by Lisa Howorth
“I haven’t seen Teever in forever,” said the buzz-head. “Maybe he’s back in the pokey.”
Ernest poured a big plastic cup half-full of sour mash. “What the hell happened to your hair?” he asked Hump. Or Pump.
“Caught fire in a marshmallow-related incident,” the girl said. They laughed.
“Scorch becomes you,” said Ernest. “Na zdorovye.”
Jill was in the pantry with Boudleaux and one of the dress boys, a waiter with a shaved head named Porter. They were smoking a number and offered it to Ernest, who declined. “I’ve got some X, if you’d rather,” said Jill.“Or a Dilaudid? Or one of these?” She pointed to a few flat little packets about the size of a half stick of Juicy Fruit. Each was stamped white bronco.
“I don’t shoot, but I think I’m in some pain,” Ernest said, chewing a proffered pill.
Porter, who had what looked to be either a busted lip or a small disease, was leaning slightly on Boudleaux.
“Are y’all ever gonna play?” Ernest asked him, trying to focus his eyes on Jill.
“Man, we just played for an hour!” Boudleaux said. “Where you been?”
“Jill,” said Ernest. “You look lovely this evening.” He took in Jill’s long, skinny form and scant but downy, freckled cleavage. A hot glow came over him and he sprang an equine tuffy. “Happy birthday, darlin’.” He tried to thump himself down but it wouldn’t go.
“Some thing, this ice storm, eh?” said Jill, smiling at him, checking him over. “You clean up pretty good, too, Ernest. Want to see something cool?”
“Uh, sure,” said Ernest, thickly. He was suddenly finding it difficult to speak.
“Watch.” Jill stood a flashlight on end and held her fingers close over the lens. Each long, witchy fingernail was punched through with a tiny star. Shining through the stars, the flashlight beam projected a little Fourth of July galaxy across the ceiling. Ernest was transfixed. Jill moved her fingers as if casting a spell. The stars danced sensuously. Ernest thought he’d never seen anything so wonderful. Fuck Byrd.
“Porter and I were just saying, in an emergency like this, nothing is true, everything is permitted,” said Jill. “None of the rules apply.” She smiled; not young, but beautiful.
“Ernest don’t go by rules anyway,” said Boudleaux. “Pimp law, maybe.”
Ernest tried to say, “Son, I take exception to that,” but his jaws had gone numb. He could only manage to mumble between teeth that were beginning to clench.
Porter said, “Ernest, you okay? You want to go lie down?”
“Prayer,” he muttered as his legs gave out and he sank to his knees in front of Jill. He buried his face in her long coat. “Lil prayer.” The AK clanked heavily against the floor.
When Ernest came to, he was on a bed with Jill and Porter, sandwiched between them. His shirt was open and his pants were undone. Good god. He was freezing. He vaulted sideways over Jill’s comatose form, pulling his clothes together. His coat lay on the floor and miraculously still had the gun swaddled inside. Jill and Porter were wearing their coats but both of their dresses had hiked up. No underwear. He sniffed the air for clues and tried to focus on his various orifices to see if anything seemed amiss. Everything seemed to hurt, but nothing hurt inordinately, except his head. Maybe his pride. Ernest left the house in a hurry, hoping nobody had seen the threesome on the bed. He’d never live that down.
Once he was on I-55, heading back to Wallett, he relaxed a little. The interstate was a longer haul but he’d stupidly tried the back roads and they were a mess and he’d had to turn around. On I-55 the pines had been bowed to the ground and had been chainsawed back to the shoulder of the road, their pale cut ends turned to the traffic like hundreds of clock faces. Beyond them, scattered around the edges of the cotton and bean fields, the hardwoods stood, stripped and raggedy. By Dundee things were considerably improved: the trees, all but the tall, skinny loblollies, looked okay. The landscape was frosty, but not crystalline like last night. By Coffeeville, it was completely clear. He stopped at the Stuckey’s in Vaiden for beer, smokes, and some BC powder, and he mentioned the ice storm to the woman taking his money.
“What ice storm?” she said.
The beer and BC eased his headache a little; his head felt cleaved. Taking the Dixie Crystals sugar packet out of the glove box, Ernest unfolded it, tapped the contents onto his fist, and held it up to each nostril. He chewed the packet and swallowed it. Feeling around to see if he might have sustained any wounds, he located nothing other than a small, scabby knot on his head. It would take a little extra mousse to make his hair lay back and cover it, was all.
