“This is one of her good days. Last Monday she walked all the way from her room at the end of the building to the front door stark naked. She’d have kept right on walking if I hadn’t happened to glance up as she passed the office.”
The fat woman finished her story on a high squealing note. While she was taking a breath and before she could start telling another, Mrs. Milbocker approached and put her hand on her shoulder. “Miss Skirrett, this is Mr. Walker. I told you he was coming to see you today?” There was hope in her tone.
“I remember.” It came out testy; evidence that the stories were true. She looked up at me with unfocused eyes, but would not put on her glasses in that company to see what I looked like. She smiled with wellfitting teeth. “Would you give an old fat woman a hand?” She offered one loaded with junk jewelry, with bright pink polish on the nails.
I took it and braced myself, but she rose with the kind of easy grace you only see in people who have been accustomed to moving around extra tonnage for a long time. She had on a perfume that put me in mind of a gift shop loaded with porcelain gnomes and pillows embroidered with hearts. She gave my hand a squeeze before letting go. Her palm was as moist and squishy as a shower cap.
I thanked Mrs. Milbocker. She smiled in response, cast a last considering glance at Miss Skirrett, and left us, checking vital signs on the way.
“My room’s just down the hall. Now, don’t you go getting any ideas about closing the door with just us two in there.” Fleta Skirrett’s voice twirled up into a hysterical titter. The other residents laughed at her laugh and redirected their attention to the cooking lesson on TV. No one bothered to turn up the sound.
I accompanied the woman in the yellow dress down the hallway to a purple door near the end. She wore her stockings rolled to mid-calf with flesh spilling over the tops like dough. On the way she waved at a woman shuffling along the rail with a hump and a frizzy permanent, and a man in a white belt and shoes and two kinds of plaid looking out a window at a hummingbird buzzing around a feeder on a squirrel-proof stand. Neither of them paid any attention to her.
The purple door led into a small bedroom. A pink-and-white crocheted coverlet dressed up a bed with plain head- and footboards and a tropical fish with red stripes and a big tail shaped like a scimitar circled the inside of an old-fashioned round bowl on the bureau. Color Polaroid shots of what might have been nieces and nephews in drugstore frames covered one wall along with older black-and-white snapshots of people in hats and overcoats standing next to automobiles with bulging fenders and bug-eye headlamps. A painting, done boldly in oils, occupied a gilded plaster frame on the wall opposite. The frame had been expensive when it was new, but now there were white chips on the corners and old dirt and grime caked black in the ridges and between the petals of the florets.
I wasn’t interested in the frame. An original painting is rare in such surroundings and I stepped up for a better look. The scene struck a bass chord I felt in my testicles. I saw again the broken-nosed profile of the rough customer in the trenchcoat in the foreground, the overdeveloped blonde in the red slip waving a broken bottle in the background center—the sweet spot—the bedroom strewn with books and clothing, and dark elongated figures running hunched over amid the flames burning outside the window; only this time everything was eight times larger and I could see the heavy combed brushstrokes in the thick paint. It was the original illustration from which the cover of Paradise Valley had been reproduced.
Like many seriously overweight people, Fleta Skirrett was light on her feet, tiny ones with painted nails in woven-leather sandals; I didn’t know she was standing right behind me until I smelled her gift-shop perfume. I felt her breathy whisper on the back of my neck.
“That’s me, all right,” she said. “I was a blonde then. We all were; Monroe was just getting big and we thought a bottle of peroxide was all that stood between us and Hollywood. God, I’d kill for a butt about now. Got any?”
6
You were a model?”
In the time it took me to reshape what she’d told me into a question, she’d flounced over to a platform rocker upholstered in flowered chintz and lowered herself into it with the same grace she had used getting up. She put on her glasses, smiled at what she saw, and said, “You might try not to look so surprised. Just because a girl turns sixty and puts on a few pounds doesn’t mean her feelings can’t be hurt. How about that cigarette?”
She was banging hard on seventy, but her fat filled in the wrinkles. I shook a Winston out of the pack and went over and held it out. “I’m out the window at the first siren.”
