Joe by Larry Brown Read Free Book Online Page A

but catch a ride to town and buy whiskey with it.”
     
    “Leave her alone,” Gary said. “She don’t need you fussin at her.”
     
    At nine that night they were gathered around a small fire in the middle of the yard, mute in the thunderous din of crickets. The grasses and weeds were beginning to look like a bedding ground. They were cooking a meal of pork and beans in opened cans, and the old man was halfway through a bottle of Old Crow. They had foraged for firewood and had a pile nearby.
    The faces around the fire were pinched, the eyes a little big, a little dazed with hunger. They sat and watched the blaze burn the paper off the cans. When the beans began to sizzle, the woman stooped painfully on her bad hip and reached for the cans with a rag wrapped around her hand. Clotted strings of hair hung from her head. She took five paper plates, set them out on the ground, and dumped the beans onto them, shaking them as she went, the way a person might put out dog food for a pet. She dumped the largest portion into the plate intended for the old man.
     
    The breadwinner was sitting crosslegged on the ravaged grass, the whiskey upright in the hole his legs formed. He was weaving a home-rolled cigarette back and forth from his lips, eyes bleary, red as fire. He was more than a little drunk. His head and chest would slump forward, then he’d jerk erect, his eyes sleepy. Grimed and furtive hands reached out for the plates quietly, took themback and drew away from the fire into darker regions of the yard. The old woman took two small bites and then rose and scraped the rest of her food into the boy’s plate.
     
    The fire grew dimmer. The plate of beans before the old man steamed but he didn’t notice. A candlefly bored crazily in out of the night and landed in the hot sauce, struggled briefly and was still. The old man’s head went lower and lower onto his chest until the only thing they could see was the stained gray hat over the bib of his overalls. He snuffled, made some noise. His chest rose and fell. They watched him like wolves. The fire cracked and popped and white bits of ash fell away from the tree limbs burning in the coals. Sparks rose fragile and dying, orange as coon eyes in the gloom. The ash crumbled and the fading light threw darker shadows still. The old man toppled over slowly, a bit at a time like a rotten tree giving way, until the whiskey lay spilling between his legs. They watched him for a few minutes and then they got up and went to the fire and took his plate and carried it away into the dark.
     

Noon. The field bordering the road lay baking beneath a white sun, pale green rows of little plants that merged far away. The earth seemed to be smoking and it had no color, so dry was it, as if it had never known rain. It seemed dead as old bones. Down at the south end of the bean patch a tiny blue tractor was turning and coming back. It struggled against the immense flat landscape, crawling at what seemed an inch at a time, the dry soil not folding but merely breaking into dust across the plows. The old man scowled up at the blistering sky.
    “Throw the rest of em out,” he said.
     
    The green metal Dumpster he stood beside was positioned off the blacktop on a bed of pit-run gravel as hard as concrete. The county workmen had bolstered up the shoulder of the highway and widened it, and bits of ground glass lay everywhere.
     
    The boy was standing inside the rusty iron bin. He picked up another black garbage sack and slit it open with a knife; then, leaning toward the open door, mired to the knees in refuse, he dumped it out. A rain of cast-off matter cascaded: wet beer cans,egg shells, a half-pint whiskey bottle, cigarette butts and blowing ash. Unidentifiable bits of ruined fruit and fly-specked vegetables. Here a half-chewed weiner that a dog or a small child had worked over. All of it covered with wet coffee grounds. The old man bent over, pawing through it. He lifted three Diet Coke cans and