Nightwoods - Charles Frazier [69]
At a back table, a game of eight ball. Bud hunched in concentration, the nap of green felt around the head spot rubbed to a bare greasy brown like a tanned hide. His stick twitched a fraction back and forth behind the dingy cue ball while he waited for his opponent, who took pride in a tight rack, to finish jiggling the triangle of balls. Bud set the butt of his cue down on the floor and said, Shit or get off the pot.
The break, when it finally happened, offered an awful lot of flourish, but after the balls settled down, Bud found himself with no shape at all. He eventually lost a tall stack of quarters and kept on losing, game after game, until he quit in disgust and walked outside to cool off, blinking against the brilliant blue-and-yellow October day. The air so lacking in haze that after his eyes adjusted, he could make out the cross members on the Juala Bald fire tower.
Bud sat on the bench with three old men in sweat-stained grey felt hats and white shirts and soft pale blue overalls. Also, the former dime store bandit with his air of distraction and pink forehead dent. The men went right on without pause, swapping watches and knives and telling elaborate nasty stories of their younger years, which most would call lies, the main elements being women and fighting. But the old tellers more than balanced out their lack of fact with truth of desire.
One of them delivered an antique joke of stunning dirtiness, very deadpan. The other men sniffed back their sinuses and made other hawking noises in lieu of laughter.
Lit passed down Main Street in his black-and-white. Raised a forefinger to the bench sitters and kept going.
One of the elders said, Sad shit there.
Bud’s ears pricked. Sad why?
—Everything. His wife and his girls. He’s a lonesome man. Luce is all the relation he’s got in the world anymore.
—Say what? Bud said.
—They don’t speak when they pass on the street. Treat each other like they’re both dead.
It took Bud a few seconds to let that sink in. And then all of a sudden, it hit him like a big fat-ass epiphany.
He said aloud, Goddamn. And then he caught himself in time to avoid blurting, So Lit’s Lily’s father too.
Bud, without even a parting witticism, walked to his truck and drove down the lakeshore, past the dam, and through the valley on the river road, thinking and panicking. Breathing fast and shallow until he got dizzy and pulled over to hang his head out the window to heave a little.
Being Lit’s former son-in-law hardly seemed promising, no matter how you looked at it. Lily hadn’t liked to talk about her people, and when she did, Bud wasn’t usually listening. If she called her daddy anything at all, it was Daddy. That’s the best Bud could remember. And what kind of name was Lit, anyway? Not a person’s name Bud ever heard. Or else it slid right on by while he was thinking about something else.
It was like falling into some game with rules everybody knows but you. Such as that business about not flushing with your foot. And because you don’t know the rules, you keep stepping on your own crank while lesser people jump ahead. Exactly like life in general.
Bud clutched his shark-tooth necklace in his fist. Then he cut a deep diagonal slice across the pad of his middle finger with the serrations millions of years old. When the blood domed out, he put the finger in his mouth to taste the iron.
Bud closed his eyes and blew air through pursed lips like a silent whistle. He counted to fifty. When he got his breathing under control, he went through the pertinent facts about his identity.
What signs could they possibly know him by? Bud was a nickname, and to the best of his recollection, it never came up in his various court matters. As for Johnson, it was one of the three most common names in the country. No way would Lit or Luce know he was