“I’m not a charity case. I’m paying rent on this dump and if I feel like smoking it up I’ll build a campfire on the rug.” She leaned forward to let me light it, then sat back and tilted her head to one side to blow smoke out the corner of her mouth. “You might close the door and open the window, though, just to avoid upsetting a nurse. They’re delicate creatures, poor dears.”
I saw it then, when she mentioned the nurses: the feral look of the woman wielding the broken bottle. You never outgrow enemies in this life. Near the end they all wear white and drape stethoscopes around their necks.
The window was one of those horizontal jobs that tilt out on pivots. I tilted it and walked over and shut the door and leaned back against the bureau and lit a cigarette for myself. I didn’t want one especially, but the generation she belonged to never let a lady smoke alone. We took turns tipping our ashes into a squat turquoise-painted Mexican pot that was supposed to contain a plant on a round some-assembly-required pedestal table beside the rocker. That made me an ash brother and someone to confide in. A fine gray powder coated the top of the black potting soil inside. No plant had grown there in a while, only butts.
“Edencrest seems like a nice place,” I said. “Modeling must have paid well even back then.”
She spat smoke. “It’s a rathole with a fresh coat of paint. My Social Security just covers the rent. I made more in tips waiting tables. But waiting tables won’t get you into the movies.”
“Did you get into the movies?”
“Plenty of times. All it cost me was the price of a ticket.”
“How’d you wind up posing for paperback covers?”
“ ‘Wind up’ is right. I came to the agency hoping to do magazine covers. That’s how Lauren Bacall and Audrey Hepburn started. I shot lingerie spreads for catalogues for almost a year. Eleven months into my career I was still parading around in my undies with my head cut off in every shot. When they told me the art director at Tiger Books had requested me for a cover I thought I was on my way. The address they gave me belonged to the Alamo Motel. You know the Alamo?”
“I know the Alamo.” I saw Eugene Booth’s typewritten note to Louise Starr on Alamo stationery. I took in a lungful of smoke to keep my body from vibrating.
“It ought to go on the National Register of historical fleatraps. The architect, if it ever had one, designed bus stations and none of the owners ever changed anything but the lightbulbs. ‘Fleta,’ I said, ‘you’re in the arts. Van Gogh worked out of an attic.’ So I go in and meet the artist and he hands me a slip two sizes too small to squeeze myself into. I’m coming up on my second year in the business and I’m still modeling underwear. I think that’s when I realized Lana Turner had nothing to fear from me.”
“That was the Paradise Valley cover?”
“Mm-mm.” She shook her head, sucking on the filter tip. “Truck Stop. You never heard of it. It was the first Tiger title not to go into a second printing. The guy that wrote it made a bigger noise when he threw himself out of a window at the Book-Cadillac. It didn’t help sales, though. I didn’t work for six months after that. The goddamn editor that bought the book blamed it on me. He said I scared away customers. I looked too intimidating. I wasn’t ladylike enough holding a forty-five automatic as big as a Frigidaire.”
“How’d you get back in?”
“Gene requested me. He liked the Truck Stop cover and h
e wanted one just like it for Paradise Valley.”
“That’s Eugene Booth?” We were coming to it now.
The feral look returned. She took the cigarette out of her mouth, picked a shred of tobacco off her lower lip, and flicked it into the clay pot. “What’s your interest in Gene? Is he in trouble?”
“Just the opposite. I’m working for someone who wants to give him money.”
She managed to make a giggle sound like an arid chuckle. “Just because the catalogue hacks cut my head off doesn’t mean I never use it. I read some of the books I posed for; I still had hopes and I didn’t want to get myself tied up with pornography or commie propaganda. It was the fifties, remember. Decency still had a good reputation. Anyway, I read some of the books and in every one of them the detective claimed he wanted to give the guy he was looking for money. That was the magic word. It was a lie every time.”
