The Last Worthless Evening Read Free Page B

there?”
    â€œNo. I wouldn’t be able to stand it. I couldn’t get leave anyway. My father wrote to me, after they went down last Christmas.”
    â€œDid he say it was bad?”
    â€œHell, no. It was a happy letter. He said compared to the sixth floor of a tenement, it was a Goddamn resort. A little house with a little yard with flowers, and they have a vegetable garden, and two oak trees, and a dirt road, and a front porch with a swing where they can sit. And friends. Old people. They gather on the porch at night and drink coffee and talk. No gangs of punks. No junkies. No dealers. Sometimes there’s a fight at the bar.”
    â€œThat’s the best kind.”
    â€œOf fight?”
    â€œOf bar.”
    â€œI forgot. You don’t like the officers’ club. Mean-ass Cajun carries a knife. Holds it at a redneck. Poor guy’s celebrating. Just being happy because they found what the fish and the river left of Emmett Till.”
    â€œA pocket knife. For fishing and hunting. And in general.”
    â€œIn general.”
    â€œI’ve always had one. Since Daddy gave me my first one—”
    â€œWhen you were two.”
    â€œEight. To go with my first long pants.”
    â€œNo button on it? Makes the blade come out smelling blood?”
    â€œHere.”
    I twisted in the seat and tried to put my hand in my pocket, but he said: “Shit no, man. Don’t pull that thing in here. This is your kind of place, not mine. I like quiet plastic bars. I don’t need some drunk Marine charging over with a bayonet. Just happens to be taped to his leg. Tell your joke.”
    â€œYou’re not kidding, are you?”
    â€œAbout what?”
    â€œViolence.”
    â€œNot at all, friend. If it weren’t for the draft, I wouldn’t even be a public relations man in a fucking uniform.”
    â€œI think—”
    Then I stopped, and looked away, at the reddened darkness and the moving shapes of people.
    â€œYou think what?”
    I looked at him.
    â€œThat if I were a Negro I’d be dead now.”
    â€œOr you would have learned how to stay alive. The joke, Mr. Fontenot. And I hope it’s not as complex as you are.”
    â€œI’m not complex.”
    â€œNo,” he said. “You’re not.” He finished his beer, looked at my near-empty glass, and raised his hand without looking at the bar, or at the waitress when she somehow and at once noticed him and came and he ordered Asahis. He was looking at me, at my eyes. “My Cajun shipmate,” he said.
    â€œThere’s a monkey walking down the road. In the South, a gravel road, a country road, and he’s walking on the side of it. He hears a pickup coming behind him, and he looks around, and there’s a white man at the wheel, speeding up and aiming at the monkey, and the monkey jumps off the road just in time and lands in a deep ditch. Truck goes on and the monkey climbs out and brushes himself off and shakes his head. Then he starts walking down the road again. After about a mile he sees a car coming toward him, on the other side of the road. There’s a Negro driving, and when he sees the monkey he comes across the road at him, and the monkey jumps in the ditch and the car misses him and goes on by. Monkey climbs out of the ditch again. He brushes off the dust and watches the car driving away, and shakes his head and says: My people, my people …”
    Again Willie laughed, even as the waitress appeared suddenly out of the dark and noise, and he reached back for his wallet, doubling forward with that motion and his laughter too, and gave her some yen and shook his head and held his hand up to refuse the change and she thanked him in Japanese—I can’t spell the word; its sound is arrigato —then he stopped laughing and drew on his cigarette but he laughed again as he inhaled, then he coughed. I was laughing and he waved a hand at me to stop so he could