A Parallel Life

by Robin Beeman

  Inside the tavern a party seemed to be getting started. The Polonius brothers were sipping the drinks they’d been promised and had ordered Charlie’s best brandy. The Basque who was the caretaker at Murphy’s was trying to find out why Tarver’s truck had wound up in Fiesta’s pen, and trying to figure out where the pony was. Tilly Worth had arrived. She had chased Fiesta out of her garden and had gone to complain about it to the Basque who wasn’t there. Tilly knew the habits of the Basque and decided to confront him here—where he drank. Tom Scarlatti, the VFD’s paramedic, had examined Beck’s ankle and decided along with Beck that it was a sprain, and that he should just keep his weight off it when he walked.

  Beck, disconsolate over matters far worse than a sprained ankle, was drinking whiskey with a beer chaser. The two women who had been taken at gunpoint arrived after being admonished and released by the sheriff. The small woman introduced herself as Bright Hawk, and was recognized as a legendary lady wrestler. Her friend—tall and beautiful, whose name was never announced—allowed Tom to put a bandage on her forehead. And the crew of the Tarver’s Crossing VFD, who had sweated under their slickers on a mission to save a compost pile, looked on as they sipped their beers.

  Joe took a seat at the end of the bar opposite Beck and ordered a beer with a whiskey chaser. He was aware that everyone in the room had surmised what the situation was between himself and Beck.

  One of the Polonius brothers elbowed the other and they both grinned at the same time. They weren’t twins, but they were so alike and had lived together so long that no one was sure who was who anymore. Together they looked from Joe to Beck, and then from Beck to Joe. After this appraisal, they conferred and when they looked up again their grins were even wider.

  “Hey, Charlie, bring Joe the dice!” said Milt—or was it Mack?

  “Hey, Beck, you and the kid roll the dice. Take care of it that way,” said the other.

  “It seems like Rita ought to have a word in this,” said Joe as Beck scowled.

  In Rita’s kitchen, her long counter bravely upheld the labors of the afternoon. It stood heaped with loaves of bread, with succulent chickens, with tender salmon, with piles of vegetables reeling under olive oil and vinegar and garlic. Wet with perspiration, head in hands, shoulders shaking with the force of her weeping, Rita sat beside these offerings.

  This is the sight that Cherry Vivaldi, passing on her way down to meet her lover Tom Scarlatti at the Manhood Tavern, saw when she looked in after smelling the odors of all of that wonderful food.

  “Rita!” she said. “I thought you’d closed.”

  “Oh, Cherry,” Rita wailed, looking up. “I’m so miserable.”

  “What’s wrong?” Cherry asked and knelt beside Rita, taking her hand and holding it.

  “It’s about love,” sobbed Rita. “Do you think love ever really makes anyone happy?”

  “Oh,” said Cherry. She and Tom had just fallen in love and she wasn’t the right person to ask, but she was willing to consider this. “I don’t know,” she said finally, “but it makes them glad.”

  “Oh, Cherry,” sobbed Rita and threw her arms around the young woman’s shoulders. “I love them both.”

  Cherry, who had been present when Beck arrived, knew what Rita was talking about. “That’s a problem.” She squeezed Rita’s hand to show her deepest sympathy. “But things may just work out.” Cherry was a born optimist. She was also curious. “What are you going to do with all this food?”

  “I don’t know,” Rita said. “I just had this urge to cook.”

  “We could have a picnic. That should cheer you up. Tom and I were going to the reservoir to swim. We could invite people. Why don’t you wash up and come with us? It would be better than sitting here feeling terrible.”

  “I don’t want to,” Rita said. “Just take the food.”

  “No,” said Cherry. “No you, no picnic.”

  That’s why, a little later Cherry led Rita into the Manhood Tavern to count heads for the picnic. Before this could happen, however, Rita had to face both Beck and Joe, who sat at the bar as if they were waiting for her. They both turned when the door opened, and both of them watched her walk into the center of the room. She was pale and her dark eyes looked like two coals in a snowbank.

