Patchwork

by Bobbie Ann Mason

  “How much do you owe?”

  “Over five hundred dollars.” Emmett lifted his skirt and fanned his legs. “They hit me over the head with it. I’d forgot all about it.”

  “It was that semester he dropped out of Murray,” Sam explained. Emmett had dropped his courses but kept collecting monthly checks from the V.A. all semester.

  “They won’t take me to court, though,” Emmett said. “It’s not enough money for them to fool with. And I don’t have no salary to garnishee.” He laughed.

  “You can take my education benefits and pay for those classes,” Sam said. “I don’t want to go to college that bad.”

  “That reminds me, Sam. Your mama called this evening when you were out running. She wants to know if you’re going to U.K. this fall.”

  “I don’t want to go to the same school as my mother. That would be too weird for words. Did she want me to call back?”

  “No. She just said to tell you she still wanted you to come up there.”

  “Don’t go,” Lonnie said, reaching for her hand. “I need you here to help me get started.”

  “I’m not going to Lexington. The track team’s better at Murray than U.K. anyway. It’s more personal.” Sam had been accepted at both the University of Kentucky and Murray State University, and Murray was nearby. She hoped to commute.

  Emmett gave Sam a can of beer. “Go ahead and drink it. I won’t tell on you. It’ll give you carbohydrates so you can run tomorrow.”

  Sam sipped the beer. It didn’t taste as bad as it smelled. She and Lonnie were sitting close to each other on the couch. Sam’s bare legs brushed against Lonnie’s jeans and made her feel a stir of desire. The couch was fuzzy and scratched her legs. Emmett had bought the couch at a yard sale. Emmett did most of his shopping at yard sales. All their stuff was junk. She felt empty and disappointed. Lonnie didn’t have a job, and he wasn’t going to college. Sam had worked at the Burger Boy after school for two years, but in March she had quit so she could have more time to study. She had been promised her old job back in the fall.

  Emmett took the muffelatas from the oven and transferred them to melamine plates that Sam’s mother had left behind. She had taken her good dishes. He brought the muffelatas in to Sam and Lonnie.

  “Thanks, Emmett,” said Lonnie. “This is what I call service.” He stubbed out his cigarette in Emmett’s Kentucky Lake ashtray.

  “Don’t mean nothing,” said Emmett.

  Sam didn’t really like the taste of beer, but the muffelata was delicious. Emmett knew how to make muffelatas just right, with lots of olives and onions. Irene never made muffelatas.

  “I don’t think that storm’s coming,” Emmett said when he brought in his own plate.

  “What’s on HBO tonight?” asked Lonnie. “This MTV crap is too weird.”

  Billy Joel was singing “Uptown Girl.” He was in a garage mechanic’s coveralls, lusting after Christie Brinkley. Sam said, “HBO is pukey tonight—Humanoids from the Deep. But there’s an R-rated movie on Cinemax at midnight.”

  “Oh, good!” Lonnie’s parents wouldn’t get cable because of all the Rrated movies. Two weeks ago, someone had blown up the cable man’s mailbox with a cherry bomb.

  Emmett punched the buttons on the selector box. Surfers rode by, then policemen. He settled on Johnny Carson and sat down with his plate, scooting the cat to one side. His skirt fell on the cat, but Moon Pie didn’t budge. He was black with white armpits and a big saucer face. Emmett was so crazy about the cat he even slept with him. Moon Pie always woke him up at 4 A.M., and Emmett would get up and feed him, but lately Emmett had been keeping a packet of Tender Vittles under his pillow and a bowl beside the bed so he could feed Moon Pie practically in his sleep.

  “How do you know Humanoids from the Deep is no good?” said Lonnie.

  “Hemorrhoids from the Deep,” said Sam. “I’ve seen it and it stinks. Oh, look at Johnny’s suit!” she cried, pointing. Johnny Carson’s suit made rainbows under the TV lights—soft, glistening colors like those in a puddle of oil. The colors reminded Sam of the Jupiterscope her mother had sent her for her birthday last year. She had bought it in a museum in Cincinnati. The Jupiterscope was a circle of plastic, like a large soft contact lens, that turned scenery into shimmering colors when you looked through it. It was a silly present.

  Lonnie laughed. “Hey, can you imagine Johnny Carson wearing a skirt?” he said. “I dare you to wear that skirt out in public, Emmett.”

