Handling Sin

by Malone, Michael

  Victoria pinched her nose, both ears, still wasn’t relieved, and burst out: “That’s exactly right. You’ll die!”

  Reba cried louder. “Oh, Lovie, don’t listen to her. You’re not going to die. Don’t think it!”

  Lovie abruptly started to tap dance and sing, her silver sandals tapping in time to the hamburger patty she smacked between her hands. “O dem golden slippers, o dem golden slippers, gwine to put on dem golden shoes, climb de golden stairs.”

  Victoria shook Reba’s wheelchair as she shouted, “Y’all don’t seem to care if you die or not, so why should I! Reba! Stop bawling!”

  “When I gets to Heaben, gonna put on my shoes, dance all over God’s Heaben, Heaben, Heaben…”

  “Y’all seem to think Mama and Papa and everybody’s up there in the sky still eating fried chicken and listening to The Lone Ranger. LOVIE, PLEASE!”

  Lovie stopped in midnote. “How do you know they’re not? Vicky Anna, you sound like you don’t even believe in Heaven. Maybe they’ve got angels singing on a radio up there.”

  “I believe Hayeses are lying in the ground, period. And precious few of them with all four limbs attached.” The old missionary saleswoman had pounded her hamburger patty into pieces and had to start over.

  Reba reached out to both sisters. “Of course Vicky believes in Heaven! Why, she had a calling! She gave up a chance for a personal life and carried the Lord on out to the corners of the world far and wide.”

  “Oh God Almighty!” snapped Victoria. “Raleigh! Come out here to the grill with me and carry this bowl.”

  In the yard, while Raleigh circled, choking, to turn the sputtering black chicken, he advised his aunt not to be alarmed if he left suddenly in order to escape Mingo Sheffield, who might be wanted for murder.

  “Fiddlesticks. He never murdered a fly. But I don’t blame you for wanting to get out of this place fast. I just want you to imagine, Raleigh, what it must have been like to have to grow up in a madhouse with all this laughing and loving when they don’t even know what they’re talking about! It just drives me insane. If they’d seen a half of what I’ve seen, they’d shut off that damn piano. I’ve seen people that would kill you for what’s on this grill right now. Love is not enough, and never was. Never was. Move those drumsticks over. So, I hear we know where Gates is now. Maybe.”

  “Yes. Can you believe that?” He scraped charred chicken into the bowl.

  “I can believe anything, Raleigh, except that Somebody with brains is in charge of this universe. Well, go on. I’d come with you if I didn’t expect Reba and Bassie’d be buried before I got back. You keep in touch with me over this Earley business. And if you need help, you just remember, if I can knock a Surabaja bandit over the head with a dead pig—”

  “Who’s this Jubal Rogers?”

  Before answering, Victoria stabbed pieces of chicken and dropped them into the bowl. “…Why?”

  “Daddy wants him.”

  “…That’s your daddy’s business.”

  “He didn’t want me to ask you about this guy. You didn’t like him? You don’t know where he is, do you?” Raleigh heard a horn honk as Jimmy Clay pulled back into the driveway.

  His aunt pulled the glasses down from the hard blue eyes, now blinking from smoke. She looked at him, then pushed the glasses back. “No, I don’t know where he is,” she said. “Go on if you’re going.”

  Raleigh surprised himself, and his elderly aunt, by leaning across the warm bowl of chicken to kiss her shyly on the cheek.

  “Hold down the fort!” he called, as she marched, straightbacked, across the lawn with the birthday dinner.

  His plan was a success. Upon returning with the rum, Jimmy Clay was touched to find his cousin waiting in the driveway to apologize for having hurt his feelings. (As a matter of fact, Raleigh—after looking at that high-school photo, and the bronze baby shoes, and those little white nubbins of teeth and straw wisps of hair that might have been Jimmy’s—really did feel mean-hearted for having dragged the deluded imbecile over to look at the shallow pit of his life.) Jimmy was also touched by Raleigh’s concern in warning him that Mingo Sheffield was down in the Wreck Room giving every appearance of making a play for Tildy Harmon. He threw open the front door so fast, the shamrock fell off.

