Handling Sin

by Malone, Michael

  When Mrs. Shiono brought Hayes his bill, there was a fortune cookie on top. He crunched it to bits with a slap of his palm, and took out the coiled slip.

  “Quit it, Claude?” she asked him. He gave her his Visa.

  Raleigh Hayes didn’t read his new fortune until he had staggered outside, astonished that balance too had deserted him, entirely drunk for the first time since his wedding reception twenty years ago. By excruciating will, he brought into focus the little sliver of print. It said, “This is your lucky day.”

  Chapter 2

  Which Treats of the Strange Message the Hero’s Father Sent Him IN SASHAYING CURVES, Raleigh Hayes’s Ford Fiesta swirled down First Street like a square dancer’s skirt. The more the intoxicated man tried to make the car go straight, the more gaily it danced. His arms pushed so tightly on the wheel that a charley horse twisted through his left biceps, and he had to steer with his right hand while in a frenzy of pain he shook the other one out the window. Behind Hayes, the teenaged driver of a Triumph sportscar pounded his falsetto horn, downshifted, and as he passed the Fiesta, yelled, “You old drunk asshole, get off the fucking road!” This unprecedented verbal assault so stunned Hayes that he slammed on the brakes, bumped the curb, and stopped. Without knowing why, he walked to the rear of the car to stare at his license plate—a vanity plate given to him by his wife for Christmas to serve as a business ad, a reminder to tailgaters to purchase MUTUAL LIFE INSURANCE. But the state had only allowed Aura enough letters to spell out MUT LIFE. Hayes had left it on to prove his indifference to wisecracks, including his wife’s.

  He rubbed the plate. It was inescapably his own; that obscene adolescent had undeniably shouted at him, at Raleigh Hayes, father of teenaged female twins who might even know the lout, who might even have sat in his Triumph’s passenger seat, cheering him on with shrieks and giggles as he rampaged through Thermopylae.

  At the far end of First Street was Raleigh’s father’s little white stucco house where he’d lived with his third wife after Raleigh’s mother had divorced him. Now two women and a man were standing in the yard, among so many dandelions that the fidgety threesome looked to him as if they were up to their ankles in bees. They were all pointing at the roof, but as far as Hayes could tell, his father wasn’t on it. Then they hurried into a station wagon at the curb and drove away before he could even find his key, which was in his left hand and not in the ignition, where he futilely kept attempting to turn it.

  Once the insurance man was close enough to read the sign in front of which the trio of strangers had apparently been standing, he simply took off his glasses, dropped them in his lap, and drove on. He drove on past the house, eyes locked to the fore, foot firm on the accelerator. But there was no use pretending he hadn’t been able to read the FOR SALE sign staked through his father’s unmown lawn.

  “Mama, he’s crazy,” said Raleigh Hayes on the way to the hospital. Then he said, “Ha ha.” But there was no use pretending he believed he could communicate with his deceased mother, nor any reason to suppose this appraisal of her former spouse’s sanity would be any news. Unlike most of his relatives, Raleigh never conversed with the dead, or the Deity. He found offensive the way, for example, his aunt Lovie in a poker game would call for aid upon her deceased brother Hackney (a semiprofessional gambler who’d died chasing a fly ball in a semiprofessional baseball game). “Come on, now, Hackney, just give me one more jack, that’s all!” Lovie would yell to the ceiling, as if above, among the empyreal seraphim, Hackney Hayes crouched over a cloud’s edge, mesmerized by a few middleaged hicktown women in a nickel game of seven-card poker in which not only were threes and nines wild, but extra cards were handed out to anyone with a four.

  Raleigh found outrageous his kinfolks’ assumption that an Omnipotent Being had nothing better to do than arrange reality into parables for their personal benefit: in 1933, God had closed the banks to keep his great-aunt Mab from squandering her savings on a bigamist from Chicago. His uncle Furbus (now dead of lung cancer from smoking three packs of Lucky Strikes a day) had married Emily Shay because she’d fallen out of the bleachers at a Thermopylae High School basketball game, landed on top of him, and broken his clavicle. “I don’t see how God could have said it any plainer, how Little Em was meant for me,” said Furbus, year after year.

