by Tim Sandlin
The Prescott house was this fairly large, white monstrosity loaded with balconies and gables and triangular windows way up on the third floor. If they gave a test measuring tastes of the well-to-do, I guess we’d all fail, but at least I know I have bad tastes and don’t buy anything without the counsel of women. Skip must have designed his house after a tour of Southern train stations.
I went up the steps, rang the doorbell, and waited, watching the automatic sprinkler system drench the lawn; but no footsteps sounded inside. No imposing butler laid open the door. I rang some more, and after a while a severe black woman in a white uniform came out on the second-floor balcony to glare down at me. I asked a couple of questions on the lines of “Is anyone home?” but she wouldn’t speak. Normally when I see a new woman I imagine how she would taste and how she would sound when she came, but this woman had a posture that nipped fiction right in the bud.
The house next door was also Deep South gaudy, but at least the place looked lived in. A volleyball net was stretched across the freshly mowed lawn, and a kid’s Sting-ray bicycle leaned against a flower box with some late violets or pansies or something in it. Purple flowers anyway.
The door was answered by a short person in an Extra Terrestrial costume.
“Get lost,” he said.
“Phone home,” I said. I knew he was E.T. and E.T. said “Phone home” because the last night Wanda and I made love was the night we drove to Carolina Circle Mall and saw E.T., the movie. That was two months before she ran off with the pool man, my 240Z, and Me Maw’s jewelry. I, personally, had been sexually dormant the full two months before and six days after she left. I should have known Wanda couldn’t go that long without a salami.
The boy looked behind me at the Dart. “You’re a Jehovah’s Witness,” he said.
“No, I’m not.”
He yelled “Mom,” then ran down a hall and disappeared, leaving me at the open door. Taking this as an invitation, I walked on in and followed down the hall. One door opened on a formal parlor, the kind of room no one enters except to dust once a month. In the Old South, when you died they stuck the open casket up on sawhorses in rooms like this and left you overnight while the women and darkies cried and the men drank whiskey.
The other door opened on two women sitting on a couch, drinking General Foods International instant coffee.
“You’re not a Jehovah’s Witness.”
“No, ma’am.”
“Don’t call us ma’am, darlin’,” the other woman said. “If you’re not a Witness, who are you?”
“Sam Callahan.” The women were dressed country club casual—expensive golf shirts, white shorts, and tennis shoes. The one who’d spoken first had red painted fingernails. The little one who’d called me darlin’ had a big diamond on a chain around her neck and her hair in a ponytail.
She had the challenging steel-gray eyes of a woman who rates herself by her allure. “Are you the mystery boy Billy Gaines telephoned all in a dither about? He described you as much younger.”
“I’m surprised to hear he was in a dither.”
She leaned her compact body toward me. “Billy said not to talk to you until Skip has a go, but Skippy and I live next door, so why come here if you want Skippy?”
She would probably talk through the entire orgasm—No. Yes. Oh, God. Yes. Yes. I don’t care much for women who talk and come at the same time.
“You’re Mrs. Prescott?”
“Katrina to you. This is Mimi Saunders.”
Mimi said, “Katrina, I see no call to flirt with the young man.” Mimi had a really long neck and her hair in a bun. I hate to be mean, but she didn’t strike me as a woman who has orgasms.
“I’m not flirting.” Katrina drilled in with the eye contact. “Am I flirting with you?”
“I’m not good at recognizing flirting when it happens.”
“Well, this isn’t flirting. I’ll tell you when I start to flirt.”
Both my hands slid into my pockets. “Thank you.”
“Now sit and tell us why we can’t talk to you until Skippy gets first go.”
Mimi set her coffee cup down with a click. “He didn’t even present his card. If we’re not supposed to talk to him, I don’t think we should.”
“Oh, hogwash, Mimi. If it’s something Billy Gaines doesn’t want us to know, of course we’ve got to find out. It’s our job.”
I sat on an ottoman footrest with my hands still in my pockets. The women watched, relaxed in their upper-crust lives. Mimi wasn’t certain she wanted me rocking the boat, but Katrina was bored silly by the privileged life and dying for anything to happen. You can tell these things if you’ve spent any sober time around men’s wives.
