Read Knowing for Free Online Page B

summer’s gone. . . . Henry ain’t in no more trouble is he? He found a job yet?”
    “My boy still ain’t found no job. Don’t think he want one.” Little Bubba shook his head shamefully. “Giving up them drugs ain’t easy. I promised Lillian ’fore she died, I’d do everything I could to put him in a drug rehab, and see that he got back right.” He jockeyed himself toward the pool table. “Three years, and each year been worse than the last one. Last night . . . no, this morning, he came in around five o’clock looking like he been rolling around in a gutter. I pray to God Lillian can’t see him, otherwise she’d be turning over in her grave. I had to get outta there this morning before I killed him.”
    Little Bubba fetched another cold one for each of them. They talked and joked about the easy days of growing up back home, reminiscing with the same old stories they’d told each over the past twenty years, knowing they’d still provide a laugh or two.
    Z.Z. Hill’s down-home blues bounced off the freshly painted black cement walls of the renovated church building. Five black and white and red hands of cards — aces, kings, queens, jacks, and tens, of hearts, spades, clubs, and diamonds — were stenciled in three-foot sections at various intervals around the room. Jackson shuffled his feet to a slow dance, using the pool stick as his mate. Turning up the volume, he watched Little Bubba smiling to himself, nodding his head to the melancholy beat.
    The digital clock above the bar registered 11:47 A.M. “Man, it’s almost noon,” Jackson said, clearing the empty beer cans lined up along the bar. After consuming a twelve-pack, playing fifteen games of pool, and making several trips to the newly installed men’s toilet, they were both beat.
    Little Bubba flushed the toilet with a bucket of water, and took a seat at the bar. “Jackson, we gotta get that toilet finished. I can’t haul too many more buckets of water. I’m too old for this. I think I’d be better off waiting ’til I get home to use the bathroom.”
    Rinsing out the last beer can, Jackson placed it back inside the carton, which he stored next to several boxes of empties by the door. Joining Little Bubba back at the bar, he picked up a discarded wrench and began tapping it against the counter.
    “Okay, pal.” Little Bubba turned to look Jackson square in the face and exhaled. “We’ve been friends for a long time. What’s botherin’ you?” Jackson waved him off. “Don’t tell me it ain’t nothin’. I been knowing you too long. Something must’ve pissed you off to get you away from John Wayne and Matt Dillon.”
    Jackson couldn’t help but smile. The beer had relaxed him somewhat, and he’d begun to feel like talking. “It’s Ginger. We argued this mornin’ before the kids were up.”
    “Man, don’t you go getting that pretty little wife of yours upset. You got a fine woman. A hardworking woman. If I had —”
    “What makes you so sure I did something wrong?” Jackson started to get defensive. “She is the stubbornest woman I ever met in my life. I didn’t have no trouble like this with my first wife.”
    “I don’t mean no offense, Jackson, but you know these women up here ain’t like our women back home — they a mite feisty, but they still good women. Now you know I was sorry, too, when your wife passed ten years ago. But — in the time you and Ginger been married, you seem happier to me. I knew she was good for you when you stopped hanging down here at the club until all hours of the night like you used to. Ain’t no married man got no business hanging around all these single men night after night. ’Cause you know they ain’t up to no good.”
    “Yeah. I’m getting too old for that kind of life. I’ll be forty-four in a couple of weeks. Got twenty-four years in at the plant, and six more to go ’til I retire. I’m gonna work two more years after that, and that’s it. Ginger doesn’t know