  Luckily for Raleigh, Sheffield and Tildy were now doing the twist buttock to buttock. Luckily, when Jimmy cut in by jabbing his elbow into the fat man’s shoulder blades, Mingo lunged forward, smashing a small rocking chair, out of which Raleigh’s palsied great-aunt Hattie leaped, with remarkable spryness, just in time. Quick as Hattie, Raleigh grabbed Mingo’s huge madras jacket from the couch, ignored his uncle Bassie who lay there asleep or expired—a Golden Book of Peter Cotton Tail on his chest—and fled up the stairs. Behind him he heard Mingo’s astonished wail. “WHhhhutt, wu wu what’d you push me for, Jimmy? Golleee!”

  The overweight cats scattered in a flurry from the living room as Raleigh sprinted through it, Lovie’s Bible and Flonnie’s package under his arm like a football.

  “Pick me up some Marlboros while you’re at it, will you, Raleigh?” pleasantly called his cousin Paschal, from the card table where he was working on the sky of the moose jigsaw puzzle.

  Raleigh cackled—it was not a laugh or a chuckle, but a cackle— as he threw Mingo’s fat suitcase out onto the lawn. The Pinto spit gravel as he wheeled around all the Cadillacs. “I don’t care,” he said. “I don’t care if I don’t have my car or my clothes and I have to drive all over the country while Betty Hemans writes novels in what used to be my office. I don’t care! At least, I’m, ha, ha, alone!”

  Our hero’s freedom lasted precisely one hour and twenty-three minutes. At that time he was returning with the tow truck (which he had walked four miles to find, and paid fifty dollars to hire), to the hilly highway shoulder onto which the Pinto had rolled to a stop after very loudly and very quickly and very disgustingly, unforgivably throwing a rod only seven miles east of Cowstream. As the tow truck came back over the hill, its young driver was nearly scared off the road by the sudden seizure that attacked his passenger, a hitherto stolid, tight-lipped man. For Raleigh Hayes began to bang on the dirty dash, to tear at his own hair, and to chant, “Goddammitgoddammitgoddammit.”

  Raleigh had gone to pieces at the sight of a white Cadillac parked behind the Pinto. For he had seen that from under the crippled car’s yellow side protruded two unmistakably fat legs in baby blue slacks.

  Leaping from the truck, Hayes ran straight to the Pinto’s smashed rear bumper, and began to kick at the “God Is My Co-Pilot” sticker. “Get out from under there, Mingo, before I tow this trashheap right across your body! How’d you find me?! Get out!”

  The young mechanic scratched his beard as he watched. “You had a friend with a Cadillac, how come you was walking?”

  Chapter 13

  Wherein Is Continued the Account of the Innumerable Troubles Endured by Our Hero “RALEIGH! You’re supposed to be my best friend, and I guess I’m beginning to wonder.”

  “Okay. Okay. How’d you find me, Mingo, how, how?!”

  “Maybe anybody’d start to wonder, you know, after somebody stole their jacket and their car, and broke it!”

  “Did Lovie tell you where I was going? Did she? She did!”

  “And didn’t even ask when they gave their aunt your wife’s foxes that used to belong to your own mother!”

  “Answer me, Mingo! How the hell did you sneak off with Jimmy’s Cadillac, which by the way doesn’t even belong to him!”

  “He said I could borrow it, I sure didn’t just steal it, that’s for sure, like some people I know!”

  Leaning on his truck, the young bearded mechanic pulled an apple out of his denim jacket. Decals were sewn all over it; one said, “U.S.A. #1,” one advertised motor oil, and one said his name was “Jumper.” He was small and sinewy and mottled with freckles. Jumper asked, “Y’all want this Pinto towed to the station? Y’all do, y’all got to take that trunk off of the top, yo
u hear?” But the two Thermopyleans were yelling so loudly that they didn’t hear.

  Mingo was livid. “Plus, told lies! That’s right, Mr. Better-ThanAnybody Hayes. Lies about me wanting to marry Tildy Harmon when I never! When wild dogs couldn’t make me trade Vera for all the gold in China and you know that!”

  “I didn’t tell Jimmy you wanted to marry Tildy Harmon.”

  “I guess you didn’t leave me there to get sent to the gas chamber either!”

  The mechanic chewed energetically on his apple.

  “If, Mingo, if you aren’t guilty, you glutinous cretin, you won’t go to the goddamn gas chamber!”

  Jumper joined them. “That’s what you think. A black guy used to work at the station, they said how he knifed this old lady and they fried him lickety-split and then later on it turned out he was left-handed.”

  “See!” shrieked Mingo.

