Chapter 3
Of a Misunderstanding between Our Hero and His Neighbors
THE SHEFFIELD DOOR was snatched back, and a white arm hauled Hayes inside. “Ooo shared ee! Oo shought uh she shame shying un ee!” Vera’s amazingly long and sooty lashes lifted to show eyes much more expressive of her indignation than whatever it was she’d hissed at him through her wired teeth. (It was, “You scared me! You ought to be ashamed, spying on me!”)
Shaking, wordless, the two stared at each other, both breathing through their mouths. Having to speak with her lips so widely stretched open had given Vera a viciously carnal look that matched her outfit, and had turned Raleigh to stone. He figured he’d have to stand there forever, like somebody from Pompeii. Strenuously he tried to move one arm; wetness sloshed his hand. It was the whiskey.
Finally, Vera’s head began to shake. “Shesheshesheshesheshe.” She was giggling. The riding crop flicked against his arm, then whacked the bagged bottle. “Oh! Ouer zhinking!”
“No, I am not drinking, I assure you, I, I, Vera, I didn’t mean to startle you, listen, pardon me, I just came over here to inquire if I could borrow your automobile.” The spell was half broken; if not move, he could at least talk. In fact, he had the feeling he was babbling. “Sort of a little bit of an emergency. Caroline took off with mine, and Aura’s gone to a…to a class.”
The riding crop kept twitching against his arm. Vera kept giggling, no doubt on the verge of a hysterical mania. Evangelism and dieting had utterly addled her wits. He had to make her think there was nothing implausible in her appearance; cajole her, then flee. Somehow he produced a chuckling noise. “Well, I guess I know who’s going to be the hit of the new show, hunh?” Raleigh swatted the sweat from his forehead, relieved. In fact, probably that was the explanation. Wasn’t Vera always in the church Easter play? Last year, in her heavy days, hadn’t she hopped into the Sunday-school class dressed up as a huge purple rabbit carrying a basket of colored eggs in her paws? Yes, that was it. The church must be doing some modernistic show this year. She must be playing Sin or Mary Magdalene or something like that. “Well, Vera, never mind about the car, I’ll just get on back; Aura ought to be —”
Clearly deranged by the trauma of her mortification, Vera continued to giggle, or to hiss, as her little whip nervously smacked harder and harder against his arm. Raleigh jerked up his elbow abruptly; the crop spun out of her hand and fell between his feet, where she squatted to retrieve it. Hayes was staring unavoidably down at two swelling creamy orbs overflowing their black vinyl confinement. This time his rebellious privates lunged desperately in frantic efforts to escape his control. In trying to jump backward, he jostled the rising Mrs. Sheffield, unsteadily balanced on her high heels, and she lurched against his thigh, throwing her arms around his buttocks. Her face nuzzled between his legs. She was kissing him there! Inches below his now rioting genitals. Hayes pulled back. Her face followed! Her warm lips moved urgently against his trousers as barbaric whimpers came from her throat. He shook his leg roughly, flinging her head back and forth with it and gouging his skin with the spikes on her collar. “Shop! I’m shuck!” she shrieked.
With both hands Hayes grabbed at her clustered blonde ringlets. The bottle crashed to the floor. He yanked and the hair came terrifyingly loose from her head and hung tangled from his fingers, revealing Vera’s customary black bobbed curls below.
Raleigh was screaming too. “What?” He looked down; the cloth of his good gray slacks, wet from drool, stretched out into Vera’s mouth. He was stuck to a loop of her teeth wire.
Just then the insurance man heard two sounds simultaneously: one was the familiar rattle of a door opening. The other resembled the records Caroline played at top volume in her room. A bloodcurdling moan crescendoed in high-pitched yawps of the sort a dog might emit if the end of a piano landed on its tail. Raleigh twisted his upper torso, hauling Vera with him, and saw fat Mingo Sheffield at the door attempting to stuff both his fists in his mouth.
“Mingo,” Raleigh began solemnly.
“…ingo!” squeaked Vera.
But, eyes averted, Mingo ran with dainty fat-man swiftness right
past them and into the front of the house.
“Now, look!” growled Raleigh, and tried to rip his pants loose
despite Vera’s clawing at his leg.
