Airships (23 page)

When Minny got home, she scolded the children for destroying her pictures in the garage. This took the last of her energy. She was all done in, hauling the bags, finding the old places for the cans and hauling them to their spots. She went to the room where the air-conditioner worked, shut the doors and lay down.

She had an hour before everybody would be hungry and Daryl, the husband, would be in. In the bag leaning on her
bed was four yards of orange cloth she would sew into a dress. Her youngest child opened the door and crawled into the bed beside her. This was her and their only girl. She was a small pulchritudinous thing, with strange heavy-lidded eyes. While Minny lay there, the child kicked her in the course of falling asleep.

I can't sleep, said Minny to herself. Why isn't Charlotte watching them? Why has Charlotte gone home? She's paid to stay. They're my responsibility. The teen-agers come by our street so fast in their cars and on motorcycles. They found out there are no police on our street and they use it as a blasting alley. One boy I met with before college liked to speed that way.

We raced everywhere. He was always early for everything, the basketball games, the prom. We never even held hands. One time when we went swimming together he looked down at my feet and tackled me. He put my big toe in his mouth. I told him to cut it out. He got big in his swimming trunks and was humiliated. He said: Listen, I got to teach you how to swim. It bothers me thinking a person like you might drown just for simple lack of swimming. So he taught me how to swim. He had a nice body and cut out through the water like a motor. No reason to go that fast, as usual, no point in getting there to the floating dock early except just to get there fifteen seconds before the others. He always kept a comb, even in his swimming trunks. Had hairy knees that disgusted me. Said I don't want anything but would you at least look at what does want to. Pulled down his trunks. First one I really ever saw, miracle, although a little bit ugly. No wonder he was proud. All men ought to be proud. All I and the rest of us have is hair and a crease. What's so emotional about titties? Mine are fine, but I never understood the excitement. Guy in a convention in New Orleans said he'd cut off his arm to savor my chest. The easiest place to have wit is in the presence of another's need. Deaf and dumb guy selling ballpoint pens comes up with a card saying I am deaf and mute, raising two children, help me out. I pretended
I was deaf and dumb too. He was giving signs like mad and I was giving signs back to him that weren't real. I was looking in his face. Who let you have children in her? I thought. What's deaf and dumb intercourse like? Then I became ashamed and bought all his pens with the grocery money. Daryl was drunk and therefore understood everything when I came home. We ate rice with ketchup on it. My hobby is Daryl now that my other interests have had no chance to grow. Maybe I was never an artist, but I could be an interior decorator. Lucky for me Daryl is good-looking. I couldn't stand phonying-up to one with hair on his knees. They once tried to hire me as an interior decorator at the furniture place on Sixth Street. They offered me a salary of $5700 a year. Daryl got on the phone to the headman. “Who do you think you're trying to hire, some Goddamned darkie? My wife has an art background and all sort of cleverness. You got to raise the ante or she doesn't come at all. Let us know if you can get it up over nigger wages. I don't want to be ashamed of what my girl is bringing home every month.” They didn't up it and I lost the job. But I loved Daryl and his pride. I guess I have pride. I guess I'm lucky how much I love Daryl, who's a silly ass by any judgment. Some hot nights I dream about the beaches in Pensacola. But Daryl is my hobby. You can tell how good it is by the temperature of a man's come. Harold's was lukewarm. . . . I suppose I shouldn't think of it, being raised in the church. But with Daryl—once the kids are asleep—there's nothing like that hot blowing out in you when you are coming yourself. I, good Lord, thank You for that. It keeps a body going through the trash in daylight. Good intercourse is a work of art.

Minny was asleep.

The boys had found a king snake in the garage. The oldest boy hit it over the head with the hammer. Then he wrapped it around the hammer handle. The youngest boy brought it into the house.

Daryl hitched a ride with his partner at the realty and drank a hot beer in the car to calm his nerves, but when he opened the door he sensed that everything was not all right. He knew that he was two bourbons away from peace, and in his desperation he opened the wrong door, not the cabinet under the sink but the basement door, and tumbled down the rotten stairs.

