“Are you going to apologize?” the principal asked after two more hard licks.
“No,” Tom said, and so, after another round, they suspended him for two weeks. Two weeks of zeros and Fs. Two weeks of working in the yard and sneaking off to the bowling alley to smoke cigarettes and an occasional joint when some of the older kids offered. Two weeks of his mother not speaking to him, or worse, telling him how she hoped he wasn’t going to end up like his father. Even when he walked into church that Sunday, nobody sat near him; nobody spoke to him. The first person who did say anything to him on his first day back at school was Sarah. His goal then was simply to get promoted to high school; he had to get the F grades up to Ds so he wouldn’t have to repeat the year. He had already decided that he’d drop out before he spent another year at that slumhole. Sarah didn’t really stop; she barely even looked at him. He was at his locker trying to cram in his jacket, and she slowed just long enough to whisper, “Welcome back.” Her lips were shiny with something that smelled like peppermint, and there were fat strands of yarn like a sailor’s knot, tied in her long hair.
“Thanks,” he said, but by that time she had turned and was walking away with her friend June, their heads pressed together as they talked. He never talked to her again until late summer, when they both wound up parked at the river. He was with some older kids from out in the county, and she was with June and a couple of high school basketball players. Somehow the two of them wound up sitting on the bank just yards apart while all the others swam against the current like they were on a treadmill. She was probably the only sober person there. It was one time when he didn’t think about what he was saying or doing; he got up and went and sat beside her, asked her if she wanted to run away with him.
“Forever?” she asked and laughed.
“Forever, an hour, you pick.” He watched her profile then as she stared out into the river. She waved to her date, somebody Martin, everybody called him Sky. Tom didn’t really have a “date” but more or less was expected to fool around with Theresa Dobbins later. “Or maybe I could call you sometime.”
“That would work.”
“Really?” he asked and reached for her hand that was inches from his. She nodded then ran out knee-deep to where June was motioning to her. For the rest of that late afternoon and early evening, he entertained the crowds by swinging from the highest vine and dropping a good fourteen feet into the deepest part of that stretch of the river. The other boys tried but they hadn’t practiced like he had. He knew every limb of every big oak there along the bank and could scramble out to the highest limbs without even paying attention. She was watching the whole time. Finally he got way out on the highest branch only to look and see the car they had come in disappearing down the muddy twisting road. He was abandoned and ridiculous for all of his showing off.
Now the memory makes him shudder as he sits on the damp and cold sand; the tide is coming in, claiming his past. Someday, when he is forty-one, he will breathe a sigh of relief because then he will know there isn’t something genetic to make him go out and buy a gun. Who’s to say it couldn’t happen? Who’s to say there isn’t something perched and waiting in his brain, something that would send him out of this world in a goddamned burst of flames.
He wonders about the sensations. How does it feel to know it’s coming? Or do people really believe it is? Whole cities have been unearthed to expose people frozen in their everyday lives as if a big plug were suddenly pulled. The people on the Titanic kept dancing to the orchestra music and drinking. Those who survived told how passengers tidied up their state rooms, fed pets, fixed their hair; by the time they knew to panic, to throw themselves out into the icy water, thousands of screams at once, it was too late. And the person gasping for a last breath knows, doesn’t he? Doesn’t he think this is it, this is it? Or is there something that keeps the brain hoping, against the odds, against the predictions? If Sarah were to suddenly wake, would she remember the last day he saw her? Would she make him swear never to tell, or would she beg him to let her try again, and then beg him never to tell? Chances are pretty good he will never know. He will know no more than one of the survivors he read about, a woman whose last memory of her father was his lifting her carefully into a lifeboat. Then she drifted through the icy water away from the beautiful Titanic into darkness and into a life with a big hole shot through the center. She probably spent all those years wondering what he did next. Did he straighten his tie and talk to someone about his business? Did he say “Some vacation, huh?” and get a round of nervous laughs. Did he pull out his wallet and show his daughter’s picture? Did he think of her at all? Or did he simply embrace death because there was nothing else to embrace?
