by Tim Sandlin
Sure enough, she was a schoolteacher. Students’ papers lay stacked in graded and ungraded piles on the stained pine dining room table, the graded pile veined by red pencil marks. Jake looked at me from framed photographs atop the piano. Like a campfire in the dark, he drew Gilia and me across the room.
The woman said, “He was killed in Korea.” I picked up a picture of Jake in his army uniform. He was grinning and firing an imaginary tommy gun at someone off to the side of the picture. He looked about fourteen years old with big ears and a short haircut. He wasn’t any blacker than Maurey after a summer in the sun.
“Is this the one your mother had?” Gilia touched the frame around Jake’s yearbook photo. Number twenty, gray jersey, leather helmet.
“Yeah.”
There was also a wedding picture of both of them dressed up, looking shy and happy and wholesome. The girl held a corsage in her hands. Jake smiled at her, protectively. Knowing Jake would soon die and the girl would be alone made it the saddest picture I’d ever seen.
I turned to look at her. “Would it be personal if I asked your name?”
Her eyes were on Jake. “Atalanta Williams.”
I pronounced it like the city the first time and she had to correct me. Then I got it right.
“Atalanta,” I said. “That’s pretty.”
Gilia glanced from the photographs to me. Jake’s eyes were different from mine. And the nose. Heck, I don’t know if we looked alike. I’ve always made it a point to avoid mirrors.
“So talk,” Atalanta said.
“I’d rather not.”
“I didn’t ask what you’d rather do.”
“You owe it to her,” Gilia said.
This wasn’t what I wanted. When Shannon had said wreak vengeance by destroying their wives, it had sounded good in theory, but the reality sucked.
“Jake may have been my father,” I said.
Atalanta took it well. She didn’t speak or anything. Just stared at the pictures on the piano. I followed her line of sight to see which one she was staring at. I think it was a five-by-seven head-and-shoulders shot of Jake wearing a coat and tie.
“Five boys had sex with Mom and she got pregnant,” I said.
“Was she white?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“What do you mean, ‘had sex’?”
I looked at Gilia but she gave no answers. “They raped her.”
“It’s a lie,” Atalanta said.
“I don’t think so.”
All the years I’d lived in North Carolina, I’d never seen a black woman cry. She made no sound. Nothing but tears and sharp intakes of breath. I looked down between my hands at Jake, wishing he hadn’t been there that night. Wishing he wasn’t dead and I wasn’t born.
“Get out of my home.”
“That’s fair.”
“And put down my picture. You can’t touch him.”
I put down the picture.
“You are a lying little white boy. How dare you come into my home desecrating the memory of my husband.”
“I didn’t want to.”
“You are trash.”
“Yes.”
10
“That house was nothing but one big shrine,” Gilia said. “I’ll bet you anything Jake left for the army about a month after he married her, when life was still perfect and she hadn’t had time to stop worshiping him. It’s love cut off at the peak that cripples people, not the long, ugly divorces.”
I had been highly confused when we left Atalanta Williams’s house, so I drove south a while, then east, then back north, not really aware of where I was going. Having pain is nothing—you live through it and go on—but causing someone else pain is totally unacceptable. I can’t stand hurting people. Won’t stand hurting people. And, yet—guess what?—I’d just trashed a perfectly nice woman.
Gilia was cool. She seemed to know that movement eases turmoil. After an hour or so of silently circling Greensboro, she suddenly got talkative. Mostly she talked about college days and the busted marriage with Jeremy. She had a story about a roommate sleeping with her boyfriend that was pretty good. Usually when a woman tells the roommate/best friend/sister-slept-with-my-man thing, they’re pissed off at the whole female gender. They never seem to blame the guy, but Gilia completely left out the self-pity part of the story.
“Those two sluts deserve each other,” she said. “Their biggest problem was who got to face the mirror when they did it.”
My fathers didn’t come up until Bojangles chicken, where we stopped for a bucket of wings. We sat in the car, chewing bones and sucking grease off our fingers while she gave me the love-cut-off-at-the-peak theory.
“Jesus,” I said.
“What?” Gilia had a dribble of barbecue sauce off the left corner of her lips.
“Or Elvis Presley. Or Marilyn Monroe. If any of that bunch had lived past fifty, they’d have been forgotten. Die young if you want worship.”
Gilia stuck a wing in her mouth and stripped meat as she pulled out the bone. She ate like a little kid who wants everything at once. I like a woman with an appetite. “So this teacher sat in a dark room for thirty years, mourning her perfect husband, having no life outside his memory, and you come along and smash everything to hell.”
“You’re the one said I owed her the truth.”
“By then it was too late.” She took a slug of Mr. Pibb. “You’d said too much to leave her alone with her imagination.”
“But the truth was worse than anything she could have imagined.”
Gilia sucked her thumb, then examined the nail. “Don’t you see, knowing for certain is better than imagining, even when what you know is awful. Imagining makes you doubt your sanity. At least when you know the person you love is a pig, you can get on with the grief process.”
“You’re talking about Jeremy.”
“He had me believing I was clinically paranoid. I’m at the school counselor whining ‘I know he’s a good man and it’s all in my mind’ when the jerk is screwing every bimbo on campus, including the school counselor.”
