very deep voice, croaky from all the smoking he did.
    "What about your folks?"
    "They don't know where I am, and they never will."
    "I'm sorry," I said. "It sounds like a tough situation. I'm just here to tell you that you need to find alternate accommodations. Let's say in a week, all right? Louise—my wife—this past year has been hard on her, as you can imagine."
    "You think this hasn't been hard on me?" For a second, I saw something rise up in him, a tough-sonofabitch independence that turned on a yellow light in his dead eyes, then went away. I recognized it, and I respected it. He took another swallow of his drink, and some froth clung to the corner of his mouth.
    "I tell you what," I said. "You can come camp with me, temporarily. The important thing is that we get you out of Louise's