  “It’s healthier for a man to wear a skirt,” Emmett said solemnly. “He’s not all cramped up and stuff.”

  Sam said to Lonnie, “It makes me so mad about that rash on his face. He won’t see about it.”

  “What’s wrong with your face, Emmett? I wasn’t going to mention it.”

  “It’s just adolescence. Haven’t you noticed how my voice is changing?” Emmett spoke deliberately in an unnaturally squeaky voice.

  “Be serious,” said Sam. “You’ve got Agent Orange. Those pimples are exactly how they described them on the news.” Agent Orange terrified her. It had been in the news so much lately.

  “I wasn’t exposed to Agent Orange,” Emmett said.

  “You might have been around it and not known it.”

  “Maybe you could get some money out of the government, Emmett,” Lonnie said. “Then you could pay them back what you owe.”

  “What would be the point of that? A lot of rigamarole and we’d end up where we started. So let ’em keep the money to begin with.” Emmett touched his face. “This ain’t nothing,” he said. He shrugged, then cocked his head. Thunder. “Socrates wore a toga,” he said, petting Moon Pie. “All them Greeks and Romans wore dresses.”

  Sam laughed. “Are you going to wear it to McDonald’s in the morning, Emmett?” Emmett always had breakfast at McDonald’s with his friends.

  “I don’t want anybody to get any wrong ideas.”

  Sam and Lonnie laughed. “What would they think, Emmett?” said Lonnie.

  They knew what people thought. There were a lot of stories floating around about Emmett. Emmett was the leading dope dealer in town. Emmett slept with his niece. Emmett lived off his sister. Emmett seduced high school girls. He had killed babies in Vietnam. But he was popular, and Emmett didn’t care what some people said.

  Ed McMahon blasted out one of his phony belly laughs, and then a loud thunderclap made the light flicker. Emmett suddenly bent over and clutched his chest.

  “What’s wrong, Emmett?” Lonnie asked.

  Emmett was grimacing with pain.

  “You’ve got heartburns again,” Sam said. “It’s those tacos you ate at supper.” Sam explained to Lonnie, “He’s been getting gas. I told him not to eat tacos with hot-stuff. It always makes him belch.”

  “I guess so,” Emmett said, straightening up and shaking his shoulders. Thunder crashed again, and Emmett cringed. Sam was scared. She had never had heartburns herself, and she didn’t know if heart attacks were related.

  “Are you all right, Emmett?” asked Lonnie. “Don’t you go kicking the bucket without making out your will first.”

  “It’s all right,” Emmett said. “It went away.”

  Emmett looked stately in his skirt—tall and broad, like a middle-aged woman who had had several children. Sam and Lonnie sat on the couch with their hands on each other’s thighs while Emmett cautiously sat down in the vinyl chair, fluffing up his skirt to let air flood his legs.

  “We’ll be right back,” said Johnny.

  PART 2, CHAPTER 2

  The storm broke soon after that and they raced around, unplugging appliances. During the storm, Emmett huddled on the stairs with Moon Pie. The rain was so hard the water rushed across the yard from the downspouts. The basement was probably flooding again.

  In the hallway, in the dark, Lonnie grabbed Sam and held her close to him. “Are you disappointed in me?” he asked, after they kissed.

  “I thought you liked Kroger’s. You liked that job better than you liked working
at Shumley’s.” Shumley’s was the large farm-equipment plant where Lonnie had been a trainee after school during the winter. Lonnie had to buy expensive safety shoes for the job, but then he had been laid off. Now he had no use for the safety shoes, which had hard, bulbous toes.

  “Kroger’s was a dead end,” Lonnie said. “It was boring, and I goofed off. I’d put all the cans in one sack just for meanness.”

  “I’m not disappointed in you. But I’m disappointed.”

  “Maybe I could apply at Ingersoll-Rand.”

  “They’re not hiring.”

  “Mama and Daddy will have a fit, though.” They had wanted Lonnie to go to vocational school to learn a trade, but Lonnie didn’t know what he wanted to do, now that he couldn’t play basketball. He was famous for sinking ten out of twelve jump shots in a winning game against Hopewell’s biggest rivals, the Bingley Bulldogs. People in Hopewell still talked fondly about how Lonnie had done that.

