Trevor and Barry Get Lucky (4)

He put his hazards on and followed her at eleven miles an hour.

She went down Fourth to the end and took the left onto Main, slowly, the way people drive when they're thinking about something else, and the pie went round the corner on the roof of the car and sat there. Trevor came round behind her with the amber lights going on the shop windows. The man outside the barber's stopped sweeping to look. A tow truck with its lights on was not unusual on Main Street. A tow truck with its lights on following a perfectly good car at a walking pace, with nothing on the back, was a different matter, and the man stood with his broom and watched them all the way past.

There was a speed bump outside the school. Trevor had never liked it. The car went up and over, and the pie lifted, very slightly, and came down again exactly where it had been.

Trevor breathed out through his nose.

Every light on Main was green for her. The pie went through all three of them. Barry sat up straight on the seat with the ball in his mouth and did not take his eyes off it, and Trevor found he was leaning forward over the wheel as if that would help.

She pulled in at the Grange hall at the end of Main, where there were already a great many cars and a great deal of tinfoil going in through the doors. She got out with her handbag and shut the door and turned, and saw the pie on her roof.

She stood very still.

Then she looked behind her, at the tow truck idling at the kerb with its lights still going round, and Trevor did something he had not done once in eleven years. He lifted one finger off the wheel at her.

She looked at the pie. She looked at him. She lifted the pie down off the roof, holding it in both hands, and instead of going in she came over to his window.

He wound it down.

"Were you following me?" she said.

"Your pie," Trevor said. "It was on the roof."

"All the way down Main?"

"And Fourth."

She looked at him for a while. She was about sixty, in a quilted coat, with her reading glasses pushed up on her head, and he knew her, because he knew most people. He had towed her husband's pickup out of the slough behind their place three springs ago and charged them for the second chain.

"You're Mott," she said.

"Yes."

"Bev Tjaden. You pulled Ron out of the slough."

"I remember."

"You charged us for the second chain."

"There were two chains."

She looked down at the pie, and then at Barry, who was looking at the pie too.

"Well," she said, "you'd better come in and have some of it, then."

"Oh, no," said Trevor. "No, I'm all right."

"It's the harvest supper. There's more food than people." She was already walking. "Bring the dog. Everybody brings their dog."

He sat in the truck with the engine running and the lights going round. Barry took the ball out of his mouth and put it down on the seat, and looked at Trevor, and looked at the door of the Grange hall, and looked at Trevor again.

Trevor turned the engine off.

He had never been inside the Grange hall. He had towed a fair number of cars away from outside it, at the end of various evenings, but he had never gone in. It was one long room with a wooden floor and a stage at the end with the curtains closed, and long tables down the middle covered in paper cloths, and along the side wall a row of trestles holding more hotdish than he had known existed. He did not entirely know what hotdish was. He had been told several times. It seemed to be any food at all, provided it was hot and in a dish.

There were perhaps eighty people in the room. He had towed, at one time or another, about half of them.

He stood just inside the door with his hands in his pockets. Nobody looked at him the way they usually looked at him. Nobody in the room had broken down today. Not one of them had been in a ditch, or had a flat, or locked their keys in, or reversed into anything. He was a man by the door with a dog.

Bev put a plate in his hands. Somebody else put a fork on it.

He sat down at the end of a table, because it was the end. Arvid and Lloyd were further down with their wives, and Arvid lifted a hand. Across from Trevor a young woman with a baby asked him where he was from, and he said Swindon, and she said she'd never heard of it, and he said that was the general view. An old man next to her asked if he knew the King.

"We've not met," Trevor said.

"Huh," said the old man, as if that settled something.

A man in a fleece sat down on Trevor's other side with two plates, one of them for somebody else, and recognised him, and said that funnily enough his transmission had been making a noise all month, a sort of a whine, coming off the line at the stop sign, and he'd been meaning to ring. Trevor got ready to hear about it. The man frowned at his plate.

"Didn't do it today, though," he said. "Not once. Drove in here quiet as anything."

"Well," said Trevor. "Keep my number."

"Oh, I've got your number," the man said, without any malice in it at all, and went off with the second plate.

