Carolina Moon (21 page)

Tommy had imagined it all many, many times. His dad got up from the bed, the sheet wrapped around his waist and dragging the sticky dusty floor. He stood at the window in full view of anybody on the strand. He thought he was a regular “Brethren of the Coast.” Aye, matey, you’ll never catch me. I’ll run myself in so that you don’t. He fired the pistol and when he did his head went through the big window and was sliced clean from his neck and the hair on his head, the neglected facial hair, burst into flame just like in the story about Blackbeard.

This is how Tommy had described the scene to the school nurse when she asked him what he knew about his father’s death. He told her that his father’s head burned and rolled a path to the sea. He told her that if you go to the beach late at night you would see his father walking the shore, a headless gray figure in search of his head.

“Really, Tommy.” The nurse sat frozen and pale, tears in her eyes. “That sounds more like the Blackbeard story your teacher says you’re always telling, that and the Maco Light.”

She waited, but he made no response. He watched his mother as she stood on the other side of the glass partition of the principal’s office, her back to them.

“If you
do
want to ever talk,” the nurse said, “you know where I am.”

“He was drinking and fucking,” Tommy said to the nurse. The words out of his mouth felt good like a rush of cool clean saltless water. “Always drinking and fucking.” He rapped his knuckles on the glass where his mother and the principal were staring, faces white, mouths open. Not so soundproof after all. The principal offered to
handle this discipline problem so that Tommy’s mother wouldn’t have to. They had already had such trouble with him, splitting the lip and smashing the nose of Jones Jameson, who wouldn’t tell what he had said to prompt such a beating. He had sat there in the school office and lied, said that Tommy attacked him for no reason except maybe jealousy. Tommy wasn’t involved in all of the school activities that Jones was, after all, and he guessed the girls didn’t like Tommy like they liked Jones.

“Your old man was a fucking loser” is what Jones Jameson had said right up in Tommy’s face. “People say all he did was fuck whores.” And even though Tommy hated his father and had thought those same thoughts, he would not hear it from somebody else, not from somebody like Jones Jameson. He would have killed him if the assistant principal hadn’t come and pulled him off Jones. He spit in Jones’s bloody face, and then he punched him, over and over until the blood and spit mixed and smeared like thick paint.

Then the principal went for him, ten swats with a wooden board with holes in it that had been a gift to him from some fraternity. Boys who had gone on to graduate had signed their names there like it was some big deal to have had your ass beat by some shitty principal who had to show he was tough. Tommy took the paddle, his face like fucking stone with every swat, while Jones Jameson and a crowd of boys watched. It was like a public hanging, there in the hall right in front of the cafeteria, girls hiding their faces with every strike. The one time he dared look out into the crowd he saw Sarah there, her shoulders hunched, arms hugged tightly to her own chest as she watched. He had known who she was from the first day everybody poured into the junior high school from various elementary schools around the town and county, but chances are this was the first time she had noticed him. He wanted to impress her that day, and so he took it
without a flinch. But he wasn’t going to take it again, not the next time, not in front of his mother, and when that son of a bitch got his little fratty paddle off the wall, Tommy went for him with all he was worth. “I’ll beat the shit out of
you
big man,” he screamed. “You’re so tough aren’t you, what a tough shit man?” The principal motioned for his assistant and another male teacher to come and help, but Tommy got in one hard swing to the side of the bastard’s head before they each grabbed an arm and forced him face first into the cinder block wall. The school nurse stepped in to beg, but they pushed her away with a wave of the hand. Tommy’s own mother said she couldn’t bear to watch and turned and walked down the hall and outside, the large blue door slamming behind her.

“Now what did you say?” the principal asked.

“I said I hate your rotten guts,” Tommy spit. “I said that you are a hateful son of a bitch.”

The first crack landed above the belt, stinging his lower back and knocking the breath out of him. “Some places this is illegal,” he gasped.

“But not here,” one of the men said. “Not in this school, son, and not in this whole big state.”

“Are you going to apologize?” the principal asked after two more hard licks.