Katrina studied me. “I don’t suppose you’re a Mafia debt collector out to break Skippy’s legs?”
“No.” I stopped myself on the edge of ma’am.
“One can only hope.” She looked disappointed and reached for the coffee box on the glass-topped table, through which I could see her legs crossed demurely at the ankles. A lot of time and money had gone into those legs.
She stared at the box. “Must be a dark, disgusting secret from the past then. I always knew Skippy was hiding his shame.”
“Yes.”
Mimi inhaled and raised one hand while Katrina held her breath and lowered both hands. I clarified. “Except I doubt Skippy is hiding the shame from you because I doubt he knows.”
Katrina’s face broke into a smile. “This is great.”
“It is no such thing,” Mimi said. “He’s a shyster, Katrina. Look at that silly grin. Pretty soon he’s going to ask for money.”
“No, I’m not,” I said.
Katrina slid toward me on the couch, which made her shorts ride up. “Tell us the secret this minute or Mimi and I shall take you down on the floor and torture you.”
I decided she was a fireball. Certain somewhat small women are fireballs and they make me nervous. Being tortured by this particular fireball might be interesting—or if she was my stepmother it could spill over into weird—but I didn’t see any reason to keep secrets. I mean, the men raped Lydia. If fallout came from exposure, I sure wasn’t the one to stop it.
I tried to meet her eyes. “Mr. Gaines, Mr. Saunders, and Mr. Prescott were part of five football players who, uh, had group sex with my mother and created me.”
A girl appeared in the doorway that led to a back patio type place. She was tall, big boned, and in her early twenties. I couldn’t tell you how she would sound, but I knew she tasted like lemon meringue pie.
“I’m headed for the pool, Mom,” she said. She had light blond hair, which I don’t normally go for, and wore a white terry-cloth robe open at the middle to show a sky blue one-piece bathing suit.
I turned to see which woman she was calling Mom. The girl looked at Mimi, who had her lips puckered as if she’d eaten something rotten.
“What’s wrong?” the girl asked.
Katrina recovered first. “This boy says he’s your half brother, Gilia.”
“Might be,” I corrected. “The odds are one out of five.”
Gilia studied me with frank, blue eyes. Shannon could pull off that honest yet wanting nothing look. Must be an attitude the new generation of women developed because I don’t remember it from my day.
She said, “I didn’t know Daddy was married before.”
Mimi made a choked sound. “He wasn’t. It’s a scandalous lie. This villain has come to destroy our home.”
I said, “That’s a classic overreaction, Mrs. Saunders. I’m not here to affect your home in any way.”
Her face was awful. The woman had lost all reserve. “How dare you make accusations at Cameron. My husband is an honorable gentleman.”
“I’m sorry, Mrs. Saunders.”
Katrina suddenly stood up. “Don’t be sorry. Skip has a scandal coming. That pinhead’s been dipping his wick ever since I married him.”
I glanced over at Gilia. She stood uncommitted as a fence post.
; “I don’t see any call for scandal,” I said.
Katrina laughed. “I can’t wait to see how Mr. Wheeler-Dealer handles this. First, he’ll offer you money to change the story.” She grabbed my arm. “Don’t take it.”
“I don’t need money.”
“Then he’ll threaten you with hired violence. Skip’s too wimpy to touch you himself.”
Mimi’s voice was up near hysteria. “Cameron does not dip his wick.”
“Oh, he does too,” Katrina said.
“And Cameron does not deserve scandal. You. Leave my house this instant.”
I stood up from the ottoman, but Katrina didn’t release my arm. “I’m sorry to have upset you,” I said.
“Out.”
Katrina’s fingernails dug into my skin. “Don’t make him go. I want all the sick, ugly details of how your Cameron and my Skippy soiled this poor boy’s mother.”
At the word soiled, Mimi buried her face in her hands and sobbed. I hadn’t expected to have this effect on people. I hadn’t thought beyond the fathers and me, but now it sank in that others were involved—innocent strangers who’d never raped anybody.