Tom gets up now and walks back over the dunes to where his truck is parked. The hot sand squeaks under his feet, the low-growing flowers—“Indian blankets” is what Myra Carter had called them when he did some work on her porch and she spied several on the dash of his truck—spreading around him in every direction, their blossoms protected by the sandspurs mixed in. He hears Blackbeard behind him, smacking saliva and panting, and behind that he hears the constant rushing of the surf and beyond that he thinks he hears someone whispering “Aye, matey, it’s a good day to lose your head,” and he keeps walking, faster and faster, fearful of turning around to see someone there, a man, a monster, a vision. He’s afraid he might see some truth he has yet to see.
Part Three
For Myra Carter there is nothing quite like a big load of topsoil from down near the river where the moss and ferns have been growing and shooting their spores into that thick musty air. The only thing better is a nice big load of manure, practically steaming from some old cow’s bottom. She likes to think of that, the steamy plop that she had watched as a girl on her grandparents’ farm. Those cows would stand there and stare you right in the eye without a single change in expression as they raised their tails and delivered a fine dollop of fertilizer. It is so exciting to think of fertilizer; she feels embraced by life and filled with energy. It makes her think words like “fecund.” Now what would a therapist make of that? Well, she won’t ever know because there’s not a therapist on this earth who can understand Myra Carter. Howard couldn’t, and he might as well have been a psychiatrist, he was every other kind of doctor in town. It is the curse of Myra’s life that her husband knew what everybody—man and woman, boy and girl—looked like without their clothes on. Ruthie sure can’t understand her; Ruthie can’t even understand herself these days, she’s so man-crazy.
Myra breathes deeply over the new topsoil that Mr. Digby left first thing this morning. If Mr. Digby weren’t forced to live such a lower-class life, she would envy him his property there near the river bottom. If they were of the same kind of people, she might even invite him in for some tea some afternoon just so she could sit there near him and breathe in the dirt and manure and river rot from his clothing.
Fecund, fecund, fecund. She sings in her head while she digs in with her shovel and tosses loam to the wheelbarrow. She tried to get Ruthie to use “fecund” in a poem, and Ruthie chewed on her pen, which is her main food source, and then said after about two hours that she couldn’t think of a single thing that rhymed with “fecund.”
“Well, does everything have to rhyme?” Myra asked, to which Ruthie shook her head and laughed, said, Who is the poetess in this room?
Fecund, fecund. The shovel strikes a rhythm; dig and toss, dig and toss. Fecund. Fecund. Dig and toss. Deacon. Beacon. Dig and toss. Myra stops and rests, takes a deep breath. “Rhymes,” she mutters, and Sharpy runs over to her. “Miss Crow will say that my words don’t have a ‘d’ on the end and therefore can’t work.” It makes her mad and she grips that shovel harder and gets ready to set into some serious damn digging. She dares anybody to match what she can do with a shovel. Howard couldn’t. Ruthie can’t. Dig and toss. Dig and toss. I’m the boss. I’m the boss. Take that Connie; take this shovel in your big wide grinning mouth. Tell us how like Jesus you are no
w. Myra is just getting up to a full-fledged rage when her shovel strikes something solid. If that Mr. Digby has camouflaged some trash and brought it to her yard, she will have his poverty level reduced to subpoverty. Probably if he worked harder he wouldn’t be poverty level to begin with, this is America after all. She keeps pushing in with the shovel, striking like a snake and every time hitting something solid. She is red in the face and getting winded, so she throws the shovel to the side and gets on her hands and knees to start digging. Sharpy thinks she’s playing a game, like when she sniffed around the yard and taught him how to lift his leg like a man dog ought to, and he runs over to help. And Sharpy is the one to get there first. Sharpy is the first one to find skin, pale and pulpy, bluish gray. Sharpy’s natural instincts make him back off and growl deep in his throat.
