Cherry

by Mary Karr

  The fact that no redneck leapt on Augustus Maurice that day to beat the dogshit out of him testifies to his considerable size and to the innate splendor of his bearing. Some kind of schoolwide status instantly worked like a shield against the more common cruelties of Leechfield High toward the unorthodox. (By contrast, when Meredith wore combat boots to school her senior year, a football star rushed up to her at lunch to say, “Fuck your boots!”)

  Maybe the fact that he courted the creamy-skinned Miss Ann, who was what you then called a Jesus freak, counted as a stab at heterosexuality. So the average redneck could tell himself, Well hell, he’s trying. But Miss Ann never normalized Augustus Maurice one iota, nor did his magnificence dim by a watt in her company.

  His ability to travel sans butt-whipping also speaks well of the state of Texas, where attachment to personal freedom can result in tentative acceptance if not succor. A bold enough demeanor could buy certain oddballs something like prestige. In your family this was called having enough fuck-you. Augustus Maurice had scads of fuck-you, spewed fuck-you into every room he entered. This pose can also get the shit kicked out of you, but occasionally, it buys a pass.

  He was the first person you ever saw whose clothing projected genuine ideology, for he was engaged in a sartorial project to overthrow the dominant social order. He could break you up just by deciding to wear a zip-up polyester jumpsuit in pea-soup green, the type favored by old war vets and pensioners. His sent an alternative message by hugging his ass so tight that you could see the rectangular label outlined on his jockey shorts, and the shoulder pads he stitched in made his upper body resemble either Joan Crawford’s or a linebacker’s.

  It’s Miss Ann’s much older brother, Chick, who steers you all to Effie’s. His blues band gets booked there to warm up for the rumored appearance of Lightning Hopkins and B. B. King. (Both were reputed to jam there en route to New Orleans from Houston—something you’ll later have cause to doubt.) Chick even gets the cover charge waived by putting your names on this I’m-with-the-Band list.

  You’re hopeful that Little Hendrix will show up with the college girlfriend, Halter-Top Ho, as you call her. He’ll see you are With-the-Band, while he isn’t. Then you can flip filbert nuts at the back of his head, or shoot slobbery spit wads from your cocktail straw.

  If you’d gotten to this sagging little shack even one dot or tittle less high—maybe fifteen minutes earlier—you might well have decided not to go in. You might have scoped the garbage-strewn streets skeined over with swamp gas and thought, Maybe not. But by the time you pull up, the acid rush has kicked in on overdrive, and objects are shivering inside their outlines. Just looking at Effie’s through the windshield saps every amp of thought. You just think that such a Down With It place proves how Down With It your cracker ass is.

  For a long time you clutch the wheel as the engine ticks like a time bomb and stars pulse in their screw holes. It looks like a ghost town, the bare street skittered through with this urban tumbleweed of cigarette cellophanes and the odd wrapper. You have to cling to that wheel for more than a few minutes to get your bearings, for your navigational instruments are giving up only the bluntest physical truths, i.e., My feet are down; my head is up. Or, a chair is to sit. Or, right is the hand I color with.

  Outside, the proportions are already going wrong. Some streetlights rise up thin as skyscrapers to the clouds; others shrink dwarflike and cowering. Nor is any line plumb. So the curb before the bar door arcs out like a stage apron, while the door itself shrinks back in forced perspective, seeming small and edgeless as a rat hole.

  Augustus Maurice says, This is what I took my party dress out of mothballs for? His top lip has a natural outward curl that keeps his face in perpetual sneer.

  You say, It’s a blues joint, Augustus. We’re not coming to see the Jackson Five. We’re not talking ABC/Do-re-mi.

  Miss Ann thumbs a raspy Bic lighter to study by flame the map her brother drew. She looks up and cranes around for nonexistent street signs, ultimately saying, in a voice as chipper as the twittering of a bird, This is definitely it.

  Though Miss Ann would be of virtually no use in an actual barroom altercation, her presence soothes someone tripping hard as you, for she gives off the joyous aura of that pink fairy godmother in Disney’s Cinderella. Also, because of her Jesus-freak status, you’re fairly sure she isn’t high, so at least one of you will (allegedly) know what’s going on.

