All the while Tom Lowe works on finishing off Quee’s new deck, he plays the radio, listening like everybody else in town for news about Jones Jameson. It has turned into a hot day, and he has stripped down to no shirt at all and has a bandana tied around his forehead to keep back the sweat. He has yet to see the dingdong doctor Denny, though he finds himself thinking of her off and on, checking every time Quee’s door opens. Most of the visits have been from Ruthie Crow, who is as agitated as a person can get without needing to be put in a straitjacket. She keeps eyeing the pack of cigarettes in the pocket of his shirt, which he’s hung on a lagustrum bush. “Uh-uh-uh, Ruthie,” he says. “Don’t you be a bad girl.” This was kind of flirty, he realizes, but she’s too addicted to nicotine to be thinking of sex.
Sometimes when Tom is working, he thinks back over the old pirate stories; it’s like he’s being read to in a pirate brogue. He loves when Jack Rackham thought Anne Bonny had taken up with another man only to discover that it was really Mary Read in disguise. You? You? Why, you little wench! They were some tough-ass women, to be sure. Unlike their male companions, they didn’t get strung up by the neck because they were pregnant. Supposedly the three oldest professions were medicine and prostitution and piracy. Quee had told him that one day when he was telling her stories about Blackbeard. They’d begun talking about facial hair, and nobody had more facial hair than Blackbeard. Quee said, “I’d pick prostitute.”
“I’d pick pirate,” Tom had said, though clearly he wouldn’t. Oh, he could take the part with the boat and the ocean; he could take the stealing and looting. What he couldn’t take was the murder. That’s when he told Quee the pirate superstitions about drowning and how nobody ever tried to save anybody because it was thought to be interfering with the underworld. Drowning pirates would scream for help, and their friends would yell back, “Give in, matey, it’s meant to be.” Now he keeps hearing Give in matey, it’s meant to be, with every scrape of his handsaw, every slam of the hammer. Ruthie is back inside now and since he no longer needs to stand guard over his cigarettes, he can drift along, turning back again to Sarah, wishing, as he does every time he thinks of the day he saw her at the Exxon, that he could have done something to keep her future from happening.
HE DID FINALLY agree to drive her around, for old time’s sake, to prove that he could be her friend, and he had driven several blocks, Sarah’s hand still just inches from his thigh, when he asked where she wanted to go.
“Show me where you live,” she said, and plucked some dog hair from her shorts.
“In my mind or for real?”
“Do you still go out to your lot?” She relaxed and stretched her legs, leaned her head back on the seat. He felt her watching him and nodded. “Do you go every day?”
“No, not every day.”
“Anytime I think of you, that’s where you are.” She paused. “I love that you do that; I love the story, always have.”
“Is that what it is? A story?”
“A wonderful story.”
“A story you told in college? Maybe tell at cocktail parties?”
“No.” Her hand is there again, patting and then covering his hand on the gearshift. “It’s a story I guess I keep to myself.”
The memory of the river was so strong it pulled him away, although she sat right beside him. He had planned what he would say to her, things like: “So, I guess we broke up, huh?” or “You are some kind of fickle highfalutin bitch” or “How many guys have you fucked since me?” He has also imagined himself at her wedding, there in the Presbyterian Church. She would change her mind at the last minute and together they would run to his truck and head for the beach. He could see her in her long white dress, thigh deep in the ocean. Her arms around his neck pulling him down.
“How about where you actually live,” she said, just as they passed the bank and the house where he grew up. His mother had recently added a sunroom and the new brick didn’t quite match up with the old. He didn’t look to see if his mother was there; he would see her soon enough, and he’d hear about how he needed a real job and a real house, a wife and children. She would say, “No woman, or sensible woman I might add, will ever put up with all those mongrels.”
“Why?” he asked, once his mother’s house was two blocks behind them.
“I don’t know. Seems fair. You know where I live.”
“Yeah, well, I used to like my neighborhood, but it’s gone down quite a bit.” He pressed the accelerator, making it through the yellow light at their old elementary school. “A lot of people have moved in and driven down the value of my property.”
“Oh.” She laughed. “Now most people would argue that your property value has gone up since all those people moved in.”
“Depends on your definition of value.” He turned into the subdivision, pausing at the big brick pillars to give her the full effect. “If you value trees, frogs, privacy, well, you might say something has been lost.” He drove slowly past the houses and yards, three-car garages, and little islands of landscaping. “You might want to duck. I bet you know most of the people who live here. And if you don’t, you surely will soon.”
“I’ve been here several times,” she said. “The realtor was determined that we buy a house out here.”
“She probably tried to sell you the one right across the street from my mansion.”
“Yes,” she nodded knowingly. “Yes, she did, but I had no idea that you were the person.”
“The person everybody out here hates?” He turned into his drive and then bumped into and beyond the pines that hid his trailer completely from street view. There were only six dogs then. “Home Sweet Home,” he said and offered her what he thought later sounded more like an apology than he meant for it to. “I was here first.”
“You really haven’t changed, Tommy.”