  Now when our hero had asked God please to assure him that He’d precipitously transformed the banker Ned Ware into a malevolent comedian, he certainly didn’t think God was anywhere in the vicinity listening to what he said. He did believe in God, but, frankly, he didn’t trust Him, and saw no reason in the world why he should. If God’s idea of salvation was Jesus Christ, God was too eccentric to rely on. Mr. Hayes was a churchgoer (indeed, a deacon), but he considered his religion a civic duty, a moral discipline, a social obligation, and (he was honest) a business asset. That’s why as an adult he attended not the small Episcopal church where his father had once been rector, but the large Baptist church across the street, where most of his clients went. Hayes was a Christian, but if the truth be known, Christ irritated him to death. With the army in Freiburg, Germany, he’d read the Gospels while cooped up in the infirmary, and he’d argued by pencil in the margins against the Savior. In his personal opinion, Christ’s advice sounded like civic sabotage, moral lunacy, social anarchy, and business disaster. Hayes had been a serious young man; and he still believed in virtue, which he suspected Christ of ridiculing by gleefully making up stories in which decent people were cheated by wastrels and the deserving blithely passed over in favor of bums, like Raleigh’s own younger half-brother Gates, who’d actually served time in jail, and now, thank goodness, had disappeared.

  Hayes believed in virtues like fortitude. Consequently, he was able to keep calm when at the hospital the doctor (half his age) showed not the slightest remorse at having lost his father; when, shrugging, this adolescent physician yawned that if Earley Hayes didn’t want them to evaluate his heart, it was a free country. He kept calm when this…kid threw in some unwanted advice: he, Raleigh Hayes, should cut back on the booze, with his kind of blood pressure! The rage to keep calm burned all the alcohol out of Raleigh’s blood and left him with only a massive brain tumor throbbing against his eyes and ears. Palm pressed on one eye socket, he stood with his father’s abandoned tan suitcase in the hospital gift shop, where he had to buy a Get Well card because the cashier wouldn’t change his dollar so he could use the change to call his wife. The cashier, a flagrantly sadistic woman with a deceptive grandmotherish look, deliberately gave him his change in nickels and pennies.

  “Come on home,” said Aura. “Earley left a message on the doorstep. I’ve got to go back out right away. Where’d you go?” “What do you mean? Where is he?”

  “Can’t you find him? It was just sitting on the welcome mat.” “What was? Why didn’t you hold on to him, Aura, for Pete’s

  sake?”

  “Well, I guess because I never saw him. He must have sneaked by

  while I was over painting signs at Barbara Kettell’s.”

  “Message?” Raleigh hauled shut the phone booth door. Two doctors stood in the hall, comparing their clipboards and laughing

  loudly. Hayes bared his teeth at them.

  “On a package. It says, ‘Raleigh, play this. Love, Daddy.’ ” “Aura, what are you talking about? Play what?”

  “I didn’t open it, of course. You know how you can’t stand anybody opening your mail. It says, ‘Raleigh, play this.’ It doesn’t say,

  ‘Aura,’ or even ‘Raleigh and Aura, play —’ ”

  “Could I intrude on your busy schedule, Aura, to ask if you’d

  mind opening it now?!” Hayes bit the hairs off his forefinger while he

  waited.

  “Well,” said his wife, “it’s funny. It’s one of those tape recorder

  tapes, and Earley wrote ‘Message For Raleigh’ on the side. Did you try

  his house? Maybe he’s just not answering his phone.”

  “Aura.
” Hayes moved the phone to his other ear while decompressing with a long sigh. “Aura, Daddy took thirty thousand dollars

  out of the bank and bought a yellow Cadillac convertible from

  Jimmy Clay and ran off with a black teenage girl. And his house is

  for sale.”

  Raleigh’s intimate companion for twenty years monstrously

  revealed herself as a total stranger. She laughed.

  “Is that all you can say?” he asked, although she hadn’t actually

  said anything.

  “Who was she?”

  “She was wearing a white dress. According to Ned Ware, Daddy’s

  planning to marry her.”

  “Maybe that’s why they picked half the daffodils out of your

  greenhouse. For a wedding corsage. Your daddy!”

