A Place Called Wiregrass

by Michael Morris

  “He’ll do you right. He’s fast with his hands.”

  I shot my eyes towards Kasi, wondering if she was talking from personal experience.

  “Works on them cars day and night,” she added.

  “I expect his wife gets tired of all that working.” I shocked myself by bringing up the mechanic’s home life. It was at times like this when I wished I was equipped with a built-in tape recorder and could recapture dumb words by pressing a rewind button.

  Another long drag on the cigarette, and then her head flung backwards as though she was looking for the first evening star. Oh great, I thought. Now she’s going to make it worse by asking me if I’m interested. I hated games women like her played.

  “You’re not going to believe this. He’s a widow,” Kasi said. Rings of smoke escaped with each word.

  “Widower?”

  “You know, his wife died. He won’t talk about it. And all Miss Trellis would say is that it was tragic.” Another long dramatic drag of nicotine. “You know how the old bat is, making you beg for answers. Well, she can kiss my tail before I beg anything out of her grubby little mouth. You heard what she done when Laurel rode her bike up by the office the other day? She went and…”

  “I believe that’s got it.”

  I didn’t even hear him walk up. He was wiping his hands together, I guess hoping the grease would somehow disappear. Fearing he heard my earlier comments about his marital status, I felt a streak of heat roll up my neck.

  “You got my work numbers to call when it’s ready?” I was busy pulling my ponytail across the base of my neck. Not allowing myself to look at his walnut-shaped eyes, I looked down at the circle of dirt he was standing in.

  When he casually walked away, he stuck his hand up in the air and cocked it forward. Skateboards and bicycles scattered to the shoulder of the pavement, and the shiny black truck departed with my worn-out car.

  Cher was in the height of her glory riding with Laurel in the backseat of Miss Claudia’s big Lincoln.

  “Where to, Miss Cher and Miss Laurel?” I knew I shouldn’t have encouraged them to act like big shots, but I tried to remind myself that you’re only a young ’un once.

  “To the penthouse apartment, darling,” Laurel said a little too convincingly. All those trashy soap operas she watched, I thought.

  “Onward to the club,” Cher said in a throaty whisper. She leaned sideways onto Laurel and giggled. Cher’s silliness comforted me. Her developing body had not evaporated my little girl yet.

  Just because I wasn’t allowed to act silly doesn’t mean it will hurt anybody else, I decided early on with Cher. Maybe if Suzette could have escaped her problems in silly giggles and make-believe, she wouldn’t have had to escape her heartache with dope.

  After the girls were dropped off at the skating rink, I found myself not wanting to go back home. Emptiness seemed to be sucked into my pores from the very air that spewed from the air-conditioning vents. Would Kasi want to talk if I stopped by her place? But then the mental image of her getting all fixed up and spiking that hair out to go juking flashed across the windshield.

  I was sure Gerald Peterson was out on some date too. I pictured him cleaned up and capless, sitting at a restaurant cutting his T-bone with those big powerful hands. After a big meal, he would go out to a club and dance. Maybe one or two beers, but he wouldn’t overindulge. He’d keep one elbow on the bar and turn his head to grin at all his friends.

  As I turned up the soft echoes of the steel guitar on the radio, I tried to capture Gerald’s voice and guess what he would say to the girlfriend he may be with tonight. All I could think of was his hair and how wavy it was. For a second I caught myself wanting to put my hands in it. But who was I fooling? Speaking of hair, I remembered mine when he first laid eyes on me. Pulled back like some bald-headed fool with a ratty ponytail dangling down my spine. Gerald Peterson was the type of man who could only be with a brassy woman, probably some beautician who spent hours pulling out all her eyebrows and drawing perfect new ones on with a black pencil. I took my knocks, but nobody could ever call me stupid. I knew where I could be accepted.

  “Now, I hope I’m not bothering you or nothing,” I said under the dim yellow light of Miss Claudia’s porch.

  “Oh, don’t be silly,” she said, dressed in a long white silk robe with big butterflies and pink flowers. “I’m just in here looking at TV.” She held the front door open, and I entered with the McDonald’s bag.

