The Imaginary Lives of Mechanical Men

by Randy F. Nelson

  I’m not saying it was right and I’m not trying to make excuses or anything I don’t want you to think I’m a hypocrite. It was wrong okay? I made peace with that a long time ago. It just wasn’t as simple as you think. I mean good God she dated a damn criminal for a year and then turned around and married an ape what does that sound like to you? It was like she wanted life to punish her or something, which you can’t even imagine with somebody that beautiful you know what I mean? There were days at the bank she came in with cuts, bruises on her arms or face when you just wanted to put your arm around her. She was so sad. Look I don’t even know what I’m saying anymore I just know I would have done anything to make her smile for a second. I won’t say I loved her but I did in a way and I would have done anything…. And I’ll tell you something else I would have killed the son of a bitch if I’d thought he was doing it to her. But maybe she was hurting herself, you know what I’m saying? There’s just no way to tell if you ask me.

  He was terrified of dead people. He hated funeral homes even though they were the first places in the South to be air-conditioned, and we always made the cemetery run around noon just to be sure that we weren’t overtaken by nightfall, but here’s the funny thing. He knew the location of every grave in maybe two dozen cemeteries. Like he had a personal relationship with every corpse in Bladen County.

  El never touched a casket. Never looked upon a body if it was in an open coffin. Never spoke in a room where there was a corpse, I don’t know, maybe because he was holding his breath, I just don’t know. And always he washed his hands after handling funeral flowers. Always. Used a big yellow bottle of Joy back there at the utility sink.

  We had to go to Payne & Pinkerton one time, the colored funeral home there in Morton that took up three floors of a colossal white house on Houston Street, looked like a plantation. And the guest of honor was this fat lady, member of the Eastern Star or something, who just barely fit into her casket, which looked like a double-wide to me. They must have tucked her in with a crowbar and a shoehorn. Anyway, she’s laying there sweet and serene as can be in a pink chiffon dress, white gloves, your pearl earrings, pearl necklace, and all your Eastern Star secret paraphernalia—except for one thing—the pink and white corsage that we’ve got to pin on her just before the service.

  So what do you think, I’m going to do it? I’m fourteen years old and this involved touching a dead lady’s breast in a colored funeral home that looked like Tara on an oiled-up dirt road where no sane white person would go after six o’clock on a Saturday night knowing that Roosevelt was no longer a favored name among Negro parents. What am I trying to say? I’m saying the times they were a changing, and you didn’t want to handicap your future by maybe getting killed over some aspect of the new social order that you hadn’t figured out yet. So I said, “Just leave the box on the front pew or give it to the oldest daughter, man, but let’s hit the road before they bring in the forklift and she tips it over on one of us.”

  But no.

  He had to do it. Take away everything else, and that’s what was left. A gentleman. I can see his hands shaking to this day. See him swallowing hard. Taking that corsage up in one hand, the pin in the other, working his way up to the casket with slow shuffling steps. Till it gradually occurred to me what he was going to do as he took the pin. Eased it through the center of the bottom carnation until it stuck out the other side about an inch and a half. Then—whap—straight into her like a thumbtack.

  Except I’m the one who squealed. “Oh God, no! What’d you do that for, man?! Jeezus Christ, El, you think they don’t shoot to kill down here?”

  “We got to go,” is all he said. “It’s after four.”

  “You got that right! Grab your hat, we gotta haul ass before the Fruit of Islam comes pouring through that door. Head for the border, you moron!” Just as she came in—all dressed in white—this younger version of the poor lady in the coffin, weeping.

  She said El you think we could have stewed tomatoes tonight? I thought I saw a can of stewed tomatoes in the cabinet.

  And now there is only one thing left, so I will tell it.

  Patsy Burdette had long auburn hair and epilepsy. By the time she was thirty, I guess, she was working in the Morton Federal Savings and Loan, and I worshiped her. So did El. She painted her toenails, which you could see in the summer whenever she wore sandals, and never a piece of jewelry anywhere except the rings that El bought her when they were married, long before I started to work at Weiss Florist. And he was faithful as a dog. Never mind the rumors, he drove home for lunch every day so they could see each other for a few extra minutes. Sometimes there’d be guests, sometimes not.