“No,” Tom said, and so, after another round, they suspended him for two weeks. Two weeks of zeros and Fs. Two weeks of working in the yard and sneaking off to the bowling alley to smoke cigarettes and an occasional joint when some of the older kids offered. Two weeks of his mother not speaking to him, or worse, telling him how she hoped he wasn’t going to end up like his father. Even when he walked into church that Sunday, nobody sat near him; nobody spoke to him. The first person who did say anything to him on his first day back at
school was Sarah. His goal then was simply to get promoted to high school; he had to get the F grades up to Ds so he wouldn’t have to repeat the year. He had already decided that he’d drop out before he spent another year at that slumhole. Sarah didn’t really stop; she barely even looked at him. He was at his locker trying to cram in his jacket, and she slowed just long enough to whisper, “Welcome back.” Her lips were shiny with something that smelled like peppermint, and there were fat strands of yarn like a sailor’s knot, tied in her long hair.

“Thanks,” he said, but by that time she had turned and was walking away with her friend June, their heads pressed together as they talked. He never talked to her again until late summer, when they both wound up parked at the river. He was with some older kids from out in the county, and she was with June and a couple of high school basketball players. Somehow the two of them wound up sitting on the bank just yards apart while all the others swam against the current like they were on a treadmill. She was probably the only sober person there. It was one time when he didn’t think about what he was saying or doing; he got up and went and sat beside her, asked her if she wanted to run away with him.

“Forever?” she asked and laughed.

“Forever, an hour, you pick.” He watched her profile then as she stared out into the river. She waved to her date, somebody Martin, everybody called him Sky. Tom didn’t really have a “date” but more or less was expected to fool around with Theresa Dobbins later. “Or maybe I could call you sometime.”

“That would work.”

“Really?” he asked and reached for her hand that was inches from his. She nodded then ran out knee-deep to where June was motioning to her. For the rest of that late afternoon and early evening, he
entertained the crowds by swinging from the highest vine and dropping a good fourteen feet into the deepest part of that stretch of the river. The other boys tried but they hadn’t practiced like he had. He knew every limb of every big oak there along the bank and could scramble out to the highest limbs without even paying attention. She was watching the whole time. Finally he got way out on the highest branch only to look and see the car they had come in disappearing down the muddy twisting road. He was abandoned and ridiculous for all of his showing off.

Now the memory makes him shudder as he sits on the damp and cold sand; the tide is coming in, claiming his past. Someday, when he is forty-one, he will breathe a sigh of relief because then he will know there isn’t something genetic to make him go out and buy a gun. Who’s to say it couldn’t happen? Who’s to say there isn’t something perched and waiting in his brain, something that would send him out of this world in a goddamned burst of flames.

He wonders about the sensations. How does it feel to know it’s coming? Or do people really believe it is? Whole cities have been unearthed to expose people frozen in their everyday lives as if a big plug were suddenly pulled. The people on the
Titanic
kept dancing to the orchestra music and drinking. Those who survived told how passengers tidied up their state rooms, fed pets, fixed their hair; by the time they knew to panic, to throw themselves out into the icy water, thousands of screams at once, it was too late. And the person gasping for a last breath knows, doesn’t he? Doesn’t he think
this is it, this is it?
Or is there something that keeps the brain hoping, against the odds, against the predictions? If Sarah were to suddenly wake, would she remember the last day he saw her? Would she make him swear never to tell, or would she beg him to let her try again, and then beg him never to tell? Chances are pretty good he will never know. He will
know no more than one of the survivors he read about, a woman whose last memory of her father was his lifting her carefully into a lifeboat. Then she drifted through the icy water away from the beautiful
Titanic
into darkness and into a life with a big hole shot through the center. She probably spent all those years wondering what he did next. Did he straighten his tie and talk to someone about his business? Did he say “Some vacation, huh?” and get a round of nervous laughs. Did he pull out his wallet and show his daughter’s picture? Did he think of her at all? Or did he simply embrace death because there was nothing else to embrace?

Tom gets up now and walks back over the dunes to where his truck is parked. The hot sand squeaks under his feet, the low-growing flowers—“Indian blankets” is what Myra Carter had called them when he did some work on her porch and she spied several on the dash of his truck—spreading around him in every direction, their blossoms protected by the sandspurs mixed in. He hears Blackbeard behind him, smacking saliva and panting, and behind that he hears the constant rushing of the surf and beyond that he thinks he hears someone whispering “Aye, matey, it’s a good day to lose your head,” and he keeps walking, faster and faster, fearful of turning around to see someone there, a man, a monster, a vision. He’s afraid he might see some truth he has yet to see.

