by Louis Bayard
The gas and lubricant kept flowing, the store shelves got emptier and emptier, and the line to see Madame O showed every sign of being perpetual. Even from the service bay, I could hear her snarling at her customers.
“A dreadful curse hangs over you! Only blood can remove it!… The devil and the moon sit opposed! You must give up this man you call Billy Bob!… Make peace with your dead grandmother now, for tonight you yourself will die!”
Didn’t matter how dire the forecast—people wanted more. I’ll confess I wished for a couple minutes myself, but I had too much going on with batteries and spark plugs and fan belts.
There was a few locals who declined to partake in the day’s festivities. Chester Gallagher swung by for a couple gallons and a hello, but Mina stayed in the car with the windows closed. Pastor Goolsby drove by, real slow, like someone taking the measure of Gomorrah. (Mrs. Goolsby had already snuck in to get her palm read.) And somewhere round three in the afternoon, the butternut Chevy Eagle of Harley Blevins come rolling past.
Dudley was back at the wheel, in his Buck Rogers outfit. I saw the car stop for a few seconds, long enough for Harley himself to push his head out the window and take in everything he needed to see. He snapped his fingers, twice, and the car drove on. Dudley never took his eyes off the road.
I can’t tell you how many thermoses Madame O downed over the course of that day, but by four o’clock, her head was tilting hard south. It’d lift a little when someone set down next to her, but then it’d start sinking all over again—till finally it was resting right on the table.
“Madame Ouspenskaya!” cried Hiram. “Are you all right?”
From somewhere in that tangle of black hair come a low droning.
“What’d she say?” someone called.
“The shadow world has grown dim,” said Hiram. “No more can Ouspenskaya see.”
“But we ain’t heard our fortune,” said someone else.
“It’s a rotten deal,” allowed Hiram. “If I could make the spirit world operate like a business, you bet I would. But tell you what, everyone still in line is going to receive a chit. The next time Madame Ouspenskaya’s in town, you’ll all get a free reading, you’ve got my word on it. Till then, how about some saltwater taffy, folks? It’s on the house.…”
Funny thing. For all the people who’d lined up to see her, nobody paid her much mind once she was conked out. Me, least of all. It was only that night—when the crowd had finally cleared out and taken their cars and kids and left behind all their wrappers and bottles and straws and paper cups—that I saw Hiram bending over some bundle and realized the bundle was her.
“Tell me she’s alive,” I said.
“She is.”
“What are we supposed to do with her?”
“Same as we did before.”
Only she was a lot heavier this time. Weren’t no point dragging her back up the stairs, so we took her into the house and laid her in Mama’s bed. By now her wig had fallen half off her head, and her string of beads had somehow wrapped itself round her forehead like a rani’s headdress.
“Hiram,” she muttered. “Put a sign on the door, would you? I don’t want any maids waking me up.”
“We don’t got no door,” I whispered.
“She won’t notice.”
True to form, she dropped right back to sleep. Like some anchor come and dragged her down.
“How do you know her again?” I asked.
“My theater days.”
“She an actor, too?”
“Wardrobe mistress. I figured, with this kind of thing, the clothes are more important than the acting.”
Watching Madame O laying there, with the snores pouring out her open mouth, I got a little stab thinking on Mama. Only ’cause she would’ve got such a laugh out of it.
“Guess it’s okay to leave her,” I said.
“She wouldn’t have it any other way. Got something to show you.”
The bag of change was sitting behind the store counter under Hiram’s stool. He picked it up, hefted it in his hand with a tiny cracked smile.
“You want to count it yourself?” he said.
“Just tell me.”
“One hundred ninety-four dollars and fifty-six cents.”
I had to sit down, but there weren’t nowhere to sit.
“You ain’t shitting me, are you?”
“I should add that eight dollars and seventeen cents of that came directly from Miss Janey Hoyle. Who can no longer speak.”
