by Lisa Howorth
She appreciated the fact that Home Trends didn’t carry things like that horrible torture tape for mice, whose tiny feet stuck to it making them struggle to death for days. She wouldn’t even wish that on moles. Or voles. She thought about her mother’s zealous hatred of squirrels. Her mom bragged about trapping them in her Havahart trap and then popping them with her BB gun as they quivered there. Mary Byrd had asked her to please not do it around William and Eliza, who loved Beatrix Potter when they were little—and besides, she had said to her mother, did she want them to think Nana was crazy? Her mom did scare her sometimes. What was the difference between chipmunks and mice, squirrels and rabbits, deer and horses? What was a squirrel but a bunny in Spandex, with short ears? They were all just trying to make it, right?
The car behind her honked, jolting Mary Byrd out of her Home Trends musings, and she rolled the car forward to first in line. The school doors disgorged William, entangled with his guys, and then the girls. Mary Byrd focused on William—eight years old, she thought, nine next October. Stevie had been only nine, and was still only nine. Precious in a 1950s way, Stevie, so pink and golden, easily sunburned, had looked nothing like William, whose eyes and hair were deep brown and whose skinny body turned so dark in the summer that they called him the Brown Skeleton. Her heart gave a big chug, and she couldn’t be sure if it was guilt, anxiety, or love, or for which boy she felt it. Both.
The boys body-slammed the car, pretending she’d hit them, and William clambered in. The usual carpool boys, Other William and Justin, peeled off to catch a ride to their Boy Scout meeting. She’d had misgivings about Boy Scouts, and William hadn’t seemed to care about joining. Eliza and Meggie, Other William’s sister, flung themselves into the car, backpacks and girl junk flapping and banging. They were always snappish and kinetic after school, like dogs left on leads too long. Lately, William and Eliza had ratcheted up their surliness; not just after school, but it had become standard, round-the-clock behavior. Even at their ages—Eliza was only a sixth grader—they both seemed to have tapped into teenage viciousness already. Eliza, finding Mary Byrd up late one night upchucking violently in the bathroom after a night of too many cigarettes and Beefeater martinis, olives taking the place of dinner, had regarded her mother coldly and in a manner curiously like Evagreen’s, saying “Oh. My. God. Is that vomit?” As if Mary Byrd might have been on her knees in front of the toilet doing anything else. “Go back to bed,” she had told Eliza. “I’ve got a stomach virus.” The next day Mary Byrd had overheard Eliza telling a friend on the phone, “Mom blew chunks last night. So gross. She said she had a stomach virus.”
In her own day children respected, or were afraid of, their parents. Why would they be afraid now, when they had learned from the Berenstain Bears that dads were bumbling fuckups, and from Roseanne that mothers were for fighting with. Charles, formal and aloof, might have commanded more respect had he been around more, but Eliza and William knew better than to mess with him much. She regretted that the Eddie Haskell model of teen rudeness that she and Nick had grown up with was gone—an art kids had developed of behaving offensively without seeming callous or mean, exactly. Just smarmy and punk, like Eddie.
Mary Byrd turned the Explorer slowly up Jefferson, watching for stray kids that might, frantic to get away from school, run into the road.
“Mom, Taylor got the Jansport backpack that I wanted to get, so now I can’t, and I know you won’t go to the Athlete’s Foot to let me pick out another one, and this one sucks,” Eliza said. “Even Meggie has one.”
“Meggie sucks,” said William.
“Everyone named William sucks,” said Meggie.
Looking into the rearview mirror, Mary Byrd could see her daughter’s lovely face, framed by stringy blonde hair and still padded lightly with fat that had not quite settled on her bone structure, pulled into a puffy pout accented by her new red-and-blue rebel braces. “And mine still smells like deer pee.” Some boys who liked Eliza had put some crap—deer musk or some kind of hunting jizz—on her backpack, and despite a number of washings in everything from tomato juice to, yes, Dog Gone Pee Remover from Home Trends, the faintest whiff was still discernible. The children themselves smelled meaty and stale.