  “I went on a hunch here. You like chocolate milkshakes?” I held the bag up trying to entice her.

  Whether she did or not, I would never know. She clamped her hand on her chest and closed her eyes. “It’s just what I needed right now.”

  We decided to take our milkshakes in the family room. It was warm and inviting, with fashionable furniture. Old photographs of Patricia and Richard were scattered on the mantel and the coffee tables. A big built-in bookshelf took up one wall of the room, and I wondered if she’d really read all those books or just had them there for show.

  “They tell me Gerald Peterson is just the salt of the earth,” Miss Claudia said when I updated her on my car. She paused to suck up the last remaining drops of milk chocolate from her straw.

  “My neighbor Kasi, she said he works all the time.” I sat with my bare feet insulated under the sofa cushion, and rolled my eyes to see if my bait had been accepted.

  “I expect he has to.”

  “Does he have a bunch of kids to feed or something?”

  “Erma Lee Jacobs. You ask more questions about him than I ever heard you ask about me.” She slapped the arm of her chair. “And here you are all propped up on my love seat. Are you wishing Gerald was here to share that love seat with you?”

  I bolted my feet from under the cushion. “That’s a lie,” I yelled, trying to drown out her laughter. All I could think of was how I sounded like Cher teasing Laurel over some boy she had couple-skated with. “I mean, I was just wondering why he had to…”

  “Oh, me.” She wiped a tear away from her eye. “You’re still a good-looking woman. You’re expected to notice men, don’t you know.”

  I wondered if she knew her compliments got me every time. Whenever she made such a comment, and she did often, I always wanted to run and look in the hallway mirror to see if I could see the same qualities she claimed I had. But I usually just looked down or waved my hand, believing I could shoo away her silliness.

  “To my knowledge, Gerald Peterson is still a single man. Or he was the last time I had my car tuned up.” Miss Claudia jiggled the straw in her cup. “He’s sure had some bumps along the way.”

  Oh, Lord, here it comes, I thought. Prison, crackhead, most likely a womanizer.

  “It’s probably been three years. His wife was killed in a most terrible car wreck out on Highway 431. They tell me she was coming back from prayer meeting when a drunk ran right into her head-on. Naturally the drunk survived.”

  I thought of Bozo and all the nights he went on drunks and how I stayed worried not for his safety, but for the safety of everybody else on the road.

  “After I heard about it at the beauty shop, I took a pot of chicken and rice over. That big giant man just sitting there with his hands on his head. Lord, it liked to tore my heart out.”

  “He got any kids?”

  “There’s a girl. I say girl, I think she’s married now. And a son. Gerald Peterson is a good man, Erma Lee. You like his looks, I suppose?”

  “No, ma’am. I mean, he’s attractive and all.” I felt guilty for talking like this over a poor dead woman’s husband.

  “I don’t want you thinking every man is like that Bozo person. It took me some time after Luther was lost at sea…well, before I could think of another man. Not because I mourned him, don’t you know,” she said and pointed the tip of her straw. “But because I was scared to death I was a magnet for meanness.”

  “How did you get over all that?” I suspected there were more stories of beatings and ugliness. S
he was like me in that way. We pulled from our memory file and shared the first that came to mind, not necessarily the worst, but the most convenient.

  She shook the empty cup and sat it by the edge of her recliner. “I have to credit the good Lord for healing those mental scars. I leaned on Him mighty heavy and Missoura for healing the physical scars. She was so sweet to me. She’d ever so lightly put the lard on my broken skin. I often think now what a terrible predicament I put Aaron and Missoura in by running to their house after I thought I’d be killed. After all, Aaron worked for Luther, and him being colored was just inviting trouble. But where was I to go? My mama was under a spell of doubting where her next meal would come from, and the sheriff left it all up to Mama. Well, there you go.” She tossed up her arms to emphasize the desperation, then looked down at her painted toenails.

  I always hated times like these, not knowing whether to speak up or let the person catch their thoughts. The grandfather clock in the hallway chimed eight times. If she didn’t speak on the tenth, I would say something.

