by John Yount
“You don’t need to do that,” Lester said.
“I’m going to,” James said.
Lester nodded, but then, for all the bruised color in his face, he looked suddenly gray, and he took a few feeble steps to the cut bank along the railroad and sat down. “I don’t feel so good,” he whispered.
James went over and sat beside him, and neither of them spoke for a long time. Lester let his head drop back against the dirt bank and closed his eyes, breathing through his open mouth almost as if he were winded, although his breaths were shaky and not very deep. He was sweating too, but after a few minutes he opened his eyes again, and at last he sat up, although his color was still strange.
“Are you all right?” James asked.
As though puzzled, Lester shook his head. “Feel puny,” he said. He stayed where he was for a while, letting his breath whistle out. “Better now,” he said.
He got up then, but slowly, and James got up with him, and they went on, although Lester had to stop to rest once more before they got to his house.
Effie was taking clothes in from the line when they came into the backyard, but the moment she got a look at Lester, her eyes went wide. “Child! What in the world …!” she said, and then her eyes took in James too.
“I was gettin beat up, and he took my part,” James blurted. “It was all my fault.”
“Now Momma,” Lester said, “hit ain’t nuthin.” He tried his best to give her an easy smile, only the new contours of his face turned the effort into something without a name. “It’s nuthin broke,” he told her. “I just ain’t real handy at fightin.”
“Awwwh, honey,” she said, her back beginning to bow over the clothes she held as though they were an enormous weight, and her eyes still wide, but with pity now, more than surprise.
“I’m a little tired,” Lester said, “but if you’d let me lie down, I’ll be as good as gold by supper.”
“Awwwwh, baby,” Effie said.
“Hey boys!” Roy shouted, appearing suddenly from the barn, but no one answered him.
Lester had already stepped up on the dogtrot and was letting himself into his room, so by the time Roy came up, he already knew something was wrong; and the moment he saw James, he not only knew what it was, but seemed to make some sort of peace with it. “Had you a fight, I see,” he remarked as though he were neither amused nor angry, but merely stating a fact, just as he might have said: “I see you got yourself a haircut.”
“We didn’t fight each other, Mr. Buck,” James told him.
Something about Roy Buck’s countenance changed then, as though he nodded without moving his head or smiled without moving his lips. “Well that’s good,” he said.
“Lester’s awful hurt,” Effie put in. “I ort to look—”
But Roy Buck patted the air softly to hush her, as though to say that Lester should be allowed his privacy just then. “You don’t look just brand new, yourself,” he said to James, which somehow made him see how very little he was hurt compared to Lester. Almost instantly his eyes filled because Lester had taken the beating meant for him and taken ten times more of it than James ever would have, if only because Lester meant to turn it into a victory. And so he told them everything—how the fight had started and Lester had rescued him and wouldn’t give up, how Hagerman had forbidden all three of them to go to school, and how Lester had had to rest on the way home—while Effie put her arm around him and squeezed him against her breast and against the stiff clothes that smelled of lye soap and sunlight, and Roy nodded and nodded.
EDWARD TALLY
He pulled the Packard up to the curb, turned off the ignition, and stared through the windshield down the street of row houses. But he didn’t know he was staring until sometime later when he caught himself at it. After he had forbidden himself to think of Madeline and James, his mind often seemed to go altogether blank, and he would discover himself gazing dry-eyed and numb into space. Not even glancing up to Paris’s third-floor windows, he got out of the car and opened the trunk where he’d hidden the enormous pink elephant from Womb Broom and Ironfield since he wouldn’t have been able to tolerate the slightest teasing about it. Paris had two days off before she went on the night shift and was fixing his supper for the first time ever, but he knew he’d bought the elephant for strange and possibly perverse reasons he himself didn’t understand. It was a ridiculous-looking thing, google-eyed, cotton-candy pink, and as big as a hog, so she was sure to like it. He tucked it under his arm, gathered up a fifth of Canadian whiskey, and slammed the trunk lid with his elbow. Across the sidewalk he went and, after some difficulty getting through the door, up the narrow, creaking stairs, the elephant pressing against the wall, pushing him off balance, and making him stumble as though it were another person trying to jostle past him. Madness. If he wasn’t thinking about Madeline, how come he could feel her with him every single moment? Nitwit, he told himself, asshole, don’t think of anything that ever happened to you. Think of the future. No. Not good. No good at all. Paris, he told himself, think of Paris, and he struggled toward the third-floor landing, he and the elephant like two fat men trying to get through a narrow doorway at exactly the same time.
