Rules of the Road Read online

  Johnny Gee flipped it open, counted the cash. Twenty, forty, sixty … one … two … three. Sixty-three dollars, two pawn tickets, a driver’s license belonging to somebody called Denny Miller.

  Relief.

  Johnny Gee sat on the toilet seat and took a few deep breaths, then walked back into his room and fumbled in the cooler for another beer. Last one, floating in a pool of tepid water. He cracked it open and sipped it slowly as he shuffled over to the dresser and flipped on a cheap transistor radio. There was an FM station up in St. Louis you could get sometimes, and sometimes you couldn’t. He twisted the tuning knob. Yes! There it was! The rasping tones of the Butthole Surfers crackled through the static, filling the room. He danced a little shuffle back into the John, put the beer on the edge of the sink, and looked at himself in the mirror. It hadn’t been the best of years for Johnny Gee. His skin had the permanently grayish cast of one who had spent a bit of time under a bare light bulb in a windowless room. Indeed he had: a short stretch in a state medium security prison for possession of gambling paraphernalia, namely, betting slips in his pocket and two slot machines in the trunk of the car he was driving at the time. The fact that the car he was driving wasn’t his—“I borrowed it from a friend, Judge, sir”—failed to persuade His Honor of the obvious innocence of the accused, and he was sentenced to three years. He got two off for good behavior. A recently ended term of parole had introduced into the life of Johnny Gee a new concept, an office, and it was to his place of business he was headed after morning ablutions.

  He was looking at a two-day growth of beard, but before he shaved, there were decisions to be made. What was on the day’s agenda? Any collections overdue? Nah. Couple of guys who needed some gentle prodding about upcoming due dates, but that could be done on the phone. He liked to make collections with a two-three day growth. It made him look perpetually hassled and pissed-off and … tough. If anything could be said to make the undernourished, ratlike features of Johnny Gee look purposeful and tough, he figured a couple of days’ growth was it. In truth, however, his was the face of one accustomed to taking orders from and doing the bidding of others. Nothing he tried in the bathroom could cast his features in any light other than that which stared back at him in the mirror: a small-time hustler going slowly to seed, who clung to the last vestiges of a punkish hipness that was losing relevance at approximately the same rate he was making money: slowly, but inevitably.

  Ahhhhh, fuck it. He splashed some water on his face, and ran a pasteless tooth brush quickly over a set of inordinately pearly white teeth. He squeezed some Brylcreem on one palm, rubbed it against the other, and ran his fingers through his hair. With a fine brush, he swept the front of his hair into a pompadour, smoothing back the sides, admiring the neat trim a barber kept around his ears. There were many things that had escaped the attention of Johnny Gee, but a decent haircut once a week wasn’t one of them. He enjoyed getting his haircut so much that he had attended barber school while he was in the joint, taking a job briefly at a bus depot barbershop when he got out. The barber job didn’t last a single day past the obligatory six months the terms of his parole dictated. Johnny Gee moved on, changing cities and parole officers so often no one really ever had a chance to check up on the status of his employment before he departed the scene. He never violated parole, exactly, never missed a single interview with his parole officer, always listed a valid residence, always showed up for obligatory visits to the state employment office. The thing was, he just never held a job during the long year of his parole, with the exception of the first six months cutting hair at the bus depot. It was a source of great pride to Johnny Gee that both in and out of the joint his greatest skill was keeping most of the people happy most of the time, something that was best accomplished by tap-dancing to whichever tune was playing at the moment. He might have looked like a page out of some very distant, very beat past, but the fact was, he lived in the present tense and was almost incapable of planning any more than a day in advance. While this manner of living kept the wits in tune, it frequently left the wallet flat.