By the time he crossed the Hatchatalla County line, it wasn’t even cold. The sun shone warmly and there was no ice on the ponds. It was a drag not to have hooked up with Mary Byrd; it would have been a totally different night if he had. She must have gone ahead up north, goddamn it. He wondered how that shit up there was going for her. That sicko was going to beat the rap even if they caught him. He really ought to go up there and see what’s up; he could find the sick fuck and turn him in, and the bounty would be Mary Byrd, in gratitude. And it would be good to lay low for awhile after last night.
No use thinking too much about whatever had happened. What happened in the storm stays in the storm, he decided. It was really a gorgeous day. The red MG buzzed along on the wide, dry road, perfectly ten miles over the speed limit. The sky was blue. He could go home, sleep some, get fresh clothes, and drive to Virginia in the morning.
Ernest reached to put in a tape. He wanted to hear “Tangled Up in Blue” and think about his bounty-hunter trip. He couldn’t seem to punch the track up. As he turned off onto the long, ascending exit for Wallett, he was fiddle-fucking with the buttons, finally finding the song. I helped her out of a jam I guess … He bent his head to light a cigarette and looked up to see a beat-up pickup truck coming at him. Maybe it wasn’t moving at all. The cigarette fell to his lap. He had time to yell, “Wrong way, bastard!” and then Jack Ernest was sailing again, remembering last night’s magical skate down the icy street, the sparkling winter wonderland of frozen trees and the stars in the deep, infinite night sky, twinkling and winking at him like so many beautiful, beckoning women.
“Everybody looking for something in this world,” Teever said to himself out loud. He knew he’d have to find a way to be useful to the Mexicans, make a place for himself, if he was going to hang with them. He had keys to shit, knew things, jungle-war things that could come in handy, but these dudes probably knew that kind of stuff—desert and mountain shit. It was all basically about the same thing: fucking people up before they fucked you up, finding and taking what you needed to survive. There was nothing he could offer them: substances, maybe, but with no money and if he couldn’t find Ernest, he had no game. Teever’s heart clamped into a tight fist of regret. He knew better than to think he was anything but a loser.
His thoughts turned back to the glorious, coiling monster thing that had risen out of the fire. Suddenly he understood what it had wanted him to know. Like he’d put a key in the ignition, his heart loosened and gave a violent chug. A garden! He’d make these dudes a big-ass fucking garden just the way he’d helped his Grand make hers. It was time—nearly past time—to set out collards, onions, sweet potatoes, peas. Peppers and tomatoes first weekend after Easter. These dudes would be jonesing for peppers, no doubt, and he could find out what those beans were that they liked, plant some of those. And corn! Big, juicy sweet corn! Tools from his hooch, manure from Big Lars and Yimmy, who he’d borrow—have to muzzle that biting-ass muvva Lars—to turn up some rows by the trailers. While all these guys were out working on condos, laying bricks, making other people’s gardens, he’d make theirs. He thought about it, ideas popping in his head like firecrackers. When they returned from work in the evening they could all shuck corn and drink beer and shell peas—beans or whatever—and shoot the shit. Some of them would cook. He could cook! He cooked in the army for a lot more guys than this
! Then they’d all eat around the fire and chunk in bones and cobs and drink more beer and piss in the fire and listen to their music—the happy kind—with all the brass and shit. Go to sleep in the back in their trailers; he’d even be happy to sleep in the one with Muhammad Ali. He knew about chickens, too. He’d get some of those chicks off Cong, he thought. They could have eggs. Boil eggs, devil eggs, fry eggs, poach eggs, scramble eggs, egg and olive sandwiches, egg McMexicans with that saucy shit and melted rat cheese on them. Hatch some and have more chickens. Fatten ’em up with the corn! For a second he thought about raising some to fight—hook ’em up with that Ali—but that wasn’t really his way. He didn’t like to see anything get hurt, or die. Unless, of course, it deserved it.