Just yesterday Ironfield and Womb Broom had gotten their one and only glimpse of Paris, waving and throwing kisses from the sidewalk in front of her hotel as the three of them drove past on their way home from work. “Mercy,” Womb Broom said, although he disapproved. It was all right for a man to be unfaithful only if everything was fine between him and his wife. If not, then being unfaithful was evil and destructive and menacing to all things sacred.
But Ironfield’s scalded eyes had studied Paris only a second. “Mercy, shit!” he said. “If that sweet-looking bitch had as many dicks sticking out of her as she’s had stuck in her, we’d all take her for a goddamned porcupine.”
On the next-to-the-last step, he barely stubbed his toe, but it was enough to make him stumble headlong against her door. He rested a moment, sweat crawling, like secret misery, out of his sideburns. Don’t think at all, he told himself and knocked on the door with his forehead before he bothered to get his feet under him. It didn’t feel bad.
“Is that you, cutie?” Paris called. “You get in here. I’ve missed you awful.”
He tried to open the door with the hand that held the whiskey but nearly dropped the bottle. He couldn’t even reach the doorknob with his left hand. The enormous elephant wouldn’t allow it.
Stymied. Helpless.
At last he thought to pass the whiskey to his left—a simple solution, since his arm held the elephant quite nicely all by itself. With a perfectly free hand he opened the door and wedged himself and the elephant through. “Hey,” he said to her heart-shaped ass, since the other end of her was peering into the oven, “look what followed me home.” He set the whiskey on a table and held the elephant out by its trunk—his other arm held wide to embrace her.
“Oh, how precious!” she said, but anger immediately swept her face, and she took the elephant and slapped his arm away in the same motion. “That’s cruel. You’ll hurt him!” Rocking the elephant side to side with her mouth against its neck, she crooned, “Poor baby, poor baby, Momma won’t let him do it anymore.”
He thought briefly of explaining that it was only a stuffed toy. “Their trunks are very strong,” he said at last. “You can’t hurt an elephant’s trunk.”
Paris appeared to consider the matter. She held the elephant out at arm’s length, cocked her head, pursed her lips. “Little pink ones you can,” she said. “Oh you’re so sweet,” she told it, “you can just sit right here and watch me fix your daddy’s dinner,” and she set it atop the kitchen table where it took nearly all available space. “I made a pork roast and applesauce,” she told Edward. “Doesn’t that sound southern? And after I feed you, I’m going to screw you until you die.”
“Thank you,” he said.
“Thank you?” She frowned and studied him. “Thank you? What’s wrong with you anyway?”
“Nothing,” he insisted. “I’m tired as hell, and I want a drink and a shower, that’s all.”
She looked at him doubtfully.
“Really,” he said. He held out his arms again, and hesitantly, her head cocked a little to one side, she came into them; but he held her gently and stroked the small of her back and her bottom until the stiffness went out of her and she seemed to relax a little.
“You scare me sometimes. I don’t want you buying me a beautiful elephant and then pulling some cheap shit. You’re not planning something like that, are you?”
“Hey,” he said, red-faced, laughing, squeezing her, “all I want is a drink and a shower, supper, a wild fuck, and a terrific blow job.”
She giggled and dug a thumb in his ribs, which made him flinch and release her. “So go get cleaned up,” she told him.
