Bettyville (7 page)

On streets in towns around here, old houses tumble, drawing meth cookers who start fires at night. Helicopters filled with state police look for dealers who hide in trailer homes and campers in the woods. In Columbia, where the elderly, including Betty, go to the doctor or for tests at the med center, MS-13—a deadly gang that drifted north after Katrina—is being held responsible for a series of “senseless shootings” and is said to be involved in drug trafficking, robbery, murder, prostitution, and arms trafficking. On the streets of this once peaceful university town, it is possible to acquire military-style ammunition that can pierce a policeman's protective vest. There are rumors of young women inducted into white slavery against their will. The husband of my mother's friend Betsy was approached by a youthful prostitute in the parking lot of Red Lobster. “We were there for Crabfest,” Betsy said.

“That brings them out,” I replied.

There is frequent mention of depression and bipolar conditions. “It used to be hysterectomies and then there was mastectomies,” Evie Cullers says. “Now it is always something up in the head.”

This is not a locale whose residents are waiting desperately for the latest version of the iPhone. This is a place where the Second Coming would be much preferred to tomorrow's sunrise, the world of the Dollar Store, the Big Cup, the carbohydrate, and the cinnamon roll—a region of old families, now faded, living in trailer homes, divorcing and having illegitimate children. But there is also kindness, such kindness, the casserole on the doorstep from someone who does not expect to be acknowledged, the wet morning flowers in the mailbox.

And then there is my mother, one of the last truly fashionable women in Monroe County, even now. She fusses over the catalogs, always determined to find the perfect blouse. People still remark to me on her outfits, her style. Our friend Linda Lechliter says that when her mother died, she could find no one in Paris who would even take her dresses, which didn't fit Linda herself. You can't get the women here into anything but jeans, Linda claimed. “And these were nice dresses,” Linda said, “beautiful dresses. And not a soul in this town to wear them.”

. . .

At the parking lot of Hickman's IGA, our grocery store, I notice, on one of my late-night rides, the sunburned kid who mows our lawn sitting on the hood of his car, all alone, hugging his knees, waiting in the dark, watching the occasional car go by. I have also seen him sitting around at the car wash or chasing squirrels down the street in the evenings in his dirty clothes. Aside from a few old people and little kids, there are few pedestrians in Paris; everyone drives and practically lives in what they call their “vehicles.” I don't know this kid's name, or his family, or if he has one at all. He looks like he might belong to one of the wanderers—sham ministers who found churches and make off with the dough; women on the dole, unmarried or divorced, who drift in, rent old houses for next to nothing, and disappear, leaving a kid or two old enough to kick off the gravy train. You see these young ones, not even out of their teens, walking on the sides of the highway in the early mornings and wonder what they have been up to.

It is always the wandering ones, the underdogs, the eccentrics, the castoffs who tell me their stories. Leslie, who I met in graduate school, had a distant relationship with truth. From her I learned never to trust anyone who ever lived in Los Angeles. Then there was Esther, an old woman who pushed her stuffed cart along Perry Street. We met at a laundry called the Stinky Sock. Cookie, the black drag queen, wore enormous bejeweled crosses and earrings with healing crystals, small Statues of Liberty, and large glittery crescent moons. Jason was a homeless Puerto Rican street kid I took in. At night he wrapped his head in towels to try to silence the voices he heard when he tried to sleep. In my apartment he left a stocking cap I keep on a vase as a small tribute and a leaky plastic jar with colorful floating fish that he bought at a discount store for my birthday.

. . .

The first of these characters arrived in my life early on; he was a family friend who drifted through our lives. Wray Chowning resided in Madison, in his parents' old house, a place so covered with vines that the brick barely showed. Preach Burton mowed the lawn, which received no other attention. It lay flat and half brown, like an old carpet. In the front hallway stood a huge grandfather clock coveted by Betty and a desk of cherrywood with thin elegant legs that slightly curved. My mother said the desk was of the Queen Anne style and that it wasn't really right for a man's house. Who knew these rules could attach themselves to even a piece of furniture? Though I told no one, I felt united with Wray. I understood, somehow, that we had a bond. I was a kid trapped between feeling something and knowing nothing.