“I better go,” I said.
Gilia looked from her mother to me.
I said, “Nice to have met you.”
Her lips parted, but she didn’t speak.
***
“You ain’t my kid, you’re too scrawny.”
Babe Carnisek was big—big as Billy’s coffin case. Even leaned back in a recliner with his hands curled in his lap he appeared in the upper-six-foot range and near three hundred pounds. He hadn’t gone to fat, either. A well-dinged free-weight set and lift bench filled the gap where the breakfast nook should have been.
“But you did have relations with my mother,” I said.
“I humped her, if that’s what you mean. I was number two behind that bastard Skip, before she got wore out.”
Babe’s wife, Didi, came in from the kitchen, carrying three ice teas on an A&W Root Beer tray. “Who got wore out, honey?”
“His ma. A bunch of us screwed this junior high chick and Pee Wee here says we got her pregnant. Says I might be his dad.” Babe was paying more attention to the Washington-Detroit game on TV than to his wife or me. Washington was up 21-8—not so close a game as should have pulled him away from the possibility of a son.
Didi offered from the tray. “He’s too shrimpy, Babe.” She put a finger on her chin and studied me like a Food Lion steak. “You couldn’t be his father; unless your mama was a midget. Is your mama a midget?”
“No, ma’am. She’s about the same height as you.”
“I wish you was his boy. Babe always wanted a son, but we can’t have any, on account of the steroids.”
“Look at that pussy block,” Babe said. “I can block better’n that, without my knees.”
Didi sat down across from me on the vinyl-covered couch. “Babe had a scholarship to Virginia Tech, until he ruint both knees playing softball.”
The tea had enough sugar to send a horse into diabetic shock. “If you aren’t my father, which one do you think is?”
The Detroit quarterback fumbled the snap. “God almighty,” Babe said, “I hate quarterbacks. Every ratty little one should be horsewhipped.” He looked over at me. “Skip Prescott or the nigger, I imagine. Other than them we’re all linemen.”
“Billy Gaines was an end.”
“Tight end. And high school teams didn’t pass much in the fifties. Guilford County ran a T formation with Billy blocking the left side.”
“Was he any good?”
Babe snorted. “Billy’s blind as a bat. Mostly he stood in people’s way.”
“So you think it’s Skip or Jake.”
“I was you I’d hope for the nigger. I’d rather have a nigger daddy than Skip Prescott any day.”
“You don’t like Mr. Prescott?”
Babe went back to the game, but Didi clucked a couple times and gave the explanation. “Skip hired Babe the first summer out of high school, then said he’d fire him if he didn’t play on the Dixieland Sporting Goods softball team.”
“And Babe blew his knees,” I said.
I looked at Babe, who was pretending to watch the game. But I could tell he was thinking about what might have been.
Didi sipped her tea. She was pretty in a Kmart kind of way. I’ll bet she’d never been gone down on in her life. “Then Skip told Babe if he took these blue pills he’d grow strong and be able to play football again.”
“Steroids,” I said. “I didn’t know steroids existed back then.”
“We didn’t know what they were,” Didi said. She gestured at the game. “Now all those players on TV take steroids and not a one of them will ever have children. Babe says if he sees Skip again, he’ll break his neck.”
“I know where Skip lives.”
I think Babe wanted to change the subject, because when he spoke it was louder than before. “Your mama was a pistol, boy. I have to admit, that girl was a pistol.”
Seemed a weird thing to say about a girl you raped and urinated on. “She runs a feminist press in Wyoming,” I said.
He frowned. “Lesbo?”
“I don’t think so, she has a boyfriend.”
“Lesbos scare me. They was one in Woolworth’s the other day buying shotgun shells. Said she was going to shoot her husband.”
“You didn’t tell me that,” Didi said.
“How did you know she was Lesbian if she had a husband?” I asked.
“Short hair and a fuzzy mustache.”
Didi protested. “Italian girls have mustaches and none of them are Lesbo.”
