Red, White & Blue

Lew Harris. Coming and Going at the U.S. Open. Digital photograph. 2013. 36 × 48 inches.

I saw Gwen under the Aqua-Mule sign, with a hoarfrost of powdered sugar caught in the fine hairs of her upper lip. She had her arm around Chief, steadying him, the fresh stump of his wrist resting lightly on her shoulder, cuffed in clean white gauze. Her little girl Amber was sneaking sips from the seven-ounce Little Kings dangling from his good arm, and when she smiled, her teeth were stained red with snocone.

Amber’d gotten a little honeybee painted on her face. And I wondered if she picked it out herself or if her mom told her, “That’d be cute.” “Honeybee” is what I call Gwen. It popped into my mind the very first time I saw her, when Amber was just a baby, picking out off-brand diapers at the Dollar General. I think because she was so tiny, but not skin-and-bones like she is now. She had the same dirty blond hair and big, dark eyes and that hum just under her skin. That first time in she bought diapers and some little dime boxes of candy cigarettes we had leftover from broken bags of Halloween treats. They can’t call them candy cigarettes anymore so they call them candy batons. I didn’t say anything when I rang her up, but she opened up one of those boxes and worked one slender stick into her mouth and back out again. She had a white smudge down the center of both lips, with a faint streak of red from the painted ember, like one of those old Japanese geisha girls. She said, “I love these things.” She smiled at me with teeth like so many sun-polished seashells and I tried to smile back with my lips together. One of my front teeth has a corner broken off, from a different kind of baton. She had a beautiful smile back then. She asked if I was new.

I didn’t know it then, but I’d already met Chief, actually worked with him on a roofing crew my first job in town. Me and two local ’billies stripped the old roofs off with Number Two coal shovels and then grunted seventy-fivepound bundles of shingles up a ladder so Chief could tack them down with an air gun. I like him, always have, even when it’d be easier not to. He didn’t care that I had tits, because I never held up the show, but the other two wouldn’t let it alone. One day I guess Chief got as sick of hearing “dyke” as much as me and chased one of the ‘billies across somebody’s front yard shooting roofing nails at him with the air gun. He ducked down behind Chief’s truck, and Chief let loose a half-dozen nails to rattle around inside the bed, just to let him know what was what. It seems like I might have even met Gwen when we’d all stop for a beer after work, but for some reason I can’t remember. I got the job at Dollar General, which is a lot easier, and it wasn’t long before the Mexicans put Chief out of business anyway. The money’s not as good, but at least my knees and shoulders don’t hurt all the time and I don’t run through all the hot water in the trailer trying to get the shingle grit out of my hair. Less chance I’ll need the health insurance I still don’t have. That roof work’ll make you old before your time. Chief got on over at Discount Tire with Billy and Grimace. At least he was.

When they started walking, I followed at a distance, between the square trailers selling cotton candy, corn dogs and nachos, funnel cakes and sno-cones. And layered over all of the other smells, a thin fog of manure from all the animals judged this morning. There were still a...