“Hey, I bet you was a cheerleader in high school.”

She shook her head and made a face. “I was on the dance team for a couple years. It was hard to cheer for football because we hardly ever won a game. Who could win a game when their name’s the St. Mary Blue Gators?”

Bucky talked out a lungful of smoke. “Yeah, when I played football, we used to smash those little private schools into the dirt. What else did you do when you was growing up? Wrassle any snapping turtles?”

“No, but I fished with my brother, and I was president of Four-H. The school had a lot of dances, and when I got to be seventeen, the lounge owners would let us in to jitterbug to the old stuff.”

“Did your old man find out about that?”

“Hell no.”

Bucky stubbed out his cigarette. “Yeah, I know what you mean. My daddy used to think I went to Bible study every Wednesday night.”

“Where were you?”

He picked up the check and looked at it. “I forget,” he told her.

Chapter Twelve

Twelve

For two weeks she looked for work with the desperation of a newly landed immigrant. The only business in town that was hiring was Trosclair’s U-Haul franchise, which was hooking up the departing welders and pipe fitters as fast as trailers could be deadheaded into town from other parts of the country. One afternoon, she was ironing her father’s shirts, wondering if a lounge would hire a pregnant barmaid, when the phone rang. Bucky Tyler’s voice drawled out of the receiver, telling her that his bookkeeper had run off to Atlanta with his stationary engineer. He wanted to know if she would work for him. Her last bank statement flashed in front of her eyes, and then she considered Bucky’s sandy hair and horsey grin. “Yes,” she said too quickly, surprising herself.

“Now, it don’t pay more’n eight dollars a hour,” he told her. “But it’s better’n welfare.”

The next morning, she went down the blacktop south of town, turned off onto a wide weed-haunted road topped with powdery clamshells, and drove the two miles to what used to be a factory that processed trash fish into fertilizer, but which now simmered and stank behind a plywood sign proclaiming TYLER INDUSTRIES, INDUSTRIAL SANITATION. The man at the guard shack motioned her in as though he’d been told to expect her, and she drove to the office, a building covered with asbestos siding next to a murky canal full of listing barges. Inside she found a jaundiced Bucky Tyler sitting in a folding chair with his head nearly between his knees.

“You okay?” she asked.