"Yeah, these are a treat. Aren't they, Dave?" Jimmie said.
"You bet," I said, trying to wash down a piece of simulated sausage that was like a chunk of rubber.
We were on the amusement pier, sitting on a wood bench in the shade of a huge outdoor movie screen. In the background I could hear pinball machines and popping sounds from a shooting gallery. Ida wore a pink skirt and a white blouse with lace on the collar; her arms and the top of her chest were powdered with strawberry freckles.
"Dave and I go back on the quarter boat in the morning," Jimmie said.
She chewed on the end of a carrot stick, her eyes staring blankly at the beach and the surf sliding up on the sand.
"We'll be back on land in ten days," Jimmie said.
"That's good. Maybe I'll see y'all again," she said.
But if there was any conviction in her voice, I did not hear it. Down below, a huge wave crashed against the pilings, shuddering the planks under our feet.
chapter TWO
After the next hitch we went back to the motel where our cousin, the manager, who was confined to a wheelchair, let us stay free in return for running a few errands. For the next five days Jimmie had nothing on his mind except seeing Ida. We cruised the main drag in our convertible, night-fished on the jetties, went to a street dance in a Mexican neighborhood, and played shuffleboard in a couple of beer joints on the beach, but nobody we talked to had ever heard of Ida Durbin.
"It's my fault. I should have given her the motel number," he said.
"She's older than us, Jimmie."
"So what?" he said.
"That's the way girls are when they're older. They don't want to hurt our feelings, but they got their own lives to live, like they want to be around older men, know what I mean? It's a put-down for them to be seen with young guys," I said.
Wrong choice.
"I don't believe that at all. She wouldn't have made sandwiches for us. You calling her a hypocrite or something?" he said.
We went back on the quarter boat and worked a job south of Beaumont, stringing rubber cable and seismic jugs through a swamp, stepping over cottonmouths and swatting at mosquitoes that hung as thick as black gauze inside the shade. When we came off the hitch we were sick with sunburn and insect bites and spoiled food the cooks had served after the refrigeration system had failed. But as soon as we got to our motel, Jimmie showered and changed into fresh clothes and started looking for Ida again.
"I found her," he said our second day back. "She's at a music store. She was piddling around with a mandolin, plink, plink, plink, then she started singing, with just me and the owner there. She sounds like Kitty Wells. She promised she'd wait. Come on, Dave."
"Why'd you come back to the motel?"
"To get my wallet. I'm gonna buy us all a meal."
Jimmie had said she was waiting in a music store. It was actually a pawnshop, a dirt-smudged orange building sandwiched between a pool hall and a bar on the edge of the black district. She was sitting on a bench, under the canvas awning, twisting a peg on a Gibson mandolin that rested in her lap. Most of the finish below the sound hole had been worn away by years of plectrum strokes across the wood.
The street was hot, full of noise and dust and smoke from junker cars. "Oh, hi, fellers," she said, looking up from under her straw hat. "I thought you weren't coming back. I was just fixing to leave."
"Did you buy the mandolin?" Jimmie asked.
"It's already mine. I pay the interest on it so Mr. Pearl doesn't have to sell it. He lets me come in and play it whenever I want."
She returned the mandolin to the pawnshop owner, then came outside again. "Well, I'd better get going," she said.
"I'm taking us to lunch," Jimmie said.
"That's nice, Jimmie, but I got to get ready for work," she said.
"Where you work?" he asked.
She smiled, her eyes green and empty in the sunlight, her attention drifting to a car backfiring in the street.
"This time we'll drive you," I said.