  “Aura, good-bye. I’m coming…” He couldn’t bring himself to say

  “home” to this bizarre woman. He said, “…to the house,” and hung

  up.

  Mr. Hayes returned to the gift shop to purchase extra-strength

  aspirin, four of which, to the consternation of the cashier, he chewed

  right up like mints. This feat humanized her, and she asked, “Don’t

  those taste bitter?”

  “Not at all,” said Hayes.

  “You forgot this.” She gave him the Get Well card he’d bought

  without seeing. It showed Jesus, wide-armed, smiling out of the sky,

  ready to hug anybody He saw. Across the rainbow in quotation marks

  was written, “I am with you always,” and inside was a poem.

  When days are dark and full of care, When rain clouds come, the Lord is there. Just call His Name, just say a prayer. The rainbow proves, the Lord is there.

  This promise was followed by the command “Get well soon,” and by assurances that not one tree had been destroyed to produce the card. Raleigh was flexing his wrist to pitch it in a waste bin, when beyond the glass door he saw Victoria Anna Hayes, his sane eldest aunt, go by, pushing her sister Reba in a wheelchair toward the elevator. Hurrying out, he told them, “Don’t go up, Daddy’s disappeared.” Then he realized that his aunt Reba had on a hospital gown.

  “What happened?” He asked the question of Victoria Anna, a blue-eyed unmarried woman of seventy-two. She was a semiretired traveling saleslady for a missionary supplies company, and burned still with a ruthless energy. She was the only Hayes, other than himself, whom Raleigh considered entirely rational. “What happened to Reba?”

  “Raleigh, why bother to ask?” Victoria Anna reminded her favorite nephew with a twitch of her watch-spring curls.

  Reba, gray in the face and fatter than ever, answered, “Honey, they took my other one.”

  “Leg,” said Vicky Anna.

  Raleigh looked down. Indeed, both his aunt’s bedroom slippers were fastened to wooden feet. “Diabetes?” he whispered.

  Reba nodded. “Just like Papa.”

  Her elder sister made a spitting noise. “Please don’t say it like you’re glad to see y’all had something in common.”

  “Vicky Anna, our papa was a wonderful man.”

  “That’s right, Reba, and he’s lying out in the Hayes plot next to his legs, and now your legs, under a mountain of six thousand dollars’ worth of marble saying how much everybody loved him, not that it crossed y’alls’ minds to hide those Coca-Colas somewhere he couldn’t get at in his wheelchair.”

  Reba told Raleigh, “It was the fried eggs and peanut brittle with me, Dr. McConors said.”

  Spinning Reba’s wheelchair to face the elevator doors, Victoria addressed her nephew. “You say Earley’s discharged?”

  “Just left, without asking a soul, went on a spending spree and is presumably intending to marry a young black woman.”

  Victoria stared at her nephew. “Says who?”

  “Ned Ware at the bank.”

  “He’s a fool.”

  “Ned? Or Daddy?”

  Miss Hayes didn’t answer this. “I just got home a few hours back. I want you to know it takes more time to go on a Trailways bus to Texas than to fly to Singapore.” Once she had covered the Far East territory, but World Missions now confined her to the Deep South. She was the only Hayes who’d gone places.

  Reba said to the wall, “Earley was hiding in my bathroom when I got back from trying on my leg. He said he didn’t have time to stay in the hospital but don’t tell Vicky Anna because he didn’t want you to get your feelings hurt that he didn’t keep his promise. He was real upset about you, Vicky. I mean about his promise.”

  Raleigh spun his aunt’s chair around. “Where was he going?”

  “To go do something for you. ‘I’ve got to do something for my little fellow, poor old Raleigh, let me borrow your raincoat,’ is what he said, word for word.”

  Hayes looked anxiously at his watch to justify his immediate departure. “Aura just told me he left a message. I better go get it. Would y’all excuse me, please?” He handed his aunt Reba the unsigned Get Well card, and hurried out to the wide flat sea of parked cars, where dizzily he searched for his hatchback, mildly surprised to find it had not been stolen.

