Flying Shoes

by Lisa Howorth

  “Mrs. Shaw has Yim and Lars out at her place doing some clearing,” said Mr. Johnny. Yim was Jim, the good mule, but they all pronounced it like the Norwegians had. “So— the tiller. You want to work, be here six o’clock.”

  “Patty fix me some breakfast?” Teever asked.

  “Sure. On the go. Lunch too.”

  “Okay, then. I’m here.”

  That’s good, Teever thought. Hang out tonight ’til Dead Jerry’s close, maybe a late-night, back to the graveyard, sleep a few, get warm and get some coffee and a hot Hen’s Nest and a honeybun, make a little cash. Okay then. Thinking about a Hen’s Nest made his mouth water. It was a JFC specialty and he wished he had the cash for one right now. Take some three-day-old chicken salad with an ice cream scoop, mash it down some, break an egg on it, fry it a little, umm. Too bad. He’d have to settle for his bread and peanut butter stashed at the graveyard shed. But he wasn’t complaining. He was just glad he had the hooch and almost everything he needed there.

  Above the pay phone, which was hung at midget height for kids and old folks in their chairs, was the bulletin board. All kinds of things were posted there for all the world to see. Teever looked them over. He could read, but he found it more convenient for people to believe he couldn’t. Bad check for this one, that one, some students from other towns, oh man, one for Booger Britches, the worst landlord and biggest asshole around. Lots of folks love to see that. He was not very surprised to see the little note from Mudbird posted too. He thought she was on to him about the reading thing, but when she wanted to get in touch she’d still just post a note with teever and a little drawing of a bird and some other scribblings if she had a big message, like in Egypt. Wonder what she want. Maybe Charles need some help, need a ride to the airport. He’d check on her later. Maybe tomorrow, next day. He liked her little drawings. This one said:

  which he knew meant “Meet me at the Black Bear Bar (the only bar in town with stairs) at five and I’ll buy you a beer. Mary Byrd.” Okay then, I can do that. He looked over at the pile of the day’s Mercury to check the date. Today the ninth, so she mean tomorrow.

  Putting the message in his jacket pocket, he left the Food Center and crossed the back parking lot just as an old Valentine Farms pickup pulled in behind the apocalyptic JFC Dumpster. It was always overflowing and unbelievably foul, and at night it came alive with critters: possum, coons, dogs, cats—an animal juke joint. Out of the truck came a Vietnamese guy that people called Cong, even though he was a refugee. He carried two clear sacks full of yellow crap that Teever knew was chicken feet or beaks, or both. Chinese students ate them, which disgusted a lot of people, but in Nam, Teever had seen it all with food. Anyway, it wasn’t any nastier than chitlins or crawdads. What folks ate and what folks fucked their own business. As Cong turned the corner of the building, Teever saw the heads of some live chicks sticking out of his jacket pocket. What up with that, he wondered.

  Four

  With the sack of groceries in one arm, Mary Byrd groped for the kitchen light. She set the groceries down and noticed that the crappy little kitchen TV was off. Huh, she thought. Usually at this time of day Evagreen would still be here, watching Oprah or her stories as she ironed Charles’s shirts. William and Eliza dumped their backpacks that sucked on the floor and ran off to the bathrooms. No one ever went to the bathrooms at school if they could help it. The bathrooms weren’t as bad as the buses, but they were often sketchy and disgusting; another no-fly zone in the education experience. Mary Byrd grabbed two leashes and went back outside to walk Puppy Sal and the Quarter Pounder so they could come in and spend the evening relaxing with the family.

  When she returned, the children were at their places at the counter, intently watching Forrest Gump as if they hadn’t seen it ten times and shoveling in big spoonfuls of Frosted Mini-Wheats.

  She said, “Okay, thirty minutes and one bowl, that’s it.” They didn’t reply. William, the Cereal Killer, consumed two or three boxes of Frosted Mini-Wheats and Honey Nut Cheerios per week and would be perfectly happy to exist on nothing else. Maybe the occasional potato chip and Miracle Whip sandwich on white bread. The brown and white diet. Mary Byrd unclipped the dogs, who rushed over to sniff Eliza’s backpack. Picking up both packs and setting them on a stool so the dogs wouldn’t hose down the reeky deer-piss one, Mary Byrd noticed a note on the counter, weighted down with an empty can of Magic Sizing. In that curious handwriting that a lot of black people had—a mixture of upper-and lower-case letters—Evagreen had written: “Get more. I’m gone. Call you husband.” She wondered a little; Evagreen rarely left early and she almost never left notes. Just leaving the empty starch or Zud can or Pine-Sol bottle on the counter would let Mary Byrd know she needed to buy more. And since Evagreen had left without her day’s pay, Mary Byrd supposed she’d need to run it by her house. Well, she heaved a sigh, it’d have to be later. Right now she needed a drink while she started dinner.

