by Lynn Pruett
Friday afternoon I was back at work and everyone, except Jessamine, looked happy to see me. Miz Bohannon had dragged Darla in to help out, though she’s not much for work in a kitchen. She did say, “Thank goodness you are here,” before stripping off her apron and bolting out the back door.
Jessamine was edgy around me as always, contradictory—you know, one salt and two peppers when I’d do it the other way, but I was feeling better in my body. My breaths reached to the bottom of my lungs. I smelled broccoli! Astonished, I lifted the lid of the steamer and savored the aroma, green with a bit of iron. So that was broccoli. I opened the oven for a better whiff of biscuits and bent over the chocolate sheet cakes so long I almost swooned. Jessamine put her hands on her hips and asked if I was on medication.
Before I could answer, Miz Bohannon dropped in, dressed for her date. She had on a nice blue drop-waist jumper, nothing provocative, although her lipstick was a deeper red than I’d seen before. She might have done something to bring out her blue eyes because they were sparkling. Jessamine didn’t say anything to her but I allowed as she looked nice. She smiled and went outside, where I heard the guffaw of the sheriff’s pick-up truck as she climbed in.
I unboxed Rice Krispies to prepare for Saturday’s breakfast and set them on the counter near the refrigerator. I checked the milk supply. “We’re out of oatmeal,” I said.
Jessamine shrugged. “It’s too hot to eat oatmeal anyway. Come with me to the storeroom.”
Guessing it was confession time, I prayed for the fortitude not to start speaking before she was done her piece.
“I’ve got something for you.” She flung open the door and turned on the light.
On the gold chair lay two cartons of Marlboros, opened, the packs still stacked. The silver rectangles were wrapped in cellophane, shiny and magnetic. My brain did a little tick. My fingers touched my lips. A gush singed my windpipe. I walked toward the cartons and slipped into the rickety chair without making a squeak.
Jessamine was gone.
I sat as if in worship. I knelt and reached out for one pack. The crinkly paper rustled like a Christmas package and my mouth watered. I lifted the box to my nose and sniffed. Tobacco, rich and brown. All that stood between me and pleasure was a thin skin of cellophane, a wafer of cardboard—and a lack of matches.
I searched the storeroom, the cabinets, the closets. I went through all the waitresses’ dirty uniforms, but found none. I went out to the dining room, searching for an ally. Instead I saw Reverend Peterson, so I retreated to the kitchen.
“Well,” said Jessamine, jiggling silverware on the drying tray as if it were a haul of herring, “happy now?”
“I came for matches,” I said. My voice was so frail I didn’t recognize it.
She tossed me the big box of matches we keep on the windowsill for lighting birthday candles. They came at stomach level. I felt as if I’d caught a log in my gut. Jessamine began to burn with the power of lies; it looks white and healthy in the beginning but it heats too fast and too bright and cores you from the inside. I knew her soul was on my conscience.
I went back to the storeroom and sat a long time, my mind in turmoil. I opened one pack and broke a cigarette and rubbed the brown crumbs on my fingers, then pressed them to my nose. This heavenly smell was the aroma of my descent into Hell. So delicious, the temptation.
I sat there a good hour in the fading light, breathing in agony, then just breathing, breathing in darkness. The sun’s last rays caught the slick wrappings and made the chair glow as if in flame, smoldering, as Jessamine had when she’d sat there all high and mighty with adulterous sin. And then I understood her wish. She was giving me the chair as she had been in it. Lusting. But I knew better. This was my chance to show her the way.
The smell of the devil was there with me, crisp to the touch and papery. I breathed loudly against him, against sin. Tough and hard air rushed through my passages. I felt my lungs inflate and grow, become large beating wings, and then the smell was gone and words came to me.
Now my lungs are clear. Now I am in the light. Whatever befalls the Bohannons and the Reynoldses cannot touch me, for it is ordained.
I am in the light.
Relief broke like sweat in my heart.