“Oh, my,” I said. “Oh, Lord. What are we—what are we gonna—”
“We’re going to start by paying the good madame her salary. Thirty-five dollars, with board and lodging thrown in.”
“Okay.”
“Then, on Monday morning, I suggest you and I bring one hundred and thirty dollars—in little stacks of coinage—to one Wallace Paxton of First Bank of Virginia. See how he likes them apples. As for the remaining twenty-nine dollars and change … that’s up to you.”
At first I was stumped, but then I got the brightest picture in my head. Me and Janey and Earle walking into Pastor Goolsby’s church of a Sunday morning. Pouring those twenty-nine dollars right into the collection plate and daring the whole congregation to take ’em out again.
Oh, I knew it’d never happen, but it give me some satisfaction. “That’ll teach ’em,” I said, half under my breath. “Best not mess with the Gas Station Pagans.”
Hiram’s face got an extra crease. “What’s that?”
“It’s just a name they give us in town. They meant it like an insult, but we figured we’d just turn it on its head and make it our own.”
Hiram nodded slow. “I like the sound of it myself,” he said.
“Well, you better,” I said. “You’re one of us now.”
Chapter
FIFTEEN
All in all, it was a good thing we weren’t church folk, ’cause the four of us was so beat, we slept near to noon. I’d have slept later if Madame Ouspenskaya hadn’t commenced to tugging on my ankle.
“Hey, kid. Is there a cab in this joint?”
Hiram took her back to Washington and didn’t get home till six. All we had it in us to do that night was get our weekly baths and listen to Amos ’n’ Andy and Fred Allen. Next morning, I woke up figuring I’d dreamed the whole business. The fortune-teller and the kids on the tire swings and Janey screaming in the root cellar and Hiram lifting up that sack of money—none of it could’ve happened, could it?
But after the morning truckers had cleared off, Hiram went up to his room and came down in Chester’s old suit.
“We’d best be off,” he said.
“Where?”
“First Bank of Virginia.”
So I put up the CLOSED sign in the window, and we drove into Front Royal and set down with Mr. Wallace Paxton, whose mustache had yet to crawl off his face (though it dearly wanted to). Hiram hoisted up the turnip sack and set to stacking every last nickel, dime, and quarter in columns on the banker’s desk. Took him near ten minutes, but he enjoyed every second of it.
“Feel free to check my figures,” he said.
Well, Mr. Wallace Paxton was looking a little green in the gills by now. He reached out one arm of his seersucker suit and dragged all those stacks into a big patent-leather pouch.
“Pardon me,” he said to Hiram. “Have we met before?”
“We have not.”
“And you would be?”
“The girl’s father,” said Hiram, his voice deep as a coal seam. “You’re telling me you don’t see the resemblance?”
“Spitting image.”
“That’s what I’ve been told.”
“It goes without saying”—Mr. Wallace Paxton pressed that pouch to him sweet and tender—“that First Bank of Virginia deeply appreciates your continued business, and we bid you both good day.”
“There’s just one more thing,” said Hiram.
“Yes?”
“Next time you send one of those
viperish little letters of yours, you address it to me, do you follow? And we’ll take care of it man-to-man.”
Now, I’d have said Mr. Wallace Paxton had ten or fifteen pounds advantage on Hiram, but you’d never of known it.
“Of course. Naturally. And may I say what a relief it is to do business with a gentleman of your obvious sagacity.”
We took our leave with no more fuss, and we was just about to climb back in the truck when I remembered we’d left our empty sack behind.
“Just leave it,” said Hiram.
“I ain’t giving them nothing they ain’t earned.”
So that’s how I come to walk into the bank just as Mr. Wallace Paxton lifted his head off his desk and shouted to his secretary in the next office.
“Miss Stanhope! Get me Harley Blevins on the phone.”
I figured it was okay to leave ’em our turnip sack.
One way or another, we was feeling mighty merry when we pulled back into the station. I was just about to get out of the car when Hiram put his fingers on my arm and said, “The bills are for you.”