  Where was the damn phone? Portable phones were not necessarily a technological advance in her book; you could never find them, and usually they ended up in Eliza’s room. Looking around, she spotted it under a pile of neatly folded dish towels. She checked caller ID, quickly deleting one she ruefully recognized as Ernest’s and beeping through a few more. One was a Virginia number she didn’t know; had to be the reporter calling again. She clicked back to confirm it. She had a bad feeling about that woman. Why was Ernest calling when she’d told him not to? Looking in the freezer, she wondered what to make, a decision she ought to have made at the JFC. She had the pork chops, easy enough, but what to go with them? Eliza hadn’t really liked “piglet meat” ever since, when she was a little girl, she had fallen in love with Wilbur in Charlotte’s Web and with Pooh’s friend Piglet. Pigs were adorable; Mary Byrd also wished they didn’t eat them. Maybe dice the meat and do stir-fry? As long as meat was served to her in a form that was not a body part, Eliza would eat it. Mary Byrd was suddenly weary. Fuck it; she’d just do the chops the way Nonna did—seared, quickly simmered with a sliced bell pepper in the sauce she’d bought, all of it dumped over pasta. Eliza could just have the pasta and Mary Byrd could add the anchovies to her and Charles’s pasta after. William would have to pick the pepper pieces out of his. Nonna would spin—sauce out of a jar. But sauce had come a long way since Chef Boyardee, even it if wasn’t from scratch. She did wish they wouldn’t put sugar in it.

  “What about pasta tonight?” she asked.

  Eliza said, “Again?”

  William said, “Wow! Look at the TV! A giant snowstorm!”

  “Actually, the other night we had spaghetti and meatballs,” Mary Byrd said. “Or was it alfredo? It would be rigatoni tonight.”

  Eliza said, “Those are the tubes with the lines, right? We used to have all the time?”

  “We stopped having them because someone insisted on putting them on all of his fingers. We might be over that now,” she said. How they could make it without pasta, the staff of their family’s life, their culinary lingua franca, the noodly duct tape that held their lives together, she could not imagine. It often seemed to be the only thing the four of them had in common and upon which they all could agree. That, and watching old Little Rascals tapes. And Mary Byrd, like her grandmother, almost always had meatballs in the freezer, like silver dollars socked away for an emergency. She’d have to replenish her stash soon. Meat cakes; her grandmother could never bring herself to say the word balls. Thinking about telling this to the children, she finally poured herself a glass of Chianti. Nope. They’d think it was funny if anybody but their mother told the story. Well, William would laugh.

  William hopped off his stool to get his face three inches from the TV screen. “Some people already got frozen to death. I hope it’s coming here.”

  “Get your dumb lice-infested head out of the way so I can see,” Eliza barked.

  “His problem is taken care of, Eliza,” said Mary Byrd. “Stop being so rude. William?”

  Eliza sneered, simultaneously
sucking in a piece of cereal from her upper lip.

  “No mushrooms, no whitish sauce, and no green things in it, ’specially English peas. And no throw-uppy cheese on mine,” he paused. “Please. I wish we could get some killer snow. But no. We get black streets and hot rain.”

  Mary Byrd had to smile. “It’s Parmesan, William. Or Romano. It’s just a very ripe kind of cheese. It’s aged. Same kind we get on pizza,” she lied.

  “That’s what I mean. I don’t like stuff that’s very ripe or old. Barf is very ripe. And on pizza you can peel the whole flap of cheese off, like skin.”

  “Maybe I could just melt down some Cheese Cousin and pour it over your pasta,” Mary Byrd said. Cheese Cousin was what they called Velveeta.

  “Please!” complained Eliza. “Some people are trying to eat here.”

  “Some people are dorks and are getting big, Frosted Mini-Wheat butts,” William said.

  “Mom! Do something about him!”