“My backpack sucks more, and if she gets a new one, I do, too! I’m tired of Ninja Turtles.” William, who preferred to be squeezed in back between the girls rather than in the front seat where he couldn’t annoy them effectively, sprawled out, deliberately putting a leg on Eliza’s side. “She always gets everything all the time.”
“Always everything all the time!” Mary Byrd said. “How about, ‘Hi Mom.’ Or, ‘How was your day, Mom?’ And please don’t say sucks—I don’t know how many times I’ve asked you this—outside the privacy of our own house. Or how about the privacy of your own head? Just think it, don’t say it. You know what that expression really means, right?”
“Yes, Mom, we know it’s about wieners. Big deal,” said William, sighing with exaggerated boredom. Meggie giggled, and Eliza looked at them both with disgust.
“And isn’t this the privacy of our own car?” Eliza said, and then, with almost no sarcasm in her voice, added, “So, Mom, how was your day? I hope it didn’t absolutely blow.”
Mary Byrd thought about reaching behind her over the seat and just smacking randomly at whatever she could hit, like her own mother used to do. Another day, she would have. Today, she thought to herself that whatever assholes they were, these children were hers, so far alive and well and as far as she knew unmolested and maybe pretty happy, probably more out of luck or fate than any good care or protection she and Charles had given them.
“Oh. My day? I guess I’d have to say it sucked,” she conceded. “It sucked big-time.”
The children looked at each other wide-eyed and laughed. “What’s for dinner?” William asked.
Dinner. Good question. The bad day had knocked the sense out of her and she hadn’t planned a meal. She’d drop Meggie off and make a quick stop at the Jones Food Center. She wanted to scare up Teever, anyway, if only to see if he could work in the yard while she was gone, but also to ask if he’d drive her to the airport so Charles wouldn’t have to. She cringed at the thought of a plane trip. An idea occurred to her: was it total insanity to get Teever to drive with her to Virginia?
She only had a few things to get and hoped Eliza and William would stay in the car, but that wasn’t happening. William jumped out and ran ahead, while Eliza walked slowly enough to distance herself from William but quickly enough to appear not to be with her mother. Having a locally owned downtown grocery store was such a luxury, but Mary Byrd also thought that its handiness encouraged her poor planning. Because it was only three blocks away at the end of her street, she found herself running there constantly, sometimes two or three times a day, for whatever. A big Kroger had opened recently out by the highway—the condo people were all over that—and she did shop there for certain things like seafood or panty hose, and Kroger’s prices were sometimes lower and they had seafood and better produce, but she was devoted to the Jones Food Center and valued all that it meant, as much as any ancient Athenian had valued his agora. The corner candy store for the children; the place where she could cash a counter check at midnight to pay the babysitter, buy a bale of hay or a sack of manure or a Mad magazine or Baby Tylenol or Tampax, or tiny new potatoes from Mr. Hollowell’s farm. If the JFC didn’t have it, you probably didn’t need it all that much. From the checkers and sackers, some of whom were challenged in various ways, you could get a five-day weather forecast, gardening or cooking tips, or a rundown on who was in the hospital (published every day in the Mercury) and why. If you needed your garden turned, Mr. Johnny could conjure up a guy with two mules who would come and do it. There was also a bulletin board where just about anything was posted: cars, services, hunting dogs, house parties, church events, messages, and bad checks. On the way out she was going to leave a message for Teever.
William and Eliza had probably gone off to
the cooler in the back for chocolate Yoo-hoos and Jungle Juice. Mary Byrd headed toward the meat counter for pork chops, passing disorderly shelves with products bearing vintage labels that could pass for stuff that had been sitting there for decades: School Days English Peas, Red Bird imitation Vienna sausages, Possum brand sardines (when she’d first come to town they’d still carried canned Negro Head Oysters), Picayune and Home Run cigarettes, Tulip brand snuff, King Leo stick candy, and Rock’n Roll Stage Plank cookies with Pepto-pink icing showing through the wax wrappers. Grabbing a jar of pasta sauce, she approached the meat, breathing shallowly. The meat bins stank weirdly of the paradoxical aromas of Clorox and spoilage. In them were stacked fatback, souse, Day-Glo–red hot dogs, and nearly every part of a cow or a hog: feet, stomachs, ears, jowls, neck bones, tails, and giant testicles labeled bull fries or pork fries, which were inexplicably packaged three to a pack. There were other things just labeled meat. Mary Byrd looked through the chops for a set that wasn’t too gray or rainbowy and then headed to Produce.