Dollar bills, he meant. He counted them, one by one, into my palm. Eleven.
“What the hell is this?” I said.
“Your salary.”
“What are you talking?”
“Amelia.” He put his one good eye level with my two. “You’ve been working like a dog all these years, and nobody’s ever given you any wages?”
“Wages is for chumps,” I said.
All the same, I will confess that the paper felt good in my hand.
“What are you going to do with it?” said Hiram.
“Save it.”
“Toward what?”
“Well, that’s a good question. New piston grinder runs twelve hundred, so that ain’t about to happen. Westinghouse refrigerator these days is running hundred and nine with no extras. I’m thinking plate-glass window for the store. That’s no more ’n a hundred, and I’m pretty sure I could talk the glazier down ’cause he’s a hopeless drunk every day but Sunday.”
“Nothing for yourself?”
“What would I get for me?”
“I don’t know. A new dress, maybe. A pair of shoes.”
I was all set to tell him about Joan Crawford’s sandals, but then I remembered they was still in the back of the broom closet, covered in mud. Hadn’t had the heart to touch them since that afternoon with Dudley. If they hadn’t been Mama’s, I’d have pitched them out with the Monday trash.
“Well,” said Hiram, “you think on it. Meantime, how about we all go to a picture show tonight?”
“Picture show?”
“Sure.”
Well, it’s a strange fact about the Gas Station Pagans that we will read Modern Screen and Photoplay and Movie Mirror front to back and tell you what Wallace Beery’s pool looks like and where Norma Shearer spent her honeymoon, but when it comes to actual movies, well, we tend to steer clear.
Mama, she just hated to spend the money, and Earle favors the radio. Me … I don’t know, there’s some part of me hates all forms of cunning, so soon as the lights go down, I can neither stop myself from seeing every crummy trick that’s being played on me nor can I forgive.
Janey’s different, though. Once she saw Gary Cooper nursed back to life by Helen Hayes in A Farewell to Arms, she was hooked. And when Hiram said the Park Theatre was showing something called Men in White, first thing out of her mouth was, “You mean like doctors?”
“Sounds it,” said Hiram.
“Gee,” she said. “This one have Gary Cooper, too?”
“Clark Gable.”
“I’ll give him a try.”
We’d have never gone to that picture but for her, ’cause the Murphy Theatre was showing Death Takes a Holiday, and Death was played by Mr. Fredric March, who is okay by me, but Janey had to have her wounds, and seeing what little voice she had left, we couldn’t stand in her way.
It wasn’t but a twenty-minute drive to Front Royal, but parking the truck was harder than we figured—the only space big enough was over by the Presbyterian church. The theater was mostly full by the time we got there. The only row that had four seats together was all the way in the front, and the only way it had four seats was if the woman sitting at the very, very end of the aisle weren’t expecting no one else to join her.
So Hiram, he did the natural thing. He leaned toward the woman in question and said, “Ma’am?”
Well, she jumped like a quail, and who could blame her? I’d seen three-hundred-pound truckers grow alarmed at the sight of Hiram.
“Didn’t mean to startle you,” he said. “Is it all right if we sit here?”
She stared at him.
“I mean, you’re not expecting anyone?” he said.
A flush stole into her cheeks, then into his.
“We’d be grateful for the company,” he said, pressing on.
She spoke. Not a timid voice at all, but low and full.
“Why, of course,” she said. “Please.”
Earle stepped on past her, and I was all set to follow Hiram when Janey grabbed my arm.
“Melia,” she whispered. “That’s Crazy Ida.”
“Who’s that?” I asked.
“Oh, for the love of Pete.” She dragged me back into the aisle and hissed in my ear. “Crazy Ida Folsom is the daughter of some local quarry owner. Got her heart broke twenty years back by some feller.”
“Big deal. What’d he do, leave her at the altar?”