  “That’s enough. Knock it off,” Mary Byrd ordered. “Enough cereal and fighting. Go do your homework.” William began backing out of the kitchen in his moonwalk approximation, singing “Woolly Bully,” a performance calculated to detonate his sister, who had lots of gold, fuzzy body hair and had just begun shaving her legs. Eliza jumped up to chase him, yelling, “Yeah, you better run, For-ray-est, run, you little retard!” After hearing one door slam, shouts, and another slam, Mary Byrd picked up the phone and dialed her husband’s office. “Don’t say retard,” she said to herself while she waited for Charles to pick up.

  “Hey. Evagreen left a note that you called.”

  Charles’s voice was pleasant and businesslike. “Yeah, I wanted to be sure you remembered that Wiggsby is coming by tonight with those prints.”

  Mary Byrd sighed, “Oh, god. I completely forgot.”

  “And I’ll be late. I’m still in Memphis with Carl, from the Callahan. He’s got to go back to D.C. in the morning and he wants to take back some of June Law’s and Minnie’s new stuff for a show he’s putting together on women photographers in the Delta. But don’t tell Wiggs that. We’re just finishing up.”

  “Chaz, do we have to?” Mary Byrd complained. “He’s so exhausting. It’s a school night.”

  “You’ll be fine. The children will be fine. Get Mann over for drinks to help you, and I’ll be home in an hour and a half and we’ll go out to the Pink Palace,” Charles said. “That way, we can just dump him back at the hotel after.”

  “He’s always rude to Mann. And he creeps the children out.” Once he had reached over Eliza’s shoulder as she ate spaghetti, forked a wad, and, raising his arm high, somehow neatly drop­ped it into his open mouth. The children were used to their parents’ friends’ eccentricities and didn’t mind them much as long as they stayed out of their personal spaces.

  “It’ll be okay. I’ve got to get those prints of the casino photographs from him, and we’ve got to get him to agree to a late spring or summer show. It’ll be fine. Get out the cream cheese and pepper jelly,” he said, trying to lighten up.

  “Ha ha. So he can eat it off his big German knife again?” They both laughed, but just a little.

  “And what’s with Evagreen?” Charles asked. “She seemed … weird, when I called.”

  “I don’t know. She left early.”

  “Well, I’ll see y’all later.”

  “At some point I’ve got to tell you about the call I got today from a detective in Richmond.”

  “Jesus. Will that never be over?”

  “I know,” Mary Byrd moaned. “Now some woman is writing an article, or something, I don’t know, and so now the police have got to reopen the case, and I’ve got to—”

  “Try not to worry about it. We can talk later. If I don’t go now I’ll never get home. Just tell Wiggs I got tied up with our accountant. See y’all in a little while.”

  So much for getting his attention. Actually, she was relieved not to have to go into it again. It could keep. They’d be too busy to talk about it tonight, and maybe same thing tomorrow, and she’d be putting the whole unhappy conversation off, and Charles would have forgotten it, and all of a sudden she’d be leaving to go up there and Charles would be furious, claiming, “Nobody ever tells me anything around here.” She knew the drill. Her avoidances and his busy priorities kept their communication level very low, sometimes a good thing, sometimes not. It worked for Mary Byrd to have Charles be too busy to discuss lots of things; they could be easily put off or “forgotten” altogether. In this way it was actually the negative spaces—the inaction and noncommunication—that helped keep their marriage together. In spite of the fact that she and Charles had failed to become much of a comfort to one another, their union was long and without major trauma, both of them understanding that a marriage was what two people make it, like a business. You had to make it your own and try not to let it be prescribed. Pretty much their unspoken thing was, whatever worked. By both accounts they would say that they had a happy marriage. If there was even such a thing as happiness at all, Mary Byrd often wondered. Contentedness seemed like maybe the best a couple could do. At any rate, Charles and Mary Byrd both abhorred the small-town inevitability of private life stupidly made public, and so they carefully avoided the trashy and tragic messes that others stumbled—leapt—into, not seeming to mind that their foibles showed for all to see like dingy, holey underwear on a clothesline.

