Zigzagging Down a Wild Trail

by Bobbie Ann Mason

  For Roger

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  With Jazz

  Tobrah

  Tunica

  Thunder Snow

  Rolling into Atlanta

  Three-Wheeler

  The Funeral Side

  Window Lights

  Proper Gypsies

  Night Flight

  Charger

  About the Author

  Also by Bobbibe Ann Mason

  Copyright

  With Jazz

  I never paid much attention to current events, all the trouble in the world you hear about. I was too busy raising a family. But my children have all gone now and I’ve started to think about things that go on. Why would my daughter live with a man and get ready to raise a baby and refuse to marry the guy? Why would my son live in a cabin by the river and not see a soul for months on end? But that’s just personal. I’m thinking of the bigger picture, too. It seems a person barely lives long enough to begin to see where his little piece fits in the universal puzzle. I’m not old but I imagine that old people start to figure out how to live just when it’s too late.

  These thoughts come up at my weekly neighborhood group. It started out as a weight-reducing club, but we kept meeting even after we all got skinny. Now on Fridays after work a bunch of us get together at somebody’s house and talk about life, in a sort of talk-show format. Although we laugh a lot, for us it’s survival. And it helps me think.

  It’s so hard to be nice to people. It’s something you have to learn. I try to be nice, but it’s complicated. You start feeling guilty for your own failures of generosity at just about the same point in life when you start feeling angry, even less willing to give. The two feelings collide—feeling gracious and feeling mean. When you get really old, they say, you go right back to being a child, spiteful and selfish, and you don’t give a damn what people think. In between childhood and old age, you have this bubble of consciousness—and conscience. It’s enough to drive you crazy.

  After our group session last Friday, I went up to Paducah, across the county line, hoping to see this guy I know. He calls himself Jazz, but his real name is Peter. He always hated that name. Kids in school would tease him. “Where’s your peter?,” “Oh, you don’t look like a peter,” etc. Some kids from my distant past used the word “goober,” the first name I ever heard for the secret male anatomy. I thought they were saying “cooper.” That didn’t make any sense to me. Then I learned that the correct word was “goober.” I learned that in the fourth grade from Donna Lee Washam, the day she led me on an expedition to a black-walnut tree on the far edge of the playground. She came back to the classroom with two black walnuts in her panties and giggled all afternoon as she squirmed in her seat. Across the aisle and a couple of seats up, Jerry Ray Baxter sometimes took his goober out and played with it. He couldn’t talk plain, and after that year he stopped coming to school.

  Jazz was at the Top Line, where I thought he’d be. He was lounging at the bar, with a draught beer, shooting the breeze. When he saw me he grinned slowly and pulled a new brassiere out of his pocket, dangling it right there between the jug of beet-pickled eggs and the jug of pickled pigs’ feet. Ed, the bartender, swung his head like he’d seen it all. “There you go again, Jazz, pulling off women’s clothes.”

  Jazz said, “No, this is my magic trick.”

  I stuffed the bra in my purse. “Thanks, Jazz. I guess you knew my boobs were falling down.”

  He came from down in Obion, Tennessee, and grew up duck hunting around Reelfoot Lake. Now he goes to France and brings back suitcases full of French underwear. He sells it to a boutique and occasionally to friends. It’s designer stuff and the sizes are different from here. His ex-wife gets it at cost from a supplier in Paris where she works. He goes over there once a year or so to see his kids. Jazz works construction and saves his money, and then he quits and lights out for France. I’ve got a drawerful of expensive bras he’s given me—snap-fronts, plunges, crisscrosses, strapless—all in lace and satin.

  “That’s a special number,” he said, moving close to me. “Scalloped lace and satin stretch. Molded cup, underwire. I’ll want to check the fitting later.”

  I grinned. “We’ll see about that, Jazz. Tonight I feel like getting drunk.”

  “You’re gonna be a granny again in a few months, Chrissy. Is that how an old granny’s supposed to act?” he teased.

  “But I’m happy, damn it! I feel like I’m in love.”

  “One of these days I’ll make you fall in love with me, Chrissy.”