“It usually is when I tell it. Not this time. A New York publisher wants to reprint Paradise Valley. The money’s good, but Booth gave it back without explaining why and pulled out of the trailer park. I’m supposed to find out where he went. If he still doesn’t want the money, that’s okay, but this is New York we’re talking about. They can’t understand why anyone would turn down hard cold cash. I’m supposed to ask.”
“Good luck, brother. Gene wouldn’t tell you his blood type if he was bleeding all over his shoes.”
“You must have done all the talking all those times he came over to visit you in your trailer.”
“Mobile home. Nobody wants to spend their golden years in a trailer.” She took one last drag that ate the cigarette up to its filter tip. “Got any more of those? One just wakes up my lungs. The second’s for nourishment and I need a third to put them back to sleep.”
“Enough of them could put them to sleep for good.” I gave her the pack. There were only a couple left.
“I heard that.” She lit one off the butt of the first and poked the butt out of sight in the potting soil like a plant stick. “That’s our government for you: Subsidize tobacco for two hundred years, then tell us it’s bad for us and we have to quit, but they don’t say how. I gave up coffee when they said it raised my blood pressure and drinking when they said it hurt my liver. Now they say coffee cures migraines and liquor unclogs the blood. If I smoke long enough they’ll tell me Camels cure rheumatism. Any chance you could steer some of that New York money my way? I’m thinking of writing my memoirs. You know I slept with Dali.”
“Really?”
“Well, he said he was Dali. I couldn’t figure out what he was doing painting Bulldog Drummond. Seriously, I could use some extra for smokes. My Social Security checks go direct to the cashier.”
“I got you from the new manager at the park for twenty. What will a carton get me?”
“Twenty’s as much as I got for a week of holding still in my unmentionables. Five of that went to the chiropractor. Bone-crackers aren’t so cheap anymore.”
I started to put a new fifty on the bureau. She told me to put it in the top drawer, what was she, a prostitute? I parked it on top of a stack of neatly folded blouses. She sure liked yellow.
“Gene got me into White Pine,” Fleta Skirrett said. “I had a real nice room at my niece’s, my own bath, but I couldn’t stand her husband. He was a TV pitchman, little bald twerp who kept waiting for L.A. to call. Never did anything around the house, Nancy even had to cut the grass when she came home from work. I stuck it out; no place else to go. Then I read in the paper where Gene was suing somebody and I remembered we used to get along okay when I was posing. The paper said he was managing at White Pine. I called him there. He was glad to hear from me, thought I might be able to help him out with his suit. I don’t know how. All I had to do with the book was what’s on that wall. I didn’t even finish reading it; too depressing. I was nine when the riot broke out and I remember my mother being too scared to let my brother and me outside to play. We lived clear up in St. Clair Shores, miles from the trouble.”
“My folks were the same way during the riot in sixty-seven, and I was older than you.”
“We’re past due for a third. Anyway we met for lunch, and I guess it was pretty clear an old fat woman wasn’t going to be much use, but I couldn’t help telling him my setup. He said there was a vacancy at the park and he could get me a deal if I didn’t mind living in a mobile home. I said I wouldn’t squawk about a cardboard box if it didn’t come with my niece’s husband.”
“Was he propositioning you?”
“It wouldn’t have bothered me if he was. I’d have put out, too. It’s been a mighty long time, and Gene is a good-looking man. The itch doesn’t go away when you pass fifty. It just gets harder to scratch.”
She was growing younger; and I thought of the broad battered face in the photo on Eugene Booth’s driver’s license. But someone had to fall for the pugs or there wouldn’t be so many of them. “I take it from the use of the subjunctive case you and he weren’t an item.”
She showed off her well-fitting teeth. They might have been all hers at that. “Subjunctive. I know what that is. You’ve hung around a few writers yourself. No, he wasn’t trying to get into my pants, and he didn’t. It was just a friendly deal. All the people his age who lived at White Pine were miserable or dull or both. Usually both. A tin box in a row of them is okay for starting out but rotten for ending up. All he ever heard around there was complaints. That’s part of the job, but you sure don’t want to have to listen when you’re with the people you call your friends. If he’d tried to strike up anything social with any of them, he’d have gone as dotty as me.”
