Flying Shoes

by Lisa Howorth

  In the master bedroom, the phone rang.

  Three

  Jack Ernest came to with the sickening but sexy sensation of something foul and warm and wet on his face. His aunt’s shameful little Yorkie was standing on his chest, feet foursquare, lapping at Ernest’s mouth. With one hand he chucked the dog across the room where it landed with a wheezing squeak like a child’s rubber squeeze toy. He reached for a Marlboro; after a smoke he’d consider full consciousness. Since his return from Bosnia he’d switched to filtered, not entirely unconcerned about his health. Eventually he would rise, shower, and descend to the kitchen where he would have breakfast with his aunt and grandmother. Then he would go back into his room and write about the war. He did this eighteen days out of the month and had accumulated most of his novel, to be titled “It Tolls for Me.” Every other weekend or so he went up to town, where the university was, to party. That was what he planned to do Saturday.

  In a not-so-far-back part of his mind he hoped to cause his path to cross that of Mary Byrd Thornton, whom he enjoyed imagining he loved because he should not. If not Mrs. T, there might be a splendid array of substitutes. But it took something away for Ernest if it came without enough resistance. It was as much about the hunt as anything else. Like a Pink Palace steak never could taste as good as something he’d stalked in the woods for hours, brought down himself, dragged out, field dressed, and grilled under the stars. He relished things that tried to get away. That’s why they called it game, right? Trophy meal, trophy fuck. Elusion and trouble were his condiments of choice. He cared about Byrd in his own way. He liked her. She was smart enough and fun and cynical; she shared his view that many things in life were bullshit. She looked good enough—she was pretty in a schoolmarmish way—but there was a sort of animal, wildlife thing about her that Ernest found enticing. He supposed he was just pussy-struck, as usual, but he could detect something dark about her that needed encouraging; something wounded and self-destructive that would be so sweet to take advantage of and would make her his perfect partner in sexual crime. She’d asked him to back off, and he could, but it was more interesting not to. She didn’t mean it anyway.

  From downstairs, women’s kitchen chatter wafted up with the warm aromas of bacon and coffee. Best smell in the world, he thought, then re-thought: well, maybe second best.

  Ernest sat down at the table with the women. Sisters, but they could not have been more different. Aunt Anna, Ernest’s grandmother, whom he called “Antenna” because as a kid that’s what he thought his older cousins were calling her, was conservative and provincial in all her notions but first with the latest fads at the mall, wore a wind suit—a plastic abomination of turquoise and fuchsia geometric designs. Ernest thought that after jogging suits, which people now actually wore out in public as if they were real clothes, wind suits were one of the most hideous affronts to the human body since leisure suits. He had not forgotten the jarring sight of those, like garbage men outfits, worn with white shoes and white belts by his grandfather and uncles, or the cheesy feel of their polyester Sansabelt slacks. Even at six or seven, running around shirtless and shoeless, he wanted to look like a frat guy: khakied, tweedy, club-tied; the perfect rebelsexual. Or like his mother’s brother, Uncle Pothus, who never wore anything that he hadn’t bought at the Brooks Brothers or Rosenstein’s in New Orleans.

  Antenna had had only one husband, Toy, who had simply sat down under a pine on the fifth hole of the Hatchatalla Country Club golf course one day and never got up again. She was as sad and prim and prissy as her sister Ella King was loose and generous of disposition.

  Ella King on the other hand looked like Aunt Bee—hen-breasted, tiny of foot and voice—but she held advanced ideas and had a sharp sense of humor. She had had two husbands and four children and was never without an escort for a movie or church event. She enjoyed David Letterman and smoked Parliaments. The recessed filter kept you from getting lip cancer.

  “You know, Jacky, if you’re going to party this weekend, there’s a big winter storm coming—it’s all across the TV,” said Antenna.

  “It’s true—Dolores called and she watches that new weather channel day and night,” said Ella King.

  “You might could use those tire chains,” Antenna said. “The ones we had for that last ice storm in nineteen seventy-three.” She rocked the skillet back and forth to distribute the grease.

  “I’ve got plans for those chains, my good grandmother,” Ernest said. “And they don’t include putting them on the car.” He winked salaciously at Ella King, who laughed.

