nice legs, when do they open?
It was always weird seeing Billie again. Not long after Dad and I had brought her back home from Thebes, we only saw her maybe once or twice a year. We knew she wasn’t living in Bicknell, but it’s not like she ever seemed to be living that far from us either. I’d be in the drive-thru at Long John Silvers and wonder if the girl in the car in front of me was her or not. Or, I’d be in Kroger’s and think I’d hear her voice in the next aisle.
One time, she came home late one night crying with the news that Stevie Ray Vaughn had just died in a plane crash. She explained how she had met Stevie once at a Blues festival. Dad waited until she was finished with her story, then got out his wallet and set the money on the kitchen counter and went back to bed. She spent the rest of the night on the couch, but was gone before either Dad and I woke up the next morning. I think Dad always kept a hundred dollar bill secretly folded away in his wallet for whenever she showed up. I could never tell if he gave the money to her as a gift or as a way to get her out of the house because as soon as she got that hundred it wasn’t long before she was out the door and out of our lives for another six months.
It’s not that I didn’t mind Billie showing up out of the blue. Dad and I never said it, but I think we were both relieved when she showed her face – just so we knew she was still alive. But what bugged us was how much space she took up when she was around. She didn’t live there anymore and her old bedroom had been slowly emptied with each of her visits to the point that there were only a mattress on the floor and an old Pat Benatar poster on the walls, but whenever she showed up it was like she had the run of the place all over again. After an hour of her being there, whether it was winter or summer, rain or shine, I’d have to escape to the woods just so I could breathe. Dad would start washing his car, inside and out. I think he preferred the sound of the Dust-Buster than whatever Billie had to say.
After Billie went into the liquor store, I looked in on the Mustang she had flown in on. Behind the steering wheel was this scrawny little bald guy with a full beard. Eyes closed, head thrown back, mouth open, the only thing that made him different from a dead body was that he would occasionally flick the ashes from his cigarette out the window.
Billie came out with four cases of Bud Light in her arms, a brown paper bag wrapped around a bottle, and the unlit cigarette in her mouth. I took the cases from her and followed her to the back of the Mustang. Opening its trunk, she flipped open the lid of a big red cooler inside. The cooler was full of water, some ice cubes floating around, a carton of orange juice and a slice of bologna sealed inside a sandwich bag. Behind the cooler were a rifle case and some logs. She screwed the cap off the bottle in the brown paper sack and drained it into the carton of orange juice.
“What’s that?” I asked.
“Malibu,” she said, tossing the sack and bottle into the trunk and drinking straight from the carton.
She offered me a drink and I put my nose to the mouth of the carton. It smelled like sun tan lotion. “No thanks,” I said.
“Suit yourself.” She took another swig. “That’s eight bucks by the way for the half-case I got you.”
I looked around for the green bottles. “They didn’t have any Molson?”
“Nope.”
Bullshit. She had just bought me what she was buying.
“Come on,” I said. “I asked you to buy me Molson.”
“I don’t have change for this,” she said, pocketing the twenty I had held out to her.
“There’s a liquor store right there. Go in and break it.”
“No can do,” she said. “The guy in there won’t open his register unless you buy something.”
More bullshit.
The bald dead-looking guy in the driver’s seat opened his eyes and watched me in his side-mirror while Billie and I stood there at the open trunk of the Mustang, facing one another with all of that Bud Light between us. She let her swoop of hair cover her leaky pupil again. “I’ll pay you back the next time I see you,” she said, and started breaking open the cases and tossing the cans into the cooler.
I picked up my half-case, put it under my arm, and watched her fill the cooler. I could’ve helped her. There were a lot of cans and she was determined to get all three-and-a-half cases in that one cooler. But I figured she had already lied to me twice, let her pack her own cooler.
“You need ice,” I said.
“Tell me something I don’t know,” she said, and closed the trunk.
I watched her move around to the passenger side of the Mustang, get in, grab a lighter from the dash and light her cigarette. The guy she was with must’ve asked her about me because she just shrugged her shoulders and nodded toward me as if to say no, it’s okay. Whatever that could’ve meant. He was still staring at me in his side-mirror and I stared back, not caring how tough or dead he seemed to be. He sat up and started the engine. Billie closed her door and the Mustang backed out with the guy flicking his fingers goodbye to me from the top of the steering wheel. Billie called out to me, “Good seeing you!” I didn’t say anything. I stepped into the empty parking space and watched the Mustang pull out onto the highway. Its bumper sticker read Nice Legs, When Do They Open?