  Everyone stopped talking and waited.

  “I’ve made some mistakes in my life,” Rita said, acknowledging the fact that a public testimony was expected. Her voice had such a delicate quaver to it that almost everyone thought she would falter and not go on, but she continued. People leaned forward straining to hear. “But not in love,” she said, and her voice grew stronger. “I fell in love with two men and I don’t want to give up either of them.” She paused and looked straight ahead, as if afraid to turn in either’s direction for fear she might be swayed. “That’s all there is to it. I want them both. I can love them both.”

  No one said anything for a long time. One of the Polonius brothers’ dogs howled outside, but everyone acted as if the dog was howling on Mars. Beck stared into his glass, Joe at the lamp over Rita’s head. Then, when they finally spoke, they both did it together.

  “Okay,” said Beck.

  “Sure,” said Joe.

  The Polonius brothers were the first to begin clapping. But everyone else joined in.

  “You guys could roll for the evenings, if you’ll pardon the expression,” said Charlie and he lifted the leather cup with the poker dice.

  “Okay,” said Beck.

  “Sure,” said Joe.

  The Polonius brothers used their truck to bring the food up to the reservoir. Everyone else walked—even Beck, who limped but wouldn’t let anyone help him. When they reached the pool in the woods, they found it to be the color of the sky and streaked with the reds and pinks of sunset.

  They lost no time in shedding their clothes. No one was coy. The Basque tried to keep on his beret, but when he dove in it came off and floated away and he didn’t seem to notice. Bright Hawk and her friend walked in holding hands and then they did the backstroke together in such marvelous synchronization that Charlie Manhood thought of Esther Williams and almost cried. Tilly Worth, who was just getting over being furious with Fiesta, tiptoed to the water’s edge and splashed herself before wading in, a gesture so demure and deliberate that both of the Polonius brothers got their first erections in fifteen years. The men of the VFD ran in, drill style, and splashed and snorted and then chose sides in order to chicken fight. Cherry and Tom swam off together to the far side to kiss and whisper and promise that they’d never be foolish. And Rita held Beck’s hand on one side and Joe’s on the other and the three waded out and allowed themselves to be suspended by the water. The sunset lasted and lasted and the light became more and more like molten silver. When they finally came out of the pool, they found themselves shining.

  Taking Fire

  THE TOW TRUCK backed the dark green Chevrolet into a space and it became one of a line of cars on the back lot behind the Gulf Service Station, but everybody knew it wasn’t just an ordinary car anymore. Even the almost-new 1957 Ford Fairlane with the caved-in roof a few cars down, a Ford that had taken the life of Red Landry on the famous Dead Man’s Curve on Military Road only a week before, wasn’t in the running.

  Meat Daigle, who owned the Gulf Station, shooed people away. He knew the car was special but he didn’t know how to handle it yet, so he placed his bulk between the car and those of us looking on, and that seemed to be barrier enough.

  As we were moving away, I saw my father drive by on his way home to lunch and I ducked behind a gas pump. Watching a tow truck bring in the car in which two people had just that morning been found dead after having been missing for more than five days wasn’t the sort of entertainment that he would approve of for his seventeen-year-old daughter. I ducked behind a pump even though I didn’t think he’d see me. He always drove with his eyes straight ahead on the road, expecting the worst. As soon as he was gone, Lorraine, Tom, and I got into Tom’s mother’s new Buick Road
master and drove to the Dairy Freeze. Nobody talked. Lorraine and I got cones but threw them away when they started to melt because we couldn’t eat them.

  “I’m going to be sick,” Lorraine said. “I can’t believe we just did that—went there.” She looked like she might actually throw up. Her plump, olive-skinned face had an odd gray cast. Her eyes looked glazed. Lorraine was very emotional. She even wept over the stuffed animals that cluttered her bed. She had been my neighbor for years and there was a bond of time between us, but mostly she made me impatient.

  “I would have gone over to see the inside of the car if Meat hadn’t been there,” Tom said. “Just to see.”