The youngest boy heard the air-conditioner running in his parents' bedroom. He opened the door and saw Minny asleep beside the baby girl. He knew it was a sin for his mother to be asleep in the daytime, the baby-sitter gone.

He looked at her awhile. Then he hit her in the mouth with the hammer.

It woke her up. It also woke up the snake, who had been only stunned by the blow in the garage. The snake unwound itself from the hammer handle and fell on the bed. It rose and twisted since half its nerves were gone. It almost stood up. The boy was horrified and fled the room.

When this woman saw it, she thought she was still in a dream and she felt very guilty for her sleep.

Mother Rooney of Titpea Street, that little fifty yards of dead-end crimped macadam east off North State, crept home from the Jitney Jungle in the falling afternoon of October 1965. She had on her high-laced leather sneakers and her dress of blue teacup roses; she had a brooch the size of an Easter egg pinned on at her booby crease; she clutched a wrapped-up lemon fish filet, fresh from Biloxi, under her armpit.

Mother Rooney had been served at the Jitney by Mimsie Grogan, an ancient girl who had converted back in the thirties to Baptist. Mimsie would hiss at her about this silly disgusting ritual of Fridays as she wrapped the fish. Mother Rooney was Catholic. She was old, she had been being Mother Rooney so long. In the little first-story bathroom of her great weird house no spray she bought could defeat the odor of reptile corpses stewed in mud. Her boarder boys, all gone now for a month, would sometimes come in late and use her bathroom to vomit in, not being able to climb the stairs and use their own. And sometimes they were not able to use even hers well. There would be whiskey and beer gravy waiting for her on the linoleum. Just unspeakable. Yet the natural smell of her toilet would be overcoming the
other vileness, she could not deny it. A couple of the young men smarties would openly confess, in the way of complaining about the unbearably reeking conditions among which they were forced to puke last night, that they were the ones. One of them even arranged his own horrid bountiful vomit into a face with a smile, such as a child might draw, and
this
she had to confront one morning at six o'clock as she came to the chilly tiles to relieve herself. Nobody confessed to that. But she caught on when she heard all the giggling up in the wings, at this hour in the morning. She wasn't deaf, and she wasn't so slow. The boys were sick and tired of her flushing the toilet and waking them all up every morning. Her toilet sounded like a volcano. Yes, Mr. Monroe had voiced that complaint before. He said it sounded as if this old house's back was breaking at last, it couldn't stand the tilt anymore. It woke them all up, it made them all goggle-eyed, everybody stayed stiff for two hours in their beds. Nobody wanted to be the one to make the move that finally broke it in two and sent them all collapsing down the hill into the Mississippi State Fairgrounds. What a way to wake up, Mr. Monroe complained. The situation here is uninhabitable. I don't know a man upstairs who isn't planning to move out of here as soon as he sees an equal rent in the paper.

She promptly brought down the rent to fifteen a month, and the boys all showed up downstairs Saturday night to celebrate, spilling wine and whiskey, which were illegal in this state, everywhere, and grabbing her ruggedly around her weary little rib cage and huffing smoke and rotten berries into her face, calling her the perfect landlady; but profanity began to be used in the dining room, and she was eager to remind them that hard liquor such as three or four of them were drinking was against the law in the state of Mississippi. The party got quiet. They all took their hands off her. They left like mice, not a backward look. She was so sorry to have ruined this party. It was too loud, it was drunken, but one thing had been agreeable to her. Their hugging on her had been good. The hugging. So many big boys had put their
arms around her ribs and had not hurt her. She didn't feel a thing there, nary a lingering of pain, but a warm circle of her body Mother Rooney rubbed against. Oh oh, it was like old flannel cloth that had fingers. Give me that, honeys, she thought. Keep me. Watch me. Watch me, witness me make my old way till one day I've got my eyes closed and you'll . . . I'll keep you here at twenty-five cents a month, but you'll have to discover me dead, feel me with those large hands, you will circle me, wrap me, you boys made of flannel cloth. Some mornings Mother Rooney would pretend and lie toes-up in her bed past six-thirty, having to tee-tee agonizingly, but not going to the toilet and flushing it on time, and getting all she could out of her own old flannel gown. By seven the pain in her bladder would take her almost to true death.