  “Honestly, Jack. What a white-trash thing to say,” said Antenna. She sniffed to signify indignation.

  Ernest ignored her, slurping his coffee and wondering how he could find Teever to drive him around up there. He hoped he wasn’t in jail again. His mouth full of a third egg-and-bacon biscuit, he asked, “Whersh Pothush?”

  “Well, he had a … restless night,” said Ella King, smirking.

  Ernest said, pushing back his plate, “Yeah, I’ll bet he did.” Pothus had pounded most of a bottle of Maker’s watching old movies.

  The insectoid dog crept nervously into the room.

  “And why is this dog acting like he’s been beaten?” asked Antenna. The wind suit gave off a lot of irritating noise as she moved toward the coffee pot. “Come here, Ashley,” she said, making little air smooches. “Mwa.”

  “That dog is a loser,” said Ernest.

  “Ashley, oh Ashley,” she said. She scooped up the little dog. “Don’t listen to him. You’re such a gentleman. And so handsome.”

  “He might look handsome at the end of a fishing line, or on the lazy Susan at the Ruby Chinese,” Ernest rose from the table. “But there is no other way he would.”

  Upstairs, Ernest took a pair of Duck Heads from a clean, ironed stack of a dozen, and a crisp white shirt from a sizable row in his closet. He added a blazer and shades and the look was complete—the relentless and correct uniform of the Mississippi boulevardier and how he dressed every day. To get the creativity and testosterone percolating for a day of writing, he decided to take his gun out and shoot some stuff. From under his bed he pulled an AK-47.

  It was an older gun; the folding butt stock had been painted red at one time, for identification, he supposed. The gun had been handled so much that the paint had worn away, leaving the wood with a rich cherry patina. It was lovely to look at and even better to feel. Ernest petted it, tracing a whorl in the grain with his finger. He had bought the gun for almost nothing—fifteen American dollars and a couple packs of Marlboros—from a wounded teenager returning from some Bosnian skirmish.

  The kid, broken in every way, had had no wish for anything other than slivovice and cigarettes. He had laughed weakly, and had spoken in a gargly voice in spite of the neck wound that leaked Marlboro smoke. Ernest had said that he himself was headed out to write about the war. A Red Cross medic, a Texas girl of Ernest’s acquaintance, had translated the soldier’s exhausted remarks. “He’s more or less telling you to go on, get on up in it,” she said. “Get you some.” He had smuggled in the AK by sending it home FedEx—you could send anything FedEx, bless them. The Mercury of the twentieth century. In Bosnia, Ernest had known guys who had sent amazing things stateside. He met a GI whose great-great-great grandfather was the Cherokee chief, the Ridge. The soldier had scalped a Serbian prisoner’s unit, taking away pud, pelt, and balls, and sent it FedEx to his girlfriend. Another GI had sent exotic mushrooms and rare plants to his boyfriend in Mobile.

  The AK under his arm, Ernest stomped downstairs again. He casually aimed the gun at Ashley and said, “Boom!”

  “This dog is worth hundreds of dollars at stud,” Antenna said. “So please point that thing somewhere else.”

  Ernest said, “You’re crazy, Antenna. You know that dog has failed at love.” He didn’t get it about a dog that couldn’t hunt, fight, or scare people, especially a dog that couldn’t even mate with a real dog who could do those things.

&nb
sp; “I know no such thing,” Antenna called. “A random Rottweiler twice his size is no test of his abilities.”

  To Ernest, if you couldn’t get it up for exotic, strange pussy, even if it was large, what was the point? Instead of saying this he said, “Well, I wish he’d quit testing his abilities on my hunting boots.” He filled his coffee cup with some Tanqueray from the flask in his blazer and went out back.