“What is this?” Myra is demanding. “What in the hell, pardon my French . . .” She reaches in and grabs with both hands, pushing against that pile with all the strength she has. She rips off her gloves so she can get to whatever it is, dog corpse or chicken or old rotten fish. The smell is there now hitting her like a two-by-four in the face. She would probably vomit and pass out if she wasn’t so furious that her wonderful fecund dig-and-toss afternoon has been ruined. Now she’s reached something hard and solid, and she locks her fingers around the edge and pulls and pulls. There’s resistance. It’s big. Whatever is in there is big and she feels like the top of her head is about to fall off when all of a sudden the pressure gives and she falls back flat on her back, a soggy weight clutched to her chest, the noonday sun burning black spots into the world, and in one of those spots she would swear she saw Howard, and he was grinning; he was looking just like he did that day that she came up on him talking to that old Mary Stutts. Medical matters, dear, he said to Myra later when she questioned him, medical matters, confidential. He’s saying it right now, plain as day, his face blinking and twitching in the sun, like it might be covered in ants or termites, and she has to close her eyes against such ugliness, It’s confidential information.
Ever since they found Jones Jameson’s car a few days ago, Alicia has been as jumpy as a flea. Quee is doing all that she can think of to calm her, to relax her. Quee has even given Alicia a massage in hopes that she would fall asleep and get some rest. But, rest? Lord Jesus, who can rest around here? Old Denny forever spouting some bit of an idea she’s come up with, old Mr. Fatass Radio ringing his bell, Ruthie Crow in front of one of the skinny mirrors reciting, and the orphan child always having to stand out on the back stoop. “Jason, honey, you need to find a girlfriend,” Quee had told him just yesterday, to which Ruthie Crow responded that she did so wish he was a teensy bit older, that she’d wait for his goose-pâté-colored self if he wanted. He turned where Ruthie couldn’t see him and looked like he might upchuck.
Quee has got to speed up the curing process and move these folks on before they make her have a breakdown. What a nuthouse. And Denny. Lord, if Quee had known how really way out there Denny is and how the child cannot shut her mouth, Quee might’ve thought long and hard before hiring her. She wishes all of her clients could be as nice and easy as the young woman who just checked in; she doesn’t even really smoke but has come as sort of a little vacation from her husband and young children. She is perfectly content to just sleep, watch a little television, and read. She has told people all over town that she was a closet smoker but finally cracked under Quee’s questioning. “It was cheaper and more convenient than a spa or a breakdown,” the woman said. Now everyone has become kind of interested in the ghost wall, so Quee agreed to give a little tour.
“THIS IS A little girl by the name of Sally,” she says and points to a small oval frame. The child in the photograph is dressed in a sailor dress and holding a kitten, squeezing it up to her chest. “She is not an orphan, but she has always felt like one.”
“Why?” Jason, who has to keep moving to get away from Ruthie, asks.
Quee shrugs. “Well, her real father disappeared and then her mother went into a kind of second childhood where she wanted this little Sally to be like her friend or little sister. You know, she’d say things like ‘Sally, come help me braid my hair,’ instead of worrying about whether or not Sally had herself any homework. Of course, Sally did her homework, because she knew from even before this picture was taken that she was going to grow up to be somebody. That’s what she would say to herself every single morning: ‘I am somebody.’ Then her mama remarried a man who pulled them on into a new life, a very different life, one that this little Sally never felt fully included her.”
“That’s my story you’re telling,” Denny says now, because it is impossible for her to go any length of time whatsoever without talking. If Quee ever went to church, Denny is somebody she’d like to see sitting there, because she can’t imagine that Denny could make it through a whole sermon without a question, or comment, or as she always says, a little psychological insight to add.
“That’s a story that belongs to many of us, honey,” Quee says and forces her sweetie smile. “And from that story I could go into a stepfather story, and there are many different varieties there.”