  “Just to see what? They’re gone,” I said.

  “Just to see,” Tom said. Then he shrugged and backed up the Buick and threw his paper cup half full of milk shake out of the window.

  “What’s that stuff called again, Patsy?” Lorraine asked me, frowning. Lorraine’s mind seemed not to have been intended to store facts. “The stuff that killed them.”

  “Carbon monoxide,” I said. “We studied it in chemistry. Remember?”

  “I guess I was absent that day,” Lorraine said. “Take me home. I have to baby-sit this afternoon.”

  With Lorraine gone, Tom and I drove out to Old Landing, a clearing in the woods on the deeper part of the river where some pilings from an ancient pier jutted out of the water. If you didn’t know the history, that boats came across the lake and up the river from New Orleans and unloaded here once, you’d probably think what was left of the pilings were just big cypress knees. Old Landing was the local make-out place. During the day black people came here to fish, but at night cars drove up and turned off their lights and parked under the low-hanging branches of oak trees. Today the place was deserted.

  We parked. Neither of us could think of anything to say. Tom got out and I followed him. He picked up a stick and threw it into the water and three turtles scuttled off a log and swam away. The October sun was low—just behind the trees and their shadows were long on the murky water.

  “It’s like a bad, a really bad, joke,” Tom said finally. “People were laughing about it, but nobody felt good.”

  “It’s like the worst joke,” I said. “To be found out like that. He had four little children over in Bethel, and they and his wife and her mother were at a prayer service when it happened.”

  “They went to the carnival. She was eating cotton candy. The Ferris wheel broke and they got stuck at the top for a half an hour.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “Somebody at the gas station saw them there.”

  “So they were at the carnival before they went to park?”

  “Yeah,” Tom said and laughed, a laugh that stopped short. He bent and picked up another stick and threw it in the water. It was a small stick and the splash wasn’t much.

  “Well, if they’d come here to Old Landing, it wouldn’t have taken five days to find them. They’d have been found in about half an hour. Everybody comes here.” I picked up a stick and threw it in the water, too. I couldn’t think of anything else to do then.

  “Jesus,” Tom said. He walked back to the car. I followed him, got in, and turned on the radio. The Everly Brothers were singing “Wake Up Little Susie.” I turned it off.

  Tom didn’t get in but stood by the car looking around. Maybe he was fixing in his mind the location of each tree and each rut in the road and each piece of ground where the grasses had been flattened by car tires. I was. “I think I’ll check the oil,” he said.

  “You just checked it a few days ago.”

  “I promised my mother I’d check the oil if I used the car,” he said.

  When he got back in the car, I moved over next to him and put my hand on his thigh. I wanted to touch him. I always wanted to touch him. I couldn’t keep my hands off him. I’d never been like that with a boy before. I’d always been able to be the cool one, the one to turn on the ice, but Tom made me a little nuts.

  I couldn’t explain it to myself. I was older than he was. I was a senior and he was only a junior. He wasn’t that handsome. He had sandy hair that was soft and couldn’t even stand up as a crew cut. He wore glasses, but when he took them off to kiss me, I couldn’t stop looking at his soft gray unfocused eyes. Somehow knowing he couldn’t really see me up so close made him seem beautifully flawed and gave me a sense of power. He turned to me and slid his hand up under my shirt and started to unhook my brassiere. I reached up and took off his glasses for him. Taking off Tom’s glasses was like undressing him. We tried to kiss but both of our mouths were dry as dust.

  “Leroy Odum says that the bodies were melted together,” my brother Davis said that night at dinner. He had been mixing up his green peas and mashed potatoes, swirling them with his fork. “The sun just cooked them in that car as if they’d been in a pot in the oven. They were birthday naked and their clothes were in a heap on the front seat.”

  “This is not a topic for dinner conversation,” my father said. “Or conversation anywhere.” He had a piece of meat halfway to his mouth but put the fork down on his plate.

  “The whole event is just better forgotten,” my mother said after she’d swallowed. Her face was puffy and damp. She always seemed to be perspiring—even when it was cold. “It’s just unspeakable.”

