Sailor & Lula Read Online Free Page B

year older than you? And he’s about bald.”
    â€œThere’s worse things can happen to a man, honey,” said Sailor.
    â€œYeah, I suppose,” said Lula. “Hair does make a difference, though.”

DIXIE PEACH
    Sailor and Lula sat at a corner table next to the window in the Forget-Me-Not Cafe sipping their drinks. Lula had an iced tea with three sugars and Sailor had a High Life, which he drank straight from the bottle. They’d both ordered fried oysters and cole slaw and were enjoying the view. There was a nail paring of a moon and the sky was dark grey with streaks of red and yellow and beneath it the black ocean lay flat on its back.
    â€œThat water reminds me of Buddy Favre’s bathtub,” said Sailor.
    â€œHow’s that?” Lula asked.
    â€œMy daddy’s duck-huntin’ partner, Buddy Favre, used to take a bath ever’ evenin’. Buddy was a stumpy guy with a mustache and goatee and kinda slanty eyes so he looked like a devil but he was a regular guy. He was a truck mechanic, worked on big rigs, eighteen-wheelers, and he got awful filthy doin’ it. So nights when he got home he soaked himself in a tub full of Twenty Mule Team Borax and the water turned a kind of thick grey and black, like the way the ocean looks tonight. My daddy would go over to Buddy’s and sit in a chair in the bathroom and sip I. W. Harper while Buddy bathed, and sometimes he took me with him. Buddy smoked a joint ever’ night while he was in the tub. He’d offer it to Daddy but he stuck to the whisky. Buddy said the reefer come from Panama and that he was gonna end up there one day.”
    â€œDid he?”
    â€œI don’t know, honey. I lost track of him after Daddy died, but Buddy was a pretty determined type of man, so I imagine he’ll make it eventually if he ain’t already.”
    â€œWhere’d you get high first, Sailor? You remember?”
    Sailor took a long swig of his High Life. “Sure do. I was fifteen and Bobby Tebbetts and Gene Toy—my half-Chinaman friend I told you about?—we was drivin’ Bobby’s ’55 Packard Caribbean to Ciudad Juarez so we could get laid. Bobby’d been down there before when he’d been visitin’ some family in El Paso, and he and a cousin of his went over to Juarez and got their peckers wet for the first time. Gene Toy and I got
Bobby to talkin’ about it one night and we just decided on the spot to get up and go get it done.”
    â€œThat’s an awful long way to go,” said Lula, “just to get some pussy.”
    â€œWe was only—let’s see, I was fifteen and Tebbetts was seventeen and a half and Gene Toy was sixteen. I had my first taste on that trip. At that age you still got a lot of energy.”
    â€œYou still got plenty energy for me, baby. When’s the first time you done it with a girl who wasn’t hookin’?”
    â€œMaybe two, three months after Juarez,” said Sailor. “I was visitin’ my cousin, Junior Train, in Savannah, and we were at some kid’s house whose parents were out of town. I remember there were kids swimmin’ in a indoor pool and some of ’em was standin’ around in the yard or the kitchen drinkin’ beer. A girl come up to me that was real tall, taller than me, and she had a real creamy complexion but there was a interestin’ star-shaped scar on her nose.”
    â€œWas it big?”
    â€œNo. About thumbnail size, like a tattoo almost.”
    â€œSo she come up to you?”
    â€œYeah.” Sailor laughed. “She asked me who I was with and I said nobody, just Junior. She asked me did I want a beer and I held up the one I was holdin’. She asked me did I live in Savannah and I said no, I was visitin’ family.”
    â€œShe know them?”
    â€œNo. She looked right at me and run her tongue over her lips and put her hand on my arm. Her name was