Tomato Red

by Daniel Woodrell

  “It’s common knowledge,” I said. “It’s found written on most shithouse walls.”

  I turned about and used my foot to jiggle Biscuit up and alert, end those snores. He stood and shook and made a noise from deep in his chest. He went to sniffing at me.

  “C’mon, buddy,” I said. We both got to moving slow on our way out. “Ol’ Biscuit needs him a walk, don’t him?”

  Just when we about reached the screen door she said, “Oh, Sammy’s the one needs to visit ol’ Bev. Him needs to get wrecked next door, but him needs to be sure and wear a condom; and also him needs to say, ‘Hi, Mom,’ for me, would him?”

  18

  Soap and Pudding

  A MESS OF cats whirled around and about in the dark, visible practically underfoot one second, then pfft! and they were gone away altogether like those ideas maybe you’d been told and told about but just didn’t get. There was a freight on the way, scolding traffic with its huge horn at each road crossing, a scolding you could hear for miles, this train still four or five roads distant. Two or three citizens were jaw-jackin’ the night away at one of the dark houses across the road, which one exactly I couldn’t say. Their talk was at that level of loud the too-drunk-to-notice favor. Biscuit broke away in the yard to my Ford and hoisted a rear leg and peed on my front left tire. He acted younger once he was done. One of the drunks over there had got to explaining some experience he’d gone through that had his congregation snorting and spanking their boots down on the porch steps, most likely pissing the host over there’s wife off pretty good.

  I’d always craved to be a hero to somebody, which I know sounds fairly lame, but it had truly been in my wishes.

  The train had screamed closer and louder and made you comprehend why people throw rocks at them. They really tested your patience and such the way a loudmouthed motor-cyclist in a holding cell might, or a father-in-law so often does on holidays. The train went by huffing like an avalanche late for a date with a flood someplace down the line.

  Me and Biscuit went on inside of Bev’s shack. I eased the screen door closed so it wouldn’t slap. The front room smelled like a bus station. There were stinks in those walls of an age where your great-granddaddy might have left them there, and then that steady application of current sad-assed stinks from cigarettes and liquor and home life layered over and combined with the older gloomy odors to create the complicated stink of right now, this minute.

  There was a lamp on over by Bev’s green chair, which she was in, slumped. Her head jerked about and her eyelids flapped as she fought against passing out. A cigarette burned between her fingers and the smoke flew straight up in a thin line.

  I guess she heard us.

  She raised her face for a look and said, “Oh. I don’t feel . . . I don’t feel up to wrestlin’ you tonight, hon. TV.” “Right,” I said. “Rain check.”

  I stubbed her cigarette in the ashtray. Her eyes eased shut and her chin hit her chest. Biscuit sniffed at her feet, then fell over and stretched flat. I got hold of her shoulder and tugged and she came along as I pulled, following my lead but not quite aware of it, I don’t imagine. She just followed to wherever I tugged her and I got her to her bed and into it. She only wore a thin naughty-nightie type thing, so I didn’t need to strip her. I tossed the white sheet across her legs and up to her middle.

  She didn’t look her best.

  I went into the kitchen where the beverages were stashed. There was no beer. I looked all up and down inside the fridge. There was no whiskey, either, none that I could find. There was wine, which I consider only for emergencies, and only wine, so I found a plastic blue juice cup and filled it high.

  I switched off all the lights in the front room. I lit a menthol from her pack and went to the screen door and stood there looking out, choking on the cigarette and the wine, which was of the Chablis category.

  This holler, at night or during the day, either one, had the shape of a collapsed big thing, something that had been running and running until it ran out of gas and flopped down exhausted exactly here. The houses were flung out along this deep crease in the hills and the crease surely did resemble the posture of a forlorn collapsed creature. Scrub timber and trash piles and vintage appliances spread down the slopes and all around the leaning houses to serve as a border between here and everything that wasn’t here.

  If I knew what to do I’d be willing to do it.