  While you’re thinking all this, in a momentary lapse of concentration, you’re all whisked across the street to the door. It’s as if your feet sprouted rollers and wheeled you there like some jet-powered robot. This happens so fast that you miss the actual travel, just arrive with your head spinning.

  In reference to this, you say, breathlessly, What’s that?

  Augustus says, That’s a boarded-up place that also has bars on the windows. He is dripping sarcasm in a way that transforms him into the comedian Jack Benny when he says, Now that’s a nice touch.

  You say with some effort from your dry mouth, Least we’ll be safe. All that armor’ll keep the dragons out.

  Or the dragons in, Augustus says. He tilts his head in puzzlement, for he is also tripping. He says, With us? Us with the dragons locked in—is that correct? Grammatically speaking?

  You flash on diagramming sentences in sixth grade under the hawklike visage of Miss Clickety Clack. You’re thinking it’s we for subject, us for predicate. The unopened door stands before you, so tiny you imagine having to stoop to get through it.

  But you pause again before going in—maybe because this is not exactly a white place. But such a motive so disturbs you that entrance is suddenly required. You now have to go in. Your pose of hands-across-the-water commands it. Besides, when you look back at the car, it sits about a thousand yards away, across a strip of desert sand. Then you notice Ann beaming serenely at the unopened door.

  You remember Ann’s brother is inside. Your unlikely triad won’t exactly wander in unescorted, white-bread faces blaring. The band’s presence will buy you safe passage. Plus look at Miss Ann glow. Whatever snakebite you suffer in these wilds, she will serve as antivenom. You hallucinate butterflies to fly figure eights around her. She is your talisman against doubt, the human equivalent of a rabbit’s foot.

  But once you pass through that portal and the door clicks behind you, the degree of your miscalculation is plain.

  First there’s the bottle-green atmosphere, for the bar air is thick as sludge with its underscent of something rotted—old Brussels sprouts maybe.

  At the back of the room, there’s a glaringly lit stage of planks, a structure you might find in a cowboy saloon. It holds a giant black woman dancing naked but for bra and panties. She’s enormously tall, well over six feet and leggy. She wears black wraparound sunglasses, the kind with the bubbled-out, amphibian surface and just a little razor-slit to peep through, as if that thin slash were all she could bear to take in of the world.

  What horrifies you more than her near nudity is the unfortunate state of those underthings. The panties are grayed-out and high-waisted, from some other era, with Tuesday embroidered in a circle on front, though you’re fairly sure it’s Friday. The elastic’s torn from one leghole, and hangs down as if it’s lost interest in hugging to her leg. To compensate for the underwear’s lackluster cling and the fact that they’re too big for her by half, she’s pulled them up, the waistband stopping just shy of her rib cage. This deforms her proportions even further—shortening her torso and lengthening her legs till she resembles some ill-shaped spider.

  She’s also basically without breasts and yet wears an outsize push-up bra constructed to hoist boobs to one’s throat. But since there are no breasts to hoist, the lace cup is scooped out, hollow. Where breasts should swell forth there’s a small cup of void held out for viewing. She’d seem far less bereft dancing bare-assed, you think. She swivels her narrow hips to describe a circle first one way, then in reverse, and in that clocklike movement time as you know it b
egins to warp.

  That’s when you know: Effie’s is not just another juke joint, only somewhat funkier than the joints on Highway 73 you visited with Little Hendrix. Effie’s is another element, one no less foreign than ocean fathoms, with physical laws as incomprehensible.

  But when you reach back for the doorknob, intending to bolt, you find it’s liquefied like wax, melted into the door, which in turn has melded into the wall. There’s neither knob nor door, just a seamless expanse of what looks the wall of a steel bunker. You try not to blink at this fact, for you’re loath to signal terror to the bar’s few occupants till you’ve mastered the place’s rules of decorum. Best in such environs to lay low, move slow.

  If I sit down, you think, the rush will wear off, and the door will materialize again. And behind that door will sit the car. And before that car will unroll the coiled road that led you here, and at the end of that will stand your unmoveable house, an icon of safety.

  Or so you tell yourself.

  Behind you, Augustus Maurice tugs back the hood of your sweatshirt. He says he has to leave. Now. He can’t stay here. He didn’t know. He has to leave. Inside his small wire-rimmed glasses, his rabbit eyes well up. His chest heaves like he’s run a great distance. He is a kid facing a roller coaster, and you settle a hand on his beefy shoulder.