In deep summer or early fall the produce department was a wonderland overflowing with the bounty of local farmers. In the dead of winter, other than greens, there wasn’t much: dinged-up apples, expensive avocados in a basket with a sign saying adovacods, slightly wrinkled, flaccid peppers; the usual stuff trucked in from wherever they grew and trucked that stuff in from. Mary Byrd lusted for the summer’s beautiful chartreuse cranberry beans streaked with magenta, or the fat, mottled Georgia rattlesnake beans; crisp, tart, lopsided York apples; Nancy Hall sweet potatoes from the town of Vardaman, the Sweet Potato Capital of the World; vaguely sexual yellow squash with fused necks and the not-so-vaguely-sexual Big Boy tomatoes with mutant, Nixon-faced protuberances. She’d give a lot, in February, to see the JFC’s grungy bushel baskets piled with the sweetest Pontotoc peaches, tomatoes labeled slicers, rusty carts full of bowling ball–size lopes, and yellow meat melons lined up on the dirty floor. And pint baskets of figs and blackberries, and sometimes muscadines and scuppernongs packaged in cellophane meat trays. All of it piled high, overflowing, a carnival of fresh, brightly colored, delicious fruits and vegetables brought into town every day, summer after summer, from the same Mississippi hill country farms.
Mary Byrd frowned, picked out a less-wrinkled pepper and a muddy onion, paid for her stuff and the two Jungle Juices that the children had already absconded with, and stopped at the bulletin board. She tore a big piece off her grocery sack and wrote:
and stuck it up with a pin, hoping Teever would notice but not too many other people would. She hurried to the car outside, where in just the few minutes they had been in the store it had gotten nearly dark, and much colder. As they pulled away toward home, the light inside the Jones Food Center glowed greenly on the empty, wettish sidewalk outside. There were no trays of flowers, fern baskets, tomato plants, or herbs in pots, no bales of hay or pine straw, no pumpkins and gourds and cornstalks and homecoming mums, no fragrant Christmas trees, no stacked firewood, even. This really is the dead of winter, Mary Byrd thought. The dead, the dead, the dead. She sighed. She hoped Teever would see his message tonight, or at least in the morning. If he was even around.
Teever Barr watched from the County Co-op as Mary Byrd parallel-parked her car and entered the JFC across the street. It would be an hour or so before it was dark enough to sneak back to his hooch in the cemetery, and he couldn’t stay there in front of the Co-op because Mr. Jimmy, the Co-op boss, would run him off. He had about one swig of Amos’s shine left but he would save that for later. Mudbird might have some smokes; she always shared and bought him beers at the bar, but she wasn’t regular with her smoking. He did have a couple half-smoked ones down in his sock. Best thing about Mr. Jimmy was he could only have a few drags before he started coughing. His cough was way worser than Teever’s—man, did he look pretty ill—and he would stop and throw his practically unsmoked butt in the coffee can where lots of folks would get ’em—Dees, Pokey, some of the water-heads from the halfway house, if they came around.