  I ordered a bourbon. What Jazz needed, I thought, was a woman who felt romantic about him. But he’d never make a claim on a woman he cared about. He’d always step aside and let the woman go fall in love with some clod who jerked her around.

  Glancing up at a TV newsbreak—a local update on water pollution—I said, “All the mussels in the lake are dying. It’s all those pesticides.”

  “I heard it was last year’s drought,” said Jazz. “That’s natural.”

  “Here I am celebrating a new baby coming into the world—for what? To see a dead lake? And air not fit to breathe?”

  Jazz touched my shoulder, to steady me. “World’s always had trouble. No baby ever set foot in the Garden of Eden.”

  I laughed. “That’s just like you to say that, Jazz.”

  “You think you know me, don’t you?” he said.

  “I know you well enough to feel sorry I always treat you so bad.”

  Ed set my drink before me and I took it eagerly. I said to Jazz, “Why don’t you ever get mad at me, tell me off?”

  He punched my arm, buddy style. “You should never go away mad at a person, because one of you might get killed on the way home.”

  The regular crowd was there at the Top Line—good old boys who worked at the plants, guys wandering around loose on a Friday night while their wives took the kids to the mall. A tall man entering the bar caught my eye. He walked like he had money. He had on an iridescent-green shirt, with a subtle paisley design that made my eyes tingle. His pants had cowboy-style piping on the pocket plackets. Over the shirt he wore a suède vest with fuchsia embroidery and zippered pockets.

  “That’s Buck Joiner, the radio guy,” Jazz said, reading my mind.

  Buck Joiner was the D.J. I listened to while I was getting ready for work. His “Morning Mania” show was a roaring streak of pranks and risqué jokes and call-in giveaways. Once, he actually telephoned Colonel Qaddafi in Libya. He got through to the palace and talked to some official who spoke precise English with a Middle Eastern accent.

  As soon as I felt I’d had enough bourbon, I marched over to Buck Joiner’s table, wielding my glass.

  “I listen to you,” I said. “I’ve got your number on my dial.”

  He seemed bored. It was like meeting Bob Dylan or some big shot you know won’t be friendly.

  “I called you up once,” I went on recklessly. “You were giving away tickets to the Ray Stevens show. I was trying to be the twenty-fifth caller. But my timing wasn’t right.”

  “Too bad,” he said, deadpan. He was with a couple of guys in suits. Blanks.

  “I’ve got to work on my timing.” I paused, scrambling for contact. “You should interview my Friday-afternoon talk group.”

  “What’s that?”

  “We’re a group of ladies. We get together every Friday and talk about life.”

  “What about life?” Out of the side of his face, he smirked for the benefit of the suits.

  “The way things are going. Stuff.” My mind went blank. I knew there was more to it than that. Right then, I really wanted him to interview our group. I knew we spa
rkled with life and intelligence. Rita had her opinions on day care, and Dorothy could rip into the abortion issue, and Phyllis believed that psychiatrists were witch doctors. Me, I could do my Bette Davis imitations.

  “Here’s my card,” I said, whipping one out of my purse. I’d ordered these about a month ago, just for the privilege of saying that.

  “It’s nice to meet a fan,” he said with stretched lips—not a true smile.

  “Don’t give me that, buddy. If it weren’t for your listeners, you wouldn’t be sitting here with all that fancy piping scrawled all over you.”

  I rejoined Jazz, who had been watching out for me. “I’d like to see Oprah nail him to the wall,” I said to Jazz.

  Of course, I was embarrassed. That was the trouble. I was lost somewhere between being nice and being mean. I shouldn’t drink. I don’t know why I was so hard on the D.J., but he was a man I had depended on to start my day, and he turned out to be a shit. From now on I’d listen to his show and think, Stuck-up turdface. Yet there I was in a French bra and with an unusual amount of cleavage for this area. I didn’t know what I was getting at. Jazz was smiling, touching my hand, ordering me another drink. Jazz wore patience like adhesive tape.