“Shop, shhop!” she hissed. The despicable wire had corkscrewed
its way through the fabric. Hayes was not sufficiently abandoned to
yield to his impulse to rip her teeth out of her head, so he stood there
in a shower of sweat as she pulled down his pants. Mingo ran back
into the kitchen pucker-faced and burst into a wail of tears at the
sight of his wife groveling at his barelegged best friend’s feet. In
Sheffield’s fat hand was a gun.
“For God’s sake, Mingo, listen to reason!” stuttered Raleigh, whose
sex organ, so recently reckless, had scurried into hiding with a craven
celerity. He tugged his blue-striped shirttail down over his boxer
shorts as he hopped free of his pants.
“Y’all didn’t even stop!” pouted Mingo. But instead of shooting
them, as at least Raleigh expected, he trotted jiggling with sobs out
the kitchen door, across his crowded patio in a light-footed weave,
and disappeared over the slope at the yard edge.
“Shave him!” begged Vera, Raleigh’s trousers dangling from her
mouth as if she’d devoured the contents. She started a longer sentence, abandoned the effort, and resorted to charades: cocking her
thumb and pointing her forefinger at her temple. Then she shoved
Hayes with such force out the door that he broad-jumped the back
steps entirely, galloped headlong over the lawn, and slid down the
brambly incline. In Raleigh’s backyard, wedged in the little double
chair on the twins’ old swing set, Mingo Sheffield sat wistfully, one
hand pulling and pushing on the rusted metal bar from which the
chair hung, one hand on the gun in his lap. Screak, screak. Screak,
screak, sighed the old brown deserted swing.
“Now excuse me, Mingo, you have the wrong impression,” began
Raleigh as he scrambled to his feet, noticing while doing so that in
his slide his shorts had come unsnapped, and—as his cousin Jimmy
Clay had once taunted him in front of a girl—his barn door was
open. Fortunately, Mingo, lost in a pensive reverie, hadn’t noticed. “Mingo, I insist that you not jump to false conclusions. I came
over to borrow Vera’s car and her teeth got caught in my pants.” Sheffield stared stolidly ahead. “I guess I’m the last to know.” “There’s nothing to know,” Raleigh persisted, and pressed his
hand to his heart. “I have no idea why your wife’s in that getup, but
as far as I’m concerned, I swear on —”
“I guess I’m just the town clown all over town.” Mingo wiped his
nose with his gun hand. “I had to hear about it from a Chinese
cookie.” Now he glanced shyly over at Raleigh, then looked away.
“Y’all thought I went straight to Tuesday choir practice like usual, I
bet. Well, they canceled it!”
“Mingo, I didn’t know you went to choir practice at all!” The
issue of whether choirs practiced had never entered his mind;
although surely, after bellowing the same half-dozen hymns for three
decades, his neighbor ought to know them by heart. “You practice
every Tuesday?”
“Mama warned me! And I was out at a bowling alley the night
she died! I was drinking beer while she was spitting up blood.” Tears
ran sideways around the fat of Sheffield’s cheeks.
By now, Hayes (incensed against his
father, on whom he put the
entire blame for his present predicament) had decided that both the
Sheffields were psychotic. Moreover, he simply could no longer bear
the rusty screaking rhythm of the swing. With a pounce, he grabbed
the metal bar, and then the gun. “Now, you give me this!” he
shouted, although the big boneless hand had made no effort to hold
on to the weapon.
“Just go on and shoot,” Mingo sighed. “I’m too chicken to pull
the trigger. I guess that’s why she’s leaving me. She hates a chicken.” Hayes shook the bar as hard as he could. “For Pete’s sake, will you
get it through your fat skull that she hasn’t left you! There’s nothing
between Vera and me! Tell him!” Vera was now making her way, in
bathing suit and heels, down the slope, Raleigh’s gray pants over one
arm. “Tell him he’s got it all wrong, Vera!”
“Oh, honey,” she hissed, and threw her arms around her spouse.
“Ooo didn’t eally shrink at? Ee an Raleigh? Raleigh? Oh, honey!”