“I’m sorry.”
“I’m not.” This time she grabbed his arm with both hands and inched her way across the seat. “You look the same, sound the same.” She leaned in close. “You even smell the same.”
“And is that good?”
She nodded and then pressed her nose near his collar and breathed in. “Let’s see, there’s tobacco and puppy breath and ocean salt and a little sawdust.” She moved up his neck, her warm breath covering his ear. “Prell Shampoo.”
“Why are you doing this, Sarah?” Now he refused to look at her. He stared straight ahead, his hand gripping the door handle.
“You brought me here.”
“You asked me to.”
“I didn’t make you, though.” Her hands were on his back, first lightly and then palms pressed flat and circling. She pulled his shirt out of his jeans and moved her hands back up.
“Your car will be ready,” he whispered, his heart beating so hard he was sure she could feel it against her breasts as she pressed in closer and closer.
“No, not yet.”
“Your husband might look for you.” That got her attention and pushed her back. “Really, Sarah. This is kind of crazy.”
“Just show me inside. Then we’ll go back. Show me your dogs, okay?” She opened her door and stepped out into the wet, soggy straw. The door creaked louder than usual when he stepped out, and it seemed the whole neighborhood had fallen silent, there were no birds, no crickets; it was so quiet he believed he could hear the mist that was shrouding the world. He opened the door to the leaping and barking of the three dogs. Blackbeard’s tail alone could do considerable damage, which is why Tom stored his dishes high up on a makeshift shelf.
“Home Sweet Home,” he said and grabbed the big bag of dog food to lead the three outside for an unexpected meal this time of day. She stood watching him, her arms crossed over her chest. He barely got back in the half door before she locked her arms behind his neck and pressed against him.
“Why Sarah?” he whispered. “Why are you doing this to me?”
“To you?” she stepped back with a wounded look. “Is that how you see it?”
�
��Yes, yes I do.” He moved away from her and pulled himself up to sit on the side of the bed. “I’d offer you a chair if there was one,” he said.
“I would have gladly offered myself the bed if you didn’t feel you were being taken advantage of.”
“Sarah.” He watched as she stood staring at his belongings all lined up on what was supposed to be another bed. She ran her finger up and down the spine of his giant World Atlas, the same book he had used to tutor her in geography years before. What a joke. Even then he knew what a joke it was; he tutored her and yet she was the one going off to a new life.
“You don’t have anything to lose,” she said without turning, and before she could complete the words he was standing, holding her arms and forcing her to listen.
“I have everything to lose,” he said. “And I’d be losing it again.”
“Oh, Tommy, I’m sorry.” She leaned into him and cried. “All this time I’ve just wanted to make things up to you.”
“It can’t be done,” he said and then softened. “What I mean is we can’t change anything.”
“Can we pretend? One minute?” She kissed his cheek lightly and ran her finger around his lips, pressed to silence any rejection. “Do you ever think about what we would have been like?”
“No,” he lied.
“We would have a nineteen-year-old,” she whispered, “somebody older now than we were then.”
“I can’t imagine that.”
“We would have slept this close for nineteen years and there would have been no hiding, no slipping.” She moved her hands up under his denim shirt, flat palms circling, her cheek pressed against his mouth. A slight turn and she spoke again, her lips not an inch from his. “You never think of me, TomCat?”
“Never,” he said and then “always.” When they kissed it was as if they had never been apart, the familiar ways of touching, her hair wrapped around his hand as he pulled her face closer.
“I want you, Tommy.” She stepped back only two steps and there was the bed. “Please.” She had that same desperate look he had clung to all those years. It spelled need, need that seemed to go far beyond the physical. And there was a pull like swimming out and then letting go, letting the current pull and pull; there was the fear of drowning in the undertow, forever lost. Then he was on top of her, her hand guiding him in when Blackbeard began barking, his tail thumping against the camper door.
“Don’t leave, Tommy.”
He swung his legs off the bed and rubbed his eyes. He heard the mail truck on the other side of the thick pines as it rattled down to the next house. “Do you love your husband?”
There was silence, and then a weak yes.
“Do you think that you might one day soon leave him and join me here in the camper?” He forced a laugh without looking at her.
“I hadn’t really thought about it.”
“So what have you thought?”
“That I want a baby.” Suddenly she was sitting up with her shirt pulled up to her chest. “For four years I have.” She began crying, openly, loudly, the same kind of crying she did when they broke up. Something clicked inside him.
“Is that why you’re here?” He shook her by the shoulders. “Yoo-hoo, was that what you were thinking?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t know what I was thinking. It’s been so hard. It’s so frustrating, I mean I know that I can get pregnant, right?”
“Yes, that we can do. But Sarah.” He pressed his hands on either side of her face, kissed her forehead. “I ain’t your guy, honey. I’d only want the baby if I got the mama.” He kissed her again, this time on the lips; this time he was in control. “In that way, nothing has changed.”
“Do you wish that we’d had a baby?”
“No,” he said. “Because you would have hated me before it ever had the chance to grow up.”