  At Molly Barr Elementary, Mary Byrd got her Explorer in the long line of cars that wound up the school driveway to its entrance. Because she was a little late—most of the mothers came early to park in the line and check out the day’s slick batch of catalogs—she was at the bottom of the long, stupid line. As usual. Through the oak and cedars she could identify every single car: the Chadwicks’ Range Rover, like a playhouse on wheels, the Blounts’ Toyota, the Morrisons’ and the Lewises’ Volvos, the smattering of BMWs and Mercedeses that belonged to new people—those who had recently moved in from Memphis or Jackson or the Delta, in search of the town’s crime-free, arty, sports-possessed, boozy, barbecued college-town life, where white people were enlightened but still in charge. It refreshed Mary Byrd a little to see the other smattering of cars in the line: a few banged-up or rusty hoopties and the earth-toned, carpeted vans from the 1970s with little ladders to the roof. What were those ladders for anyway? Stargazing? Rock concerts? NASCAR infields? The hoopties and vans had trickled down to the poor white and black families, and now were starting to be acquired by the Mexican workers who had come to construct the crappy condos that were cropping up all over town like poison ivy blisters on a careless ankle to accommodate the students, weekend football people, and retirees who didn’t want to pay taxes for things that didn’t benefit them directly, like schools. Now that tornado season was just around the corner, the regular townspeople wondered if the clusters of cheap condos would hold up with the first big rains and winds of spring. Mary Byrd hoped they wouldn’t. Let ’em wash away down the ditches they were built in or blow all over the county. Maybe condo developments would be the new mobile home parks—tornado magnets—and if they did remain standing they would be tomorrow’s tenements when the real estate thing busted, which, Mann said, was definitely going to happen.

  On the other side of the school building, Mary Byrd could see the orange train of buses all lined up. If she were queen of the world, school buses would still have the usual orange fronts and backs, but their sides would be painted in beautiful and cool ways, like psychedelic hippie buses or those crazy things in Ceylon. Or was it Sri Lanka now? Maybe kids would be happier about going to school if they could climb into a submarine, or a rocket, or a pioneer wagon, or onto a magic carpet. She could hear William saying, “Bye Mom! Got to get in the space shuttle Endeavour now and blast off for school!” No—not a space shuttle—bad idea. She thought of the Challenger and was glad William hadn’t been one of the millions of children who’d watched that awful launch. God. Maybe kids could paint the buses themselves. Why not? As they were, except for their colors, school buses were identical to the prison buses at Parchman. Maybe that’s why buses were so institutional and boring: to keep convicts or children from feeling too good about things.

  Charles and Mary Byrd saw the bus as the great equalizer. Kids whose parents worked, whether at the hospital or the university or Chambers Stove, were relegated to the school buses, which had always been a sort of rolling microcosm of the real world and a rehearsal for life’s realities. Every day zillions of American children were encapsulated in smelly, seat-belt-less tin cans piloted by drivers who could easily be stoned, hopped up, deranged, or worse—twenty-one or sixty-four. Every day they could have fun and socialize and make joyful noise and see and hear things they’d remember nostalgically their whole lives, or they could be robbed, tortured, or humiliated, or all of the above, for twenty minutes twice a day, every day. Maybe it made them tougher or maybe it broke them. Who knew. Mary Byrd hoped that by comparison, maybe riding the bus might at least make kids, even the ones with sketchy families, glad to get home and deal with whatever they needed to deal with when they got there. Well, all of them should ride the bus to school. Or walk. Too many of them were fatties already.

  Charles and Mary Byrd were willing to sacrifice Eliza and William so that they could have this democratic experience, but out of some instinct for self-preservation, or just being spoiled, the Thornton children refused to ride the bus. They were okay with walking; but she admitted to herself, the idea of them walking alone, even just a few blocks, made her worry, and so, hypocrite wuss that she was, she caved and slavishly drove them. At least this line of cars seemed emblematic of what a decent mixed bag the town was. Charles always said, “A town is only as good as its public schools,” even though he’d been sent off to Woodberry Forest because he’d been something of a problem. In the days of integration, most white townspeople had taken their medicine, opened the schools, and dug in to make the system work for everybody. Not like over in the Delta, for instance, where white people had abandoned the public schools and still perpetuated an un-Christian cycle of failure that would mean, everyone knew, that children would keep leaving and one day there would be nothing left in the Delta but vast corporate farms, computerized machinery, and destitute people, black and white.