Mother Rooney of Titpea Street came on.

Her boys had all left her now. Like mice. Not a whisper since. Some of them had said they'd write her every day. But not a line. Not a hint even as to whose facilities they were throwing up in nowadays. Her boys were lost in unknown low-rent holes of Jackson, the big midstate town of Mississippi. They had broken up their tribe. They . . .

She was deafened by thought; she'd kept it inside so long, there was a rumble. First thing she knew, she was at the doorknob leaning too hard; she broke the glass doorknob and the door gave. Still, she was a deaf-mute. If sound would come back to her, she could maybe hold on with her sneakers at the top of the hall. That retrograde dance at the top of her perilously drooping lobby, it couldn't come. She saw ahead of her the boards that were smooth as glass; she saw the slick boards beckoning her like a well down past the gloom of the stairs. The fish bundle jumped out of her arms and broke out of its paper and lit on the boards, scooting downward like a pound of grease. No sound would come to her. She flopped in her skirts; her face turned around for a second. She got a look at the wasted orange trees and a look at the sky. It was so chilly and smoky, but quiet. Then her sound came back to her. She was falling.

She put her arms out for flight. She kept her knees together. She knew she was gone. She knew she would snap. She forecast for herself a lonely lingering coughing up of spinal fluid—she could hear all her sounds now—when
fock
, landing on the fish binding, she hit face-down on the boards as if entering water in a shallow dive.

The back of the house was black, such a black of hell's own pit. Something was trying to stop her from going down there. Her breasts burned. The brooch had caught the wood and stopped her.

How wonderful of the brooch to act like a brake, Mother Rooney thought. She had slid only to the edge of the stairwell.

She might have butted through the kitchen door, clear out the back of the house and down the kudzu hill, where there was death by snakes at most, terror by entwinement and suffocation at least.

The house stood, slanting backward but not seriously dismantled yet, over a kudzu-covered cliff that dwindled into red clods upon the grounds of the Mississippi State Fair and Livestock Exhibition. Mother Rooney lived in only the bottom story of the brown middle box between two three-story tubular wings with yellow shingles. The brown box was frosted gingerbread-style in white wooden agates and scrolls, and had a sharp roof to it. In the yellow towers, upstairs, was nobody. She had her stove, pot, couch, bed and dining room, where the boarders ate.

But they were gone.

Her husband Hoover was dead since 1947.

Meager breezes of human odor fell and rose on the stairs.

Once last week she took herself up the stairs of the left wing and opened a room and buried her face in a curtain saturated still with cigarette smoke. She got
in
the curtain. This time she did not weep. She just held on, getting what she could.

Her rugs moved backward against the baseboards. You dropped a ball of yarn and it took off downhill; you spilled some tea and it streaked away from the dining room, over the
threshold hump, and vaporized in the kitchen. The boards were really slick. But she would not nail things down or put gripper mats around everywhere. She wouldn't surrender. The only concession she made to the house was the acceptance of the sneakers from Harry Monroe, the medical student, who told her they were strictly the newest development from the university, already tested and broken in for her. What they were, were wrestling shoes Monroe and his partner, Bobby Dove Fleece, had stolen off a dead woman in the emergency room, a lady wrestler who had been killed down at City Auditorium. Mother Rooney could make it, with these sneakers, even though her feet didn't breathe well in them.

She lay hurt more than she then knew beside the stairs, and felt only as usual, surrounded by the towering vacant wings of her house. Now this horror that she had not personally cultivated at all, this queer renewal of sights and sounds in the air—ghosts—was with her.

Mr. Silas was whispering to her in the dining room. “You are living in the cocked twat of the house. This house has its legs in the air. Not only is it ugly, it's an outrage, Mother. It's a woman's thing cocked beggingly between big old thighs. My shocked friends ask why I live here. I answer that it's what I can afford. I was homeless driving my motorbike and saw the ‘Rooms' sign. I chose at night. All I wanted was a pillow. Once on the porch, I fell in.”