“Are you positive?”
“Yes.” He didn’t offer her any of the ideas he’d had, things he would have done to make it work. Why should he? There would have been no guarantees. Maybe she would have grown to despise him, to blame him for existing in this town. And now, as she slipped back into her clothes and dabbed at her eyes with a tissue, somewhere in this town the young Mack McCallister was probably wondering if it was all going to work; wondering what he could do to hold it all together.
TOM PULLS HIS shirt, warm from the sun beating down on Quee’s bush, back over his head. He hates himself for having not given in to her. If he had the chance to go back he would not be so stubbornly practical and moral. He wouldn’t give a damn about Mack McCallister or the mailman or the confused dogs. He sits down and lights a cigarette.
“Hey, you.”
He looks up to see Denny leaning out the window of her apartment.
“Are you talking to me?”
“Of course.” She is grinning now. He’s not sure if he has the energy for her. Surely if you give this one an inch she will flat take a mile. If she were a dog, she’d be one of the high-maintenance varieties like his little Anne Bonny or even Blackbeard, one that has to be stroked and groomed or else winds up dull and matted and looking like shit.
Jones Jameson didn’t even glance Myra’s way when he passed that morning, and she had been so relieved, seeing as how little Sharpy was taking care of other things and she found this terribly embarrassing, which is why she tends to walk the dog so early to begin with. It was six-thirty in the morning (Sharpy’s bladder is more punctual than any clock), and Jones Jameson was driving fast. Gravel sprayed as he raced past on West Seventh Street, and it scared Sharpy. She stood and watched him heading towards the downtown area.
Sharpy perches on Myra’s lap the whole time she gives all of this information to the seemingly nice young officer who is seated in her living room. He is sitting in the chair that poor Howard used to sit in, and just seeing a body in that chair, seeing a MAN in that chair makes her furious all of a sudden without warning; she would like to smash something. These feelings come to her suddenlike and have since Howard died. She called it grief for five years and then in her head began calling it relief. She was glad when he died; she was tired of having to share her belongings. She had shared her whole life, and she was sick of it. She was looking for a good therapist to tell this to. I am so glad he’s dead, she wanted to say, what a relief, what a blessing, what a load off of my back. She would also tell that in secret she always listened to Jones Jameson’s radio show, that she didn’t necessarily like the way he chose to say things, but the ideas behind his words, ideas like that the Negroes had been given enough free handouts and it was time for deserving whites to get a chance. Yes, and she agreed with him about all these women out there wearing suits and trying to pass themselves off as something with a you know what. Jones Jameson had said the word. He had said “penis,” and despite herself it had made Myra laugh a little. Damn right she said in her head, “Stay away from what’s mine.”
“Jones and his wife did fight from time to time,” she tells the officer.
“How do you know?”
“I have ears.” She says this and then pauses for effect, like she has seen people do on Oprah, people who say things like I am in touch with a ten-thousand-year-old Indian.
“I do hope that smart young man isn’t dead,” she says, not meaning to think out loud; it’s something that begins to happen naturally when you live alone. “He needs to improve his manners, but he has a lot to give this world. He would make us a fine mayor or senator one day.”
“Why do you say that?” he asks. “Any reason?”
“He was Phi Beta Kappa. He is for equal rights to the white people.”
“No, I mean about him being dead.”
“Well, because that’s the first thing you might think when somebody’s missing now isn’t it? Like that Exxon man who disappeared from his very own driveway? Isn’t that why you’re here?” She smooths out some wrinkles on the dog and then lets the loose folds of skin fall back the way they do, like an accordion. “A lot o
f people stopped using the Exxon after that little spill, but I always said, well it was an accident. Little accidents happen.” She pauses and stares at the young man. She bets he was one of those children people thought were so ugly they didn’t know what to say to their mama. He looks okay now but, you can just tell he was that kind of child. “Now take Howard’s accident.”
“Excuse me, but I’m going to need to leave now.” He stands. “Is there anything else you needed to tell?”
“Well, not if nobody’s listening.”
“What kind of dog did you say that is?” He maneuvers his way through her living room, where she keeps a big pasteboard box full of eggs for Ruthie.
“A shar-pei,” she says slowly. “Sharpy is a shar-pei.” She is suddenly desperate for company. This man would not be her number one A-plus choice, but beggers can’t be choosy. “I can see how he could be dead, you know?” This gets the officer’s attention. “I mean, my Howard seemed to die so suddenlike, and they never quite figured what had brought it on.” She stops and smiles at him the way her Sunday school leader, Connie Briley, always does; it’s a smile that says, “I’m perfect and you are not; if you touch me, I will knock the ever loving feces out of you.” Myra hates Connie and would love to see her up and stricken with a hemorrhage; sometimes at night she gets herself to sleep with an image of Connie blue in the face and pop-eyed with that smile still intact. She thinks this, too, is something that she would like to tell a therapist. She would like to be reassured that such thoughts do not mean you are not a good Christian.
Carolina Moon Page 13