“I haven’t heard anything dotty so far.” I got rid of my Winston. It had taken me twice as long as she, and her second had burned down almost as far as the logo. That breathy voice was pure vaporized nicotine.
“What a sweet thing to say. My family says I’m nuts. I wouldn’t care about that, but Gene thought so too. He was the one who told me to come here. It seems I took a little walk one night and he was afraid I’d finish up under a bus. He said, ‘You might not mind, Flea, but a clichÉ like that would be an insult to me.’ He calls me Flea. Guess ‘cause I’m bugs.”
I smiled. My teeth weren’t fitting as well as hers and I’d grown them myself. “What did you talk about when he came to visit? Was he writing?”
“I never heard him talk about writing even when we were young. I didn’t know many writers, but all the painters I knew either talked about their work all the time or anything else but. Gene belonged to the second group. At White Pine, he talked about his dead wife, the army, his brother, some of the jobs he’d had; I guess what most men his age talk about. He loved his wife, hated the army, got along okay with his brother. Oh, and he liked to fish, but he said he hadn’t been fishing in years. The rest of the time he sat and listened to me chatter on. Pretty dull, huh? I guess we weren’t so much different from the others after all.”
“His brother’s name was Duane, wasn’t it? I heard he’d died.”
“Gene never said and I didn’t ask. You don’t, you know, at our time of life. It’s tactless. He always spoke about Duane in the past tense, so I guess he did.”
It was all wearing thin. Either her personality or the surroundings were leeching all the freshness out of the morning. I thought about showing her Booth’s note on the Alamo letterhead, about a gelding knowing better than to try to breed. It stayed in my pocket. I had the thought it was something he wouldn’t want her to see. What that had to do with anything, I didn’t know to the tenth power.
“How is it you were friends when you modeled? You said you didn’t know many writers.”
“I didn’t. I met him through Lowell. Gene used to drop in to watch him paint. They admired each other’s work. When Gene’s books started selling and his publisher wanted to commission a better-known artist in New York, Gene said no. He refused to sign a contract until they agreed to have Lowell do all his covers.”
“Lowell?”
“Lowel
l Birdsall.” She waved twelve ounces of zir-conia in the direction of the painting on the wall. “They didn’t sign them in those days. Potboilers, Lowell said. Something to pay the bills while he was waiting for the Louvre to call.”
I couldn’t figure out why the name was familiar until I remembered the business card in my wallet. I peeled it out. “Lowell Birdsall,” it read. “Systems Analysis.” It listed five numbers and none of them was an address. I showed it to her. “I got this from a clerk in a bookstore. She said he’s a collector.”
She slid down her glasses to read over the tops, then shook her head and pushed them back up. “That’s his son. Lowell died years ago. Junior used to sneak in after school, hoping to catch me undressing for work. I still get Christmas cards from him. He’s living in his father’s old studio in the Alamo.”
7
On the way out I leaned into Mrs. Milbocker’s office to thank her again. She smiled up from her clipboard. Her leathery face broke up into deep lines.
“Character, isn’t she?” she said. “Sometimes I think if some of our livelier guests channeled the energy they spend being charmingly eccentric into just plain living, they wouldn’t need Edencrest. But it could be I’m being eccentric myself. It rubs off.”
“What did you do before this, traffic cop?”
“Just the opposite. I stole cars and stripped them and sold the parts for drug money. This started out as five hundred hours of community service and ran into six years and counting.”
“The system works.”
“The system works for those who would’ve found their way out without it. But if it weren’t for this job I’d probably be wearing a gold blazer and selling real estate. Gold doesn’t suit my complexion.”
“Are you hungry? How’s the food at the German place?”
“Yes, and not bad. Unfortunately I have to eat here. The guests become paranoid when they don’t see me sharing their creamed corn. I’d invite you, but they’d think you were sent here by the state to shut us down. They’ve been uneasy ever since we prosecuted an orderly last year for attempted molestation.”
A Smile on the Face of the Tiger Page 5
