Cavedweller (42 page)

“You stay out of the sugar dish,” she scolded Nadine.

“Oh, I love you better than sugar, Tacey,” Nadine promised.

“Sure you do, honey, and if you could fry me in butter you’d love me even more.”

 

 

D
ede loved her box cutter. Razor-sharp, it was not supposed to be used on things like boxes of cigarettes and candy—paper- and plastic-wrapped items that it could slice as easily as the cardboard. A little nick in a cigarette pack meant stale cigarettes and returns to be written up. But Dede wrapped her cutter in blue duct tape from her little hardware display and gouged her initials in the handle. She used it for everything, the perishable items as well as the boxes of canned goods.

“What I need is a holster for it,” Dede told Cissy. “Need a holster for my weapon. Someone messes with me, I’ll cut them bad.”

The cutter was in her hand when Billy Tucker came in the door that Thursday morning in September. Dede was kneeling on the floor, her knees cushioned by cutoff carton tops. She had been opening boxes and stamping prices all morning. First of the month, Thursdays around ten-thirty or eleven, after the late-morning rush was when she restocked. Candy and cigarettes she did weekly from boxes she had already opened and put in the cooler. Bread came in twice a week, along with milk and beer. Tampax, specialty perishables, chips and crackers, and paper products were the secondary sellers, which came in on the monthly schedule—Thursday morning and first of the month, the days when the cutter was never out of Dede’s hand.

“Billy!” Dede was surprised to see him but not displeased. Although they had broken up, she still liked the way he looked. “What you doing down here?”

Billy wore a work shirt with “Chevron” emblazoned above his name on the pocket. He smiled and produced a little silver .38. “I’m gonna to kill you ass,” he said, and extended the gun straight out in front of him, the trigger line-sighted directly between Dede’s eyes.

“Lord, Billy!” Dede’s hand tightened on the box cutter, but she was more than six feet away from him and her weapon was no good at all. She watched his fingers move to cock the gun, the little metal piece under his thumb pulling back and clicking into place. Dede shifted her gaze to Billy’s face. “I didn’t even know you were mad,” she said.

His eyes flooded with tears, and his lips pulled back in a grimace. “Course you didn‘t, bitch. You an’t looked twice at me all these last few months. You say we gonna be friends. You say we always gonna be special, and then you call me but the once. And it’s ’cause you want to buy some grass! What am I supposed to think, huh?” He shook the gun. “What am I supposed to think?” Dede started to come up off her knees, and he waved the gun wildly.

“Don’t you move. You stay right there. You look at me now, bitch. You look at me.”

“I’m looking,” Dede said. “I’m looking at you, Billy. You say what you mean. I’ll listen to anything you say.” She pressed the blade of the cutter down through the cardboard she was kneeling on right into the linoleum floor, keeping her eyes fixed on Billy’s and her expression as gentle as possible. She had to think of something fast, but for the first time in Dede’s life, nothing came to mind.

 

 

A
lthea Brithouse stopped in at Biscuit World that Thursday morning a little after 10:00 to see Nolan. She had been out to the house twice but missed him each time and had not wanted to speak to Tacey. After her anger subsided and the sting of indignation eased, Althea found herself worrying about her youngest. Next to Tacey, her boys were simple, she thought, sweet-natured and easygoing; they were just like their father, and like their father they knew exactly how to charm Althea and get what they wanted. For Jamal, that meant early enlistment in the navy. For David, it was permission to move to Atlanta and work for Althea’s brother in his garden center.

Thank God David hadn’t wanted to quit school. Sidney had never finished school, and if he hadn’t been such a good husband and such a hardworking man, the Lord knew what kind of life they would have had. It was from him that David got his green thumb, that ancestral ability to suck a little dirt and know exactly what nutrients the soil required. A decade after the accident that killed him, Sidney’s garden was still thriving, even though Althea had done no more than turn on the sprinkler every now and then.

It was a pity there was so little of Sidney in Tacey. The girl was her mama all over again, but smarter, Althea admitted. Tacey was the smartest of them all, and so headstrong she drove Althea to distraction.

