by Stan Hayes
“My God,” Serena exclaimed. “What an incredible piece of work. Wish I’d done it.”
“Incredible just about says it,” said Moses. “Hop in.”
“OK. How do I do this?”
“Just give me your hand and put one foot on that little step. Then put the other foot inside on the floor, and then bring the other one in. That’s it. Now put a hand on the side of the car and just sit down.”
She did, smoothing her skirt as she sank into the seat’s red softness. “Man. New-car smell. This is really something.”
“I thought you’d like it,” he said, straddling the seat and flipping the starter pedal into position. “Now let’s let the town have a look.” Firing on the second kick, the engine, exhausting now through twin chrome mufflers, had assumed a deeper, more dignified tone to match its new cosmetics. “Ready?”
“As I’ll ever be,” she said, smiling at his enthusiasm. “Let’s go, Showboat.”
At the first break in the busy morning traffic, Moses headed the rig across Main Street’s westbound lane, turning east on Main and south on Lee. He hit the horn twice to greet Ziggy, who had stopped his bicycle on the corner in rare respect for the red light. He returned the greeting with a wide-eyed grin and a wag of the hand, swiveling for a longer look at the rig as Moses turned the corner. “My first passenger,” he shouted to her, returning the wave.
They continued south on Lee, commerce giving way first to small, then to larger residences. The heads of these households having left for work a couple of hours earlier, the pace of midmorning life in Bisque’s better neighborhoods could only be described as leisurely, and this Friday morning was no exception. The smell of dew hadn’t yet left the lawns. An occasional car and a yardman or two doing springtime seeding summarized the morning’s visible movement on Lee Street. The understated prosperity of this part of town had immediate appeal for Moses; it was, he thought, very like the small towns in Connecticut to which some of his father’s senior colleagues at the university had migrated. He’d wanted to live somewhere out this way when he rented the two-bedroom house west of town, on Jackson Street, but it was the first thing he could find that was reasonably decent. Now that the Wheeler place had become, as dubbed by Lee Webster, “Chez Mose,” he much preferred “the country” instead.
They rode at a leisurely pace through several neighborhoods, attracting second looks from a few ladies in their front yards, some of whom returned their waves; a couple of them actually smiled. Serena gave no sign of knowing any of the women. She sat, it seemed to Moses, perfectly content behind the sidecar’s windshield, occasionally squeezing the calf of his leg, which was inches from her face. They drifted toward the southern outskirts of Bisque and into the beginnings of rural Hamm County; what each of them had expected to be a half-hour ride had already gone well beyond that. They rode from farm to farm, enjoying the sights and smells of spring planting and, again, swapping waves with an assortment of black and white men who directed the progress of mules and tractors.
As they crested a rise on the two-lane macadam, Moses recognized the large tree on the left side of the road as the one under which he and Ziggy had parked last year during the old rig’s test ride. He rolled off the throttle and turned in, wheeling the rig around to the angle that he’d parked before, overlooking the acres of fields that were full of cotton plants last August, but now lay empty, the dead stalks having been raked away, a frizz of green weeds having emerged to replace them. “I stopped here with Ziggy last year,” he said after he’d shut off the engine. “These fields were full of cotton then.”
“It’s been a long time since I was out this way,” she said. “Probably not since I was in high school.”
“Aha,” he said, extending a hand to help her out of the sidecar. “Out here playing grabass with the boyfriend, were we?”
“I think you were born with a hard-on.” She walked around to the other side of the bike and sat against the junction of the seat and gas tank. “No, my girlfriends and I used to ride all over the place, including here, on the weekends. One of them had a ‘25 model Packard; a sedan. We’d get as many of us as possible in it and just go. To be fair, we were always on the lookout for boys, but the first real sex I ever had was after I was married.”
“Real sex.”
“Yeah. You know, pee-pee to pussy.”
“What comes under the category of unreal sex, then?”
“I imagine you’ve heard of jackin’ off.”
“Seems to me I have.”
“You didn’t think just boys did it, did you?”
“No, but…”
“That’s a relief. I’d hate for you to think that my sexuality just showed up one day. Remember when you first did it?”
“Mmmm… maybe when I was ten, eleven. Sump’m like that.”
“Nice, wasn’t it?”
“Sure.”
“Easy, too.”
“Yeah.”
“Girls have to work on it a little harder, at least at first. At least that’s the way it was for me. I had to visualize getting fucked, from start to finish. Or what I imagined that it’d be like. And it helped to have something like a dick inside me when I did.”
“What’d you use?”
“Oh, different things; small ones, like the handle of my hairbrush. But I moved on to thinks that filled me up better. You know what I liked best?”
“What?”
“A small Idaho potato. You know, for baking. Right shape, nice rough texture that rubs in there just right, with some Wesson Oil on it. And here’s the best part; I found this big screwdriver on the porch one day, and two and two all of a sudden made ten. I stuck it into my potato, and that combination got me through high school and right up to the point that I traded it in on Larry.”
“You were what, twenty-one?”
“Twenty-two, and still a Vagitarian,” she laughed.