  “Mister, would you stay out of this, please?” Hayes carefully patted his hair and his heart. “Okay. All right. I apologize, Mingo. In all seriousness, I honestly didn’t think much of your plan to run off to South America. I honestly thought you ought to go back to Thermopylae and talk to Chief Hood and clear this situation up.”

  “How, hunh? After you just ran off and left me and stole my car?”

  “I said I was sorry I took your miserable car. Believe me, if I showed you my feet, you’d know how sorry I am. I left you because I was sick and tired of your poking your you-know-what into me everytime you felt like it.”

  Jumper choked on a chew of apple.

  “That’s another thing you took,” spluttered Mingo. “Where is it, Raleigh?”

  “Right where you left it, in your pocket, but don’t think I’m about to let you get your hands on it again.”

  By now Jumper was edging toward his truck. “Look, y’all, if I’m not back to the station by seven, my brother in the Guards comes after me.”

  Hayes turned on him. “Then why are you standing there eavesdropping on matters that don’t concern you, instead of hooking up that Pinto, Mr. Jumper, as you were paid to do?”

  “Y’all are weird,” commented Jumper without rancor, and set to work.

  Mingo was pouting. “Well, I’m not going back, I’m just not. If you’re running away, I don’t see why you won’t let me come too.”

  Raleigh stared at the gloomy sky, at the scrub pines and young maples so shaken by wind they seemed to be snickering; he stared at the disinterested highway pointing in both directions. Nothing seemed to care much one way or the other. Nothing he could think seemed to bulk with much reality. He couldn’t hold a thought. In his way were the size of the luxurious Cadillac and the size of Mingo Sheffield with his round quivering mouth. Raleigh Hayes sighed. “If I let you come with me, will you stop acting like a fool?”

  Sheffield stared solemnly back. “I swear!…Where are we going anyhow?”

  “To a nursing home and the beach.”

  “Oh.…I thought we were going to New Orleans.”

  “One step at a time. Will you call Vera and try to get this mess sorted out?”

  Sheffield was all earnestness. “Yes.”

  “All right then.”

  His moon face bobbing, Mingo tried to hug his friend, who ducked. “Raleigh, I knew you didn’t really mean to leave me behind. I’m sorry I had to say I was going to shoot you. You knew I never would, really. But how can we go, with the Pinto like it is?”

  Hayes pointed at the new Cadillac.

  “But I kind of told Jimmy I’d bring it back in about an hour.”

  Reckless in the grasp of this powerful new fatalism, Raleigh even smiled. “Oh, Jimmy’ll understand. Tell him you enjoyed driving it so much, you decided to buy it for Vera. He’s trying to sell it, and, frankly, she needs a new car.”

  And brushing aside Sheffield’s worries, Hayes placed his jacket on the plush maroon seat of the Cadillac and took the next step. He transferred Tiny’s steamer, PeeWee’s bust, Vera’s clothes, Lovie’s Bible, Flonnie’s package, and Mingo’s gun from the Pinto into the capacious trunk of Jimmy Clay’s big demo. He tied the trunk shut with Vera’s gold lamé belt. “Okay,” he said calmly. “Let’s go.”

  With Raleigh in the tow truck and Mingo in the Cadillac, they drove back through darkening farm fields, to the crossroads where the filling station leaned against a garage, both half-strangled in kudzu leaves. There, sipping a Budweiser and gazing morosely at a disemboweled engine, was another bearded young man, labeled “Crash,” who looked as if he might have resembled Jumper a few million beers back. Together they considered the case of the yellow Pinto. Finally Jumper spoke. “‘KISSY PU’ here ain’t in such hot shape. Take about three weeks.”

  “Four,” said Crash with a sorrowful spit.

  Mingo, speechless, couldn’t cope, but Raleigh was indignant. “Four weeks of work?”

  “Gotta order the parts,” said Jumper, and his brother added, “Prob’ly won’t git ’em.”

  Hayes asked for a written estimate; when he saw it, he laughed. “Eight hundred dollars!”

  “Nine,” said Crash.

  Mingo whimpered.

  “Okay,” said Raleigh, on a different tack. “How much would you give him for it? Cash? We’re in a hurry.”

  Jumper and Crash strolled around the car, sharing pensive glances and remarks.

  “Looks bad.”

  “Not good.”

  “Threw a rod.”

  “Yeah. Cracked the block.”

  “Oh yeah. Head’s damaged. Look here.”

  “Looks bad. Bent the valves.”

  “Oh boy. Engine’s shot.”