  But this was of little consequence to one who had as few needs as Johnny Gee. He perused a closet that precisely fit his life. One suit, two shirts, and a pair of jeans were at the cleaners. That left the other suit, which he pulled from its hanger. It was sharkskin, vaguely purplish-black and shiny. It was also twenty years out of date, with slash pockets and side vents, ruler-thin lapels, and a black velvet collar, exactly the off-kilter image he wanted to present to the world. The pants were peg-legged, tapered to a fourteen-inch bottom, leaving just enough room through which to force one’s foot. Johnny Gee slipped into the pants and put on his starched white shirt, carefully turning the cuffs back two folds. He took a shoe brush from the closet shelf and ran it expertly over his high-heeled, pointed-toe shoes. Even in the smoky dimness of his room, they gleamed like black chrome.

  Suitably attired for the street, he walked to the door of his room, patted his wallet, ran a comb through his hair, buttoned the middle button on his suit jacket, examined the crease in his trousers.

  He glanced in the mirror over the writing desk.

  Not bad, he said aloud to the empty room. Not bad at all.

  The sheet metal flanks of the modified shuddered over the ruts in the drive down the hill to the gate to the Butterfield farm. Sam pulled to a stop at the gate, adjusted his shoulder harness, and snapped a woven nylon net into the driver’s window.

  Eyes on the gauges, he ran the engine up to five thousand rpm. Everything normal. With a glance in either direction, he pulled onto a shoulderless dirt road. He checked the rear view mirrors. Nothing. He floored it. The modified left the gate in a great spray of gravel and dirt, the scream of its V-8 echoing off nearby rolling hills. Thirty-five, four, forty-five, five, fifty-five, six thousand rpm … shift … three, thirty-five, four, forty-five, five, fifty-five … shift. The modified crested the hill doing eighty miles an hour, coasting in third gear … shift … down to second, the engine whining, wheel thrown to the left, rear tires loose, tail trying to come around in front, steer into the drift … there … just so, back off a touch, pull it around, straighten her out, floor it again, fifty-five, six, sixty-five hundred rpm … shift.

  Speed. Noise. Smoke. Dirt. There was enough in the experience of drifting a race car around a single turn to give one reason to live. This had occurred to Sam Butterfield at the wheel on many occasions, and yet … and yet …

  There was something about being able to do it so goddamn well time after time that was just plain boring. He pointed the modified down a hill at ninety miles an hour. There was absolutely nothing about driving this car at ninety miles an hour on a twisting, hilly road not crafted for the purpose of racing automobiles that disturbed him. He felt as natural at the wheel of the modified as he did in an army uniform. It was a feeling of control and ease, a marvelous sense that all you had to do was pay attention, and nothing could go wrong. It was one of the things that had drawn him to the army in the first place, and it was one of the things that had kept him in. There was something about being in a company—he really couldn’t put his finger on what it was. All he could do was feel it.

  He was fifteen miles down the road from the Butterfield farm nearing the county line. Without stopping, he threw the modified into a power slide, reversed direction, and headed home. It was time he talked to his mom about a few things. She would have the answers to the questions that were flooding his mind. He knew that she knew what was on his mind already. She wasn’t a font of wisdom, but she was the closest thing Sam Butterfield had ever come to one.

  He put the hammer down, the modified leapt ahead, and as the squat black car crested the last hill, he could see the farm over to the right, lazy against the denim sky. His mother was in the side yard hanging laundry out to dry. He shifted down into first and took the turn through the gate like a gentleman. Like an officer.

  ***

  The stairs were unlit, dark even at midday. Johnny Gee gr
abbed the worn wooden banister and took his time, picking his way around corners of torn rubber tread sticking up at ankle level on every other step. No sense in scuffing a good shine. No sir. No sense at all. At the bottom, he straightened his shirt collar and stepped outside. The sun was blinding. He squinted up and down the street before proceeding. No sunglasses. Not today. You don’t wear sunglasses with your suit. Too much. Catch too many eyes. Attention on the street is the kind of thing you want in controlled doses, and you want to do the controling. Like today. Suit’s looking good, shoes looking good. Fresh shirt. Newly mown hair. Looking sharp, and when you’re strolling, sharp’s enough.