  It took three smokes to help me get that wine down. I went into the bedroom then. I’d left a lamp burning in there so there was a tiny bit of light. I skinned myself naked and got into bed, pulled the sheet up.

  There were several pictures of Bev hung on the walls of the bedroom that had been taken back when. I could lay there and see them. Back when was her golden age, that was clear. She’d been something for a spell there. I guess the pictures didn’t make her sad. Her face and figure used to be the kind you could’ve used to sell things with: Use this soap, get this face; eat this pudding, get this figure. That sort of thing.

  You sure would’ve sold a lot of that soap and pudding, too.

  I laid there with my eyes closed but still saw those pictures of her in my head, only now they had acquired motion. She was dancing with that old figure, that old face, or laughing and leaning against a Mustang convertible in the sunshine, or, best of all, just walking away from me down a brick walkway in summertime attire but looking back over her shoulder with a daring sort of pouty-lipped look. Those pictures played on for me in my head, and I experienced a wisp of sadness and a bucket of appreciation. I hadn’t quite gotten slowed down to sleep when in came Jamalee walking like the undead, her arms slack at her sides. She didn’t say a thing. She had on one of those tents she wore, yellow-colored, and came along with her eyes held almost closed. Her tomato-red head wobbled a bit loose on her shoulders. She got to the foot of the bed, then got on her knees and dog-walked up to the pillows. She was on top of the sheet and she laid down on her back between Bev and me, the sheet like a hammock, sort of, beneath her, and closed her eyes.

  “Lights,” she said.

  I CAME AWAKE the way a bottle washes to shore. Soft, small nudges bobbed me in that direction and patted me toward eye-opening time, and when I did arrive at that time my eyes rolled open and so did Tomato Red’s. There was this jolt of social fright because we had gotten snuggled together while adrift, her tomato beneath my chin, and suddenly came awake and realized it.

  The color red filled my vision and the smell of her hair and breath and neck had my nose twitching. I’m fairly certain I had worn a smile in my sleep. My arms had gotten under and around her and pulled her in close and held her there while my body formed around her like a big spoon on a little spoon.

  There was a sense of comfort overall.

  For maybe one instant I thought she might loll in my arms a spell even while awake, but uh-uh, baby. She began to buck against my hug. She got her fingers into my arms and pulled.

  I went ahead and released her.

  She spun over to where Bev had slept.

  She laid on her side there and our eyes met and I couldn’t read her expression too well but I knew she hadn’t hated my hug all that bad, either. Not as bad as she acted. She’d wiggled backwards into me a few times, and that ain’t much of a brush-off, is it?

  Voices were reaching us from another room, which is likely the thing that sparked an end to sleep. The voices were sort of loud and clashing with each other.

  Jam listened, then whispered, “That’s that cop.”

  I can’t say for certain how Bev got him to come over, but he was there, William the John Law in the front room, and they were going round and round with words.

  Probably from the sounds of it they stood near the screen door or maybe just inside. He said something about how people pretty often insist something bigger happened than had happened. The smallness of the truth can rub the mind wrong.

  She said, “There’s absolutely no way, not a chance, that Jason went hiking up to that pond and do
ve in there when he couldn’t swim across a bathtub and also had on his fancy pointy-toed shoes. Huh-uh, huh-uh.”

  “Aw, Bev, do you know how average that sounds? Shit. I’m always running up on parents who swear their kids would never ever in a million years do what I caught them red-handed doing. I hear this stuff awful regular, Bev.”

  “Those hooks, that’s impossible.”

  “Bev, the coroner signed off on the drowning.”

  “He’s a tow-truck driver, William! Abbott Dell can only maybe, and this is just maybe, tell a knife slash from a heart attack.”

  “He’s the elected coroner. He can voucher out for a state boy to do a autopsy.”

  “But he didn’t.”

  “Each one costs the county so many dollars, Bev, I forgot how much but it’s plenty and they can’t do one on every kid who gets drunk and drowns.”

