Nightwoods - Charles Frazier [48]
AN EMPTY BLUE SPAM CAN sat atop a locust fence post behind Bud’s rental, yet some firearm malfunction stood in the way of amusement.
—You don’t think about a revolver being broken beyond repair, Bud said. They’re damn simple machines. Not much more than a hammer connected to a tube. But this pistol is done for.
Morose and not aiming in the least, Bud randomly snapped the trigger six or eight times to no effect.
—Point that up in case it does go off, Lit said.
—Shit, it’s dead broke.
Bud snapped three slow dejected snaps. And then a hopeless fourth, which fired with a fierce crack.
Lead whooshed weird and supersonic past Lit’s left ear.
Bud looked at Lit and then held the pistol two-handed up to his face, studying its profile, his expression a caricature of fear and amazement.
—They damn. It’s been healed.
Lit, unamused, put up his forefinger and wagged it at Bud.
—Set it down for a minute, he said. I’ve got questions. Such as, where are you from?
—Down along the coast. Several little towns in three different states.
—Why come here?
—Nice place, with business opportunities.
—Any relations in these parts?
—Nope.
—Mind if I take a look at your driver’s license?
—Not at all, except it went through the wash.
Bud dug his wallet from a back pocket of his jeans, and it came out cupped to the shape of his ass. He opened the wallet and extracted his license. Reached out a limp pale rectangle, which Lit declined to touch.
Not much use anyway. Little piece of pasteboard where somebody typed your name and height and weight and hair color and eye color. So, Lit’s watchman duties half-ass fulfilled, he went directly into his spiel about how you can’t sell what people don’t want to buy and how dim the local laws are. Nothing but the whim of ignorant voters keeping all these steep counties dry when you could drive a couple or three hours in any direction and legally buy alcohol. Or whatever else you need to lift your mood if you don’t get too fussy about every little ordinance. Then he shared several opinions about World War II and its sensible drug policies. The recent idiocy of banning inhalers.
As he talked, Lit began feeling like Bud was reading his mind. Like maybe signals passed between them along the order of Freemasons with their deep verbal codes and intricate handshakes. At that point of possible understanding, Lit looked at his watch and said, Time to go and do.
THREE DAYS LATER, the black-and-white sat at the street again. Lit, bleak and furious in Bud’s garage, attacked a stubborn inhaler with a chrome nutcracker. It was Lit’s cracker, conqueror of a thousand inhalers, but now something about the diameters mismatched. Either Bud’s new tubes were slightly slimmer or Lit’s cracker was reamed out from hard use. Lit worked with great focus, damning capitalism and government nonstop.
—How you doing? said Bud.
—Hanging in there, like a hair in a biscuit.
—Don’t you ever get tired of that stuff?
Lit looked up from his work and made a great exaggerated expression of incredulity and went back to cracking.
Swallowing the woolly strip inside was the goal, the thing that set Lit’s day up and gave it a forward motion, an aim.
Lucky for Lit, clever entrepreneurs had recognized in advance the profit to be made when inhalers were driven to illegality by the government. For a year prior, a fellow Bud knew down in the low end of the state had bought case upon case of the little tubes from every drugstore around. Now there was a mighty steep markup to be taken. Getting higher all the time in ratio to the dwindle of supply.
—On the dim day when these all go away, then what? Lit said. Twenty cups of coffee before lunch, is what.
Bud bent from the waist, his head in the bright circle from a caged shop light hooked to the upraised hood of the truck. He studied down the open barrel of the carb like he actually knew how all the springs and needles and jets and butterflies and floats deep in there actually worked in concert to make the truck go.
He said, Some of these bits you’re meant to twist one