  “To keep it from looking like he was involved, Aaron paid off Nettie, the lower quarter’s concubine. She let me stay at her place. Naturally Aaron paid an even higher price. Every day searching for oysters, Aaron had to listen to Luther tell him how disgraceful I was to live like the worst kind of trash. Like Luther was supposed to be better, mind you.

  “But Aaron knew how to keep his nose clean by playing stupid. And him a hundred times smarter than that sorry Luther. So Aaron got by with offering a ‘Yez zir, boss man’ to Luther’s tirades about how horrible it was that I was living with a colored harlot. I reckon if Luther would’ve figured out Aaron was involved, he would have killed him right there on the boat and used him for bait.”

  Miss Claudia dropped her chin and stared over the tops of her glasses. “So you see why I’m so crazy about Missoura? I was the same way by Aaron, don’t you know.

  “Gracious, I saw and heard things in Crazy Nettie’s shack along Howard’s Creek that a girl had no business knowing. But I just chose to look the other way. You might as well say I had to. Missoura would take me to her house in the daytime, and then, before Aaron got home and Luther would have a chance to check up on me, I’d go to Nettie’s for bedtime. Luther said he’d kill every colored in the quarters if I didn’t go back to him. But the day he showed up to take me home, Crazy Nettie was standing on the gapped wooden porch holding two live water moccasins. She jabbered some mumbo-jumbo and claimed she put a spell on Luther. He yelled at her, ‘Get out of my way, you crazy whore.’ He hadn’t made it up the first step when Nettie threw those moccasins at him.” Miss Claudia slapped the arm of her chair and howled with laughter. “Luther fell over his feet trying to get away from there. He was so eat up with meanness the snakes wouldn’t even touch him.”

  “And that’s when you moved to Wiregrass?”

  She pulled at the folds of her robe like she might be exposing herself to a room full of men.

  “That’s when I wanted to move. I was hoping to earn enough money by helping Nettie sew clothes that I could buy a bus ticket and have a nest egg. She made me a better seamstress and complimented me on being a quick learner. Whenever she went into Old Man Maxwell’s store to buy material, I’d sit outside hoping Mama would look out the window so I could mouth her an SOS. She never did.” Miss Claudia straightened the wrinkled armrest.

  “Many a time I’ve wondered if Nettie told Mama I was outside. I felt like a trapped beaver. Maybe worse than that. Believe you me, if I could’ve chewed my leg up for freedom, I would have. Instead, I chose to earn it by making dresses and hemming seams for the folks in the quarters.

  “The day after I bought my bus ticket to Montgomery, I realized it wasn’t just nerves making my cycle late. I really was pregnant. Nettie told me she couldn’t entertain menfolk with a screaming baby in the background. They had already cut back their visits on account of a white girl on the place. Aaron and Missoura begged me to go on with my plans to leave, but that paralyzing fear set in. The kind that whispers to you in the middle of the night. Me with a baby and no means of income, in a strange town and nobody to help care for it while I worked. I let the demons convince me that the hell I knew was better than a potential unknown hell. And when Luther showed up to try and once more talk some sense into me, I gave in. Before sunset, I was back in that house on the bay, washing his dishes, shucking his oysters, and agreeing with him how stupid I was to ever leave. He waited until the second night to whip me for leaving to start with.”

  I was leaning forward with my knuckles resting on my chin. I racked my brain trying to think of a positive direction for the conversation. “What about your baby?”

  Miss Claudia sighed. I was scared to death she was growing tired of me. Then she looked up and smiled. “Little Beth. She was the one piece of joy in those days. She lived two years on this earth.” She looked down and put her hand on the edge of her eyeglasses. “Typhoid fever took her away. Just like it did my daddy and brother.”

  I just sat there looking at the upturned cushion with my bare feet curled under it, wanting to bury all of me inside the padding. My nosy landlady, Miss Trellis, had been right after all. The woman who sat before me on a throne of padded khaki had suffered in a way I think most people only relate to in a movie.

  “That’s why I respect you, Erma Lee. And don’t you ever for one minute think you should’ve stayed.” Miss Claudia pointed her finger at me and almost screamed the words like the preacher at Missoura’s church. “If the car, the trailer, the whole ground caves around you, don’t you think differently.”

