Mockingbird (15 page)

“I was at Mary—”

“A few hours ago I could still drive. Not now. Now I'm Way Too Drunk. You're going to have to come here.”

“You've been drinking? At five in the afternoon? Where are you? What's wrong?”

Music was blasting away on Candy's end of the phone. “Can you imagine how many times guys have said to me, ‘Hey, honey, I got a Slick Willie here for ya!' I don't mind anyone's fun, but it gets Old. You know? It gets Old.”

“You have been drinking. You're at work.”

“Unless they've fired me and I didn't know, in which case I'd just be a customer.” Candy paused, apparently to let someone back a heavy truck over an electric guitar. “Come to think of it, I am supposed to go on shift at seven.”

“Oh Lord.”

“Oops.”

I left a cup of wheat germ on the kitchen counter and drove the six blocks to Slick Willie's. The place was just beginning to fill up with guys on the way home from work, a nicely dressed crowd stopping in for a beer at day's end. Junior account executives practiced their predatory pool-table prowls, circling the helpless balls that clumped like spherical zebras on the green felt Serengeti. The jukebox was in fine fettle, roaring out “Bad To The Bone,” reassurance for those young men, who needed to hear that they hadn't traded in their wild sides for nice Italian shoes and jobs at Tenneco and Shell. Every turncoat likes to think he's actually a double agent in deep cover.

When I came in, the bartender jerked his thumb at the bathroom. Candy emerged a moment later, smoothing her hair back and sporting a grim yet glassy expression.

“Are you okay? What's going on?”

She held up her hand for silence and led me to a pool table at the back of the room where she had started a solo game. “He turned me down,” she said, folding suddenly at the waist to disappear beneath the table. She returned a moment later clutching the triangle. “Rack 'em.”

“What? Who turned you down?”

“Rhymes with ‘shit.'”

“Carlos? Carlos turned you down? Oh, sweetie.”

Candy stopped and smelled her fingers. “Gross. I tore open a packet of mustard and stuck it into the back of my throat until I threw up. Trying to get the tequila out. Once it's in your bloodstream it's too late, you know. People always ask for coffee when they're trying to sober up, but it doesn't help at all. That's in a training booklet they give us. Can you smell the mustard?” she asked, sticking her hand in front of my nose and wiggling her fingers.

“Candy! Stop it!”

B-B-B-B-Bad!

“Get a cue,” Candy said. “It helps me stay straight if I'm concentrating on something. But I don't if I'm playing by myself. I don't want to beat myself bad enough.”

I picked out a cue and chalked up while Candy finished racking. “Flip for break?”

“I want to break.” She stalked around to the end of the table and placed the cue ball. Candy had always played, and working at Slick Willie's she had played a lot more. For a girl, she had a hell of a break. She sighted down the cue ball and drew her arm back. “Hey, Carlos!” she yelled, and let the hammer fall. Balls blew out in every direction. The nine staggered as if shot and fell face-forward into the right corner pocket. “I'm stripes,” Candy said. “You're solids. What else is new.”

She had gone to meet Carlos for lunch at the Café Chapultepec and proposed between the chips and the chicken mole, wriggling out of her seat to kneel on the tile floor and look prettily up at him while asking for his hand. He was supposed to laugh and say yes. “He just sat there like a lump, Toni. He actually inched away from me. He was embarrassed. He said he'd have to think about it. Think about it! What's to think about? Either you like someone well enough to marry them or you don't!”

“Now be fair.” I lined up the four ball for a shot on the corner pocket. “This is all pretty sudden for Carlos. You had no thought of marrying him until the Widow said you had to.” I drew my arm back slowly and stroked forward on the exhale. The four plunked solidly into the rag beside the pocket and wandered off in search of some friends further down the table.

“That was months ago,” Candy said, blasting the thirteen into a corner pocket and pacing moodily around the table to look at a shot on the eleven.

“Not to Carlos. You've been too yellow to talk to him about it, remember?”

“Whose side are you on? He's had lots of clues. I volunteered to wax his car. I even asked to visit his mother once, didn't I? How blind can the man be?—Shit!”

“Bad luck.” I looked around the table for a good shot and didn't see much. “I went over to Mary Jo's today. She wasn't lying about the roof. She might as well run a sprinkler inside her front room.”

“Can you imagine how humiliating that is? To be down on one knee in a restaurant, everybody watching you from the other tables, and the guy
inches away?
”

“She gave me a check for eighteen hundred dollars. It'll never be enough. I should just put it into savings bonds and use it for groceries when the baby comes.” I shot the five and missed by a mile, only to have it kiss two banks and drop in a side pocket. It is better to be lucky than good, as my mother was given to declare. “Give him a few days, Candy. You're pretty, you're young. He'll come around.” I shot at the four ball again. He stepped gracefully aside as if letting someone pass on a crowded train and then returned to chatting up the six. “I'm going to be showing in another month.”

“Ten in the side pocket,” Candy said.

“‘Single White Female, pregnant, broke, living in parents' house, bowlegged and getting bow-leggeder, seeks financially secure co-parent. No photograph necessary.'”

