Blacky, Pt. II

I caught the girl to my right sneaking a look at me.  Maybe she was looking at my food to see what I ordered, but I got the idea that she was looking to see if I was looking at her.  I had to decide whether to feel good or creepy.  I felt I knew the odds.

When I looked back, my friend's coffee cup had gotten fuller.  He was talking about car parts again.

"Yea," I said, "they don't make them like they used to.  When I got my first car, I used to be able to work on it--tune it up, change the oil, replace most of the parts.  Now. . . ."

"You got that right," he said.  "They just charged me $25 for a . . . had to bring it over from Tampa."

"I got to tell you, I don't care much about cars.  I just gave up on my old '85 Volvo about six months ago. It was going on 300,000 miles.  It still runs.  I'm giving it to my friend's son."

"You sound like me.  I gave my girlfriend's son my old Capri.  Thing was like new.  Had a full tank of gas."

He jumped back and forth so much in time as he talked, I couldn't keep up.  Did he have a girlfriend now?

"I was hand grinding valves when I was eight years old.  I grew up doing lots of odd jobs.  I used to work for Kirkland.  That was a hell of a time."

"Ed Kirkman?" I asked.

"No, that was the attorney.  I worked for Kirkland that ran the unions around here.  Boy, he had 'em all.  Those were a rough bunch of boys.  I used to do some dirty work for him."

"Holy shit!  I was in the union then.  They had the hall up off Highway 50.  Yes, I remember that.  I was at the hall the day the shit hit the fan.  I was there to pay my dues.  The fellow who ran the hall had locked himself up in the office.  There were some other fellows trying to take over.  It was dangerous.  Then the cops showed up."

"I'd been out of there for about fifteen minutes by then," he said.

"Holy shit!"

"We broke a lot of heads for Kirkland.  He was a rough son of a bitch.  Everybody knew it.  But the mafia was down here trying to take over, stirring up a lot of trouble.  Old Kirkland married that little girl that was his secretary," he said as if I'd known her.  "He always had great taste, you had to give 'em that.  But fooling 'round with her was too dangerous.  Never fool around with the big man's girl, know what I mean.  That'll get you dead."

"It used to be different," I said.  "People used to be polite to one another because you didn't want to piss anyone off.  You might get hit.  Now you hit someone, the cops arrest you and you get sued.  You used to be able to sock someone in the jaw without any trouble.  Kept people in line a bit."

"Look at what happened to . . . I can't remember his name.  The tall fellow comes in here got his neck broke."

"I don't know him," I said.  "I only come in here once in a while on the weekends.  How'd he break his neck?"

"Cops done it to him.  It was in all the papers.  They roughed him up good, said he was drunk and attacked 'em, but that's horse shit.  I know that old boy and he didn't do nothing like that.  They just worked him over too hard.  Now he can only turn his head like this this way and like this that way. . . ."

He was turning his head a couple inches to the left and right and up and down to show me.

"It's rough out there now.  Everybody's got a gun.  I know some cops, and they say they are scared every time they get a call.  They walk into some trailer park or bad neighborhood or bar and nobody is on their side.  You got to give them that."

"Oh, it's rough alright.  I carried a gun for forty years.  You'd never know where it was at, though."

He grinned like a fox.

"Those were some days."

I was getting the idea that he had done some pretty rough things in his life.

"I had me a '55 Ford, a Sunliner.  I changed it around, put a big old engine in it.  They came with a yellow bottom, and I changed that to black.  Then above that was black, and I had 'em paint that white. Then I put a black top on it and some whitewall tires.  She was a beauty and everyone knew it.  Man, that thing was fast.  It could really go.  I drove all over the state in that rig."

I looked at him sitting there on the stool next to me.  He was opening up a prescription pill bottle.  He shook out four pills into the palm of his hand.  They were all different.  He took one in his fingers and palmed the others back into the bottle.  And with his long, yellowed thumbnail, he broke the pill in two.  He looked up at me.

"See that?  That's a big old pill."

"You break it so you can swallow it better?"

"No. . . I chew 'em up.  These are the pain pills they gave me for my back.  Boy, they'll knock you out."

He put one in his mouth and began to grind.  Then he threw it back with some coffee.

"Here's a rough man," I thought.  "Here's a survivor."