She tossed the pants at the negligible Hayes, who was hurt to see himself so mentally unbraced that he was insulted by how hilarious she found Mingo’s accusation. As he watched in horror, the vicious woman wiggled onto Sheffield’s lap (for some reason the whole swing set did not collapse), and nuzzled among his chins. “Why, oo sheet ole shack of sugah. Ouer jhealous!” She kept on in this vein with remarks which her husband appeared to follow better than Hayes could, until Mingo was actually starting to smile with a furtive tremor. By the time Raleigh had pulled on his trousers, the couple was kissing. Astonishingly enough, no explanation was asked for or offered regarding Vera’s pornographic apparel. Perhaps it was no sur
prise to the blubbering crybaby.
“Well, I’m glad that’s all cleared up,” said Hayes somewhat snappishly. His neighbors appeared to have no intention of apologizing
for what they’d just put him through. Indeed, they were ignoring him
completely. “So if y’all will excuse me!” He stormed back up the
slope away from the screaks and coos below, enraged by a memory of
having chosen the eight-year-old Mingo first for his side in a softball
game, bravely in the face of Ned Ware’s groans of “Whaletail?” He
was enraged by a memory of having in the fifth grade denied the
rumor that Mingo would eat leaves and dirt to get attention, when
he himself had seen the pig doing it a hundred times.
Safe in his own home, Raleigh Hayes flung himself down on the
living-room couch, pulled a ruffled pillow over his head, and fell asleep.
“Why, Raleigh, this isn’t like you. I didn’t know you were in here. Are you sick?” Aura’s voice was above him, but he’d lost his sight. No, it was dark.
“Have I been asleep?” “What a funny question. Don’t you know? I hate to say it, but we’ve already eaten.”
“Who’s we? Where are the girls, did they come home?”
“From the game? They just left. It’s seven-thirty. Raleigh, are you coming down with something?”
It was strange talking with Aura in the dark from the living-room couch. It was strangely pleasant, this disembodied conversation with so calm and affectionate a voice. Like a voice one recognizes coming out of the past over the telephone. A voice so unlike Vera Sheffield’s.
“Aura, the Sheffields have turned into psychos. I want you to keep away from them.”
“Really? Vera was just over here, borrowing a cucumber. I didn’t notice.”
“A cucumber! What was she wearing?”
“I don’t think I noticed. Would you like some supper?”
“Turn on that light! What are you wearing?”
But Aura did not sport the sheer harem pants and cymbaltinkling fingers Raleigh feared. Her honey hair in a loose twist, she was dressed trimly in a green cotton skirt and a white polo blouse.
“Why do you want to know what Vera and I are wearing? Did you want to go out to eat?” Hayes’s wife eyed seriously his grassstained shirt and ripped trousers. Then she knelt beside the couch, sniffing him as if they were a couple of chimpanzees.
He slid away. “For Pete’s sake!”
“Yep. Caroline and Vera both mentioned you were hitting the bottle.”
Hitting the bottle? Where had she acquired these hard-nosed expressions? He pulled himself wearily to his feet. “Don’t be preposterous. I don’t know what Vera told you, but this was an accident, and entirely her fault. I’ve got to go out.”
She opened a bobby pin with her teeth and used it to catch up a loose strand of hair. “Oh,” she said, with Caroline’s sly smile, “are you going to a bar? Mind if I come along?”
“Aura, really. How old are you?”
She winked. “What have you got in mind?”
“You’ve known me long enough to realize that I do not frequent bars.”
She turned off the lamplight, moved toward the hall. “We met in a bar. Have you ever thought how your whole life could have been different if we hadn’t?”
“That was a bierhaus.”
“Well.” Now she shrugged, making progressively apparent where Caroline had acquired mannerisms Hayes had always thought the product of today’s inarticulate times.
Stuffing his shirt in his pants, Raleigh sat back down exhausted. “I won’t even tell you half the things I’ve got to do. You just go listen to that tape on my chair in the family room. Daddy has gone completely insane.”
She looked sympathetic. “Like the Sheffields.”
“I trust you aren’t being facetious.” Maybe he was talking to Caroline. The light was quite dim. “Did you say seven-thirty?” Hayes remembered that he hadn’t yet jogged the two miles it was his invariable habit to run each evening before dinner. “Where’s the flashlight? I’m going jogging before I leave.”
Aura now wiggled the fingers of both hands tip-to-tip at eye level, undulating her elbows. “You know,” she said as she thoughtfully watched her hands, “I read an article at the checkout counter about a man like you.”