  The thing about the street is, you want to respect it. You want to treat the street the way you’d treat the road in a car. You know that thing about driving defensively they’re always babbling about on the radio and shit? Same with the street. Drive yourself down the sidewalk like you mean it, and like you know everybody else out there means it, too. The street’s the great equalizer. You want to use everything available to get a leg up. The way you look, that’s an ankle up. The way you walk stands you a little taller still. See? It’s like a thing that adds up, and everything you got counts.

  Johnny Gee left the stoop at a leisurely pace, placing his feet precisely in front of one another, as if he were walking a crack. Left arm swinging in an easy, curving arc, from a foot in front of his waist, around to six inches from the middle of his back, the very definition of taking it easy. Right hand almost still at his side, might as well be tucked in his pocket. Sometimes was. He gazed around disinterestedly. A kid played a boom box across the street, somebody’s lookout. Railroad crossing down, ding-ding-dinging away at the end of a side street. Grain elevators gray and foreboding in a permanent haze of brown dust on the other side of the tracks. He glanced over his shoulder. The sidewalk was glaring white like ice cream. The door to one of the bars was open; the bartender was sweeping out. Across the red light, a Trailways bus pulled out of the depot, two blasts of its horn signaling the dispatcher. The sign outside the window of his room blinked faintly, lettered vertically from the fifth story to the first: Terminal Hotel Wkly Rates. Its red and blue neon lent a soft, comforting glow to his room at night. But at noon, the sign was faded just like everything else on Third Street.

  The thing about streets as down and out as Third Street is that you want to fade right into them. Daylight, see, you can wear a sharkskin suit and nobody notices, the suit’s just like the neon sign. Sharkskin’s at its best in a bar, in low, yellow light. High white light drops it out, disappears it. So what you do is, you stroll and you mind your own business and you check out all the other business on the street, and you aim for where you’re going in no big hurry and you get there whenever you arrive, you know? Daytime, worst thing you can do is look purposeful. Nighttime, you want to look like you’re pursuing a higher calling, you’re on the way to meet somebody bigger than the street, bigger than the damn town. Daytime, you stroll. Streets you don’t tear up, not unless you’re a jackhammer, and years have gone by since Third Street has seen a jackhammer.

  Johnny Gee had honed his Third Street theory of relativity to a fine edge. Excepting his time in the joint, he’d been on Third Street for years, since the year he’d dropped out of school, anyway. He used to live out past First, in the midst of what they used to call the Shacks. He got out of the Shacks just before something called urban renewal came along and tore them down. Weird thing was, nothing ever came along to replace the Shacks, at once a place to start out for the newcomer and a place of resignation for those who had given up.

  He’d moved to town from a crossroads. The first thing he heard when he hit Third Street was someone behind him: “Country come to town,” the voice muttered. He didn’t look back, he was too scared, but that voice taught him his first lesson. He’d glance over his shoulder from then on. And he’d take to the streets of a town the way he had taken to the woods of the country. He’d fit in. He knew from growing up out there that you either fit in or you died. Johnny Gee had noticed back when he was carrying a slingshot hunting in the woods that the only creatures who stood out were birds, their plumage bright like flowers. Thing was, birds could fly. Barefoot boys couldn’t fly. Neither could grown men who walked the street in well-shined shoes. For this reason, Johnny Gee was extremely careful. Despite the fact that he had been arrested numerous times, convicted once, and served his time, he had never had a close call. He had never gotten away by the skin of his teeth, the ways it’s said savvy criminals often do. The time they got him, they had him dead to rights, they’d built a case no self-respecting soul would fight. He didn’t. He copped. Every other time, and there were many during his years on the street, they never even came close. Johnny Gee fit in so seamlessly, he knew the rules so well, he was beginning to play by them. This was a function of either age or wisdom, he didn’t know which. Nor did he particularly care. He was content to spin atop his little corner of the world like a nickel on a bar, and as long as he kept spinning, that was a big enough piece of future for him.

  Right now the future was through the swinging doors. He wheeled right, glanced over his shoulder, and shoved himself out of the sun, back into the dimness.