“Yes, mine is a nice one for sure,” Denny says. “I mean, he’s not handsome like my real daddy, or tough like my real daddy, but he is nice.” Quee just nods and moves on down the hall. Denny has tried to wriggle information out of Quee since she landed here: What was my mama like as a girl? What was my daddy like? Did you go to my daddy’s funeral, Quee? Were you there when the military planes flew overhead and dipped their wings and then the whole Fulton High School Band struck up and played “When the Saints Go Marching In.” With every question, Quee has wanted to call Denny’s mama and give her yet another lecture on how to tell a good lie, how not to go overboard. You don’t just go from having an illegitimate child that probably belonged to somebody else’s too-hot-for-his-britches stepfather, up to having fallen in love with and married a decorated World War II hero. But then again, these are the stories that have probably given Denny the confidence or whatever it is that enables her to talk all the damned time.
“You see—Sally there was somebody who just naturally felt a kind of energy with the world,” Quee continues quietly. “If you look for signs and listen to what is happening all the way around you, then you just automatically know which way to go.”
“Well, I need to have my eyes and ears checked,” Alicia says and walks ahead, stops in front of one of Quee’s favorite photos of all. It’s Baccalaureate Sunday at the Piney Swamp School of Personality in 1902, and there are twenty-one stone-faced young women dressed in white, each holding a daisy. Their teacher is all in black and looks like she might be a hundred and a voodoo queen, when really she was probably only thirty or so. “What’s your story here?” Alicia asks and lifts little Taylor who has come and grabbed hold of her thigh.
“Well, that one there in the center?” Quee points to the one in black. “The teacher? Well, let’s just say that she has been teaching these young women a lot more than about how to have a good personality.” Quee laughs great big, her eyebrows arching up in an if you know what I mean kind of look.
“Tell us, tell us.” The radio guy has stepped into the hall and joined them. He has just come from the sauna and there are little rivers of sweat running down his old hairy chest and plump belly. He’s got one of those big white fluffy towels wrapped around his waist and Quee makes a mental note to go heavy on the Clorox next wash.
“Well, it’s not what you’re thinking,” Quee says. “It’s not S-E-X,” she whispers and rubs Taylor’s head. He looks at her and meows to continue what she calls the pussycat game. She meows back and turns to face Alicia, Denny, and Radio (Jason has wandered back to his room and is playing his music louder than she usually allows).
“These young women,” she points her arm at the long blurry photo. “Are training in medicine. They have learned just enough medical procedures and cures to venture out into the world and do goodness.”
“Goo
dness!” Radio waves his hand in dismissal and waddles on down the hall to where he has some books waiting. The way he says books everybody knows what kind of books. “I don’t want to hear about women and goodness; I want to hear about women and badness.”
“That sounded just like something Jones might say,” Alicia says quietly, and Old Fat Toad stops midroute. At first, there is a satisfied look on his face, mission accomplished, he too can go out into the world and be a disgusting pig shit sort, but then he seems to think better of it.
“I’m sorry,” he says and rather than be quiet so that everybody is left to watch that fat can rolling down the hall, Quee calls them over to another, a tiny three-by-three black-and-white photo like what might come from an old box camera. Most of the picture is the ocean, a seascape with sea oats lining the dunes of the foreground. A woman sits there, scarf on her head, legs hugged up to her chest.
“I love this one, always have,” Quee says and slips it from its frame, turns it over so they can all see the fine brown lines of writing: “It’s not Heaven but it’s as close as I’ve ever come.”
“We’ve all felt that way from time to time,” Quee says. “Not heaven but as close as you can get.”
“It’s been a long time since I felt that way.” Alicia sidles up closer to Quee, Taylor clutched close; she looks like she might cry, which is precisely what Quee was avoiding when she started this whole gallery tour. I mean it ain’t like she doesn’t have thousands of things to do!
“But you will again, dear heart,” Quee says. “You will.”
“Promise?”
“Cross my heart and hope to . . .” Quee calls Denny closer and whispers. “Hope to spend eternity with Ruthie and Radio without any television or liquor in the world.”
“That’s a promise, all right,” Denny says.
“Yes, that’s a promise.” Alicia wanders back toward the kitchen where Quee is about to start heating up some more oil.
Carolina Moon Page 17