  The lightning and the thunder coincided then. The storm was right there, over the house. Sam stood in the hall, clutching Lonnie. In the flash of lightning, she saw Emmett on the stairway, smoking a cigarette. They stayed there in the dark for a long time, and then abruptly the wash of rain let up and the lightning was just a flicker.

  After the storm died down, Lonnie kissed Sam and said, “I know what I’m going to do now.”

  “What?”

  “Get drunk.”

  In the dark, he took a beer from the refrigerator and opened it. “Hey, Emmett,” Lonnie said. “The storm’s let up. Let’s go somewhere.”

  “It’s almost time for the eleven-thirty M*A*S*H,” Emmett said. He was smoking another cigarette. He and Moon Pie were on the couch now.

  “Couldn’t you skip one?” said Lonnie.

  “But this is my special outfit for watching M*A*S*H in,” Emmett said, flipping the hem of his skirt. “I miss M*A*S*H. I’ve been homesick for it since the series ended. AfterMash just ain’t the same.”

  “They couldn’t fight the Korean War forever, Emmett,” said Lonnie.

  Emmett grabbed his cigarettes from the end table and stuck them in his skirt pocket. “Let’s go, then. Where to? The Bottom?”

  “I’ve already been there once tonight,” said Lonnie. “We could drive around and see if the storm wrecked anything.”

  “I know where let’s go,” Emmett said, taking the last beer from the refrigerator. “Let’s go to Cawood’s Pond.”

  “Are you serious, Emmett?” cried Lonnie. “I thought that place spooked you.”

  Cawood’s Pond was Sam and Lonnie’s favorite place to go parking. It wasn’t really a pond but a snake-infested swamp with sinkholes. Sam had even heard there were alligators there. Emmett used to go there when he was a boy, but he stopped going. Sam was surprised that he suggested it.

  “I ain’t scared,” said Emmett. “Let’s go. I might even have some sweet stuff around here somewhere.” He took a cocoa-mix can from a kitchen cabinet. “Ah-ha!” he said, looking inside.

  Emmett found a sweatshirt and sniffed the armpits before pulling it over his head. He touched his face. He had one pimple about to pop.

  “Let’s go to the pond!” he cried. “Don’t let Moon Pie out,” he said as they left the house. “At night is when cats get run over. Headlights confuse them.” Emmett was still wearing the skirt. He was so large he looked ridiculous in it. Sam had to laugh.

  The street lights were shining in new puddles. Sam soaked both running shoes. She felt drunk on that beer. She lay down on the mattress in the back of Lonnie’s van, and Lonnie and Emmett sat up front. She bounced along on the mattress, feeling like a soldier in an armored personnel carrier because she couldn’t see where they were going. Emmett had once told her how claustrophobic those vehicles were, with a dozen guys packed together on benches, their rifles poking each other, and one guy in a tiny cubbyhole driving, with only a periscope to see his way. It was like being in a submarine, Emmett had said.

  “There’s a bulldozer over yonder,” Emmett said when they reached the gravel road that led to the pond. “They’re draining the swamp and rerouting the creek. The biologists are going crazy. They say it’ll starve out the snakes, and birds won’t land.”

  “I can do without the snakes,” said Sam.

  Cawood’s Pond was named for a notorious outlaw, Andrew Cawood, who had once hidden out here and was believed to have fallen into a sinkhole. The university biologists had cleared a place for cars to park and built a boardwalk that looped out over the swamp. Sam and Lonnie had spent the night out here in the van a couple of times.

  “The insects are having a conversation,” said Emmett. “They’re talking about me. I know ’cause my ears are burning.”

  “They’re saying, ‘Who’s that weirdo in the skirt?’” Lonnie teased.

  When Lonnie turned the lights off, and they sat there in the silence, they saw how the swampy woods made a black rim around the graveled clearing.

  Emmett and Lonnie climbed over the seat of the van and sat down in back with Sam. Emmett pulled his sweet stuff from his cigarette pack. He lit a joint and passed it to Lonnie. The night was pleasant after the rain, and now and then a little breeze stirred and they could hear drops of water shaking from the leaves of the trees.

  “Where are all the birds, Emmett?” Sam asked.

  “They sleep at night. Except owls.”

  “Where do birds sleep, Emmett?” asked Lonnie, with a giggle.

  “In bird beds.”

  “Hey, tell about that bird you’re always looking for,” Sam said. “Maybe there’s one here right now.”

  “You couldn’t see it at night.”