Teever thought he’d stand there a little longer near the space heater ’til they put the chicks and ducks and seed sacks and tools up for the night. He liked to watch the little birds under the heat lamps. Too bad one of the halfway-house dudes did, too; one of them who thought he was a rock star—liked to dress up like a hair band—had bit a head off a chick one time. Teever had heard from Joey at the sally port that that dude had been sent back to Starkville to the big rutabaga ranch where they couldn’t go around normal folks. Or chickens. Teever did want to speak to Mudbird, just to check on her, see how she doing, what’s going on, she need some things done in the yard. Maybe she had a pill. He wondered if Jack Ernest was coming to town soon. He would have pills, booze, probably would need a driver. Mudbird would know when he coming back, though she and Ernest never hung out around people too much; some drinks maybe at the Bear, maybe a late-night. He knew Ernest chased Mudbird around some, but Ernest chase all the mossyjaw. He thought, personally, that Mudbird could do better. Wasn’t nothing wrong with Charles, neither; not as far as he could see, anyway, but who knew what in a woman’s mind. Some people probably thinking she crazy. She was nice. She was funny. Little old maybe, but not bad looking. Too bad she wearing those glasses—make her look like what’s-her-name, Murder She Wrote, or somebody. No tits or ass, but Teever enjoyed hitting on her, playing, get her all bothered and who knows, maybe one day. Everybody like secrets. Well. He wasn’t sure Ernest was doing her anyway. Maybe so, maybe not. So hard to tell sometimes what white people up to.
Teever, né Tolliver, was just about the last black Barr left in town. His people said they were descended from a slave of Pinckney Taliaferro of Goose Creek, South Carolina, who had come west to Mississippi when Taliaferro was accused of salting a competitor’s rice crop. The Barrs said they had some Native American in them, too. “Yeah, I got Indian,” was Teever’s response when asked about it, letting loose his extremely loud, throaty laugh. “Blackfoot maybe.”
He was also a Vietnam vet. Although no one could be sure that he could read or write, he was plenty smart. His company was made up almost completely of destitute Delta kids, mostly sons of sharecroppers from those sad old towns like Panther Burn or Marks, where the slogan chiseled into the courthouse lintel was obedience to the law is liberty. Those guys had little to lose. At Hamburger Hill something bad had happened with a second lieutenant, it was rumored, a white West Point boy from North Carolina. No one really knew what had occurred, but some of the black guys, Teever included, had gone to Parchman. Whenever anyone had the balls to ask Teever about it, he’d simply laugh and say, “Ain’t no shame in my game.” You did not want to press Teever too hard on things.
Now Teever was mostly a driver and yard guy. People around town—often some of the writers who drank a lot—paid him to drive for them. Took people to Memphis to the airport, drove kids to summer camp, picked up college kids at the bar or a party if they were too drunk, took old ladies to church and bridge, picked up “special deliveries.” He didn’t have a driver’s license. Why would he? He didn’t have a car. Nobody really knew where he lived, but if anyone needed him they could put the word out, stick a note on the wall at the JFC, and he would turn up. In a really cold winter he might do something blatant in public—openly sell some crack on the square, steal a King Cobra from the B Quick—and end up in the cozy Lafayette County jail where his old bud Papadop would cook him Philly cheese steaks every day and give him Cost Cutter smokes. He’d just repeat his mantra, “Ain’t no shame in my game,” and wait until spring, when the judge, who Teever knew to have a gay black lover in Memphis, would let him back on the street. Teever traded on the secrets he knew; it was the only currency he had. Why not? Everybody was trading on something. “Everybody got something somebody else want; pussy, drugs, famous, secrets, whatever. We all buying and selling. Every day. Every single goddamn day,” was the way he felt about it.
Teever took one of the butts from his sock, trying to ho
ld it to the orange and blue flame in the Co-op space heater to get it lit without burning himself. Before he could, Mary Byrd hurried out of the JFC with a sack and jumped in her car. Teever hollered “Mudbird!” but she didn’t hear him and drove on off. Oh well. Catch her later. Maybe she had stuck a note.
He crossed the street and entered the Jones Food Center. Mr. Johnny in there, just standing, watching his new electric doors. He was really proud about his doors.
He said, “Teever. Teever, you want to help me and Big Dan bust up some ground tomorrow if we don’t get that freezing rain?”
“Might. You gone use them nasty mules or the tiller?” The mules were about a hundred years old and one of them, Lars, kicked and bit if you weren’t careful. They’d originally belonged to two old Norwegian twins who were just as ornery. Mr. Johnny had bought them at the Sale Barn and named them for the men, even though, or maybe because, they were alleged communists.