Mammy often asked my mother to drive by to see if Wray's car was in the driveway. It bothered her if it was not. It worried her if it was. I could see that Mammy wanted to reach out to him. She took pies and cakes, but sometimes, even when his car was parked out front, he didn't come to the door when we knocked. “I'll bet he's just sleeping,” Mammy always said. “Maybe he's just sleeping.” Betty tended just to shake her head. She and Mammy both knew Wray was drinking. Even I had picked up that this was his problem. Mammy, whose brother had also been a drinker, seemed to understand what came of a life trapped inside a bottle of disappointment.

Wray was unmarried and lived alone after the death of his father and the closing of their family's dry goods store downtown. He did not work. Though his clothes suggested some involvement in large concerns, he seemed to have none. For holidays or special dinners, he came to our house or to Mammy's, never sitting in the living room with the men, but always drifting toward the kitchen. His face went red when my father or Harry or Bill laughed in the other room, and he did not join in the talk at the table, just listened, fingers shaking so that Betty's aunt Bess would reach out for the dishes to spear him some meat or ladle out the gravy. My father said his name in a way that was both too nice and not nice at all. Wray.
Wray
. Daddy added a kind of flourish that somehow diminished his greetings and their recipient and left me anguished. It seemed like my father had sided with the enemy.

Usually when Wray came to our house, he was invited with the ladies, the widows—Mrs. Bloom who ran the silver shop in Moberly; Betty Riley, a doctor's widow who went to Mississippi every winter to ride horses. My father plied him with cocktails. Everyone else tried to get Wray not to drink, but my father always kept asking, again and again, if he needed a refill. On holidays, Big George always got him drunk and my mother's brother Bill Baker would catch my father's glance and roll his eyes or chuckle when Wray stumbled or slurred his words. Big George was nice to everyone, but somehow Wray was okay to laugh at, even when he was present, just sitting there, bothering no one. My father served his cocktails with a twist of contempt that I could taste too when he held out the glass. Maybe it was just for entertainment for my uncles. Maybe it was because it was a relief for my father to have someone farther outside the circle than he was. No one kicks you harder than a pal on the bench who sees his chance to join the team.

The Chownings were among Madison's fine old families, a circle with the Bakers on the periphery that included the Thompsons, who knew Harry Truman and wrote to him if someone in Madison changed their party alliance. There were also the Threlkelds, and the Atterburys, whose son, Newton, dead for years by this point, had been Wray's great friend when they were young. When people spoke of Wray, they always brought up Newton too. Newton had married and left for Jefferson City. Wray, it was implied, was lost without him and began to drink, more and more.

Wray had hair of pure silver; any tarnished part was carefully combed over. He wore cuff links, suits tailored in St. Louis, shirts so fiercely pressed that life dared not intrude. He smoked extralong Salems lit by a shiny gold lighter meant to resemble a fountain pen. He was always the first to leave the gatherings. In the pocket of his vest there was a shiny watch, produced just after meals when he took it out to suggest he had some other pressing engagement. Sitting beside him at the table, you could hear it, ticking out the minutes until he could safely get away.

There was something about him that scared me. Bill called him a “mama's boy.” From early on, I had a sense for secrets, for the places where people were hiding things, the spaces where words went unsaid, the moments when someone at the table shifted the subject away from something or someone. Mostly, I shied away from Wray. I didn't like the way they treated him, the way my father said his name.
Wray, Wray, Wray
. I can still hear the way he said it. My father's rendition of the name made too fancy by its extra letter was almost enough to make me cry. This was my father, the one who I believed would always be loyal. Who said I could tell him anything.

. . .

My parents were gone for the weekend. Maybe a lumbermen's convention. I was staying with Mammy, who was walking by then on a cane left over from someone. Constantly she asked me to check the thermostat to make sure we weren't using too much power.

One of the most intriguing aspects of a visit to Mammy's was the gun kept under her pillow—a pistol, metal, cold, and surprisingly heavy for its size—given to her by my uncle Bill for protection. Betty said she would like to use it to shoot Bill.