  He drove home on the new Thermopylae beltway, which had taken Kettell Concrete Company twelve years to pave and had sent all five of Nemours Kettell’s daughters to college, each in a new Mustang—for even the one who’d had no more brains than to marry the giggling Wayne Sparks had attended Boggs County State until they’d both flunked out. Raleigh had already set aside enough money to buy higher educations for his twin girls. When he thought of how many hundreds of jaw-aching hours of smiles he’d had to spend to accumulate that money, how many stomach-twisting words in praise of life insurance he’d had to wheedle past the slow negative mumbles of the mindless who didn’t want to hear they were ever going to die, or couldn’t care less about the consequences to their loved ones of that inevitability; when he thought of how he’d endured decades of these indignities not for the athletic, presidential son he’d been unjustly denied, but for daughters—whom he might anyhow be throwing into the collegiate arms of a Wayne Sparks—even supposing Holly and Caroline could raise their averages sufficiently to be accepted by even Boggs State; even supposing Caroline, in response to his inquiring about her educational plans, had not lifted her creamy shoulders into a shrug and mugged with her peachy face the look of one who’d sucked on a rancid lemon; even supposing Holly (in conjunction with her request that he advance her eighteen thousand dollars from her college funds so she could purchase used from a Pepsi Challenge pit crew a Grand Nationals modified white Ford with crash net) had not announced her intention to become a lady stock car racer and to repay him with future winnings; when Raleigh Hayes’s thoughts sped—as they often did as he drove down the Kettell-enriching highway—toward this cul-de-sac of his paternal aspirations, he performed a spiritual exercise. By quickly calling to mind any randomly chosen half-dozen cataclysmic disasters so far not inflicted on him, he was able to stiffen his will so as to bounce despair off it. At least his twins were not Siamese twins. At least they were not cocaine-snorting hookers in Times Square. They were not helpless pawns of an anarchist cult. They had not been stolen by the Moonies. At least Nemours Kettell had five daughters.

  Raleigh rushed through these hypotheses like rosary beads now as he wound around the Drives, Lanes, and Courts of Starry Haven, Thermopylae’s first, and now second-best, subdivision, where he owned a three-bedroom Colonial home with a bas-relief fluted column on either side of the green welcome mat on which his father had left some ridiculous message.

  “Okay,” said Hayes to the sight that greeted him.

  On his rolled, seeded, fertilized, edged lawn where in precious leisure time he had crawled on hands and knees to tear out clumps of crabgrass, he saw leaping—her blond ponytail in the air like a deer’s tail, her legs spread perpendicular, so that he could see her panties beneath a skirt as short and ruffled as a tutu—his sixteen-year-old daughte
r Caroline. At first he thought she was shaking over her head two fat boughs of his lilac blossoms, but as he drove closer he identified the objects as two blue pompoms. Caroline was apparently a cheerleader, despite his strictures on extracurricular activities unless her grades improved. He had no time to prepare any interrogation, for blood flooded his eye sockets as, turning past his rhododendrons, he saw backed into his driveway the red Triumph sportscar that had run him off the road an hour ago. The hood was up, and projecting from its crimson maw was the bottom half of his blue-jeaned daughter Holly, buttock to buttock with the longer, leaner jeans of, no doubt, the Triumph’s foul-tongued driver. Raleigh’s paranoiac ironies had turned prophetic on him.

  Hayes swung wide, skittering into Mingo Sheffield’s gravel, which abutted his own paved driveway. As soon as he flung open his door—which instantly swung back shut on his shin—he was jolted by a bloodcurdling shriek from Caroline. “YAHHHHH!” She leaped in a split while shouting to the snap of her pompoms:

  Tomahawks! Tomahawks! Kill, kill, kill! If Kevin can’t do the job, BOOGER WILL! YAHHHHHHHH!

  “Caroline, stop stomping on the grass,” called Raleigh, stumbling over the bricks that bordered his property from Sheffield’s gravel. He was temporarily blinded in the afternoon sun by the glitter of his daughter’s glossy sunglasses, sequined T-shirt, and the metal box attached to her waist. “Caroline, I’d appreciate it if you’d —”

  Toma Toma Tomahawks. Here comes the hatchet! LOOK OUT, Huskies! You’re gonna CATCH it! YAHHHHHHHH!