  BEHIND THE DOOR of the room where he had been a boy for a long, long time, Sam sat on the edge of his bed and stared at the wall over his dresser. On the left was a Bob Marley poster stapled to the wall just over a Rolling Stones poster. Pinned on the wall next to the posters were two, maybe three dozen eight-by-ten photos of a grimy-faced young kid standing next to a grimy Number 58 modified; it was a modified all right, but in several of the photos taken at night, you really couldn’t tell. All you could see clearly was, the kid had won. He was holding three-foot-tall gaudy trophies, each one topped by a miniature race coupe. He was grinning so wide it looked like he would burst. There was no variation between pictures. In one photo he was grinning, holding his first checkered flag, the same as he grinned in another where he was holding his last. There was no letting-up on the wall. He’d wanted to win, and when he did, he was thrilled. Now the man who’d been that kid in the pictures sat on his bed and marveled. It used to be that he could visit home and look over his trophies and remember every race, hell, every lap of every race. But now all that stuff on the wall represented memories that had pretty much faded, and at thirty-three, even he wasn’t that faded yet. He looked at the trophies on the shelf next to his dresser. The largest was over five feet tall, some kind of Hercules holding aloft what looked to be a 1940 Ford coupe… . If the little gold coupe wasn’t so classic, it’d be pathetic. He had read somewhere in college about what confronted him, and though he didn’t understand it then, he recognized it now: he was looking at cognitive dissonance, midwest-style. He’d always known college would mean something someday.

  He bent to the task at hand: packing his army duffel bag. Fatigues were stacked at the end of the bed, starched and folded, his mother having washed and ironed last night and all morning to produce the neat olive drab pile. With one hand he held the duffel bag open, with the other, he carefully eased the folded uniforms into the duffel, alternating shirts and pants up and down to make things even. It seemed like yesterday, all the stuff on the wall, yet it was a long, long time ago. He was somebody else back then, not in the sense of being a race car driver as opposed to an army officer, but just … somebody else. He had less of an idea of who he was now. A divorced American male approaching middle age? Yeah, he was that all right, but … All he knew was that everything was different now, for some reason. He didn’t recognize his own bedroom’s scent. It had been too long since he had visited the room he grew up in. It seemed like if you were away long enough, either you changed, or everything else did.

  The door to the room cracked open.

  “Are you going to call Betsy before you leave, Sam?” His mother was standing in the hall, wiping her hands on a flower print apron. “You know, she doesn’t live far from here, over in Mt. Vernon. Did I tell you? She’s got a ne
w job with the state, running one of the governor’s local outreach offices. She’s in charge of liaison for all state programs in the south twenty counties.”

  “You told me. Several times.”

  “Well, are you going to call her? I’m sure she’d be delighted to hear from you. She’s not married, you know.”

  “I know. You told me that, too. Several more times.”

  “You two made such a cute couple… .” Mrs. Butterfield looked up. Also on the wall was an old photograph of Sam and Betsy at the ROTC ball his senior year. He was wearing his dress uniform, she had her hair in one of those French twists, and they were smiling so widely it seemed their cheeks would crack.

  “Look, Ma. I don’t know how to explain it, but I really don’t think I should be calling her. I mean, it doesn’t feel right. I’m gone from here for eleven years, I haven’t even been back to visit for the last two years, and suddenly I show up, divorced, lonely, and what do I do? I call my old college girlfriend. What am I supposed to say? Long time no see? It’s a damn cliché, Ma. Don’t you see?”

  She walked into his room and sat down on the bed next to him.

  “I understand that it might feel awkward, Sam, but I still think she’d like to hear from you.”

  “What have you been doing? Talking to her on the phone every week?”

  “No, Sam. I haven’t.”

  “Then how did you know about her new job?”

  “I called the outreach office a few months ago trying to get somebody to listen to me about that bridge near our land over in Hamilton County. You know the one. It’s between that eighty we’ve got on the west side of the Saline River, and the three-twenty on the east side. We’ve got to cross it with our big combine every fall, and the county let the bridge go to pot, so this year we weren’t going to be able to make the crossing. We would have had to go thirty miles out of our way to get from one field to the other to bring in the corn.”