During one of my stays at my grandmother's, Mammy realized that she was supposed to play bridge, and a neighbor named Edith came to the rescue. She tried to get me to sleep in Mammy's bed so she could watch
Love of Life
. This seemed unfair. After Edith left the room, I grabbed the gun. As a joke, I took it into the living room and pointed it at Edith. “Lordamighty!” she screamed, throwing her hands up. “Lordamighty!”

I gave up the gun with no discharge, but this was not the end of it. Edith told Mammy, who told Betty. “Edith will tell this all over town,” Betty remarked to my grandmother.

“Well, he didn't shoot her,” Mammy said.

I remember checking several times for the gun on the weekend I am recalling, but it was nowhere to be found. On Saturday, Mammy burned an angel food cake. Later, she baked another, as the dessert was for Study Club. She beat the batter up as the radio played. It was Oldies Hour: “Someone's Rocking My Dreamboat.”

That night, Mammy popped popcorn, as was her custom on our nights together. She talked to me about life, said what she had wanted most for her kids was for them to see the world.

On Sunday, Bill and June arrived with their two dogs, Tammy and Heidi, to take us to see Mammy's brother, Uncle Oscar, who had not yet left his home in Clarence, not far from the farm where Mammy grew up.

Bill sold tractors in Mexico, although he remained a partner—with Harry, Betty, and Mammy—in the lumberyards. Spitting out the windows and clearing his throat, he traveled the countryside with June and the dogs at all hours in a grimy baseball cap in search of round balers to buy and sell. Before he married, he slept in rooming houses run by old widows but lived on the back roads. Late nights found him at a roadhouse in Moonglow or sipping a Bud in some truck stop, mulling over newspapers. He met June at the Black Orchid Lounge in Joplin. A still youngish “widow woman,” she had been a beauty operator before the five farms in Kansas, Missouri, and Oklahoma that she inherited from her first husband made her a rich woman. The owner of a mink stole that I tried on in secret during a Thanksgiving dinner, she always gave me special attention.

June smoked profusely and served her seventeen-year-old toy terrier, Tammy, coffee with cream in the mornings to get her going. “In the mornings,” June would say, “Tammy needs her fuel. Just like me!”

. . .

It was late fall, November perhaps, not long before the winter set in. The Missouri sky was nearly white with smoky lines of cloud. Back home, in Madison, after the trip, there was a curious event, a car in Mammy's driveway with the windows rolled up and a man behind the steering wheel who would not roll down the windows or speak at all. He just gazed ahead, as if frozen. We had no idea of his purpose here or when he had arrived. It was Wray. He frightened me. I did not want him there.

Bill approached the car, tapped on the window, but Wray remained fixed, oblivious. He did not react. “You all right, Wray?” Bill asked. “You all right?” But Wray did not turn; he ignored Bill completely. For a while, Bill stood by the car. Then June, holding Tammy, went up, knocked gently on the window, and waved the dog's paw. “Tammy wants to see you, Wray,” she offered. Mammy finally said, “Just leave him. Let him be. He's not doing anything wrong.” Eyeing Tammy, she turned to me and mimicked strangulation.

I could not take my eyes off Wray's face, his hands on the wheel, which he gripped tight. Where was he going? He was always on his own.

Inside, Mammy served the burned angel cake to Bill and me. June would not leave Wray. She sat for a long time on a lawn chair on the front porch, holding Tammy and smoking her Dorals. From the window, I watched the smoke from her cigarette eddying through the cold air. “Sometimes,” she said, after finally coming into the kitchen, “if you just sit with a person, you can get 'em to feel a little better.” She poured coffee for herself and Tam, prepared a tray with cake and coffee for me to set on the hood of Wray's car.

When I came back in the kitchen, June was still talking. She said that Wray had somehow gotten on “the wrong road.” It is easy sometimes, she says, for a person to get on the wrong road. She nearly took such a detour after she lost a baby, Mary Ann, and then her first husband. She said she went through a rough patch. Bill cleared his throat to end the talk. It was getting too personal and he winced, as he had a way of doing if certain kinds of things came up in conversations.