I loaded the golden chair onto a flat docket, pushed it into the parking lot, careful not to spill its precious cargo, held my breath as I dipped up a bucket of discarded cooking oil from the vat near the Dumpster, then poured that rancid slime over the Marlboros. I stood back a piece and tossed lit matches onto the chair. The oil ignited. Flames spread over the crackly curling cellophane. The boxes roared; then the cigarettes caught, but they were too few to send up a tobacco-scented cloud as I wished. I wanted to see the ghost of the tobacco devil shoot out of that chair. I wanted an angel to appear at my bonfire, something grand to acknowledge acceptance of my mission, someone I could thank for my new fresh breath.
REVEREND MARTIN PETERSON
On Friday, Reverend Martin Peterson stood in his living room in front of a canvas twelve feet high, speechless. Stelle applied red paint to the canvas with a cleaning brush as if trying to scrub through it. It was dinnertime and, as far as his nose could discern, nothing was cooking.
She said, “When I speak in tongues, I see visions.”
“Visions of what?” he asked, regarding the zigzags of red and black and white from a distance.
“Visions of spiritual truth, like this,” said Stelle, standing somewhat in awe of the gory thrusts of oil.
“I see,” said Martin. This was not art but slashing with paint. “What’s for supper?” he asked, hoping to move back to familiar territory.
“I haven’t thought about it. I guess there’s some leftover lettuce and peas.” Stelle seemed to have slipped into one of her trances that brought forth strange syllables in church. When Stelle spoke in tongues, the language flowed like a cool stream through the congregation. Silence followed, a still harmony in the wake of beauty. Martin did not feel serenity in her paintings, though. They were angry and ugly and formless. She was talking of hanging them behind his pulpit, but that he would not allow.
He stood with the refrigerator door open and saw that the peas she’d mentioned were field peas, brown and mushy with dark eyes in their center, not green and sweet as he’d hoped. He’d already reconciled himself to fixing a salad, the leaves ruffly with red edges, a mountain of peas capped with creamy hollandaise.
Before she began painting, Stelle had loved to cook. Not only had the food surprised his tongue but the beautiful arrangements pleased his eye. There had always been something warm and bright—red beans or roasted red peppers or shaved yellow squash or darling sugar snap peas perfectly blanched. But Stelle never planned meals for him anymore. She barely talked to him except about the sermon and her paints. She did her minister’s wife’s duties without comment. In the past she’d fill him up with entire conversations she’d had with people in the church, all their foibles and motivations and needs. She was so empathetic. She could lay her finger on someone’s heart. Yet she’d held her distance, too, so that their house was not overrun with parishioners. They felt administered to when Stelle listened and therefore did not bother him, as he was struggling through his sermon or analyzing the budget or corresponding with other ministers about the embarrassing sex scandals of some of their national leaders. She was then the perfect minister’s wife in a state where people were busybodies and liked to visit.
With their sex life dwindling to nothing and her forgetting to shop or cook, Martin did not know what to think. He was forty-six and, until last fall, a youthful-looking man. Age appeared suddenly, sagging the skin beneath his chin, dragging down the corners of his mouth. At breakfast one morning, Stelle had said, “So you look your age. Finally.”
All his adult life, he’d been caught up in his career, practicing the delivery of God’s words. He’d been a firebrand, solving problems, raising money, leading trips to disaster areas. In Alabama, where tornadoes rushed t
hrough twice a year, these became annual treks for the Church of the Holy Resurrection. Back then, Stelle had not denied him. She was still beautiful, still the woman of his choice, still the woman he loved. But every evening now he had to negotiate a blind maze and if he took one false step—then no sex.
“I do not want to eat cold field peas,” he said glumly, loudly, but she was too enamored of her painting to hear.
He marched over to the front door and jangled his keys.
“I’m going out for dinner, to the truck stop,” he said.
“Have a good time,” she said.
Have a good time! What did she think he was going to do? He hadn’t had a good time in years, it seemed to him. She’d been so cold so long, so very long. He’d tried prayer but he had the nagging fear that Stelle was praying too and it was her prayers that were being answered.
He floored the gas pedal. Chunks of gravel bit the bottom of the car as he peeled out without looking. At the truck-stop exit, he had to mash the brakes to avoid rear-ending a red Oldsmobile that belonged to Richard and Ann Reynolds. As he was getting out of his car, they hailed him, so he went inside and joined them for dinner.