  In bits and pieces, I’ve told this at the Friday talk group: My first husband, Jim Ed, was my high-school boyfriend. We married when we were seniors, and they didn’t let me graduate, because I was pregnant. I used to say that I barely understood how those things worked, but that was a lie. Too often I exaggerate my innocence, as if trying to excuse myself for some of the messes I’ve gotten myself into. Looking back now, I see that I latched on to Jim Ed because I was afraid there’d never be another opportunity in my life, and he was the best of the pickings around there. That’s the way I do everything. I grab anything that looks like a good chance, right then and there. I even tend to overeat, as if I’m afraid I won’t ever get another good meal. “That’s the farm girl in you,” my second husband, George, always said. He was an analytical person and had a theory about everything. When he talked about the Depression mentality of our parents’ generation he made it sound physically disgusting. He had been to college. I never did go back and get my high-school diploma, but that’s something I’m thinking about doing now. George couldn’t just enjoy something for what it was. We’d grill steaks and he’d come up with some reason why we were grilling steaks. He said it went back to caveman behavior. He said we were acting out an ancient scene. He made me feel trapped in history, as though we hadn’t advanced since cavemen. I don’t guess people have changed that much, though, really. I bet back in caveman times there was some know-it-all who made his woman feel dumb.

  After a while, I didn’t pay any attention to George, but then my little daughter died. She had meningitis, and it was fairly sudden and horrible. I was still in shock a month later, when George started nagging at me about proper grief displays and the stages of grief. I blew up. I told him to walk. What we really should have done was share the grief. I’m sure the most basic textbook would say that. But instead he’s lecturing me on my grief. You can’t live with somebody who lectures you on your grief. I’ll have my grief in peace, I told him. Kathy wasn’t his daughter. He couldn’t possibly know how I felt. That was so long ago he doesn’t seem real to me. He still lives around here. I’ve heard that he married again and that he raises rabbits and lives out in the country, out near Bardwell—none of which I would have ever imagined. But, you know, as small as this place is, I’ve never laid eyes on him again. Maybe he’s changed so much I just don’t recognize him when I see him.

  “How did you just happen to have that bra in your pocket, Jazz?” I wanted to know, but he only grinned. It was like carrying around condoms in case of emergency, I thought. The bra was just my size. I’d put it on in the restroom. The one I had worn was stretching out, and I left it in the trash can. Let people wonder.

  At first, I thought Kathy just had the flu. She had a fever and she said her head was splitting—a remark so calm that she might have said her hands were dirty in the same tone. It was summer, a strange time for flu, so I hurried all the kids on out to their grandmother’s that Sunday, like always, thinking the country air would make Kathy feel better. Don and Phil kept aggravating her because she didn’t want to play in Mama’s attic or go out to the barn. She lay around under one of Mama’s quilts, and I thought later, with a hideous realization, that she somehow knew she was going to die. You never know what a child is thinking, or how scared they might be, or how they’ve blown something up in their imagination. She was twelve, and she’d just started her period a couple of months before. I thought her sickness might be related to that. The doctor just laughed at me when I brought that up. Can you imagine the nerve? It’s only now that I’ve gotten mad about that. But I hear that that doctor has had a stroke and is in a nursing home. What good do bad feelings do when so much time has passed? That’s what Jazz says.

  George blamed me for taking her out to Mama’s that day. He was gone to an engineering convention in Nashville; he was a chemical engineer at Carbide then. He said there was no reason a child shouldn’t recover from meningitis. He wagged a book in my face, but I refused to read what he had found on the disease. I thought it would kill me to know her death was my fault. I guess George wasn’t such a bad guy. He just had his ways. I think we all do and none of us knows how to be sensitive enough, it seems. He probably just didn’t know how to deal with the situation. It occurred to me recently that maybe he felt guilty for being away at the time, just as I felt guilty for not noticing how quiet and withdrawn she was, as though she was figuring it all out for herself. Kathy was in 4-H, and that year she was working on a Holly Hobbie display for the fair—the little girl hiding her face in the calico bonnet. Kathy sewed the clothes herself, and she was making a little stuffed dog and decorating a flower basket for the scene. I still have that unfinished Holly Hobbie scene—in the closet in a stereo box. I should probably get rid of it, because if Kathy had lived she would have grown out of that phase, but all I have is those little scraps of the way Kathy was, the only reality she ever had.