Teever closed his eyes to get the visuals and drew the Stuckey’s blanket up to his neck. It would be so badass, his Mexican trailer garden. Plenty to eat, some to sell. Maybe even put a little chronic between the corn rows. Maybe Ernest would help him move some of that. They’d all get healthy and happy as heifers in deep hay. Maybe Dog and Lena would let him put a little stand out in front of the liquor store, catch some of that doctor action, and Mudbird might get some ladies to buy his vegetables. O-fucking-kay, then. But now I see! He heaved a big, raggedy sigh that started him coughing and he kecked a big wad into the fire. The loogie, dark and big as an oyster, sizzled for a second. In spite of his excitement, he realized he was tired. No one had said anything for a long time. The music had stopped. Keeping his eyes shut, Teever hoped for sleep, even though he knew that in an hour or two that damn trailer rooster would be crowing for real, and he’d wake up at the crack by a heap of cinders, lying in his chaise longue alone, all the other chairs and crates empty, frosty weeds between the trailers all glittery in the sun’s first rays of the new day. He didn’t care. He did not care. That was mañana. He’d worry about mañana mañana. Fuckin’ ay. Right now he was home, because home was where they might fuck with you but for some reason they’d let you stay. Okay then, he sighed to himself. O-fucking-kay, then.
Eleven
When Mary Byrd woke on Monday morning she had to think to remember where she was. Her mother’s rose-colored, frilly guest room. Recalling that, and what her mother had told her Saturday night, and what the day had in store for her, she closed her eyes and drew herself up into a ball. Her heart pounded and goosed up her pulse so that she knew she wouldn’t be going back to sleep, which was all in this world she wanted. From the wicker nightstand she reached over and pinched up the Xanax half she’d left there the night before and swallowed it with a swig of water. Later, she promised herself, she’d take another. When she got back home she’d ask Ernest for some more.
Outside the guest room came the sounds of her mother bustling around, talking to the cats over Howard Stern’s annoying yammer. Her mother and James loved Howard Stern, but whenever she listened to him it was always about big tits or his small dick. Now she heard the back door and heavy footsteps in the kitchen. Mary Byrd rolled over and looked around the room. Her mom had good taste but it had started getting Target-ish. Maybe when you got old you just lost the will to be original and went instead for easy and inexpensive. Your things just became a pain in the ass. She was already feeling it sometimes with her own stuff, which was about to bury her. Her grandmother went around labeling things with masking tape so the family knew who got what, but if she could make you take it now, she would. “My life is over, my children are gone,” she’d say. “I can’t take it with me. No ice buckets in heaven. Maybe you can use it.” To which Mary Byrd’s uncle would tease, “Jesus, Mama. What makes you so sure you’re going to heaven, anyway?” and Nonna would pretend to be hurt.
Sunday with her family had passed peacefully. They had been sad, and tense, but glad enough to have some time together. The ordeal before them hadn’t been brought up, and they had treated each other politely, if not tenderly. Mary Byrd and Nick had been careful to avoid politics or current events. They had reminisced, telling the same old funny family stories, and Stevie and Pop had come up in some of them, but it was as if they were like Pete: alive and well, just off someplace else, just not with them at the moment.
In the afternoon while the boys watched sports, Mary Byrd had walked around the yard and had listened to her mother talk about her plants and her birds, and then in the kitchen they’d cooked and talked recipes. They ate the delicious but random dishes their mother had made—no main dish, but a little of this, a little of that—something to please each of them. They had talked about their children and what they were up to, and watched tapes of their favorite old Twilight Zone and Little Rascals episodes on the new VCR they’d given their mother for Christmas, laughing as if they hadn’t seen them dozens of times before. They’d teased their mother and mocked her admonishments, given out as if they were still children: “Handwashing is very important.”
As Mary Byrd had lain in bed afterward, she’d thought about how they had so little in common with one another, family anecdotes, mom-mocking, and TV shows aside. They didn’t see each other often, and her brothers weren’t married, although Nick had been, briefly, and had only one child—a great kid in spite of being smothered and overprotected. There was no tribe of cousins like she and her brothers had grown up with. She’d wondered how different things would be if they’d grown up more normally. Or more happily. But there were no normal families, were there. Why hadn’t Stevie’s death brought them closer together? She thought that it must be true that happy families are all alike. If a family didn’t have a dead child, why wouldn’t it be happy?