I thought about Wanda. Would it have been better to suspect she was a slut but not know, or to know? To tell the truth, I hadn’t even suspected. The first I heard about her migratory snatch was when she said I didn’t meet her needs and I’d driven her into the arms of another.
“One thing I do know,” I said, “is I’m done with fathers. I don’t plan on seeing another male relative again. Ever.”
“What if they aren’t done with you?”
I dipped a corner of my napkin into my 7Up and reached across to blot the barbecue off Gilia’s chin. “I am no longer involved.”
***
Fat chance. While we’d been circling the streets of Greensboro, pockets of people affected by my actions had been choosing up attitudes. Not near as many chose passivity as I’d hoped.
The first mistake was not taking Gilia back where I found her. Since the Saunderses lived a half block from the eighteenth fairway, she’d walked to the club, and, in our innocence, it made sense to drop her at home.
Before I even turned off the key, angry hands reached in both doors and yanked us into the open.
“Sonny!” Gilia yelled.
Then, “Ryan, you let go of him!”
A lot of people were shouting at once. The sucker pinning me against my own Dodge ordered Gilia into the house. This had to be the macho brother.
“Let go of him, you little shit!”
I agreed with the shit part, but Ryan wasn’t little. Sons of linemen grow up big.
He breathed beer in my face. “Stay away from my sister.”
“She’s my sister too, jerk.”
That set him back a moment. Meanwhile, the goon Gilia had called Sonny came charging around to our side of the action. One look told me here was the spawn of Skippy. Sons o
f quarterbacks grow up compact and sneaky.
Sonny even had Skip’s snarl. “You, mister, are going to take back every lie you said about my dad.”
“Forcing me to call the truth a lie won’t make it less the truth.” Let them work their way through that logic.
Didn’t take long. Ryan came back with the tough guys’ universal retort. “Oh, yeah.”
Beyond Ryan’s fat shoulder I could see Skip Prescott standing on his own porch. With a drink in his right hand and his left hand sunk in his tennis shorts’ pocket, he came off as the slightly amused massah who’d ordered the whipping of a bumptious slave.
“Still afraid to fight your own fights, huh, Daddy?” I called out, which got me a frown from Skip and a jerk forward, hard shove back against the car from Ryan. Behind us, I could hear Gilia begging Cameron to call off the dogs.
Ryan had a jaw big enough to club cattle. “What were you doing with my sister?”
“Communicating.”
He didn’t like that. The kid wasn’t stupid—just big and Southern.
Sonny played cheerleader. “Wipe the pavement with the bastard. Show him never to mess with real men.”
I decided to go like-father, like-son. Ryan was calm, yet dangerous; I should turn my attention to Sonny the rat terrier.
“You’re no better than your dad,” I said. “Our dad. You make threats, then find someone else to carry them out.”
“I’ll break your neck.”
“Either hurt me now or shut your fat face.”
Sonny hit me in the gut. As I doubled over, Ryan let go of my shoulders, then teed off on my chin. Gilia screamed. I remember that detail—Gilia screaming.
I made it to the pavement, went fetal, and rode out the pounding. All in all, it was pretty typical of two guys beating the snot out of one guy while a woman goes ballistic in the background. I’d written the scene several times for Young Adult sports fiction, so it was as if I’d been there before.
Lying with my forehead stuck to concrete, part of me disengaged from reality and sat on the hood of the Dodge, taking notes: Sonny goes for the face, Ryan for the kidneys, someone is dragging Gilia into the house. There was more lower back pain and less blood than in the versions I wrote. Otherwise, I’d pretty much nailed the sensation.
***
Katrina Prescott stood in the middle of the street, less than a block from what I’ve come to call Sam’s Massacre. It’s a wonder I didn’t run her down, what with being slumped over the steering wheel with blood dribbling in my eyes.
I braked hard and avoided killing her, but Katrina didn’t seem to notice the brush with death. Instead, she hopped in the passenger seat and started talking.
“Skip is cruel and abusive. I’m so glad you’re driving him nuts; it’s a wonderful turn of events.”
“Mrs. Prescott, I’ve had a hard day. I’d just as soon go on home now.”
“He forced me to take tennis lessons.”
“That is cruel.”
“Against my will, he made me get a breast enhancement—silicone. Are you going to drive or not?”
I tried not to look, but, heck, women get silicone implants so you will look. Why is it whenever a woman tells you she’s had an implant, she’s offended if you look down there?
I shifted into first and moved on up the street. “Couldn’t we talk another time, Mrs. Prescott. I have a headache.”
“You look awful.”
“There’s a reason for that.”
Katrina didn’t want to hear it. “Skip diddles his secretary, he diddles Cameron’s secretary, he diddles the jailbait in the shoe department. The one time I had a lover, Skip planted dope in Sean’s trailer and called the police.”
“I saw that story on Dallas.”
“Before that, Skip gave me syphilis and to this day he accuses me of giving it to him.”
“All men do that.”
“I hate Skip.”
“Everybody hates Skip, Mrs. Prescott. Can I please go home now?”
“Do you believe in phrenology?”