“Mother-daughter stuff,” Althea told Nolan. “It’s old and complicated and predictable as spring. Why, I didn’t speak to my mama for fifteen years, from the time I left school to the week Tacey’s daddy died. It don’t mean we don’t love each other. I love my girl, I just can’t stand her right now. Which don’t mean I want to see her in trouble or wouldn’t kill the man who would do her wrong.” The look she gave Nolan was level and sharp.

Nolan nodded, unsure whether he was being’ threatened or reassured. “Tacey’s in no trouble, ma’am,” he said. “She’s been saving my life, if you want to know the truth. She’s helping me with my mama, and I promise you she has not missed a day of school.”

“I know.” Althea pursed her lips and looked around. “I checked.” She had also checked on Nolan while she was at it. From what she heard, he did not seem the type to mess with her child. People said he was in love with some girl worked at the mini-market, said he was Christian and reliable and no worse than she should expect. But people might say anything. Althea had wanted to look the boy in the eye.

“I heard she wasn’t working here anymore, that she was working at your house.” Tacey had originally taken the job at Biscuit World to earn money for college, and while Althea knew her girl was bright enough to get a scholarship, she also knew no scholarship would pay for everything. Tacey had explained her carefully plotted scheme—the cash savings account that Althea promised to match. It was one of the things they had fought about, money and what Althea did and did not understand. Sometimes Tacey treated her mama as if she were dumb as dirt and nowhere near as trustworthy.

“She earns as much working for me.” Nolan was thinking about Tacey’s brothers. Big, Tacey had sworn. Her brothers were big as football players and seriously fast. Nolan didn’t want Althea to misunderstand his arrangement with Tacey. “A little more, actually,” he added. “And she gets along good with my mama—which I got to tell you is pretty much a miracle. Mama’s been—welt, different, since she had her last stroke.”

Nolan felt the blush that crept over his face but could do nothing about it. “Different” was such an inadequate word to describe Nadine. Nothing short of a novel would have done her justice these days. Alternately maddening and endearing, Nadine was totally absorbed in Althea’s daughter even as she continued to appall them both by saying impossibly rude things as sweetly as she professed her love.

“Strokes are awful.” Althea ignored the blush. Boy was ashamed of his mama, that was only to be expected. “My granddad had a terrible time after his stroke. Your mama crippled much?”

“Pretty much. She broke her hip. She’s had a bad time since my daddy died.”

Nolan was relaxing. From Tacey he had the impression that Althea was terror incarnate, but this plainspoken woman reminded him of Dede’s mama, Delia. She had the same watchful reserve, and she obviously cared deeply about her daughter.

“Tacey is wonderful with Mama. It’s like I said, she’s just saving my life.”

“Yes, well.” Althea hugged her pocketbook to her midriff. “I just wanted to be sure she was all right. The way she took off, I wasn’t sure where she would wind up. Tacey has a temper, you know. Like me, I suppose.” She smiled.

“Yes ma’am. She sure has a sense of herself. She knows what she wants.”

“Oh, she does. She does.” Althea smiled again. “Don’t you tell her I came around to talk to you. Better she should just go on the way she is, come home when she feels like it. Probably when she can show me up some way, boast of how well she’s done. She gets that big scholarship check, she’ll come around to show it to me.”

“Yes ma’am.”

 

 

N
olan was exhausted. After Tacey’s mother left, he had the run of his career at Biscuit World and sold out earlier than ever before. Even his daddy never closed so early. He checked his watch twice, and it confirmed the record both times. It was just eleven o’clock and he was on his way home.

“Damn,” Nolan sighed happily. For a change he might even get in a nap. At the corner of Starrett and Terrill, he paused briefly. He always stopped in at the convenience store on Thursdays, said a few words to Dede, and then picked up some club soda and the little giveaway papers. Nadine and Tacey liked to read the ads. They swore they were going to start hitting the flea markets as soon as Nadine got stronger. That wasn’t likely, but Nadine loved the lists of what people were offering for sale.

“A full layette set,” she’d read. “No more babies coming to that house.” Pool tables, “like-new” exercise equipment, and elaborate stereo systems prompted her to speculate on the kind of people who were moving into Cayro. “People who buy stuff they an’t ever gonna use. People from Atlanta or Nashville, that’s who we’re getting. A few more years and no one will recognize this town.”