Monday, Monday. Mary Byrd’s mother rapped on the door and Mary Byrd cringed. “I’m up!” she called. One of the demented cats was yowling somewhere down the hall. On Cherry Glen Lane in the mornings, her mother had awakened Mary Byrd to get a head start in the bathroom before the boys by banging the broom handle on the kitchen ceiling, which had been right under Mary Byrd’s bed. The sound she hated most in the world, that broomstick reveille, and now she meanly used it on William and Eliza.
“The boys are here,” her mother called. “It’s seven thirty. We need to leave the house in an hour.”
“Okay, I’m coming. I hope there’s coffee,” she yelled back. Somehow she was the only person in the family who drank it. She wished she could say, “If there’s not coffee, I’m not going” or “I can only go if there’s an original Chanel suit, navy blue bouclé shot through with white, size two, hanging in the closet for me,” but she shuffled out barefoot, her black curls all wacky, wearing the old flannel nightgown she kept at her mom’s, to greet her brothers, drink coffee, and sit with them silently for a few minutes until it was time to dress and go downtown and talk to some strangers about the murder of their brother and stepson.
The four of them sat in a dingy police waiting room. A little dulled out from the pill, Mary Byrd wished for more coffee to face whatever this meeting was going to be. While they waited, the boys looked at leftover Times-Dispatches and a smattering of testosterone publications. Varmint Masters. Guns and Ammo. “Couldn’t they at least have some fishing magazines?” Nick said.
“Not enough blood,” said James.
Their mother silently crocheted a granny square. She’d made dozens of afghans—they each had several—and they were the only pretty ones Mary Byrd had ever seen. The yarn was getting fuzz on her mom’s navy blue Chanel suit, size zero, and Mary Byrd picked it off. She smoothed her own suit—her black Banana Republic she wore to funerals and meetings.
A police lady came in. “Y’all can just go on in and take a seat. Detective Stith will be right with you.”
Detective Stith wasn’t in his office when they sat down. Mary Byrd looked around for some clues about the guy. Other than a big piñata—a Halloween spider that hung in the window—there wasn’t much: a stack of Sports Illustrated and another of Vanity Fair. Vanity Fair? she wondered. Must be because they had all those great murder investigations and muckraking articles cleverly stashed in between the reeky perfume and cele
brity gossip. Or maybe Stith was into perfume, fashion, and celebrity gossip. Her head started to hurt. On the wall behind the desk hung some certificates and diplomas, and she rose and leaned forward to make them out. UVA BA, UVA Law, Virginia Institute for Criminal Justice, John Jay College of Criminal Justice Crime Scene Academy, something from Penn, something from the FBI, blah blah.
All were awarded to Sooraji Mehta Stith. An Indian guy? But if he was a Stith, there ought to be an ancient FFV connection. William Byrd had had a friend named Stith back in the day. A small, framed piece of needlepoint was propped on the console behind him. It read: a stith in time saves nine. A funny guy, too. He’d better get his smart, funny ass in here.
The door opened and in walked a handsome black guy with a bright, bruisey complexion. His lips were purple and his ears stuck out boyishly, framed by hair clipped so close it made his head appear to be flocked. Mary Byrd was intrigued by the mix of people he seemed to be.
“Hi,” he said, tossing a pack of Marlboro Lights on the desk. “Sorry to keep you waiting. Got that Marlboro monkey on my back.” Good old Philip Morris. Keeping Richmond, doctors, and hospitals everywhere afloat and population numbers down.
He loped easily to the window where a coffee pot sat on a mini-fridge. “Coffee? Or a Coke?” He popped open a can of Diet Dr. Pepper, taking a sip and raising it to them.
“Nothing, thanks,” her mother said. Mary Byrd resisted her own desire for coffee. She’d only have to go to the bathroom.
James said, “We’re good.”
Stith was a skinny guy, or poor as a snake, as Teever might say. A dark red sweater, navy corduroy jacket, and khakis gave him a little gravitas, but he still looked way too cool and way too young to be a detective who had a clue about anything. She didn’t know what she’d expected—someone off the TV, past his prime, seedy, cockeyed, gimpy or bald. A gut, crappy clothes. She thought of the detective who’d questioned her the day Stevie died. Had he been the one who’d suggested the connection between her and Ned Tuttle, and asked for her diary? She couldn’t remember. They’d all seemed creepy.
