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Twenty-Nine
- West Virginia University Press
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193 Twenty-Nine In my entire life I never expected to see her again. Now and then Banger would give us a morning or an afternoon off—usually on a rainy day—and I would wander around the side roads, sometimes hitching down to Myrtle Beach and walking the streets like a real person, a man of means. I usually had maybe five dollars in my pocket, but that was more than I had on Black Hawk Ridge or in Crum. Especially Crum. I would find a soda fountain, a bookstore, a guy on the beach selling hot dogs, or something—anything that I couldn’t find back at Cherry Hill Beach—to spend my five dollars on. The sign said “Wimpo’s.” It hung out over the sidewalk from one small chain and a piece of wire; the wire was longer and the sign hung at a crazy angle. The place was a beach-side bar and hamburger joint that I had often passed, but had never gone into. Wimpo was supposed to be fat, dumb and mean, maybe crazy. Probably related to that fucking deputy, I thought. Hugo said not to go in there, that Wimpo didn’t like the guys from Cherry Hill coming down to Myrtle and messing around, thought guys from Cherry were just that—cherries. So I stayed away from the place. Usually. But, what the hell, sometimes I was a slow learner. I went in. Wimpo’s was big and airy, some ceiling fans turning, windows propped open to let the ocean breeze push the cigarette smoke and 194 stink of stale beer out the other side. There were some booths along the street side, some tables in the middle. The bar was on the ocean side and when you sat on a bar stool you could look over the top of dirty whiskey bottles and get a clear view of the water. I sat at the bar and had a beer, sipping at the cold bottle, wondering who Wimpo was and how he got here, and looking out through the windows at the beach and the gray water beyond. It felt odd to me, somehow, knowing that on the other side of that water there were people I had never seen, who spoke different languages, who thought different thoughts. People who would never, in their entire lives, lay eyes on me. But if we both, at the same time, went down to the beach and put our feet in the water . . . we were connected. Somehow. I thought a lot of weird shit, there on the beach. I thought if it was weird, it was deep. But thoughts like that made me feel good about being at the beach, about being able to look out on the water and know that others were out there, about having choices and directions to go if I didn’t like where I was. On Black Hawk Ridge, I knew something else was out there. I just didn’t know in what direction. She hadn’t been in the bar when I came in. She must have just come to work. And now she was there behind the bar, wiping at it lightly with a damp rag, her hips swaying slightly to the music from the juke box as she moved gently, slowly, in my direction. The light from the windows jumped into her shiny black hair and flicked at the edges of her face. She was calm and relaxed and I could tell she liked it here, liked what she was doing here at the beach, liked being on her own, liked knowing she would never see me again. Her eyes snapped down the bar toward me. She wasn’t close enough for me to see their color but I knew they were brown, the [3.80.144.110] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 14:38 GMT) 195 brightest brown I had ever seen. I had seen those eyes as closely as I had seen the eyes of any human being. I had been inside those eyes. They had been inside me. Yvonne. I wondered if she were still a whore. We had been sitting on the porch of Luke’s Restaurant in Crum, watching it get dark and hoping that the dark would cool the heat that smothered the valley. We were talking about getting money and leaving Crum and what we would do if we could do that, and I don’t remember seeing...