  He’d call Patsy every day to be sure she’d taken her medicine. We could be out delivering on the other side of the moon, and he’d pull in to some little country store and ask to use the phone, holding it out away from his ear like this because he had hearing like a bat, sort of talk into the mouthpiece like it was a microphone. You could hear her tiny voice on the other end saying, “What? Who is this? El, is that you? Who is this?”

  And every Saturday I’d go with him, you know, to lunch at their house, an unpainted bungalow on Doster Street with a gravel driveway sounded like you were driving over crackers until you pulled up in the carport, and there she’d be, so happy to see us. And maybe one of her friends from the bank inside having lunch too, also happy to see us. El did almost all the housework; the place looked like a dollhouse, fussy clean, I guess on account of where she lived before they were married.

  Then she died in December the year before I went away to college. He just cruised in one evening, maybe later than usual, maybe after drinking a little, nobody knows for sure; I just remember people talking. Anyway he went home for supper to the house with the dark shutters and low-hanging pines and found her in the bathtub. She’d had a seizure, the long auburn hair floating in arabesques upon the surface of the water, perfectly serene and beautiful. He loved her so. Laid her out in the bed before the ambulance got there, in a satin nightgown, covers up to her neck, the thick silky hair brushed and dried, arranged in waves down to her shoulders. No one knows how he did it.

  So now I’m one of them I guess I don’t know what happened I just turned around took my eyes off him for a second changed my clothes and there you were my own son. But I can tell you this much no matter what they say this is a love story for your mother yes but also for you. Because when he finally slammed that battered door of the old panel truck and the looming echo faded and we had made the last hospital run of the day it was no longer the spring of 1965 and now I have to strain to get him back. He was Elrod Weiss. The funniest man I ever knew.

  THE TICKING AND TOCKING OF THEIR HEARTS

  Cutters

  EMILY

  Thinks this might be the cover shot. Straight down the path with a very wide-angle lens. Which, of course, will yield some distortion near the edges. But she doesn’t care. In fact she hopes that the overhanging branches will print like a blurry hand thrown up in front of a face. It’s the flat white facade of their church that she really wants to show—a picture-postcard set on the edge of their world. Like you could step around that clapboard corner and fall straight into hell. That’s what Sam can’t understand.

  He thinks they’ve come for the story. She thinks they’ve come for the girl.

  So Emily tightens the legs of the tripod and checks depth of field while they wait for the families.

  SAM

  Sits on a gray boulder for most of the morning, inhaling one cigarette after another and pretending to study his notepad. White pages go fluttering in the wind like a magician’s dove. Every now and then he jots a question and stares at the next mountain as if searching for an answer. The boulder fits him like a throne, and it has a lichen-covered ledge that he can use as an armrest and a vague comfort that sends him musing. “So. You think they’ll actually bring the kid?”

  Emily doesn’t rise out of her crouch or turn her head when she answers. “It
’s her father. Of course they’ll bring her.”

  “Great.”

  “I doubt they trust us very much. Would you?”

  “I doubt they ever saw the picture in the first place. They probably aren’t big newspaper readers up here. And besides—that was two years ago.”

  “They saw it. Everybody in the country saw it. So how about bringing me that battery pack from the Jeep.”

  “I should have been a lawyer,” Sam says.

  “You should have been a reporter.” Emily takes a few more test shots with the Polaroid and listens for the crunch of tires on gravel.

  “I’m just saying you can’t make a story out of an obit notice.”

  “So leave. I’ll handle it.”

  “I think maybe you don’t remember who we’re dealing with here.”

  “Right. They take up serpents. It almost slipped my mind.”

  “You’re not going to save her, Emily, and she’s not going to love you for trying.”