It seemed like I’d passed out and missed a transitional statement. “Telling the future by bumps on someone’s head?”
“Phrenology is not fortune-telling. It’s the science of character analysis through the study of skull structure.”
“My housekeeper hears the future from coffee grounds in the garbage disposal.”
Katrina pulled her legs up under herself and sat facing me. “Listen, the skull is made up of twenty-six round enclosures with vacant interspaces. Each enclosure corresponds to a trait, and the larger the enclosure, the more prevalent the trait.”
“I’ll give you a hundred dollars to get out of my car.”
“May I feel your head?”
“Do you have to?”
Katrina clamped her hand on my forehead and let her fingers slowly drift to my eyebrows. She touched the side of my head in what on TV they call the Vulcan death grip. Meanwhile, I turned right twice, trying not to roam too far from Starmount Forest.
“Poor self-esteem,” she said. “A disfigured parental love, unconventional sex preferences, no wit whatsoever.”
“Don’t touch my ears, Mrs. Prescott.”
“The benevolence node is prominent. You must be very kind.”
“The node wasn’t prominent until your son hit me.”
“Shush.”
I think boredom causes insanity. Look at rich people. Or Southern California where the weather never changes so people go crazy from nothing else to do. Katrina went into a kind of spell with her fingers on my head. Her eyes took on that glaze professional women get when you eat them.
“Now, you feel my head,” she said.
“I’d rather not, Mrs. Prescott.”
“I felt yours.”
Another right turn past a Presbyterian church. “Frankly, whenever I’ve touched a woman on the head, sooner or later, I go to bed with her, and I don’t think that would be a good idea for us.”
I glanced over to see how she took this. Many women don’t like it if you say you don’t want to go to bed with them, even if they don’t want to go to bed with you. Sure enough, her lower lip trembled.
“What’s the matter?” I asked.
“You don’t want to feel my head, you think I’m repulsive.”
“I want very much to feel your head, Mrs. Prescott, but your husband may be my father and your son just kicked me in the face. I don’t think feeling your head would be appropriate.”
Tears leaked. “I am a desperately unhappy woman and all I want is for you to feel my head.”
Ask anyone I’m related to and they’ll tell you my tragic flaw is the inability to say no to a woman. I felt the top where she’d found my self-esteem, then down to sexual preferences and on to wit. She did have a lump over sexual preferences, but other than that, all I felt was hair on a head. Katrina leaned forward so I could rub the muscles at the top of her neck.
“Now, tell me all the details,” she said.
I touched her about a second longer than I had to, and that made me feel guilty. Gilia might not understand.
“Which details?”
“The details about Skip and your mother. He said she was a whore.”
“Lydia is no whore. Skip and the guys raped her.”
“Oh, my God. You know, when we were freshmen in college, I think he date-raped me. I was never certain.”
“Can I go home now? Can’t you see I’ve been beat up?”
Katrina pouted. She was a woman who controlled men with her lower lip. “Not until you promise to tell me everything.”
“I promise—but only if you let me go.”
“Tomorrow.”
I drove back toward the Prescott-Saunders houses while she gave directions to some private club she belonged to where I was suppo
sed to show up at eleven the next day. I didn’t pay much attention because I had no intention of showing up.
I stopped the car at the spot where I’d almost flattened her. Katrina opened the door but didn’t get out.
“If you don’t show up tomorrow, I’ll come to your house.”
“You don’t know where I live.”
“Don’t be silly. Skip has a private detective on retainer. By dark we’ll know every single detail of your life.”
“Oh.”
“Don’t stand me up now.” She kissed air and left.
***
It was almost dark when Katrina went her way, which meant Skip would soon know every single detail of my life. I wondered what that meant. I guess we’re all curious as to what a thorough investigation of ourselves would turn up. Would Skip hear about my interest in clitoral manipulation and general distaste for men, or would he receive a Dunn and Bradstreet on the health of Callahan Magic Carts? And which of these was me?
I hoped he didn’t try the plant-the-dope, call-the-cops trick. I’d long since traded in my amyl nitrate for beta carotene, but there would always be a certain fragrance of unresolved college karma wafting on the breeze, waiting for a chance to haunt.
As I drove home through the deepening dusk, the only thing I knew for certain was this had been the longest day in history. Between Gilia, Atalanta Williams, and Ryan’s fists, my body and brain were pulp on a stick. I swore never to look up my ancestors again. Shannon could deal with them from now on. She was young.
I parked the Dodge in front of the garage and, remembering threats, locked the doors. Shannon’s Mustang was nowhere in sight, which meant she was probably out being loose with the psych major. One more nail in my already hammered back. On the edge of the lawn, I bent forward with my hands on my knees, trying to ease the kidney pain, when a figure in black charged.
Moonlight glinted off the blade of a knife—just like in a book—and I yelled.
“Clark. Stop!”
He stopped. Consider it a miracle.
“What the hell are you doing?”
Clark’s face was dead pale and wrinkled.
“Never hold a knife up high like that. Didn’t your father teach you anything.” I raised my left forearm to his right wrist. “Look how easily you can be stopped.” The boy seemed to be in a trance.