The ten clutched his heart and stumbled back through the swinging saloon doors into the side pocket. “Live fast, die young,” Candy said. The table was now largely populated by my solid citizens. “‘Single White Female seeks weedy Mexican car sorcerer for lifetime enslavement. No in-laws. Send picture of mother's grave.'” She bent down to draw a bead on the twelve. “Toni, what if he doesn't come around? What if he says no for good?”

“Then you have two options.” My sister looked up at me. “Chemical, and nuclear.”

She laughed and shot, but the twelve didn't fall.

The jukebox had moved on to Washing Hands, the best of the eighties postpunk evangelical bands.
Hungry Hungry Hungry Hungry, Hungry for
vinegar . . .

“If I was a guy, I would be a highly desirable commodity,” I said. “I am well educated. I can be funny. I make good money, when I'm making any money at all. I am no princess, but I am not a frog either.”

Candy leaned earnestly across the table. “
I'd
fuck you.”

“You're my sister. You have to say that.”

“No, really.” She shook her head. “Nobody wants to marry me. Do you know I've never had a guy ask? Go figure. I haven't spent a Saturday night alone since I was fifteen years old, but for some reason nobody wants to see me Sunday morning. Well, not past lunchtime, anyway. Hell, even you've had a proposal, right?”

I missed my shot badly, nearly ripping the felt, and glared at her.

“What? What did I say? Steve What's-his-face, with the zits. He proposed to you.”

“Watson. His last name was Watson.”

“Exactly! So what are you doing right? You must be batting about five hundred and I'm zero for my existence. God, I want a beer.”

“No, not until your shift is over.” I stood for a moment leaning on my cue, overcome with the injustice of Life. “I know what a pitcher's ERA means and why you don't try to steal third base with two out in an inning. I know how to calculate slugging percentage. How many women can calculate a slugging percentage?”

“It's a life skill,” Candy said solemnly. “That's our problem, Toni. I have all the Saturday night skills, and you have all the Sunday morning ones.” She stopped and blinked. “Between us, we make a hell of a woman. We ought to be able to get at least one husband.”

I chalked my cue. “Like a time-share.”

“Exactly! Only it would have to be Carlos.”

“I was imagining someone taller.”

“He's great in bed. I mean—” Candy blinked and then ran her hand down the length of her cue. “Really great. We do a lot of sex magic. He doesn't know the tantric stuff exactly, I've taught him some of that, but there's a Mexican equivalent, he says. You wouldn't regret it.”

I snickered and blushed. “Well, maybe. Is he good with kids?”

“Bound to be. Look at all those brothers and sisters.”

“We could keep him in the kitchen,” I suggested. “In a rabbit hutch.”

“Feed him lettuce through the screen. He wants meat, he's got to perform in bed.”

“Or change diapers.”

Candy looked at me. “This is a great idea.”

“What about his mother?”

“La Hag? Oh, that's easy,” Candy said, eyes gleaming. “We'll keep
her
in the oven.”

An hour later we had the fight about money. Sisters are like that; you can't spend too much time with them without fighting about something. Anyway, I stayed with Candy to the beginning of her shift and then went home. On the way in I checked the mail, which I had forgotten to do, and found a letter waiting. It was hand-addressed to “The Beauchamp Household.” The postmark was from New Orleans. Curious, I opened it, and watched as the solution to all my money worries fell out.

It was from a man named Dr. Richard Manzetti, an anthropologist with some connection to Tulane University. Folk magic in America was his field and he had heard of Momma. In fact, he had even published a paper on her. He was in touch with various collectors, both institutional and individual, and had been asked to investigate the possibility of purchasing some of Momma's memorabilia. “
I have been authorized to make offers well into the five-figure range,
” the letter said.

Well into the five-figure range.

There was a phone number at the bottom of the letter. I dialed it.

The crowd gasps and then laughs as Pierrot pulls out his left eye, which is made of glass, and pops it in his mouth. Then he stuffs it back into its socket.

The Little Lost Girl slowly opens her grubby palm. Pierrot snatches the dime from her hand and crams it into his ear. From his other ear he pulls out a nickel and hands it to her. “I'll bet you a nickel I can bite my other eye,” he says.

“No. You'll just trick me again.”

“How could I bite my other eye? Look, if I win, I'll take that nickel. But if you win, I'll give you twenty cents, and you'll be able to call your mother from that pay phone on the corner.”

The Little Lost Girl looks from the grinning Pierrot to the phone and back again. “Okay,” she whispers.

Pierrot opens his mouth and takes out a set of false teeth, which he gently closes over his other eye. The crowd shrieks with merriment. The Little Lost Girl begins to cry, very quietly.

“There there, poppet, it's not so bad.” Pierrot plucks the nickel from her hand and pats her on the back. “I'll give you one more chance. I'll bet you I can pee in your shoes and make it smell like rosewater. If I win, I get your last penny. But if you win, I will show you your very own house with the white picket fence and the yellow trim around the door and the swing hanging from the big live oak tree out front.”

Tears are trickling down the Little Lost Girl's cheeks. “Okay,” she whispers, and she takes off her shoes that she's been wearing ever so long while she's been walking, walking, walking through the city.

“You sure now? You are actually asking me to pee in your shoes?”

The little girl nods.

Pierrot picks them up with a flourish and brandishes them at the crowd. “You are actually
asking
me to pee in your shoes?” The crowd snorts and giggles.