Barry had gone under the table at once and was making his way along it, from knee to knee, and Trevor could follow his progress by where people laughed and looked down. Somebody gave him a piece of ham. Somebody else gave him a dinner roll, which he carried back to Trevor's feet and lay down with, between his paws, guarding it, though he did not eat it.

At the next table the man in the seed cap was telling a story about a scarecrow. He was telling it badly, starting it twice and getting lost somewhere around the petrol pump, and he did not have his cap, and everyone round him was laughing anyway.

"You leave it?" somebody said.

"Course I left it. It looks better on him."

They laughed. Trevor, who knew a little about telling a story at a counter, sat and listened, and thought he'd have dropped the pump altogether and come in faster on the hat. But he didn't say anything. He ate his hotdish, which turned out to have tater tots on top of it, and which he would not have admitted to anybody was very good.

Bev came and sat down across from him with the pie, and cut it, and gave him the first piece.

Then she told the table. She told it better than the man in the seed cap had told his. She told them about the keys, and the roof, and how she'd driven the whole length of Fourth and the whole length of Main thinking about whether she'd turned the oven off, and how she had got out of the car and seen the pie up there, and turned round, and there was the tow truck, lights going, right behind her, the whole way.

"Followed me the whole way," she said. "Eleven miles an hour."

Everybody looked at Trevor.

"It was on the roof," Trevor said.

At the next table the man in the seed cap laughed louder than anyone, and tipped back on his chair, and pointed across the gap at Trevor.

"Good man," he said, with no idea at all.

Down the table, Lloyd put his fork down.

"Well, now," Lloyd said. "That's a story, Trev."

Under the table Barry shifted against Trevor's leg and put his chin on his boot. Trevor had a number ready. He had been saying them all day. He reached down instead and scratched Barry behind the ear that worked, and ate his pie, which was cherry, and very good, and had come a long way.

He left at nine. Bev made him take a plate of hotdish wrapped in tinfoil, and he said he couldn't possibly, and she put it in his hands anyway, which seemed to be how it went out here. He put it on the passenger seat. Barry sat next to it the whole way home and looked at it the way he had looked at the toast that morning.

The phone had not rung all day.

He set it on the kitchen table and looked at it. He had not earned a penny since he got up. He found the electric bill and worked out roughly on the back of it what a day like this came to, if he had a few more of them, and then he turned the bill face down and sat looking at the blank side for a while. Then he put it in the drawer with the takeaway menus and the instructions for things he no longer owned.

"Skint, then," he told Barry.

Barry had taken the ball to his bed in the corner. He lay with it between his paws and did not seem concerned.

Trevor went to bed and did not sleep. It was not anything in particular. He lay there with a lot of hotdish in him, looking at the ceiling, waiting for the phone, which was on the bedside table with the ringer all the way up, and which did not ring.

The house was quiet in a way he did not recognise. The furnace, which every night at about eleven banged twice in the basement like a man coming home late and missing the last step, did not bang. The tap in the bathroom, which dripped, did not drip. The wind that had taken the cap off the man's head had gone round to somewhere else and left the windows alone. He lay and listened to all the things that were not happening, one after another, until he could hear his own watch. At ten to twelve he gave up and put his dressing gown on and went down to the kitchen and put the kettle on and two slices in the toaster, which was what he did when he couldn't sleep, and had done for eleven years.

Barry lifted his head in the corner and watched him.

The toast came up. Trevor buttered it at the counter, right to the edges, the way he liked it. The clock on the cooker said 11:59. He turned for the kettle.

The clock went to 12:00, and his elbow found the plate.

The toast hit the lino butter side down, with a small wet slap.

Trevor looked at it. Barry was already there. He had crossed the kitchen in the time it took the toast to fall, and he had left the ball behind in his bed to do it, for the first time all day. He ate the toast in two bites and licked the lino where it had been.

Trevor laughed.

It came out of him all at once, loud in the dark kitchen, and he had to put a hand on the counter to stay up. He laughed until his eyes ran. He went on laughing until Barry stopped licking the floor and sat down and looked up at him, with butter on his nose, waiting to see if there'd be another.

Trevor got the bread out.

 

~End~