Nolan wiped his neck and rocked his head from side to side, listening to the muscles pop. His mama was right, he thought. Things were changing so fast. Some days he felt as if he were constantly losing ground. He should go home and do his exercises, take a hot bath and lie down for a while. Get some rest. He could drop by the store later, when he wasn’t so tired. And if he got in a good long nap, he could try the sheet music Delia’s friend Rosemary had sent from California, a Tone Kwas duet for clarinets. If he had time, he could try each of the parts. He glanced over at the lot and saw only one truck outside the store, a Chevron emblem on the door.

“Billy Tucker. Oh, hell.” Nolan almost went on by, but then he remembered how busy Dede could get in the afternoons. He rocked his head again. “All right,” he said to Billy Tucker’s truck as he pulled into the lot. He could see Billy’s green shirt just inside the door as he climbed out of his car and walked toward the store.

On the third step he saw the gun. Nolan stopped. Billy Tucker was standing in Dede’s convenience store with a gun in his hand.

“Oh, Lord,” Nolan whispered.

He looked around quickly, up the road and back down toward Delia’s place. There was no one around, no cars in sight. Nolan looked back to the store. He saw Billy take a step forward. The gun in his hand was angled down. Nolan went forward another two steps and saw Dede on the floor, her face turned up and expressionless, her gaze intent on Billy’s face.

There was a shout and Nolan flinched. Billy was yelling. The gun in his hand wavered and shook. Billy’s head rocked and swung. There were mumbled unintelligible sounds coming through the glass facade of the store. Cursing. Nolan listened to Billy cursing in a deadened monotone. He’s gone crazy, Nolan thought. Billy Tucker has gone crazy and he’s going to kill Dede.

“I said stay down, bitch!” The words were muffled and peculiar through the glass doors, almost rubbery and echoing as if coming from the other end of a tunnel.

Nolan moved forward carefully, quietly. A bird was singing in a tree at the edge of the lot. Dede’s face was still upturned and empty. Billy had lowered the gun a little, and was holding it now in front of his belly, the sight still centered on Dede.

“You don’t give a shit about me,” he screamed. “You just always thinking about your silly-ass self.”

Nolan put his hand on the right double door. A wave of dizziness swung over him. He looked down and saw his shadow, small and hunched, just visible in the patch of sunlight that shone through the glass-paneled door. He had no idea what he was going to do. I’m going to get killed, he thought.

Nolan opened the door.

Billy was completely focused on Dede. He was waiting for her face to show something, her eyes to widen or tear up or her mouth to twist. Something. He wanted to see his mark on her before he killed her. He wanted to know that she was afraid, that she knew who was doing this to her. In her next life, she’d take more care, he had thought, but that didn’t make sense. God wouldn’t let her out of hell once he sent her there.

Billy had been doing methedrine for three weeks. He had slept no more than two hours any night in weeks. He knew his boss was going to lay him off. He knew his daddy thought he was a damn fool. Margaret Grimsley had told him he was sick in the head, and ugly besides. His mama had suggested that he talk to their preacher, and this morning when he had stood in the bathroom looking at his face in the mirror, the solution to everything had become crystal-clear. He would shoot her. He would. And afterward he would shoot himself. Then he would sleep. Then he would sleep forever. I want to sleep, Billy thought. God, I want to sleep. He felt the air move behind him, the door opening.

 

 

“Y
ou have to decide what you treasure,” Mr. Reitower had told Nolan at four in the morning a few months before he died. They were at Biscuit World and the ovens had just made the low booming sound that signaled the gas was flowing and heat would soon start pouring against the baking racks.

“You need to take the time when you have the time, ’cause things happen sometimes so suddenly you won’t have time to think. Like your mama and me.” Mr. Reitower had leaned over the flour-dusted counter and given his son a slow inclination of his head. “I knew what she was like. I knew she had a temper. I knew that being married to her wouldn’t be no bed of lilies, no easy thing at all, but I took the time to look close at her. I knew her. You understand what I’m saying?” He had nodded hard once as if everything he meant were plain. “That woman would take all of me and I was ready. It sure is something wonderful to know that—to know the woman you love as well as you know yourself. And the thing is, to know a woman deep, you got to know yourself. You got to know what you need. I needed someone just like your mama.” He smiled wide. “Someone to kick my ass and keep me moving. Which she has, Lord knows. She has.”