  “I think maybe you’re right. Now how about hooking up that hose and giving me a fine spray over the front of the whole thing. Okay?”

  EMILY

  Loves the look he gives her; but this time he lumbers away, untangling the stiff hose and finally throwing up a wide fan of water. She wants a mist but even a torrent will do—an old photographer’s trick that seems to work, coalescing light around the window frames. She runs a roll through the Pentax and hopes for magic.

  “They’re going to come crackling down that road any minute,” Sam yells. “And see what? Mrs. Greenburg’s son with his thumb over the end of a hose watering their church.”

  Emily can’t tell if his hand is shaking or if it’s simply the way he sprays the water. She feels a warm current of air that has been rising from the valley all morning, as if the mountain thinks it can take back summer. And there’s a faint scent of bread and apples from somewhere below. At last the sun drops low enough to transform the windows into dead eyes, the door into a gaping mouth, the steeple into a tall dunce cap. The wet paint turns a leaden white. It is what she has wanted most, the image of a clown face upon black velvet.

  After she finishes shooting, Emily carries the tripod back to the Jeep and contemplates the almost invisible road that brought them to this place two years ago. It coils its wet way around the mountain and stretches back two years to when she and Dietz did their first story about the Holiness people. Since then she has not returned, which leaves her wondering if she will be remembered at all.

  JARED

  Tries to explain over lunch at his desk, egg salad dribbling over tomorrow’s news. “… couple of years ago. So I sent her up to the same little town to cover the trial. Seems one of the saints wanted to eliminate his wife using a copperhead, so you figure that’s got to be good for a feature story, right? Maybe a cover for the weekend magazine. Anyhow. I sent Emily and this kid named Dietz. Some hillbilly dumping ground up in the mountains. And I’ve got ’em camping out in a local motel, sending back dailies and taking in a few of the religious services. You know, the snake-handling stuff. Getting brotherly and sisterly with the families. Spending weekends with them at camp meeting or whatever the hell it is they do. Anyhow, developing trust. Next thing I hear, Emily’s cut herself, sliced the shit out of her arm on some broken glass. And then, get this, one of the grandmas takes her in. Bandages her up. Prays over her night and day—who the hell knows? Then, bam, the trial’s over. Just like that. The guy gets life, and we bang out a story from Dietz’s notes. I put Sam on the rewrite, and we go with it on a Sunday. A month later one of Emily’s pictures, the cover shot, gets nominated for a Pulitzer. Damnedest thing you ever saw in your life.”

  SAM

  Spends the early afternoon on the side of the church where the dropoff is steep, setting up equipment, loading film, helping her shoot from impossible angles. Stringing wire for the lights while she pokes around in the basement. Conspiring, he thinks. Framing some guy for a crime he doesn’t even know about yet. While all morning her eyes remain as empty as the space between stars. Where has she been, he wonders. Someone this beautiful, how can she hide?

  And when they finally do arrive, the eight or ten silent families, they come like characters from a fairy tale, already ancient and unbelievable. Led by an old woman bent over her crooked cane. Followed by grave, silent children who hold hands. And two young mothers already pregnant beneath faded print dresses. Emily mingling easily among the women, Sam standing apart from the men, who appear to have been drawn in charcoal with brief, impulsive strokes. A tall teenager gives Emily a wiggle-fingered wave, and Sam wonders if she is the one. Tries to remember the picture of Marla Ann Creecy. Then tries adding two years.

  The prelude is like any funeral, solemn and self-conscious—a touch to the shoulder, a whispered word or two as people file through the door; but the service itself opens with the first hint of guitar music and a sudden shout of praise. Emily takes his arm, and they fall into line behind an angular blond boy of maybe sixteen. At the threshold she slips her hand into his and draws him momentarily closer. “This,” she promises, “is going to be the most erotic experience of your life. Trust me.”

  There is music already and singing, an “undeniable hypnotic appeal” that he will mention in the article. Maybe he will even call it the “little white church where they practice the only religion that’s illegal in America.” Toss in a few ironies, a few descriptive details. Three or four paragraphs if he ignores the extraneous stuff, like the stiff plastic bandages. Where Emily cut her fingers this morning. On the rocks by the basement door.