“Left her the day after. On their honeymoon.”
“Well, that is peculiar.”
“Now, some say she kilt him, but there’s others say they seen him shacking up with some hotsy totsy in Harrisonburg. Which makes him a two-timer and maybe even a bigamist.”
Two-timer. Bigamist. Hotsy totsy. Where’d she ever find these words?
The house lights was still up, so I could see Ida’s face tolerably well. Heart-shaped in its youth, I guessed, but going soft round the edges, with curd-white skin that blotched in the oddest places.
“She don’t look crazy to me,” I said.
“Oh, but she never got over losing her feller, and ever since, she goes round town all on her lonesome. Square dances, church socials—movie theaters. Wherever you’d take a husband, only it’s just her.”
“Ain’t nothing wrong with a woman going off by herself. She don’t need no damn man.”
“But Melia, her hair…”
Can’t explain why I didn’t notice right off. All I needed was another second or two, and I could see that weren’t no cape or shawl hanging all the way down to the floor. That was Ida Folsom’s by-God hair. Long as an Indian squaw’s … mighty as a river. Draped cross her lap like some rich lady’s dog. Dear God, I thought. How much time would it take for a gal to grow hair that long?
Then it hit me. Twenty years.
Ida Folsom’s hair had been growing for twenty years. And it’d keep growing till that man of hers come home.
“What’s the holdup?” called Hiram. “Show’s about to start.”
So we filed on in, Janey and me, and you’ll have to believe me when I say that, hard as it was not to look at Ida’s hair, it was even harder not to step on it. I was relieved, honestly, when Hiram took the seat next to her. Even more relieved when the lights went down.
It was a full bill that night. Krazy Kat cartoon, then a newsreel on the emir of Yemen, then a Charley Chase comedy, and only then did Men in White get around to showing itself. It was mostly pretty dumb. Clark Gable walks around in white scrubs—whitest you ever seen—and saves little girls and old folks, but he spends too much time at his work, so his rich girlfriend gets all hot in the collar. “How come you can’t have some vittles with me, and how come you don’t love me like I love you?” and on and on. So along comes this pretty little nurse who’s English.…
Well, that’s ’bout as much as I can tell you ’cause it was right around then I noticed Hiram’s head tipping. Just ever so slightly in the directi
on of Crazy Ida.
At first I figured he was falling asleep, only the head tipped itself back like nothing happened. Couldn’t make sense of it, but then I heard him talking. In the most low-down secret kind of way. I was sitting right next to him, and I had to work to hear him.
“Get a load of that hospital. It’s like something on Venus.… Never seen a patient with so much makeup.… It won’t do letting Myrna Loy into your operating room.…”
Looking back, I can see it’s the kind of thing I do at the movies, too, always seeking out the foolishness. But I could tell that he meant his little wisecracks for one pair of ears, and they wasn’t mine.
Now and then he’d say something so amusing she’d have to put one of her gloved hands over her mouth to keep a laugh from coming out. Before long, she started whispering back to him. And something she said must’ve been funny, too, ’cause his head tilted back and his lips stretched wide.
Dear God, I thought.
From there, that dang movie couldn’t end quick enough. Soon as the actors’ names come crawling up the screen, I was calling over to Janey and Earle.
“Hey, now! We’d best get going! Scoot!”
“Oh, what’s the hurry?” said Hiram. “Think I saw a soda counter down the street.”
Before I could talk him out of it, he was leaning his head back toward Crazy Ida. “Maybe you’d care to join us,” he said.
Long as I live, I don’t think I’ll forget the look on her face. Or the way the words come rushing out of her, like they was afraid of being called back.
“I’d be delighted,” she said.
Wouldn’t you know? Shiner’s Drug had four open stools. Hiram sat the kids first, then he offered Crazy Ida the third, and he motioned for me to take the last, but I said I’d rather stand.
“Daddy Hiram,” said Janey, “can I get a cherry Coke?”