  “I knew who he was,” Davis continued. He was thirteen and still felt that it was worthwhile to try to talk to our parents. “He drove the bulldozer over at the pine oil factory. She was a waitress at Carmichael’s.”

  “I think everyone is familiar with this information,” my father said. “I think I have heard this repeated at least fifty times today.” My father was a pharmacist and generally heard everything. There had once been a soda fountain in his drugstore which had attracted people. When he took out the fountain to get more shelf space and replaced it with a Coke machine, people still came and stood around talking, with bottles of Coke in their hands.

  Even though he heard it all there behind the prescription counter, my father never repeated anything. He felt that the drugstore was a hallowed place and he, like doctors and lawyers, had a sacred duty to keep all the gossip that he received within those walls confidential. People trusted him, it’s true, but I always thought this notion of his made him a pretty boring person.

  “It makes you wonder, though . . .” my mother said and squinted across the room as though looking for something in the china cabinet there.

  “They were trashy people,” my father said. “Trashy people do trashy things.”

  “They died for love,” Lorraine said.

  “They died because of love,” I said. “It’s different.” Lorraine and Tom and I were driving around after school in my father’s Studebaker, a ridiculous car, that my father had bought several years ago because he thought it was what the cars of the future would look like and, by buying it as soon as it came out, he would be recognized as a visionary during his lifetime. We had just driven by the hill of pine knots beside the pine oil factory. An old straw-hatted man was driving the bulldozer today. Several other cars were also driving by the pine oil factory, which was unusual. Hardly any traffic ever went along this pothole-pitted back street. I figured if we saw any of the same cars passing by our next stop, Carmichael’s, we’d know that we were part of some sort of sorry pilgrimage.

  There was a small crowd at Carmichael’s, a narrow place between the hardware and a florist, more than you’d expect at 3:30 on a Friday afternoon. People our age didn’t go to Carmichael’s. It didn’t have a jukebox, just a radio tuned to a station that played country music alternating with farm bulletins. Afternoons were for the pie-and-coffee set, the local businessmen, the farmers who came into town for the day, and women who’d spent a taxing afternoon at the Ben Franklin or Shultz’s Dry Goods.

  “This was her dress,” I heard one of the waitresses—a fat woman with tight blue sausage curls and small close-set eyes—say to a woman in a red flowered house coat. “She left it on this peg
here in the hall and changed into a regular dress in the ladies’ room. She was wearing a little rabbit-fur jacket she’d just gotten, and I think he probably helped her pay for it, because how else . . .?”

  “However else . . .?” the woman in red echoed as if there was really no question about that sort of thing. She looked at the dress but stood back from it as if it might be carrying some disease the way that blankets the white men gave to the Indians carried smallpox germs.

  “This was her dress, Ruth,” the woman in red said to another woman who came up to her. I slid along behind them and went to the ladies’ room and waited inside next to the door until they’d gone. Then I came out and passed the dress, brushing against it, letting it touch my face. It was a pink cotton dress with a white collar and cuffs. I closed my eyes for a second, feeling it against my cheek. It smelled of sweat and Evening in Paris dusting powder. I knew about Evening in Paris. My father sold it. My mother preferred Coty’s.

  “They had the radio tuned to ‘Randy’s Record Shop.’ ” Tom said as I slid into the booth next to him. Lorraine sat across from us twisting her hair around her finger and looking at the men in the room. I could see her giving eye contact to someone and I turned slightly to check it out. It was Mr. Demarie, the mailman. He was good looking but he was also almost old enough to be Lorraine’s father.

  “Watch it, Lorraine,” I said, “Or they’ll be vacuuming you off the backseat of some old Chevrolet.”

  “That’s disgusting,” Lorraine said and pushed her order of fried onion rings away. “I’m going to puke.”

  “God,” Tom said. “That really was disgusting, Patsy!” His face was pale with shock. “You don’t have to be so specific. Lorraine’s not that kind of person.”