  It was only when I saw her finger shake and her lip quiver that I moved to the edge of her recliner. My turn had come. I draped my arm over her soft shoulder. Instinct told me to put my head against hers, but I did not. I knew what it felt like to want to keep an inch of pride.

  She sniffled and patted my hand. I quickly moved back to the sofa.

  “We all have our cross to bear, don’t we? But I won’t have anybody feeling sorry for me, don’t you know,” she said and pulled a tissue from a gold box next to her chair. She asked me to help her up, and we walked into the formal living room with her holding my arm.

  “They say music is food for the soul. How about it?”

  I just smiled and tried to nod, but all that came out was a halfhearted movement of my head. Too much honesty always embarrassed me. How could you sing right now? I wanted to scream. You just tore your heart wide open and now—sing?

  But sing we did and repeated the chorus five times: “Count your blessings, name them one by one.”

  Seven

  Days passed, and still no sign of a shotgun-toting Bozo. Maybe that court order mandating that he keep five hundred feet from me paid off. My sleep grew sounder, and every day my nerves settled a bit more. I decided to take Miss Claudia’s advice and not question Cher about her declaration of Bozo’s return. Miss Claudia reminded me of the adjustments Cher had made and that she was most likely making it all up. I reasoned with Miss Claudia. Cher was just living in a dream world. It was her age. And I know it had to hurt Cher that Bozo stopped calling to check on her. Anytime he called it was only to cuss me out and order us back to Cross City.

  So when the phone snatched me out of a deep sleep one night, I decided there had to be something wrong with Miss Claudia. An emergency call needing my help, I thought and flung the hair from my eyes. I fumbled down the darkened hallway, stubbing my toe on a doorstop en route to the phone. Has Miss Claudia fallen out of bed? Did Richard go into one of those fits she was always talking about?

  “Hello.”

  “Where you get the idea I want to come after you?”

  I dropped my head on the kitchen counter, and my hair created a curtain over my face. The screaming on the other end of the phone seemed foreign in the otherwise still, dark trailer.

  “I warned you you had till the end of the month to get back here. And it’s been two months. You think you’re so popular I ca
n’t get shut of you, gal?”

  Every time I opened my mouth against the cool counter, he blasted through my incoherent mumbles. After what seemed to be thirty minutes of Bozo’s tirade about how he wouldn’t waste his gas to come after me, I flipped my hair back and stood erect, forcing the slits of my eyes to open. The red light of the microwave clock read three thirty-seven.

  “Is there any rhyme or reason to all this, or do you just like tying one on so you can harass me?”

  “Me harass? Me? What about the harassment you give me by having that deputy come to the shop and give me them papers?”

  The court order protecting me from this lunatic. Funny, I thought. Over the phone he seems more pathetic than scary. “Maybe if you hadn’t been telling Cher you were coming down here, they wouldn’t have to serve no papers.”

  “I ain’t told nobody nothing. Hey…hey, I don’t give a flying rip. Stay down there on welfare for all I care.”

  That did it. Me busting my tail to live paycheck to paycheck, and him accusing me of welfare. “Bozo, let me tell you one thing. I got connections here. And if you ever so much as call me drunk again, I’ll tape-record you raising sand and turn it over to the law. By the time I’m done with you, you won’t be able to step foot outside Cross City.”

  “Don’t you threaten me, woman. I can always come see my grandbaby if I want to. You can’t stop me. Hey…hey, I signed them papers as her legal…”

  “Legal daddy, maybe. But you don’t care a thing about Cher.” When I turned around, I caught a glimpse of Cher’s bare feet and the slip of her white cotton nightgown. While Bozo rambled about how sorry I’d be when he signed the divorce papers, I could only hope that Cher hadn’t heard me. I ended the call the usual way, hanging up the receiver fast and furious. The second step was taking the phone off the hook.

  Cher’s foot dangled off the side of my bed. Her soft brown hair swept up on the pillow. Her eyes were closed tight, and I tried to convince myself that my voice had not been heard. Maybe she had just had a bad dream and slipped into my bed.