Hayes did not pause on his way upstairs to hear what kind of man the increasingly elliptical Aura might consider him to be. He changed into the white jogging suit he was now sorry he’d purchased from Mingo Sheffield; he rifled the kitchen drawers for his flashlight, glanced in disgust at the open pizza box on the table, and ran out briskly into the night. Naturally, the batteries died before he left his own yard; nor did he wear his glasses, useless this late anyhow. As he ran, a peculiar ease seized him. Hayes did not jog for pleasure, but to outrun his paternal genes, to seek reassurance through each strained sinew and slender bone that life was pain, and the race to the sternly stoical. But there was a peacefulness to running after dark. He was not jolted with massive surges of adrenaline at the sounds of unleashed dogs and the horn blasts of drivers warning him of their superior size. Children did not shoot out of their driveways on plastic motorcycles. Only the moon ran with him now, and the moon was quiet. Ordinarily, nothing more distressed Hayes than trying to compel his eyes to make sharp distinctions without the aid of their glasses. Tonight the world was a comfortable blur. From ranch house, Cape, contemporary, and Colonial, flicked through piny lawns only the silent blue rays of television sets.
Hayes’s course took him along Heritage Drive, around Strawberry Patch Court, up Red Mill Lane to the pool and tennis courts communally owned by residents of Starry Haven. He was himself Treasurer of the Association, although he never used the pool or the courts. But Caroline and Holly wasted their summers there, greasing and frying their almost entirely exposed bodies. Trotting beside the chain-link fence, Hayes was startled by the high white wooden lifeguard’s chair, looking, moonlit, like the seat of some ghostly giant.
He jogged suddenly backward. Yes, the gate was unlocked. Teenagers. Copulating. No, he heard splashes. T
eenagers, swimming, without lights, when the pool was officially closed. Splashes, and incoherent shrieks. Was someone drowning?
“Hey!” he shouted. “Hey! Who’s there?” He couldn’t see a thing as he ran. “Need help?” The rubber-capped toe of his left jogging shoe caught on the aluminum leg of a lounging chair that was supposed to be stacked in the shower room, and he plunged headfirst into the eye-poppingly cold water.
“Jesus!” shouted a man’s voice. Then Hayes was in a tangle of arms and legs, held under by a huge girth of naked squishy flesh.
“Jesus!” shouted Hayes too, when he finally pummeled his way to the surface for an instant.
Coming up again, he heard, “EEshus!” Yes! It was Vera Sheffield. And the white jiggling blob wrestling him was his neighbor Mingo.
“Let me loose!” Hayes gasped.
“Raleigh!” Mingo backkicked, swinging Vera behind him. “Leave her alone, can’t you!”
Unless his weak eyes deceived him, the paddling Vera was…yes, she was definitely bare-breasted. Hayes trod water backward. “What are y’all doing here?”
“Ush?” spluttered Vera. “Ud boud oo?”
All three circled in a dog paddle, Mingo careful to block Vera from Raleigh’s view.
“Mingo, y’all are breaking the rules. You know the pool’s closed.”
“Tough titties,” incredibly replied the man Hayes had befriended since boyhood, against all inclination and social advantage.
“Yesh, shuf shiddies!” Vera spat a spout of water in air, arched and plummeted, exposing as she dived the moony globes of her posterior. They were skinny-dipping. At their age! They must be on drugs.
“Okay,” said Raleigh. “Okay.” He swam to the ladder rung, where he fought to pull his sodden suit and shoes free of the weight of the water.
“Are you going to t…tell?” called Mingo. Always his old sissy childhood question.
Hayes didn’t answer. In the aluminum chair, he saw stacks of clothes that he considered taking with him, but why sink to their level? Behind him he heard Mingo whisper, “He won’t tell. That’s one thing you can say about Raleigh.” Burning through Hayes was a fire of memories. True, he didn’t tell. He had not told the fearsome den father that it was Mingo who’d eaten all the marshmallows meant for the campfire roast. He had not told the gym teacher that it was Mingo who had vomited from terror all over the locker room. He had not told the world that Mingo Sheffield had wet his pants, cheated on algebra tests, denied that he’d run over his own dog backing up in his father’s truck which he’d been forbidden to drive, lied to the IRS, and now, presumably, was a sadomasochistic pervert probably addicted to illegal narcotics.
Handling Sin Page 5