  You say, I need to sit down a minute. Have a Coke.

  Do you say this or only think it? The membrane that separates your inner world from outer phenomena such as speech has been pierced, so that imagined and real swirl together.

  Ann strokes Augustus’s back, whispers in a tone like a bronco buster might use to calm a cutting horse with a new bit in his mouth. In response, Augustus’s facial flush begins to recede like tide.

  You waver for what seems a long time as if planted there at the room’s vortex, shrunken to this tiny size, a mere gnat in the bar, which is growing hollow and canyonlike. The ceiling widens and stretches away, extending far past the dancer toward an infinite horizon. Likewise, the dark floor slopes downward seemingly forever. So you stand at the hinge of a pair of yawning jaws. Plus surfaces have become mobile. The white asbestos ceiling tiles are pockmarked, and now the black holes appear to bubble and boil, while the black linoleum floor’s faux marbling coils and eddies. At the center of all this, you feel like a perspective point from which all of it’s drawn.

  From behind you, Augustus hulks against your back. When his finger pokes between your shoulder blades, it’s as if he’s pushed some button to power you up. In that instant, you become—in the phrasing stolen from your friend the ex-marine—point woman for this mission. You even think of his story about some horrible place called Khe San. How on a hill there when gore was exploding around him, the voice on the radio said the same scratchy phrases over and over, words you now repeat: Stay strong. Hang tough. Help is on the way.

  You silently repeat this refrain. Again, some unseen force, maybe what powered you earlier from car to door, suddenly whooshes you all across the room in a nanosecond. You’re placed before the stage in a chair drawn up to a black cocktail table.

  Before you, the Amazon dancer with the stilt-long legs and beleaguered Tuesday panties continues her pelvic clockwork before a blue-sparkly drum set. She swivels herself larger and larger. (Years from now, when Star Wars comes out, the big hairy Wookie who follows the hero around as looming sidekick will flash her to mind.)

  Augustus Maurice’s face has gone all pouty, his demeanor broodingly porcine. You can see his belly rise and fail. He’s the terrified pig in Charlotte’s Web. Which makes you Fern. You briefly hug his sweaty neck. Through his astringent cologne and flowery deodorant, he gives off the odor of sweat socks. He says worried things that sound like chitter chitter chitter, and you soothe in tones that sound like kum-ba-ya m’Lord, kum-ba-ya…

  Drinks! That’s it. You will go to the bar for drinks. Surely the barman will welcome the commerce in this bare place, and Lord, is he fat, a soft and sloping mountain, all curvature and camber. His form hosts not a single angle, no evidence of bone. The barstool under the spillage of him seems comically tiny. He’s chewing a pickled pig’s foot and is hunkered over it in a pose almost feral.

  Your legs struggle toward the bar as if through thigh-high mud. He’s finished the vinegary knuckle, tosses it into some unseen receptacle, and dabs at his mouth with the bar towel tucked into his shirt front like a bib. Behind him three massive specimen jars hold hot pickles and boiled eggs, cured pig’s feet. The very sight of them makes a gland in your throat contract, and suddenly you smell formaldehyde, a long silver vein of it, and the giant jars hold not regular bar snacks but fetal forms you flinch away from—images you refuse to acknowledge for fear of giving them life.

  You ask for sodas. He wipes each finger daintily with the towel-bib then scoops ice into three highball glasses. Grabs a jointed silver bar hose. But in his hand the spout instantly transforms into a hooded serpent’s head—eyes glowing amber. He squeezes on the flared hood so its gums retract to show bared fangs, then he lowers those fangs into each glass—one, two, three. In each is hissed out a full measure of black and steamy venom.

  Meanwhile, the Wookie dancer has taken a post at the end of the bar. You halfway consider her an ally, for she’s a girl after all, and the kind of loose-limbed dancer you and Clarice watching Soul Train always aspired to be. But something in her manner makes her unapproachable—some regality in her profile, short hair burnt straight and combed back in a frazzled shock not unlike Nefertiti’s headdress. The barman moves away from you to get jukebox change for her. When she turns, you can see under the amphibian glasses for the first time. How the left eye is encrusted with sores, runny as an egg, the flesh eaten by some awful infection. Surely you don’t really see inside that putrefying mess to the white surface of bone, but you think you do.