In her carnival of a bathroom he felt somewhat better. The plumbing rumbled and spat, and it was difficult to move around or even find enough room to stand, since the sides and floor of her bathtub were dangerous with razors, eyelash curlers, emery boards, bottles of shampoo, creams, bath oils, and a great clutter of beauty aids he couldn’t begin to identify. But at last he found himself a cake of soap shaped like a rose and worked up a greasy, lavender lather. He was okay, he told himself. He was just fine. So what if his heart felt full of holes? So what if he was crazy? It was only another way to be.
The elephant was no longer in the middle of the table when he got out of the shower; it was seated on a chair at the end with a napkin tied around its neck. And Paris was no longer in slacks, but in a sheer, filmy, wine-colored nightgown; and she had laid his pajamas out on the bed. He put them on and took a whiskey and soda from her when he sat down at the table.
“There,” she said, “isn’t this nice?” And they touched glasses and had a drink.
But he had to have a second long swallow in order to rid his throat of roast pork, which was so dry and stringy it went down like steel wool. He ate some applesauce and took a forkful of something bronze on the left side of his plate. It was in various-size lumps and very hard to chew, and he rolled it around in his mouth like gravel, hoping it would soften before he had to risk his teeth on it again. “What’s this, honey?” he asked and tapped the mysterious bronze substance on his plate with his fork. It sounded as if he’d tapped the shell of a turtle.
She looked at him a long time, her big yellow eyes going wet. “Did I ever tell you I was a good cook?” she asked him. “Did I ever claim I was some sweet little thing who could make you southern-fried chicken and biscuits and pineapple upside-down cake? Did I?” she demanded. “It’s stuffing, goddamn it!”
“I only wondered what it was,” he said earnestly. “I never said it wasn’t good.”
“It’s shit,” she told him, and with a single motion swept her plate from the table. Hit by debris, the elephant rocked briefly on its chair but remained upright, a blob of applesauce exactly where it should have been on the napkin tied about its neck. She stood up to make a swipe at his plate too, but he managed to catch her hand. Everything was happening so fast, he seemed to have missed the exact moment when tears had begun to pop from her eyes.
“Whoa! Jesus Christ, don’t cry!” he said and struggled around the table without letting her go until he could gather her in, contentious, dangerous elbows and knees and all. “Whoa, hey, whoa, whoa now,” he told her. “I want that dinner you made for me.”
After a lull and a second explosive little struggle, she seemed to settle into weeping while he held her and explained over and over that he was only a hungry working man who was just grateful as hell that she’d fixed him something to eat, and all he wanted was to by God eat it.
“Really?” she asked him at last.
“Absolutely,” he told her.
She was still for a long time, her forehead resting against his chest. “Let me go to the bathroom and fix my face,” she said in a very small, tired voice.
Nervously, carefully, he released her, although he kept his hands in space on either side of her shoulders like a man who had just balanced something but didn’t trust it not to fall. But she did go into the bathroom, and after he’d cleaned up what she’d flung on the floor—dishes in the sink and food in the garbage—he learned how to eat what she’d cooked for him, and it wasn’t so bad. If he chewed the pork for a while, a healthy bite of applesauce would allow him to swallow it pretty well. The stuffing was another matter. Still, by the time she was back at the table with her makeup renewed, he’d learned to take a bite of stuffing, followed by a discreet sip of whiskey, let matters steep and marinate for a moment, and then begin to grind the stuffing down to its chewy center. He was so convincing that after a while the suspicious look on her face began to fade, and she sat across from him with her elbows on the table and her chin held between her palms and watched him eat with something close to enchantment.
“I wish I’d had time to make a dessert,” she told him. “Would you like some coffee or anything?”
“Sure,” he said, “and another drink.”
He meant to clean his plate no matter what, and when, finally, he tucked the last shred of roast and nugget of dressing in his mouth and saturated it with whiskey, he looked up at her and found—wonder of wonders—that her eyes were both full of light and jumping with mischief.
“Googh,” he told her, trying to keep the whiskey behind his lips.