HATTIE BOHANNON
God was the last thing on Hattie Bohannon’s mind when Gert Geurin caught her in the office and invited her to church. She’d been having murderous fantasies about Kenny Ranford over late shipments of beef: Kenny Ranford, sprig of a man, chilled in a meat locker until inert, released onto blacktop so steamy it shifted when trod upon. That’d give him the fantods, the same flutter of anxiety he gave her when the food supplies didn’t arrive on schedule.
“However, I am not an evil woman,” she’d said, glanced up from her ledger, and seen Gert, pious as a bull, filling the doorway.
“Miz Bohannon,” said the cook, “on behalf of our Savior, I ask you to attend our revival service next Friday night.”
“Oh, Gert,” Hattie said, “I’m afraid I have a date Friday night.” So Hattie accepted Paul Dodd, the sheriff, by way of refusing Gert. Until that moment she had turned him down. A man who dangled handcuffs from his belt made her nervous. Yet he had a pleasing protective shape, a barrel chest, and thighs, she supposed, bigger than hers. Her heart began to pound a little, just thinking about him. I am silly, she thought, but she couldn’t keep from smiling. It was no big deal, really, just a trip to the drive-in theater to see a movie. But something had changed. Fresh blood seemed to flow from her heart and she felt as if its old husk was splitting and falling away.
On Friday night, Hattie shook the enormous tub of yellowed popcorn on her lap. It had sat, a barrier between herself and Paul Dodd, on the seat of his truck. He had neglected to buy her supper. The snack crunched like Styrofoam, and on opening night, too. She munched a handful as yet another preview showed men in combat, this time using tanks and a radar screen to blow up an enemy. Yay, team! Oh, a mistake. It was an ad for the army. They could spend a million dollars in advertising but they couldn’t tell her where her deceased husband was. Oakley Bohannon, Missing in Traction. How could they lose a body from a hospital bed?
She forced her attention to the screen. She wanted to have fun tonight. She watched the opening credits and absently let her hand sift popcorn. If she placed the tub on the seat or offered it to Paul, they would have an awkward moment of speech. The silence in the cab loomed large as a cave. Perhaps he had bought the big tub because he hadn’t eaten supper either. Perhaps he had expected her to offer him a meal, since she owned a restaurant. Perhaps he thought she was a pig.
She had thought the drive-in romantic but now everything about it irritated her: the perspiration on her neck, the dust on the windshield, the squawky box she jarred loose trying to swat the mosquito biting her knee. It was smelly and dusty and the movies moved fast and too many people got killed in them. She glanced across the seat at Paul, enthralled in the now-rolling murder-chase adventure. Why had he worn setting gel on his hair? Short and stubby, it looked like a fresh wash would make it stand up.
Paul’s arm reached out and lay across the trickle of sweat on the back of her neck. Her jaws clamped down on two kernels of popcorn. She stared hard at the screen. His head drew close. He planted a kiss, half-on, half-off her mouth. Before she had time to think, she wriggled her shoulders out from under his arm. He slid away, his chin resting on the steering wheel, eyes glued to the hero’s mad escape in a Land Rover.
She choked, then coughed the chewed corn into her hand. Paul slapped her back where her bra hooked. The bra was old and one hook was bent and sharp. It jabbed with each blow of his hand. She felt the hook lose its grip. She sat back, squashing his hand against the seat. “I’m fine,” she gasped.
He slipped his arm free. “Didn’t mean to give you a scare, old gal.”
Old gal? When her breathing calmed, she stole a look at his rigid profile. She retrieved the tub and hugged it to her chest. He was a nice man, well-meaning. Could she tell him that sitting in a pickup truck on a warm evening with half the county galumphing by for peanuts and Sno-Cones was not the ideal spot for stealing a kiss? It was nothing like she’d imagined, the first kiss of being single again. She pictured herself sitting on an overstuffed couch covered with soft peach fabric, leaning forward, hand closed around the slender stem of a crystal wineglass, her knees comfortably together beneath a striking but tasteful marine-blue evening gown. The man was a bit amorphous. All she’d imagined was a dark suit and a dark head bending to meet hers.