“Wasn’t no Italian. I can tell Italian women.”
Subject closed. We sat drinking tea and watching the game while the Redskins scored two more touchdowns. Babe didn’t seem to have any more to say about fatherhood. Partway through the third quarter he had Didi fetch his hand squeezer exercise coils so he could watch TV and build up his wrists simultaneously.
“So, you’re sure you aren’t my father?” I said.
He shrugged without looking away from the game. The Lions were finally mounting a drive. “Hell, anything’s possible. Maybe you’re just a runt.”
“I think I’ll be leaving now,” I said.
Babe ignored me. Didi took my glass. “Come back any time,” she said. “We always have plenty of tea. Babe won’t drink beer. Too many former athletes drink beer and let themselves go.”
Babe sat in his recliner, flexing his wrists. Lord knows what he did for a living. What does a person whose life is his body do when the body lets him down?
“Good-bye, Mr. Carnisek,” I said.
His eyes brightened, as if he’d received an idea. “Tell you what, come Father’s Day, you can send me a card.”
“I’ll do that.”
“I always wanted a card on Father’s Day.”
7
I stopped in my yard to watch a one-legged robin hop around the grass. She seemed as stable as the next robin—didn’t tilt to one side or wobble or anything. Reminded me of a three-legged dog a neighbor of ours owned back in GroVont. Next to my pecan tree, the robin pulled a worm out of the ground. It was a long wienie and it didn’t want to give up its grasp on the earth, but the robin kept pulling and hopping back on her one leg until the worm popped free. Then she flew off, south.
Since the World Series when Wanda left, I hadn’t been seeing past myself. I hadn’t noticed how the maple leaves across the street were a deep Mogen David wine color, and the air smelled like refrigeration. The neighbor’s black cat lay curled on the hood of their Lincoln Town Car. I saw the girl Gilia in my mind and wondered where she might be swimming, so I could go there and watch. In Wyoming this was swimming temperature, but I figured the country club pool was drained by now. Maybe she was one of those people who takes swimming seriously, as opposed to a social tanning session. She had interesting eyes.
Inside the garage, a Vicksburg golf cart hummed into the plug in the
ceiling recharger. Five other models named after Civil War battles were lined up, facing the double doors. I sat on a bucket of pool-cleaning chemicals and stared at the gardening tools mounted on fiberboard on the back wall. Each hoe and hammer sat in brackets and fit into an outline of itself drawn in yellow paint on the board—like the outlines they draw around murder victims found on the sidewalk.
I had no reason for being in the garage, other than I was tired of people. Inside the house, another complicated relationship no doubt waited to be dealt with. Gus, probably, or Shannon demanding information on her grandfathers.
The truth is, meeting never-before-met parents takes a lot of emotion. Less than halfway through the process and I felt drained. Fried. Since then I’ve learned large cities have support groups for people who thought they knew who they were, then one afternoon a stranger knocks on the door and says Mother. Dad. Whatever. I don’t know what they call the support groups—Switched At Birth Anonymous, maybe—but I know they exist. One sent me a newsletter.
***
I found Gus dribbling used coffee grounds into the garbage disposal. The moment she saw me, her index finger crossed her lips in the international sign for Shhh.
“San Francisco by fourteen,” she said. “Bet on it.”
“I don’t know any bookies.”
“Your loss.”
I opened the refrigerator for a Dr Pepper. Dr Pepper is my one remaining degenerative addiction. “Gus, I’ve read everything I can find on mystic, ju-ju bwana fortune-telling methods, and no legitimate psychic in the country reads the future in coffee grounds put down the garbage disposal.”
She shut one thick eyelid and cocked her head over the drain. “My mama taught me, her mama taught her. The spirit ear goes way back to Africa.”
“How many generations in your family owned garbage disposals?”
Gus didn’t care to answer that one. “Going to be war,” she said.
“Me and Wanda?”
Her closed eye popped open. “United States of America.”
“I have enough problems this week without a war.”
Both eyes closed as Gus concentrated. “Against black people. The brothers and sisters going to fight men disguised as plants.”