Moses laughed too. “You beat all I’ve ever seen. Maybe you’ll show me that trick sometime; gives a whole new connotation to ‘screwin’. But I wish I could’ve swapped places with old Larry the day you gave it up.”
“It was his first sex too, and there were definitely a few funny moments, looking back on it. But we loved each other, so we thought, and it worked out. I just didn’t understand what I was up against. Married to the nicest man in the world, whose only real passion was, and is, nuclear physics.”
“Yeah. You wouldn’t have any interest in second place.”
She looked sharply at him. “And why the hell should I? As I recall, the vow says ‘…forsaking all others.’ That certainly included Robert fucking Oppenheimer, as far as I was concerned. I was stupid enough to buy into it for too long, letting him haul Jack and me out to a 3-room shack in that stinking hellhole Los Alamos, and once we got there we hardly ever saw him.
“Looking back on what was at stake, I understand why they worked at such an insane pace; but there we were, little Jack just seven years old and completely confused about what we were doing there. I couldn’t tell him anything that made sense, because I didn’t know what the hell Los Alamos was all about. Larry wasn’t permitted to tell us anything, so I got more and more frustrated as the days dragged on. We were only allowed to go into town once a week; one day in May of ’44, it was past a hundred degrees by lunchtime, and I just snapped. I packed a bag for Jack and a bag for me, caught the bus to town, and got on another bus, the next one headed east.”
“Just like that.”
“Yep. I left Larry a note telling him that we were headed to Bisque, and that I’d call when we got there. I don’t think that he was that surprised, except by the abrupt way I did it. I didn’t do right by him, or Jack, by handling it that way, but I don’t think that I could’ve done it if I’d had to see the two of them say goodbye.”
“I guess not.”
“Nope. Whatever room there is in Larry’s heart for loving people, is all Jack’s now. He’s just one of those guys who’s married to his profession. We fell in love
without either of us realizing that he was already married. I wish I could’ve talked to my mother about him before we’d gone that far. Of course, we wouldn’t have Jack if we hadn’t gotten together.”
“You know, in all the time that I’ve known you, you haven’t had much to say about your mother. I know that she died when you were pretty young…”
“I was fourteen,” she said, very quietly, her face gone solemn.
“Hey, sweetie. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to…”
“It’s OK. I’d like to tell you about her; Miz Rose was quite a gal.”
“That’s what you called her.”
“Yes. Rose. Rose Watkins Redding. The Watkins, her folks, had one of the largest farms in the county, about twenty miles southeast of town. She and daddy got married in 1907, when she was 21; he was 30. She was the youngest of five children; Granny Watkins was almost forty when she was born. Being the baby, she got pretty much anything she wanted, including going to college. One of her teachers had gone to Agnes Scott, over in Decatur, and that’s where she wanted to go, so naturally that’s where she went. And that’s where she became what she called ‘progressive.’ Gene Debs is named after Eugene Debs, the Socialist, who ran for president the first time in 1904.”
“Oh, yeah. Ran one time from prison, didn’t he? I never stopped to think about that, with all the ‘Roy Genes’ and ‘Joe Lees’ around Bisque.”
“That’s the one. Anyway, she and Daddy got married before she finished school, in 1907. They say it almost killed Granny Watkins; marrying a man almost ten years older than she was. After she died Aunt Bonnie told me that she married Daddy mostly to spite Mr. Hartwell, his partner; she’d wanted to marry him for years, but he wouldn’t ask her.
“Old Man Hartwell left Daddy half the business when he died, back during World War I. He’d come to love him like his own son, and Daddy had taken to the cotton business like a duck to water, unlike Peter Hartwell, who preferred just having a good time. He became the wheelhorse at Hartwell & Redding, and he had less and less time for Mama, which of course was asking for trouble. She and Pete Hartwell took up with each other again, sometime in the mid-twenties. They were driving out in the country one summer night in 1927; the car turned over somehow and killed both of them. She was 41.”
“How awful. And what a time for you to lose her.”
“Yes,” she said, tears streaming down her face. “Yes, that’s what it was. It was awful.” He held her tightly to him while she cried, and after. She looked down at him, her eyes liquid emeralds. “She had way more to offer the world than little old Bisque knew how to handle. She should never have stayed here. And I know it’ll get me if I stay. So I’m getting out.”
“Back to New York.”
“Yep. If I don’t I’ll wake up one day, still here and as old as Mama was when she died. I’m not gonna get old in this little armpit of the world.”
“And Jack? Does he know how you feel?”
“Sure he does. I’ve never tried to fool him about why we came back to Bisque in the first place. It was home, and we had no other choice.”
“So what’s your timetable lookin’ like?”
She laughed, her eyes regaining their brilliance. “Well, I can’t go tomorrow. Much as I’d like to. Hap Rutherford’s been after me to do just that, but I’ve gotta make sure Jack’ll be OK in college. Get him through his freshman year, maybe. Then Miz Ríni’s gone for good.”
“That’s a long time to wait for something you want.”
“What choice do I have? I’m not taking Jack back to New York, now that he’s started school and made friends here. All I can do is go on with my art as best I can, run the hotel and look after my son. And now that you’re here, that doesn’t seem like such a bad way to spend a few years.”
