Joe Read Online Free Page B

go put it in the cooler, then. Put some more water in there, too.”
     
    He picked up his coffee and stood sipping it until the last hand had gone out the door with his little sack. Then he set it on the counter again and waited for the storekeeper to open the till. Freddydidn’t look happy when he looked up from his money, and spoke to Joe.
     
    “You couldn’t wait a little while on this, could you?”
     
    “What’s the matter? You ain’t got it?”
     
    “Aw, I got it. I got it right here. My gas man’s due today, though. If I can’t buy gas I might as well not even keep the door open.”
     
    “When you gonna learn not to bet money you can’t afford to lose, Freddy?”
     
    “I never thought Duran would beat him.”
     
    “So you said.”
     
    “Would you let me give you half this week and half next week? She’s gonna notice this as it is.”
     
    He thought about it for a moment, about winners and losers and high rollers and those who aspired to be. Finally he said: “All right. Give it here.”
     
    Freddy reached in quickly and took out three hundred dollars and handed it over, shaking his head with relief.
     
    “I sure appreciate it, Joe. Business ain’t been good lately.”
     
    “Looks pretty good to me,” said Joe.
     
    They were trying to finish up a tract of a hundred and seventeen acres close to Toccopola that they’d been on for eight days. He’d started with a crew of eleven, but he’d fired two and one had quit the second day. He stopped the truck on a bulldozed road deep in the woods, a slash of red dirt high in the green hills of timber. He sat on the tailgate with the file in his hand, while Shorty and Dooley held the blades across his leg for sharpening, a small pocket of bright filings growing in a crease in his jeans. When he had fiveready, he told Junior to get the men started. Shorty had climbed into the back and wrestled the thirty-gallon drum of poison over on its side and he and Dooley were filling the plastic milk jugs with the thick brown fluid.
    Joe raised his head and looked far down the tract to the dying trees they’d injected three days before. It was as if a blight had grown across the emerald tops of the forest and was trying to catch up to where they stood.
     
    “Y’all won’t need no water yet,” he said. “Go on down there to where we quit yesterday and start in before it gets too hot.”
     
    “It ain’t gonna rain, is it?” one said hopefully.
     
    Joe looked up to a sky gray and overcast, with rumblings of thunder in the distance.
     
    “It ain’t gonna rain,” he said. “Not till dinner anyway.”
     
    He finished with the last blade and tried to hurry the hands as much as he could while they in turn tried to prolong the beginning of their labor by filling their guns and priming the tubes.
     
    “All right, let’s hit it,” he said. “Y’all done fucked around long enough. We got to finish by tomorrow if it takes all day.”
     
    The man who carried their water and poison took up a jug of each and followed behind them and they all went off down into the hollow to find their marks and begin. Joe got in the cab and pulled the whiskey out from under the seat and opened a hot Coke and sat there. He lit a cigarette and coughed long and slow, spacing the spasms out, clearing his throat and finally spitting something onto the ground and wiping his mouth. He took a couple of drinks and then capped the bottle. The wind was coming up a little. Faint flashes of lightning speared the earth miles away. He lay down onthe seat with his cap over his eyes and his feet out the door. Before many minutes had passed he was asleep.
     
    Soft droplets on his face woke him. He opened his eyes and looked at the cab roof over his head. He’d knocked his cap off and water was running down the inside of the door on him. His feet were wet. The windshield was blurred by rain and he could see only bleary forms of greenery through it. It was ten minutes after nine. He