  In Meredith’s parlance, She has suffered. Or as another saying goes: You’re thinking the blues; she’s living the blues.

  The barman’s squeezing limes in your snake venom when, to distract him from your creeping unease with your own hallucinations, you start to jabber about music. Tones exit your mouth. You sense your jaw working. Good. Your stunning insights on Albert King, Howling Wolf, Lightning.

  When his eyes link with yours, you feel a flint strike of recognition you’d like to capitalize on. Connection is comfort, and you hold the instant. You order Fritos and slim jims to prove your largesse. He announces himself as Effie, and says with gruff pride, This my place.

  Effie holds out change, and your hand opens to receive it. But rather than drop the coins, he clamps hold to your wrist, which feels small as a pencil in his rusty hand. Then with one finger, he lightly strokes the line that divides your palm—heart line? life line? You try to maintain your disaffected pose inside the barefaced intimacy of a light touch, but retrieving the hand would seem rude. It’s become some unit of barter you’re gauging the worth of when his mouth plants a moist kiss at the hand’s center. Only then do the few coins fall.

  In a flash, you’re back at the table, lowering a drink before Augustus, who sits lumpish and still, though his face is riven with undried tears. You feel too indicted by Effie’s kiss to tell of it. (She was asking for it.) Augustus sobs out how he needs to go to the bathroom. Bad. But he’s too scared, even if you go along. He keeps saying, I know I won’t come back. I know it. I won’t come back.

  Ann has an arm around his soft shoulder, stroking one side of his head as you would a cat’s. He takes off his wire-rims, soaks two napkins in his foamy glass of venom, and places the damp wads on his eyes, pressing them into the hollows like a blind man seeking cure.

  Once the drinks are settled, you remember the snacks back at the bar, paid for with the kiss that still sears your palm. To leave the snacks uncollected virtually announces your fear to Effie, your revulsion. Your mind is seesawing between the alternatives—going back for snacks or not—when you feel some new gaze graze your back. You turn back. Slow. For in these districts, quick movemen
t might draw some lunging attack.

  But there at the bar is a lividly red-haired man in a crisp white sailor suit with bell bottoms that button around the front. So overjoyed are you at his whiteness and the sparkling state of his uniform (which in normal environs would label him a filthy imperialist swine) that you cross back to the bar right away, gather Fritos and slim jims, tell him your name and lead him back to your table.

  Ann tears into the Fritos and says, Hey I’m Ann.

  Augustus removes the Coke-soaked compresses from his eyes and—also perking up at the sight of the sailor—waves his beringed hand like a Mouseketeer. The sailor bends to say quite lucidly, My name’s Cook. You nod, and he expands it: Robert Cook.

  You nod again in understanding. Augustus asks across the blaring juke box if Mr. Cook is familiar with the men’s room here, and Cook leans closer to your ear—maybe because he’d have to stand and bend across the table to reach Augustus. He utters the following: Cook, Cook. Robert Cook, Robert Cook, Robert Cook. My name’s Cook Cook. Robert Cook. Robert Cook’s my name.…

  Robert Cook withdraws from your ear and beams forth a sedate and blue-eyed pleasure with the introduction. How well it went by his standards.

  Ann grins her fairy godmother grin.

  It occurs to you maybe you fancied the repeated name, so you try again, shouting to Robert-Cook-Robert-Cook, How do you like the music?

  He replies, It’s a little jivey, but it’s all right. A little jivey. It’s a little jivey. All right. All right! All right! It’s a little jivey.…

  His words corkscrew into your ear through cranial matter till you grasp his words and sink back into fret. You haven’t yet plumbed the depths of the dangers here. You don’t know who the bad guys are, and who the allies. In your untouched glass, a lime is skewered on a small red sword. You slide the fruit off and think grandiloquently, If I have to do battle with this, so be it.

  Robert Cook slides his chair close to yours, and you sense the nightmare quality of his brain—a structure with no lit exit signs, with sliding bookcases and trapdoors, hidden passages you instinctively know burrow into the boiling tarpits of hell.