  There were always temptations, and failures. Women loved Charles’s sexy preppiness and reserve. He had very thick brown hair that his mother, Liddie, referred to as “hair-colored” hair shot with silver and hinting of no ethnicity, neither the swarthy nor the fair, not curly and not straight, with a perfectly situated cowlick at his hairline that came from generations of good WASP breeding and created an alluring, natural wave that matched his eye-colored eyes. He was tall and slender, but not so tall and slender that people described him as skinny, and he looked mannish rather than manly; he had a youthfulness that Mary Byrd, as she counted her liver spots and crow’s feet, found annoying. Charles didn’t encourage women particularly but they were often attracted to his chilly aloofness, which seemed to challenge certain women or pique their interest by raising questions rather than answering any. She didn’t think much about him and other women, maybe because she didn’t, or couldn’t, care enough. Or she was too busy. She’d heard other women with children or jobs or both talk about not having quality time with their husbands, but it wasn’t that—she had plenty of quality in her life with Charles, she thought. He approached everything in their marriage with the surgical precision he’d inherited from his dad, Big William. He made things work: sex, money, arguments; it was all sort of like lighting the grill, making coffee, or cutting a mat for a photograph. And he didn’t hold grudges, and god knows she’d given him plenty to grudge.

  Mary Byrd did love Charles. What was not to love? Handsome, intelligent, cultured in a charming Old South way, a good father, and a pretty straight shooter, as far as she knew, and she thought after all the years she really did know him. He was an incorrigible do-gooder, a Dudley Do-Right with an edge. No hobbledehoy, he liked his minor vices and carousing as much as Mary Byrd liked hers, but somehow he never got confused about issues of honor or morality, like she did. For Charles, things were black and white, while Mary Byrd floundered constantly in a confused gray fog. They both saw life as being too short, but Charles thought the challenge was to leave a strong, clear footprint; Mary Byrd was drawn to kicking up dirt, but wanted to get it all smoothed over and cleaned up again. And not get any on her, as they said. But she had never even thought about being married to anybody but Charles, that was for sure. Well, maybe Jack Hanna, or the dad on The Waltons. Or Christopher Walken, but that might be too scary. And why discard a perfectly good husband just because he wasn’t paying attention?

  She was glad Charles had been married before to a beautiful, rich Delta girl whose daddy had the biggest John Deere dealership in the state, and one of the first catfish farms.
Way younger, way prettier, and way dumber than Mary Byrd, she’d feigned pregnancy to get Charles to marry her, and then left him almost immediately to “have a career” with Wachovia in Charlotte, to Charles’s great relief. Charles’s sense of duty would never have allowed him to dump her. Of course, “having a career” meant that she quickly married a Wachovia CEO and probably was still up there, growing a fat ass and being a lacrosse mom and gloating over having transcended her humble Delta roots. At any rate, that first marriage had made Charles a better candidate for the second, of course. He’d quit thinking with his dick, if a man ever actually could quit doing that, and gotten a taste of how much marriage could suck, and was primed for a mate like Mary Byrd: attractive enough, nice enough, understood that there was a dark side to everyone, and had no ambition really, other than getting by and only occasionally pushing the fool button or the envelope to keep from dying of boredom.

  But too much contentment made Mary Byrd discontent; too much comfort made her uncomfortable. She wasn’t much used to happiness and security. Before her children, there’d been a medical student she liked because he did little but study, fish, and shoot ducks. His profile was low, he knew few people in town. Tall and skinny, serious-looking and unlike most of the silly, fat-assed boys out on the campus, he was a farm boy who had grown up working his father’s fields in an air-conditioned combine, high up above the lush soybeans and cotton, beating off to Warrant’s “Cherry Pie” when he grew bored. He was safe. He was clean, he understood disease; and their worlds did not intersect. At his little rental house as often as not she’d simply sleep a deep sleep while he studied. Sometimes he would read to her from one of his medical books—his only books. Once it was about the chemical analysis of sexual passion. “Chemistry, that’s all it is,” he said. “Dopamine, norepinephrine, and phenylethylamine—natural amphetamines. Then the endorphins, morphine-like substances, kick in and people settle down for the long haul. Think about that, M’Byrd. Love is nothing more than a dope trip.” Mary Byrd found the idea of it all being science oddly affirming. It was like taking acid back in the day: part of the thrill of it had been knowing that you would eventually come down—you couldn’t sustain that intensity forever—and get back to normal. She’d cut the boy loose when he’d started to badger her for butt sex. It was natural, she supposed—maybe a med student needed to explore all the options, or orifices. Lucy, who was single and still on the market, said that ass was the new pussy, due to too much easily available porn. Mary Byrd was also generally against hanging with younger guys: memento mori fucking. Who wanted to see her loosening, dry skin pressed against the taut, peachy flesh of a twenty-five-year-old? And really, she decided, it took adults to commit adultery, and he wasn’t quite one.