  The screen door whined, which meant it opened, and the voices went into the yard and were lost to me. I shook out a cigarette from a half-wadded pack on the night table there. The cigarette had a crook in it but burned fine.

  I sat on the bed and looked at those photos hung on the wall. Jamalee sat on the bed and looked the other way. The day was going to be another one that made tar bubble and flowers wilt and foul moods general. The smoke hung in the air, no breeze to break it up.

  The door whined open again, and whacked shut, and the footsteps shuffled across the carpet and came directly to the bedroom doorway. Bev had on a white dress and no shoes and a real startled facial expression.

  “Well, well,” she said. “You-all, you didn’t tell me something, did you? William said a strange thing. He said, ‘What I could investigate and solve would be which trashy bunch ruined the golf course. I could do that, Bev, and probably today.’ ” Bev switched her eyes from Jamalee to me to her own feet, then around the circuit again. “I think there might be something major you all need to let me in on, is that not right?”

  19

  Rock Pavilions

  “JUST GIVE IT to me one leg at a time,” Bev had said, and we did that. But Bev wasn’t swallowing the whole truth too well. She had a number of objections to it, which she shouted. More or less shouted. Sitting on a green picnic table in the town park with so many other folks about, her voice seemed shouted anyhow. Eventually she added, “You crazy babies. You crazy fuckin’ babies.”

  Regular citizens from all the ages were all over the park. They were apparently celebrating some fun moment from history that I don’t know about. The picnic tables were coated by plates and sacks and big plastic bowls. There were grilling burgers and ice chests and lots of watermelons in evidence. I couldn’t imagine what big event was being honored this way. Watermelon rinds were scattered by the rusty trash barrels, looking like so many dead green grins. There were quite a few radios playing, mostly carrying the Cardinals game from St. Louis, and kids running loose and toys flung in the air, or batted or kicked there, flying from one big spread of food to some other feast across the way.

  Biscuit got frisky from the many fetching smells and the active children. He was a shaggy fur ball of appetite. His nose kept busy trying to inhale the whole range of treat smells that rode on the air.

  “What do you mean skied?”

  I let Jamalee do the explaining, but once in a while I’d put in with a “That’s right” or “Yeah, yeah, that’s the way it happened.”

  Biscuit wandered over to the chain fence that went around the swimming pool, which was defunct. The water in the pool was shallow and brown, with paper cups and leaves floating. The mutt sniffed and scouted most of the fence line, then heard something he liked, I think, and jogged over the grass to a man in a white T-shirt and plaid shorts and a three-day beard. The man slipped him a bite of something that he accepted with one big chomp and a tail wag.

  “I guess you could’ve found folks worse to mess with, but you couldn’t do it around here.” Bev got a smoke lit. Her expression, funny enough, didn’t express fright or disgust or anything except, I think, anticipation. “If King Kong lived in town I reckon you could’ve fucked with him and been in worse trouble. Or if Frankenstein came from Grace Avenue you could’ve thrown mud balls at his momma and got a monster chasin’ after your dumb asses.”

  “I couldn’t let them do me that way. You weren’t there to see it, Bev. I couldn’t have the regard for me I need to have if I let them do me that way.”

  “Oh, so what if you were mistreated, baby Jam? So what? You weren’t invited. You weren’t wanted there. They didn’t send for you. Hon, that’s the entire purpose of private places—to keep us out. You do understand that, I know you do.”

  Jamalee sat there and in response shifted into that simmering, sullen posture she could accomplish that left no need for a response via words. She had on shorts in daylight for, I think, the first time I’d ever seen. Shorts and a buttoned-down long-sleeve blue shirt, despite which she didn’t seem to be sweating.

  I said, “There’s times you need to stand tall, you know, show some spirit.”

  “You call trashing the golf course ‘standing tall,’ do you?”

  “A person has to show some spirit—fate just about never shines kindly on chickenshits.”