  JARED

  Gives Michael time to remember the picture, a close-up of a timber rattlesnake and the daughter of one of their preachers, Byron Creecy. Then he recalls for himself the girl, maybe twelve or thirteen years old, but not a day over that. “She’s beautiful,” he mutters. “Hair pulled back. Skin as smooth as cream. And got to be wearing her first touch of lipstick, which you notice immediately because of the natural contrast with the thing she’s holding in her hands. And I mean, they’re just about face to face. It’s sickening the first time you see it, but you keep turning back to it as you read the story, like you can’t believe the words without the help of the picture. So you look again, and she’s still lifting him up like this, like an offering or something. Bastard’s thicker than a man’s arm, and the skin is splitting, flaking off in places, I don’t know, maybe it’s the time of year for them to molt or something, but it looks like he’s being born right there in her hands. You can see the underbelly just emerging from the old skin, and it’s not white like you’d expect. It’s the color of melted gold. And the dead skin is like paper. But that’s not what haunts you. I mean, the snake, that’s not what stays with you when you close your eyes. It’s the girl. That’s what got this picture reprinted a million times. Her face. It’s tilted a little to the side and back, her own eyes closed like she’s in a trance, lips slightly parted, maybe praying. Emily told me they call it an Anointing, when the Holy Spirit descends on them and for a time they are invulnerable to poison or the sting of serpents or any mortal harm. Who the hell knows? I’m just telling you that’s not what it looks like to me. Not like praying. I mean, you and I could wait a lifetime and still not get that shot. I’m just telling you what I remember. Because what it looks like to me is a first kiss.”

  BROTHER PAUL

  Swings himself to his toes with each exclamation, arms pumping like pistons. As he says, “I know some people will say to you that Brother Byron must have been crazy, a sort of throwback to olden times. And I do believe they were right. He was plumb Bible crazy and so sure in the Word that he gave himself up entire to the love of Jesus Christ with signs following. Because why? Because he understood this one plain spiritual fact: if there ain’t nothing dangerous about your religion, then you might as well join a country club. If you ain’t alive to the Spirit, then you might as well be dead to everything else. That’s what I’m saying. You got to risk something—I’m tell
ing you here today—when you stand before Almighty God. You got to be like old Moses on the mount stepping into the devouring fire of His presence, amen, and kept alive by nothing but his grace. And just because you’re bathed in the Light don’t mean you’re going to live through it, my friend, I’ll tell you that much. Oh, yes, and I’ll tell you this too. I’d rather be snakebit than deaf to the Word a God.”

  SAM

  Studies the face and finds a visible longing that the preacher cannot articulate. Sees Brother Paul praying at the lectern, stumbling through his litany of sins confessed and blessings conferred without hint of order or, perhaps, even understanding that the words should make sense. The prayer becomes a kind of chant, and the face, Sam sees finally, has become the meaning behind the prayer. It is a face filled with fear and desperate longing. And it is what Emily has brought him to see.

  Sam finally shuts out the chaotic sounds and studies the other faces around him, finding the same plea. On an old man with stick-thin arms, a farmer perhaps, worn down by rock-filled fields. On a young woman, heavily pregnant and sitting alone. And on all the others. The forgotten faces of middle children of large families, who would do anything to be loved, faces fearful of being left behind, desperate for attention, pleading past all reason, “Please God. Look at me.”

  And after a time Byron Creecy is no longer a presence at his own funeral. There is simply a succession of readings, hymns, and reminiscences that, like the movements of a symphony, build to climaxes and then fall away into interludes of soft meditation offered by the guitar and keyboard. It is like the ebb and flow of the ocean that most of them have never seen. And it is more than an hour after the last mention of Brother Byron’s name that the real moment arrives, a moment in the midst of a quiet hymn whose calm is broken by a shout.