  It was true that a white academy had opened in their town, too, back in the sixties, subsidized by a wealthy backwoods family that had sold their land in the remote north corner of the state to Weyerhauser. Wanting to “protect their heritage,” the family had usurped the university’s name to add dignity and the suggestion of scholarship. University College Academy—double dignified—had opened in an old country store with seven students, learning their reading, writing, ’rithmatic, and racism. Now UCA was still up and running and operated out of a big new steel building that housed both the library and the gymnasium, and three new Jim Walter homes smushed together for classrooms. But at least UCA absorbed the kind of people who would otherwise be banning books and evolution, creating cotillions and sororities, complaining that black kids got all the playing time on the field or the court, and raising hell about prayers.

  But the Delta, Mary Byrd thought sadly. You could go over there, to Shaw or Jonestown, and just looking around was enough to make you cry. The most beautiful, haunted landscape she knew, where every built thing in the tiny cotton-crossroad towns seemed from another time, or another country. She understood its hard past, but for her generation to have turned their backs on it—it sucked. They had had a chance to change history. It was as if crop-dusting poison had eaten their hearts and brains and they were all moving or dying out with all the birds and frogs and bears. Nothing alive but beans, cotton, and farmed catfish. A mosquito empire. Everybody loved the blues, loved to go to the festivals, but go to school with them? Ha. Well, easy for her to say; the university had made their hill town an oasis.

  For a second Mary Byrd let her thoughts turn small, to the day’s unhappiness. She suddenly couldn’t wait to see her children. She had her catalogs, and the previous day’s mail had brought her favorite: Home Trends: Practical Products for Practical People. The catalog was so lovable and entertaining because it was exactly the opposite of what it advertised. It should have been called Home Crapola: Unnecessary Make-Work Gadgetry for the Sunset Years. Mary Byrd was always enthralled; the main concerns of the catalog seemed to be dealing with bugs, unruly baseball caps, sleep problems, soap scum, and the protection of wall-to-wall carpeting. Random, nameless cooties were definitely the enemy for these customers. Who were they? The terminally lazy, germ freaks, people with that obsessive-compulsive thing, the really, really bored or the really, really old, or hopeful people with stock in plastics? Teddy bear cleaners. A thing that enabled you to wash baseball caps so that, the description said, they came out of the washer “unscathed.” Sock clips to “end one of the world’s greatest mysteries—missing socks.” Mary Byrd knew this wouldn’t do her any good—socks in her house were hopelessly estranged before they even got to the wash
er. A shower cap–like thing with a gel pack—you could put it in the freezer then snap it onto an electric fan and voilà— personal air-conditioning. A long catch-and-release Bug Buster Wand. The Blanket Support was a jinky under-the-covers rig that kept the feet of restless sleepers from touching the bedding. Even weirder was the personal between-the-sheets Bedfan that for only $79.95 “creates a cool personal microclimate between your bed’s sheets.” What was that really about—bed farts? Some products bordered on snake oil, like the Episal Overnight Drawing Salve which purported to “draw out foreign substances from beneath the skin” while you slept, so that in the morning acne and ingrown hairs would be gone.

  As if American products weren’t overpackaged anyway, there were plastic containers for plastic containers. A pancake dispenser for “accurate” pancakes. A brush with more than a thousand bristles for removing corn silks. Forks with serrations on the inside edges of the tines to “stop slippery noodles from falling onto the table or your lap.” Maybe this stuff was for the handicapped and she should feel bad for ridiculing it. Maybe one day she would actually need the Acid Reflux Pillow (on sale for only $59.99). Possibly the purpose of the catalog was to give meaning and purpose to life in geezerland. She imagined the process: waiting for the catalog, perusing new products, deciding that there were pressing needs and good bargains, ordering over the phone, taking time to ask a lot of questions and meticulously describing problems. Waiting for the order and the excitement over its arrival, trying to open boxes with arthritic hands (where is that special Big Grip Box Cutter ordered last month?), phoning friends to describe a product’s success or failure, maybe going to the P.O. to return an item with a long, dissatisfied note. Days could be filled. Why didn’t they think of the things she needed: an engraving tool for putting ineradicable IDs on eyeglasses or bicycles, or contact paper art, maps, or TV screens for the ceilings of gynecologists’ offices, or lady-size Bobcats for big garden jobs. Ha. For burying nosy reporters.