After dropping off the last of his costumed passengers, Hud went home to sit alone and compose some lyrics. Robbie Schrock’s life seemed perfectly lived for a country song. Country songs, to Hud, were chronicles of destitution, haunted by beaten-dead wives and abandoned children. The key to an authentic country song, he thought, was to tell the story of a life lived stupidly and give it pretty strains of remorse.
Hud wrote: “He had the cheap kind of heart that broke when you wound it too tight.” Then he wrote: “He got all turned around on what was supposed to be wrong and what was supposed to be right.” Hud had spent many of the summer’s days, the days following the finalization of his divorce, at his kitchen table writing songs and drinking Mogen David red like it was soda pop.
Hud climbed out through his window and up to his roof. The town square was usually quiet at night, but people continued to celebrate the execution of Robbie Schrock. The costumed children strung toilet paper in the trees on the courthouse lawn and knocked on doors for handfuls of candy. There were costumed adults on their way to parties: a man in a cape and top hat and white gloves alongside a woman wearing only a long red magician’s box, her head and arms and feet sticking out, a saw stuck through the middle. A woman dressed as a nurse in blue jacket and white stockings pushed a pram jingling with bottles of liquor.
Hud, not amused, began to sing one of his more mournful songs, about a girl stung to death by wasps. He strummed a purple guitar. People passed in the street, but no one stopped to listen. No one wept for the man in the song sad about the death of his girl. No one even offered a knowing, sympathetic nod.
My neighbors hate me, Hud thought. They all knew and loved his wife. Tuesday taught art at the grade school, taught the town’s children how to make tongue-depressor marionettes and abstract paintings using slices of old potato. And they hate me now, Hud thought, only because I’m without her.
2.
AFTER his rooftop performance, Hud suddenly remembered he was supposed to help Tuesday’s dad at the drive-in; they were showing a movie with bloodsuckers and prom queens to further celebrate this mock Halloween, and they expected a late-night crowd. The Rivoli Sky-Vue was one of only a handful of drive-ins in the state, and one of only a few in the nation that still showed classic drive-in movie fare. All the spaghetti Westerns and the dirty wet-bikini flicks and the souped-up back-road racing movies were part of a private collection owned by Hud’s ex-father-in-law. He even had a few out-and-out pornos that they showed from time to time after midnight. The Rivoli made little money, but it was the town’s only tourist attraction and had been featured in People magazine and Film Comment.
Though the movie had started, Hud stood at the front gate taking admission for Tuesday’s dad, who they all called Red though his head of thick curls had turned gray years before. Red had a longtime girlfriend, the Widow Bosanko, the town’s librarian. Hud remembered, from when he had checked out Zane Grey Westerns as a kid, how she always wore a bracelet of wooden cherries that knocked together with a pleasant click.
Alone in the drive-in’s entryway, Hud collected a few of the summer’s last fireflies, trapping them in an olive jar to bring to Nina, who enjoyed bugs. He was interrupted when Junior, a boy Gatling’s age, drove up. You wouldn’t know from Junior’s piercings up and down both ears and his black-eye that he was the zealot responsible for Gatling’s religious conversion. Now that Gatling was off touring with the Daughters of God, Junior dated Charlotte, Gatling’s pensive ex-girlfriend.
Hud had always had a harmless crush on Charlotte that had been helped along a few nights before when he had seen her selecting songs at the jukebox at the Steak and Black Coffee, an all-night diner on the highway, her tongue at her lips in concentration. She wore a tight t-shirt pulled over the top of a sundress. After selecting a few dollars’ worth of old country ballads like “Crazy” and “Cold, Cold Heart,” she sat down with Junior, who bowed his head in prayer over his New York strip and hash browns. But Charlotte didn’t pray along, involved as she was in the music, her coffee cup held still just beneath her lips as Hank Williams sang about the robin’s lost will to live.
“Looking awfully lonely there tonight,” Hud said. He peered inside the car to where Junior sat alone.
“Well, I tell ya, old man,” Junior said, handing Hud $5 and shrugging, winking, “I think I scare all the pretty little girls away.”
Hud leaned in more, looking beneath the steering wheel. He reached in to push the button to pop the trunk. “Ah, come on, man . . .” Junior protested. “You can’t . . .”
Hud walked to the back to open the trunk lid, where he found Charlotte curled up. “Some date,” he told her, taking her hand to help her step out. She wore a slick red robe patterned with bluebirds sitting on the branches of spindly trees. Her fine hair was knotted up atop her head and stuck through with black lacquered chopsticks.
“We’re broke,” she said, leaning back against the car, fanning herself with a fragile paper fan that featured faceless geishas fanning themselves.
“I would’ve let you in anyway,” Hud said. He tapped a knuckle against her cheek. “I still like you some.” Hud just barely kept himself from giving Charlotte a short kiss, just on the cheek or the forehead, just something friendly and fatherly. “Here,” he said, handing Charlotte a pair of pink plastic fangs he’d been giving out to the children.
“If you were smart you’d get back with Tuesday,” Charlotte said, moving the fangs between her fingers, pretending they were doing the talking.
“I happen to know that,” Hud said. Just last Fourth of July, Hud and Tuesday had had a momentary truce, a few nights of reunion that involved popping off fireworks in the front yard. When night fell, Hud lit the expensive ones, the ones with all the color and noise, but he didn’t watch the sky; he couldn’t take his eyes off Tuesday, who sat with Nina on her lap, holding a parasol above their heads to protect them from the burnt shrapnel that fell from the sky. The summer had been dangerously dry, and they all looked a little nervously to the leaves of the trees, which rattled as the hot pieces of the spent fireworks rained through the branches.
Junior called out, “Lottie,” a name Hud thought only he and his son called Charlotte, and Charlotte slipped away. As Hud walked to the side of the car, he saw Charlotte taking a drag off Junior’s cigarette, the pink teeth loose in her mouth.
Hud became desperate to see his daughter, as he thought ahead, of her growing up only to become confused and lost and learning too much too fast. He hoped to God Nina never crawled into the trunk of a car at the request of a cheap boy.
Hud wanted to wake Nina up and pull her out of bed and rock her back to sleep. He wanted to count all her fingers and toes, and all the hairs on her head. He’d sneak in through the window, and he’d tell Nina, “Nobody else is worried about you. Just me. Everyone else sleeps through the night.”
Hud drove quickly to the house and let himself in to find Tuesday sleeping on the sofa, the still hot coal of her cigarette burning a hole in the velveteen of the cushion. Hud sat on the coffee table and took the cigarette from her fingers. He leaned back, took a drag, examined Tuesday’s costume—she wore a 1970s-style shirtdress, her hair swept up in a fresh beehive slightly crushed by the sofa pillow, a false eyelash dangling from one eyelid. A fake yellow bird with synthetic feathers sat perched in a small birdcage at the foot of the sofa. Hud couldn’t figure out who she was supposed to be.
Tuesday had always slept the deadest sleep he’d ever witnessed—her body didn’t move at all, not even with her breath. She usually stayed up late painting desert scenes on the skulls of cows and horses, then fell into her bed. Hud could too easily imagine all sorts of things happening in the night of Tuesday’s deep sleep—a terrible storm, or a kidnapping, or a fire engulfing the entire house long before she choked awake on a single breath of smoke. That’s the only reason I drink, he thought, crossing his legs, crossing his arms, blowing cigarette smoke toward Tuesday’s face to test her as she slept. She didn’t flinch. I drink because I worry myself sick about my girls,