  “If it’s white, wouldn’t it look like a ghost?”

  “What kind of bird is it?” Lonnie asked.

  Emmett hesitated before answering. “An egret.”

  “What are egrets like?” Sam asked. “Are you sure they’re around here?”

  Emmett drank some beer. “I believe egrets are the state bird of Florida.” He took the joint Lonnie passed him and puffed it.

  Sam said to Lonnie, “This was a bird he used to see in Vietnam.”

  “Really?”

  Emmett exhaled slowly. “Yeah. You’d see it in the rice paddies, dipping its head down in the water, feeling around for things to eat. It’s a wader.”

  “They might be here, then,” Lonnie said. “In a swamp like this.”

  “Why do you want to see that bird so bad?” Sam asked cautiously.

  “It was so pretty. It was the prettiest bird I ever saw, all white and longlegged.” Emmett worked at the tab on the beer can. “They’re like cowbirds, but cowbirds aren’t pretty. Sometimes you’d see these water buffalo and every one of them would have one of these birds sitting beside it, like a little pet.”

  “Why did they do that?” Lonnie asked.

  “The bird would eat things the buffalo turned up, and it would pick ticks off the buffalo’s head. Sometimes you’d see the bird setting on the buffalo’s back. He didn’t care.”

  “Won’t it bring back bad memories if you see a bird like that again?” Sam asked.

  “No. That was a good memory. The only fucking one. That beautiful bird just going about its business with all that crazy stuff going on around it. Whole flocks of them would fly over. They fold their long necks up when they fly.” Emmett rolled the beer can in his palms, and the aluminum crinkled. He said, “Once a grenade hit close to some trees and there were these birds taking off like quail, ever’ which way. We thought it was snowing up instead of down.”

  “Did you see a lot of action like that over there?” Lonnie asked.

  “Some. I nearly got my ass killed once or twice.”

  “How?”

  “Oh, you don’t want to know.”

  Sam passed Lonnie the joint. She exhaled and coughed. She could almost see that bird. She felt peaceful, but her head was spinning with thoughts about Emmett. He hadn’t said this much about Vietnam in years. Watching M*A*S*H so much
must be bringing it out, she thought. Emmett used to have a girlfriend, Anita Stevens, but he had broken up with her at Christmas. He never said why. He took her out for Shrimp Night at the Holiday Inn and gave her a fancy cheese basket from the Party Mart in Paducah. Anita playfully called it her Easter basket and asked Emmett where the sweet stuff was. The basket had so much cheese and salami in it she probably still had some in her refrigerator.

  “Hey, Emmett,” Sam blurted out. “I wish we had Anita with us. Why don’t you call her up?”

  “Sure. Hand me the phone.”

  “I’m serious. Why don’t you call her up tomorrow?”

  “Anita doesn’t want a bird-watcher in a skirt,” Emmett said flatly.

  “Well, don’t wear a skirt then,” Sam said.

  Emmett mumbled something. He sat propped against the spare tire in the back of the van. The glow from his cigarette reminded Sam of Mars, the way it popped out in the summer sky, burning bright orange, seeming to move toward the earth.

  Lonnie turned on the radio, and Bruce Springsteen yelled out, “I’m a cool rocking Daddy in the U.S.A.!” It was from his new album. For a while, they sang along with the songs on the university FM station, Rock-95. Sam watched the moon inch from behind the broken clouds. The night was clearing, and the radio was playing “Ain’t Gonna Bump No More with No Big Fat Woman,” a song Emmett loved. Anita wasn’t a big fat woman. She was pretty, and Sam was sure Anita still cared about Emmett. Sam felt Lonnie pulling at her, wanting to smooch with her, but her mind was whirling around in the darkness and she couldn’t catch it.

  Emmett and Lonnie went outside, and Sam lost track of time. Maybe she dozed off. She felt afraid. With the moon out, this was a perfect setting for a horror movie. Gradually, she became aware of a familiar yet strange sound on the radio. It was a song by the Beatles, but it was not a song she knew. Sam thought she knew every one of their songs, because her mother owned all their records. She had left them with Sam when she moved to Lexington. “You better leave my kitten all alone,” they were singing. How could the Beatles have a new record, she wondered groggily.

  “We’ve got to be quiet,” Emmett muttered when he and Lonnie returned to the van. “Lonnie, keep your cigarette inside your hand. Don’t show it.”