Making it sound, Moses thought, more than ever like a tour of duty.
It’s Labor Day. Mose says it’s a holiday up north. We had school, though; first day. Miz Borden made me a Captain of the School Safety Patrol. Gil Walters is the other one; last year we were the only two fifth graders on the patrol, and she said that’s why she picked us. We’re also the biggest, which she probably thought about, too. Our badges are different; they have a blue center, where the regular patrolman badges are all silver. Now I have to think about who I’ll pick for my Lieutenant. They get badges with a red center. Miz Borden says that it’s an important job, and we shouldn’t just pick the patrolman we like the best. It would be easy if I could just do that; then it would be Ricky. I’ll probably pick him anyway.
But I’ll have to think about that later. I just got to the Winston, and I gotta clean up after the 2 o’clock show. Mose is down at the café, and Freddy’s in the projection booth. Evelyn, who’s new, is in the box office. She’s still in high school, but she can be here for the early show because she’s in the DCT. I’m not sure what that stands for, but it’s part of high school; she gets credit for coming here just like she was in school. She brings her books into the booth, but I never saw her study. I think Freddy likes her; she looks OK and has those nice titties. Be better if she didn’t chew that gum all the time, though.
I work here on weekends, and sometimes after school. When Mose bought the Ritz, my Mom told me that he asked her if it would be all right if he offered me the job, and she said it would. It kind of surprised me; I never thought about working anywhere but the hotel. But then Mose told me what he wanted me to do, just sweep up, tear peoples’ tickets in half and give them the stubs for the six o’clock show, and help at the candy counter. And of course see all the movies free. It sounded like fun, and Mom said she could spare me at the hotel. So I said OK.
Now, when Ziggy and I finish cleaning up, if I’ve already seen the show I go up and watch Mose or Freddy run the projectors. I think I could do it myself, but I haven’t asked to yet. Those film reels are big, and you have to start the projector with the new reel and shut off the one with the old reel pretty fast, when you see the black circle up in the corner of the screen. I’m going to watch a little longer before I ask to do it. Sometimes I take the film boxes that have the new shows in them up to the projection room, if they’re still downstairs. A Barton Brothers Film Express truck drops them off at night, and picks up the ones that have show that we already ran in them.
I can’t work here after school on Tuesday and Thursday because I have to practice football; Ziggy has to clean up by himself on those days. I’m right end; Ricky’s quarterback, and he passes to me a lot. He even got Mr. Harris, Roland Harris’s daddy who’s our coach, to let us put in an end-around play so I could run the ball. So I guess he’s going to be my Lieutenant.
I like the Wincycle a lot. It has red lights and a sireen, just like the ones on the police motorcycles. Since Freddy’s eighteen and has had his Servi-Cycle for a long time, Mose is teaching him to ride it. Mom says I can only ride in the sidecar, but sometimes when he takes Ziggy and me someplace I get up behind Mose on the buddy seat. And he’s gonna let me ride with Freddy in the high school football parades on Friday afternoons before home games. He said I’ll have some free passes, each for two people, rolled up in little cardboard tubes. The tubes’ll have stickers with Winston printed on them. My job’s to throw ’em to people on the street; I have to make sure not to run out before we get back up to where we turn off Lee Street and go back to the parking lot at the high school. People stand on the sidewalks, and in the parkway that runs down the middle of the street, too. So I’ll throw some out on the way up the street, and the rest after we get to the spot where we turn around to go back down the other side of the street. Mose says I can always throw them to people I know, but to pretend to shut my eyes, so people won’t think I’m playing favorites..
Anyway, working at the Winston is OK. But I get tired of Ziggy borrowing money from me all the time. Usually I don’t have any, or very much, but he must think I do. He won’t ask me in front of Mose or Freddy; he tries to get me alone to ask me, and some of the things he thinks of are so funny I have
to laugh when he tries them. The other day I was up in the projection room with Freddy, looking over his shoulder as he threaded film into one of the projectors. Ziggy stuck his round brown head in the door, and when he saw me he said “Hey Jack. Ya package down heeunh.” That’s what he was saying, but he said it so fast I couldn’t understand him.
“What?”
“Yuh package down heeunh, bwy,” he said, pissed because he had to hang around long enough to say it again and have Freddy realize that he was there at all, let alone why.
“What package you talkin’ about, Zig?” I said. I was getting a kick out of his pissedness, which was getting worse fast.
“Yuh PACKAGE, gotdammit. Yuh better come get it now.”
“Who’s it from?” No answer to that; just a nasty look as he disappeared.
“Just put it behind the counter,” I yelled behind him, laughing. “I’m busy right now.”
Freddy was laughing too by now. “Why you so hard on ole Zig? He’s just tryin’ to put the bite on you.”
“Oh, you noticed? And he thought he had you fooled.”
“Hell, it’s not just you; he does it to everybody.”
“I don’t know what he does with his money; he’s got three or four jobs,” I said.
“I’ll tell you what he does with it.”
“What?”