Part Three

For Myra Carter there is nothing quite like a big load of topsoil from down near the river where the moss and ferns have been growing and shooting their spores into that thick musty air. The only thing better is a nice big load of manure, practically steaming from some old cow’s bottom. She likes to think of that, the steamy plop that she had watched as a girl on her grandparents’ farm. Those cows would stand there and stare you right in the eye without a single change in expression as they raised their tails and delivered a fine dollop of fertilizer. It is so exciting to think of fertilizer; she feels embraced by life and filled with energy. It makes her think words like “fecund.” Now what would a therapist make of that? Well, she won’t ever know because there’s not a therapist on this earth who can understand Myra Carter. Howard couldn’t, and he might as well have been a psychiatrist, he was every other kind of doctor in town. It is the curse of Myra’s life that her husband knew what everybody—man and woman, boy and girl—looked like without their clothes on. Ruthie sure can’t understand her; Ruthie can’t even understand herself these days, she’s so man-crazy.

Myra breathes deeply over the new topsoil that Mr. Digby left first
thing this morning. If Mr. Digby weren’t forced to live such a lower-class life, she would envy him his property there near the river bottom. If they were of the same kind of people, she might even invite him in for some tea some afternoon just so she could sit there near him and breathe in the dirt and manure and river rot from his clothing.

Fecund, fecund, fecund
. She sings in her head while she digs in with her shovel and tosses loam to the wheelbarrow. She tried to get Ruthie to use “fecund” in a poem, and Ruthie chewed on her pen, which is her main food source, and then said after about two hours that she couldn’t think of a single thing that rhymed with “fecund.”

“Well, does everything
have
to rhyme?” Myra asked, to which Ruthie shook her head and laughed, said,
Who is the poetess in this room?

Fecund, fecund
. The shovel strikes a rhythm; dig and toss, dig and toss. Fecund. Fecund. Dig and toss. Deacon. Beacon. Dig and toss. Myra stops and rests, takes a deep breath. “Rhymes,” she mutters, and Sharpy runs over to her. “Miss Crow will say that my words don’t have a ‘d’ on the end and therefore can’t work.” It makes her mad and she grips that shovel harder and gets ready to set into some serious damn digging. She dares anybody to match what she can do with a shovel. Howard couldn’t. Ruthie can’t. Dig and toss. Dig and toss. I’m the boss. I’m the boss. Take that Connie; take this shovel in your big wide grinning mouth. Tell us how like Jesus you are now. Myra is just getting up to a full-fledged rage when her shovel strikes something solid. If that Mr. Digby has camouflaged some trash and brought it to her yard, she will have his poverty level reduced to subpoverty. Probably if he worked harder he wouldn’t
be
poverty level to begin with, this is America after all. She keeps pushing in with the shovel, striking like a snake and every time hitting something solid. She is red in the face and getting winded, so she throws the shovel to the side
and gets on her hands and knees to start digging. Sharpy thinks she’s playing a game, like when she sniffed around the yard and taught him how to lift his leg like a man dog ought to, and he runs over to help. And Sharpy is the one to get there first. Sharpy is the first one to find skin, pale and pulpy, bluish gray. Sharpy’s natural instincts make him back off and growl deep in his throat.

“What is this?” Myra is demanding. “What in the hell, pardon my French . . .” She reaches in and grabs with both hands, pushing against that pile with all the strength she has. She rips off her gloves so she can get to whatever it is, dog corpse or chicken or old rotten fish. The smell is there now hitting her like a two-by-four in the face. She would probably vomit and pass out if she wasn’t so furious that her wonderful fecund dig-and-toss afternoon has been ruined. Now she’s reached something hard and solid, and she locks her fingers around the edge and pulls and pulls. There’s resistance. It’s big. Whatever is in there is big and she feels like the top of her head is about to fall off when all of a sudden the pressure gives and she falls back flat on her back, a soggy weight clutched to her chest, the noonday sun burning black spots into the world, and in one of those spots she would swear she saw Howard, and he was grinning; he was looking just like he did that day that she came up on him talking to that old Mary Stutts.
Medical matters, dear
, he said to Myra later when she questioned him,
medical matters, confidential
. He’s saying it right now, plain as day, his face blinking and twitching in the sun, like it might be covered in ants or termites, and she has to close her eyes against such ugliness,
It’s confidential information
.