  Nearby the table we sat on there stood two rock pavilions that had gotten built by all those hungry hobos and whatnot the government harnessed and put to work back in the Dust Bowl-type days, when starvation was easy to come by and no rain wrung from the sky till too late. The pavilions had roofs and cement floors and held six or eight tables and each had big old brick cooking pits built in against the eastern wall. The pavilions were packed by people. Families, no doubt. They were grilling those wieners that grow plump over heat, that kids seem especially to favor. They had banners hanging that still didn’t make it plain to me exactly what great moment from the heydays was getting so celebrated by the general population. The men stood around holding scary long forks and had bellies drooping above their legs, most of them. These old boys thumped their fat bellies proudly, with a kind of strange confidence, like all that fat was so much fat in the bank, fat they figured to retire on someday and live off.

  They seemed to like their children.

  I saw Biscuit snorting the ground over near there, on a treasure hunt.

  “Oh, lordy, do you really believe that crap, hon? You-all think maybe you got you something special going with the spirit world, do you, when you and your three pigs tore the golf place all to hell? You think the spirit world’ll be impressed by that?” She actually buried her face in her hands and let loose a gut-bucket kind of growl from her chest. “Which ear is it these ideas sneak into your head through? ’Cause you need to plug that one. You need to plant taters in that ear and block it shut for good.”

  Well, there’s only so much of this blame a person wants to listen to. Nobody cares for getting belittled by a person you’ve had sex with. A person you’ve licked all over. Nobody wants to sit there and get run down too far by somebody who gives them a hard-on. Just about nobody does, anyhow.

  A batch of kids attempted to get Biscuit to catch their Frisbees for them, but he didn’t give a damn for that, just let them fall and followed his nose toward burgers. He got to circling around a metal grill several tables over, but I could see him. He scooted between legs and so on, got petted a few times, wagged his thanks. Then he got just to the side of the grill and stopped and his back got all humped up. His back humped and it looked like even his hairs became tense from straining and he developed, I swear, a true grimace. He made quite a face. The mutt humped and strained, then pinched a loaf. He pinched a loaf right there almost underfoot. Relief showed quick in his face. He had another loaf ready to pinch when he was seen and empty cans started bouncing from him, and loud unhappy words were shouted. Biscuit fled, mighty confused, I suspect.

  I suppose the three of us all had been watching.

  Jamalee stood and clapped for the dog.

  “About time to choo-choo,” she said. “Why don’t we go on and do som
ething about it?”

  20

  Pretty International

  WE TRACKED THE first important figure we knew of to his office, his tow-truck office, over past the stockyards but short of the train tracks. The office was in a vintage garage from the days when cars were narrow so garages were narrow to where they look like playthings to us from now. Tall, narrow doors and a low ceiling and a great big picture window. The old ones made the place with riverbed stone and made it to last. The man had his name above the door, branded in thick loopy cursive on a planed and varnished hunk of driftwood, I believe, that had been hung up there. Abbott Dell. Towing and Repair.

  When I parked, Bev jerked the car mirror around and aimed it at her face, then pushed her lips just about smack against their reflection. She worked her lips out hard in the mirror, stretching them wide, stretching them tall, puckering them tight, then got her lipstick out and started drawing. The color she applied I couldn’t name, though it was in the pink tradition, I’d say, but above the average pink in pizzazz, like a pink that had been drinking gin since lunch and wanted to dance. This color put some fizz on her face and seemed to make her hair and eyes look trampy and bold.

  Jamalee said, “Ask him the questions sort of from the side at first, not head-on. See if he’ll let something slip.”

  “Uh-huh. I could do that, hon. I certainly could do that. Or I could be an a-dult and flat ask the questions I’d appreciate answers to.”

  “Aw, suit your fuckin’ self.”

  “You look mighty fine,” I said, which I meant.

  “Thank you, hon. When they get to panting for you, why it’s not so hard to steer them some.”

  Bev got out of the Pinto and went toward the office. She slipped some comely wiggle-waddle-wiggle into her walk. Her dress was a size low or so and she got that white fabric slamming from side to side like it was a sack she’d trapped a poodle in.