  “So’s the body. Oh yeah.”

  “Yeah. Well. Boy.”

  Mingo followed helplessly behind them, as hurt as if they had Vera on the operating table and didn’t see much hope. “The tires are practically new,” he whispered.

  Jumper slammed one with a wrench. “Yeah. Well. KISSY PU’s headed for the dump. Hundred-fifty dollars.”

  “Two-hundred-fifty,” said Crash, who seemed compelled to overbid his brother, whatever the issue.

  Forty minutes later, Mingo had signed over Vera’s Pinto for $480, minus four dollars’ worth of Corn Puffs, Mars Bars, and orange sodas. Raleigh sent him to make his phone calls while he cleaned out of the old car’s backseat the slops from the glutton’s afternoon binge; while he removed the KISSY PU plate, the Buddhas, and, with an angry squeeze, the little statue of Christ. Jumper and Crash, their faces masks of melancholy, watched him work. They nodded when he asked if they owned the station, and kept nodding when he suggested that perhaps they didn’t get much business out in the middle of nowhere—except for unlucky accidents like his own.

  “But better’n punching a time clock, better’n having a boss,” Jumper pointed out.

  “Only country left where they can’t stop you from owning your own business,” Crash said. They added that if things didn’t pick up soon, they supposed they’d enlist in the Marines.

  As Raleigh and Mingo drove away, headed for the shortcut to Mount Olive, behind them a wide black cloud with hulking arms loomed over the hill like a giant in a nightmare.

  “Your seat belt is not fastened. Thank you.”

  “Leave me alone, Mingo.”

  Sheffield, who was driving with Corn Puffs and a can of soda

  crushed between his enormous thighs, giggled. “I didn’t say it. The car did. It’s been talking to me all along. Listen, here it goes again.” “You are running low on fuel. Thank you.”

  “Isn’t that something, Raleigh? I mean modern technology. Now you wouldn’t have thought when we were little that someday there’d be a man in the dashboard to keep on telling you you’re low on fuel. And he told me to shut the door and get some windshield fluid, and all sorts of things. I wish he’d tell me where the lights are. I can’t exactly see the road.”

  Hayes turned on the signal indicator, the wipers, the tape deck (which burst on with a terrifying shriek by a woman singing that she’d be
en a fool too long for love); finally he found the lights. “Mingo, do you mind if I ask you why you didn’t buy some gas when we were sitting at a filling station for more than an hour?”

  “I forgot.”

  “Well, will you please stop at the next place you see?”

  But there was no next place. There was nothing but scrub pine, corn stubble, burnt-over soybean fields, jungles of kudzu, and the old asphalt two-lane, so bypassed by the New South that suddenly every hundred yards, the past appeared in little panels, once red, washed pink now. Mingo read each one:

  Does your husband MISBEHAVE?

  Grunt & Grumble Rant & Rave?

  Shoot the Brute Some BURMA-SHAVE

  There was also an old billboard still insisting they IMPEACH EARL WARREN. There was nothing else but blackness, wind, and the deep rumbling growl of the storm cloud, which had now stretched out and spread itself over the whole sky.

  “You are running low on fuel. Thank you.” “Shut up,” said Raleigh, craning to see the gas gauge, which disappeared below empty as he watched.

  “Ohh, gollee,” said Mingo. “Something’s wrong. I guess we’re stopping.”

  “I wonder why!” Hayes snapped. “Mingo! Get the damn car off the damn road! No, on the shoulder, on the—”

  The Cadillac was rolling into a little grove of pecan trees. Raleigh knew they were pecan trees because lightning shot all over the sky and lit them up.

  “I’m scared,” Sheffield confessed. “Lightning scares me, I can’t help it.”

  The insurance agent told him what he’d often told Holly and Caroline, and, indeed, assumed to be true. “A car’s the safest place you could be.” Why add what he was thinking? That rolling to a stop under the only cluster of trees in a flat meadow was the fatheaded act of a half-witted butterbrain? “Shut off the lights, Mingo!”

  They sat there for a while in the dark.

  “Mingo, please stop trying to start the car. Isn’t it fairly obvious that we’re out of gas? Hasn’t that remote possibility crossed your mind?” Pawing through the glove compartment, Hayes was obliged silently to bless his cousin Jimmy Clay, for there was actually a flashlight in there, along with a videotape of Debbie Does Dallas. “Stay here. I’ll flag somebody down.”