Paul broke out laughing. All the trucks around them seemed to be shaking with laughter as well. On the screen, the red cherry of a patrol car slowly emerged from a shallow lake. A fat sheriff’s face sputtered a soggy oath.
This felt like a charade of a date, all wrong. As if she was an alien, not a native. Who did she think she was? A model in a magazine, a movie star, a doctor’s wife? Her sojourns to Washington to visit Oakley had changed her. She’d always gone alone and enjoyed being anonymous in the city. Yet her trip last fall to find Oakley had been fruitless. She’d come gladly home, where her name meant something. But did it mean she had to fit in to be happy? She looked at Paul enjoying the action. Maybe he would like to drive his patrol car at fast speeds chasing criminals across state lines.
The more he laughed, the more alone she felt. She studied his lips, features she hadn’t considered before. It seemed important to fix them in her head in a pleasant way. At the truck stop, she reduced men to a single characteristic—a chin, a chest, a pair of knees. It made them less intimidating.
Paul’s lips were uneven, ragged. The right slope trailed longer into the corner than the left, and the lower lip rolled forward like a fat caterpillar. No. No. Positive. It must be positive—an ocean wave to buoy her with tingles and goose bumps. There, that was right. His lower lip was like a cresting wave.
Slowly Paul turned, as if beckoned by her probing eyes.
“You remind me of Clint Eastwood,” she said.
He swung his head back to the screen.
Good Lord, Hattie thought. Would he take that as a compliment? She hadn’t paid enough attention to know if Clint Eastwood was in the movie or not. But there was something about Paul Dodd that reminded her in a vague way of Clint Eastwood: his silence and the craggy brows over his eyes that seemed to know more than he would ever say.
So she simply reached across the seat of his pickup truck, took his hand, and squeezed it.
He sighed and returned the squeeze. On the screen the hero and a starlet fell to the ground and began rolling in wild passion. Paul talked over the window speaker. “These young girls today don’t even fight. They want it, and that turns me off like a hard freeze. I like a gal that resists.” He pointed to the screen. “We are of the right generation, Hattie. No kooks.”
Hattie leaned against the headrest. This was going to be all right. They’d go just as slow as she wanted.
On the way home, Paul’s police radio squawked. A woman had died on the other side of the county and he needed to go right away. “Let me
show you how a real cop works, honey,” he said, and squared his shoulders.
Hattie sighed and watched bugs swirl in the headlights above the back road they took to Nougat, a tiny community that still wasn’t hooked into the county water system. The window was down. They drove through a tunnel of heavy-scented pines. Despite the circumstances, it was nice to be out and away from work and her daughters. She moved her face into the wind.
“You know,” Paul said, “I could set up a radar team at the truck stop. Tennessee and Georgia cops don’t mess much with speeders so I’m sure the cars are flying like bullets into Alabama.”
“If you get to be a regular, you won’t have to wait for your food,” Hattie said, and looked away to hide her smile.
Paul stopped in front of a small house. Hattie waited until he joined a huddle of people on the lawn before she fixed her bra. She felt like a voyeur. The people gestured toward the house and a car parked on the road where others hovered and tapped its windshield.
Hattie got out of the truck. Honeysuckle grew like grass in the yard and made the air sweet. The vines rooted a stack of cascading tires to the ground, a statue of movement. Hattie wondered where the dead woman was.
Paul was still writing on his tablet when the ambulance and the news reporter arrived. A spotlight swept over the parked car, revealing, in silhouette, a woman sitting in the driver’s seat, glaring down the beams flaring in her face.
Drawn, like Paul, to the car to watch the medics ridiculously shine a flashlight in the dead woman’s wide-open eyes, to see them push back a dozen layers of sleeves to find her thick wrist, to check her pulse, to hear them shout, “Stretcher and a sheet!” and then to feel her own way backwards to the pickup truck, to lean against its breathing warm metal with her breathing warm skin, Hattie wished for the antiseptic deaths of the movie screen.
A tottering old man at the edge of the crowd collapsed. The neighbors tugged his shoulders but he was too weak to sit up. They put a flask to his lips. He rinsed the liquor through his mouth, then spat it on the ground, “I never drank a drop in my life and I am not going to start now on account of Dovie Mae.”