He chewed, and they looked at each other, and because he was a sadder, smarter fellow than he’d ever been before, he saw the sorrow hiding in her eyes as well. It dwelt in some aspect of them he couldn’t quite identify, but he knew he saw it, just as he knew all the happiness and mischief were only a momentary, giddy overlay. He knew all this without thinking it into words, just as he knew that, like him, Paris was a crazy person. She’d just been crazy longer. Maybe she had more talent and tolerance for it, or maybe she’d just had more practice, since, for sure and certain, he wasn’t the first son of a bitch she’d run into. He chewed and smiled at her, his eyes watering, but the smile she returned was dazzling, and in the next moment she was around the table, had caught the front of his pajamas, and was towing him toward the bedroom, his pajama bottoms stretched a foot from his belly.
In another second she had shucked him out of them and herself out of her gown, they were on the bed, and she was in search of whatever it was she always seemed to need but could never quite reach or satisfy. He didn’t know when, exactly, he’d begun to realize that he didn’t have so big a role in all of this, that finally, Miss Paris Pergola was somehow, strangely and sadly, all but alone and unattended. But she whimpered and moaned and labored, sometimes turning childlike and languid and frail, only in the next moment to begin to brutalize herself upon him until he feared she would split herself in two, pound him into jelly, and reduce the bed to splinters. Or she might take him in her mouth with such piston violence, it was painful, and she’d gag, and the corners of her lips would begin to crack open, which only seemed to make her go at it all the harder.
At last, when she had exhausted both of them, she laid her misty cheek against his chest and gathered herself close to his side. “Oh Eddie,” she told him, surprising him, somehow, that she knew his name, “I love you so much. Wasn’t that grand?”
“Yes,” he said, but he felt so miserable that he willed the breath to go out of him and willed his black heart to cease and desist. Still his breath came and went and his heart thumped as though on purpose to spite him, lifting her blond head to the sill of his vision with each beat. Gently he stroked her head, her silky shoulder and flank, while his heart subsided but kept its painful, subterranean rhythm.
“Will you hold me all night?” she asked.
“Shhhh,” he told her and petted her hair.
How had she gotten herself so screwed up? How had he? Madeline? Or was he the only one? One thing for certain, even with Paris right beside him, he felt as grieved and lonely as if he were the last human being left in all the earth.
He wasn’t going to make it, he knew that much. Before long he wouldn’t be just crazy; he’d be insane or a hopeless drunk or dead. Maybe all three. How could Madeline take so much of him with her that there wasn’t enough left to run on? How had she grown into him like that? He lay still and pondered it while the light failed and there was nothing to brighten the bedroom but a faint glow, like a moonbeam, seeping in from some small light in the kitchen. After a while Paris began to breathe deeply, then to snore softly like a cat purring, and then to grind her teeth, just as she always did.
What kind of man was he and what kind of horseshit was this, that such a thing could happen? It seemed to him he’d never depended on Madeline for his happiness before. A lot of it had absolutely nothing to do with her. A hell of a lot of it was in spite of her, goddamn it. How could she take even that with her when she left? And his son. Irritated or impatient or proud or shamed or pleased or whatever James had made him feel by turns, he was his own flesh and blood, and Jesus …
It was horrible. Embarrassing. Humiliating. But being without them was a torture he could never have guessed at. He loved them, and there was no way to deny or duck it. Knowing that, the only thing to do was the last thing he would have expected of himself.
Gently, carefully, a little at a time, he eased himself from beneath her head.
Bottom. He had hit the absolute and total bottom. No pride, no dignity, no nothing. But for the first time in weeks, he felt the possibility of hope. In the dim light diffusing into the room from the kitchen, he found his shoes and pants but couldn’t locate his shirt. His underwear he didn’t care about. Holding his clothes to his pale groin, he looked at Paris until his eyes teared. “Oh doll,” he whispered, but something closed off his throat. Like a thief, he slipped into the kitchen and out the door, not even stopping to put on his pants and shoes until he was on the landing.
Outside it was so cold his skin shrunk immediately along his arms and across his chest. Did he only imagine, sweet Jesus, he saw her pale face at the window as he started the Packard and eased away from the curb?