  Don and Phil grew up and left as soon as they got cars. Can you believe anybody would name their sons after the Everly Brothers? I reckon I’d still do something that silly. But I never told them we named them for the Everly Brothers. Jim Ed, the father of all my children, loved the Everly Brothers, and he used to play them in his truck, back when eight-track tape decks were a new thing. Jim Ed was loose about a lot of things, and he never criticized me the way George did. I don’t know if he blamed me about Kathy. I have a feeling that if we’d stuck it out we could have learned to love each other better. But he was restless, and he couldn’t hang around when we needed him most. He moved over to Cairo and worked on the riverboats—still does. I guess he has some kind of life. The boys see him. Don’s wife ran off with one of the riverboat guys and Don lives in a cabin over there. I don’t see him very much. He brought me a giant catfish, a mud cat, on Mother’s Day. Catfish that big aren’t really good to eat, though. He sets trotlines and just lives in the wilderness. I doubt if he’ll ever marry again. Phil is the only one of my children who turned out normal. Now, what is there to say about that? A wife with a tortilla face and bad taste in clothes, spoiled kids, living room decorated with brass geese and fish. I go there and my skin breaks out. There’s no pleasing me, I guess.

  Last week, Laura—my other daughter, the baby—wrote me that she was pregnant. She’s barely divorced from this museum director she met at school—he restored old pieces of pottery, glued them together. He made a good living but she wasn’t satisfied. Now she’s going to be tied down with a baby and a man, this Nick, who does seasonal work of some sort. They’re living in his home town, a little place in Arizona, in the desert. I can’t imagine what would grow there.

  Laura, on the telephone this past Sunday, said, “I don’t want to get married again. I don’t trust it anymore. And I want to be free of all that bureaucratic crap. I trust Nic
k more than I trust the government.”

  “You need the legal protection,” I said. “What if something happened to him? What if he ran off and left you? I can tell you exactly how that works.”

  “I’d have to murder Nick to get him out of my life! Honestly, he’s being so devoted it’s unbelievable.”

  “I guess that’s why I don’t believe it.”

  “Come on, Mom. Just think, you’re going to be a grandma again! Aren’t you going to come out when the baby’s born? Isn’t that what mothers do?”

  Laura was five when Kathy died. We didn’t take her to the funeral. We told her Kathy had gone off to live with Holly Hobbie in New York. If I could undo that lie, I would. It was worse when she found out the truth, because she was old enough then to understand and the shock hurt her more. I thought my heart would break when I saw Jim Ed at the funeral. I saw him alone only once, for a few minutes in the corridor before the service started, but we couldn’t speak what we felt. Jim Ed was crying, and I wanted to cling to him, but we could see George in the other room, standing beside a floral display—a stranger.

  Jazz said, “Ever notice how at night it’s scary because you feel like your secrets are all exposed, but you trick yourself into thinking they’re safe in the dark? Smoky bars, candlelight—that’s what all that atmosphere shit is about.”

  “That’s what I always say,” I said, a little sarcastically. Sometimes Jazz seemed to be fishing around for something to say and then just making something up to sound deep.

  We were driving to see my son Don out at his cabin by the river. It was Jazz’s idea, a crazy notion that seized him. He said he felt like driving. He said I needed some air. He didn’t let me finish my last drink.

  I met Jazz a year ago, in traffic court. We’d both been in minor fender benders on the same road on the same day, at different times. We’d both failed to yield. I remember Jazz saying to me, “I hope that’s not a reflection on my character. Normally, I’m a very yielding guy.” That day Jazz had on a plaid flannel shirt and boot-flared jeans and a cowboy hat—the usual garb for a man around here. But it was his boots I loved. Pointy-toed, deep-maroon, with insets of Elvis’s photograph just above the ankles. He’d found the boots in France. That night we went out for barbecue and he gave me some peach-blush panties with a black lace overlay. We had been friends since then, but we never seemed to get serious. I thought he had a big block of fear inside him.