The cops busted my neighbor in the trailer next door again last night. I could hear Larry calling them motherfuckers as they dragged him out, see the pulse of the cop car strobes through the ragged Venetians that barely covered my trailer bedroom window.
Larry was a tweaker who stayed up for days at a time, tinkering on his rusty yellow Ford Pinto or just watching TV spun out, and he'd told me over beers from the broken Styrofoam ice chest on his tiny deck that he had outstanding warrants. He'd pissed off the old bitch three trailers up one too many times, and she'd called the pigs on him. Finito. It was just a matter of time.
I could hear the baby crying in the trailer on the other side, frightened by the sudden noise and light, and the chopped staccato crackle and pop of the cop car radio as they called in to dispatch.
I find it interesting that people fight cops. It's like fighting the weather -- except the weather doesn't automatically beat the shit out of you in response and throw you face down on the hard plastic backseat of a police cruiser, arms handcuffed behind your back.
I've spent time in county, that's all. Nothing to write home about, especially when all they give you to write with is a four-inch golf pencil that goes dull in five minutes, and if you sharpen it yourself and they catch you, it's considered a shiv and they toss you into solitary.
Jail is so boring your soul comes to a grinding halt after a few days and you can feel your life running down the drain and all you can do is listen to the chatter -- nobody ever stops talking, day and night, they never turn the lights off, and none of it means a thing except the judge when they finally put you in front of him in shackles and striped pajamas that don't fit, and if you're lucky he's in a good mood and gives you time served and cuts you loose to go back out into the bleak daylight to find a job and another place to live, since most of the time you've lost both on the inside.
Guys like Larry seem to take it in stride -- I guess there's nothing else to do? For them it's a seasonal event, a reverse-holiday. Larry said he'd been in jail about thirteen times in ten years, best he could count.
I'd been in twice, once for fighting in a bar and once for -- well, never mind. I got off lucky that time. Never again. Never.
I was surprised the assholes had time to answer penny-ante disturbing the peace calls with all the hold-ups going on lately. The Budweiser Bandit, because he always stole a sixpack of Bud along with whatever was in the till.
That's small town cops for you. People could get murdered on the street and the cops'd be out making pot busts, or answering noise complaints.
The guy had hit about every liquor store in town, including my favorite one up the street, Big Daddy's Liquor. The little blonde who works mornings when I get off work told me he was more or less white or possibly Mexican and wore a ski mask and was real polite, except for the .45 in one hand and the stolen sixpack in the other.
I couldn't go back to sleep after that. It was 12:41 a.m. and my night off at the plant, but I was used to being awake for graveyard shift and it had been a stupid idea to try to go to bed in the first place. My brain was tired as hell but my body thought it should be punching the clock.
I got up finally and turned on the little lamp and rolled a cigarette.
The cops were gone with Larry and the baby had been shushed to sleep, apparently.
I smoked in the silence. Well, not silence-silence. Someone on the next row had their TV on and I could almost figure out what they were watching. The hum of traffic continued unabated as always in the distance.
Down by campus the college kids were whooping it up in the bars, angling to get laid, spending their parents' hard-earned cash on beer and music and the frivolities of youth.
I'd lived here a year in this run-down rented trailer and usually it didn't bother me, but all of a sudden I felt claustrophobic. I had $75 in my wallet that I need to stretch a few days, but the thought of drinking a cold beer in a frosted mug surrounded by spoiled, sleek sorority girls ... no, fuck that, but I needed a drink, and the few cans of beer in my rattling old fridge wouldn't cut it at all, so I'd have to go out.
It was warm outside even this late. I stood smoking under the street light in the gravel lane between the rows of trailers and watched clouds of insects swirling around it, and bats darting frantically down like kamikazes looking for dinner.
"What happened to Larry?"
She stood on the shabby wooden deck of her trailer, holding a sleeping baby in her arms. Her name was Kayla. She was small and sexy, with a little round bubble-butt cupped by her ragged daisy dukes and little tip-tilted teacup titties. It was all offset in a kinky way by the black eye she was sporting. Her hair was the color of a last-minute sunset, and her eyes were green.
I knew she had an old man. He drove a purple '72 Buick Skylark that smoked and had a black Elvis mullet and muttonchop whiskers. He was another Confederate sympathizer like Larry. Rebel yell!
I gestured toward the sagging Airstream three trailers down. "Mrs. Chinaski called the cops. They were fighting before you got home. She said he was playing his stereo too loud. He told her to piss up a rope. He's lucky she didn't stomp his ass."
"I was at Walmart," Kayla said. "My boyfriend Johnny Ray is locked up too. For a few days anyway. They're friends."
"Him and Mrs. Chinaski?" I grinned.
"No," she said, rolling her eyes at my joke. "Larry. They're friends."
I shrugged. "You want a beer?"
She nodded a little and joggled the baby, which had stirred in her arms. It burrowed deeper and slept.
I stepped over to Larry's porch, where four cans of beer floated in the cold water of his fractured ice chest, grabbed them and went back.
Someone had a radio on. "Papa Was A Rodeo" drifted through the air.
She had put the baby away someplace inside and we sat on Walmart lawn chairs on her deck and watched the bats whir.
"When I was a kid," she said, "we all used to go camping down by the river in the summer -- me, my mom and dad, my two uncles and their families, my grandpa and grandma, even my Pappy -- my great-grandpa. He was old as hell but he could get around pretty good. He ran moonshine when he was young. Anyway we'd fish in the river and put our fish on a stringer and leave them in the river overnight, and then get up the next morning and clean them and have fried fish and potatoes for breakfast.
"But sometimes turtles would come in the middle of the night and eat the fish right off the stringer, and when you pulled them out the next morning all you'd have was a stringer full of fish heads."
I digested this briefly. "And this story has what to do with anything?"
"Beer me!" She crumpled her empty and gestured for another. "It reminds me of this whole fucking place up here, where I am now," she said. She must've started earlier; she was already getting a buzz. "Johnny Ray tells me we're gonna be all set, but where is he now? Shit. It's all just a stringer of fish heads."
"Where you from anyway?" I asked.
"New Orleans." She smiled broadly, popped open her beer can and raised a toast. "Here's to the Upper Ninth Ward! Everywhere else sucks ass!"
I drained half my beer. We were going to run out shortly. I had to do something but I didn't want to drive. Then I thought of Larry's trailer.
"Be right back," I said.
