Cavedweller (53 page)

“Oh, look at you!” Sheila giggled. “I an’t gonna bite you. And I know you’re taken. Whole world knows that.” She kissed him again, vastly amused at how he blushed and trembled.

When Sheila turned to go, Dede was standing in the doorway watching them. She had a bag of groceries in her arms, and a face as pale as the moon in the night sky.

“You son of a bitch,” Dede said, “you goddamned son-a-bitch!”

 

 

N
othing in Cissy’s life had prepared her for the sight of Amanda sitting at the bar at Goober’s, her cheeks flushed and her eyes bright and glittering. Was she drunk? Was Amanda drunk in the middle of the day? She had one of those great big glasses in front of her, half full of one of Goober’s famous fruitoholic drinks. Vodka, Cointreau, coconut milk, ice, pineapple juice, and slices of pineapple filled the tall, sweating glass.

Cissy sat down next to her. “So, what are you doing?” She was surprised to hear how much her voice sounded like Delia’s. Mama voice, she thought. Here I am, talking Mama talk.

Amanda swung her head slowly to face Cissy. “Why aren’t you watching the boys?”

“Michael has them.” Cissy took a deep breath. She could smell the Cointreau.

Amanda shrugged. “Well, all right then.”

“What are you doing at Goober’s?”

“Becoming a regular.” Amanda took a sip of her drink and rolled her eyes at Cissy. “You look shocked,” she said.

“I am shocked. What’s come over you? You been running out every day, staying away from home, barely looking at your boys when you are there. Is this what you’ve been doing? Sitting in Goober’s every day, getting drunk on your butt?”

“No.” Amanda shook her head. “This is only my second time. I’ve been to the mall. I’ve been to the peewee golf, and the video-games center down in Marietta. I went and had my nails done, and one day I drove all the way to Chattanooga to look at their bridge before I drove back home.”

“Why would you do that?”

“I never saw it. Started thinking about how many things I had never seen, and just decided to go.” She paused and took another sip. “And on Wednesday I was arrested,” she said, each syllable distinct and precise.

“Arrested?”

“And released. The deputy wouldn’t hold me no matter what I said. And I said something about it. I said a lot, but they just drove me around and ignored me. Put me out back at my car. Told me to go home and talk to God a little more.” She leaned forward slightly and sucked at the pink straw that was stuck through one of the pineapple slices.

“I didn’t know that deputy. I never saw him before in my life, but he knew me. He told me he knew all about me.” She looked at Cissy. “When I wouldn’t get out, he pushed me out. He got in the back beside me, laughed real mean, and wiggled over until he shoved me out on my butt.” She rocked her glass on the bar for emphasis. “Rude,” Amanda said. “The man was rude.”

Cissy twisted on her stool. “I don’t understand,” she said. “Where were you when you were arrested?”

“Over at the Planned Parenthood Center.” Amanda sipped briefly and sighed. “I tried to bust up one of their typewriters. Didn’t do any good. They were ready for me, I think.” She sat quietly for a minute, eyes on her drink, and then spoke again very softly. “I felt like such a fool.”

There were tears in Amanda’s eyes, Cissy could see. She was not letting herself cry, but she was wet-eyed, sweaty, and limp. She looked like she had been wrestling somebody. She also looked like a woman who had never taken a drink before today.

“You know, I’ve never felt like a fool before.” Amanda’s voice was calm and slow. She seemed to be genuinely puzzling out what she was saying. “I’ve done foolish things, and I’ve done things that other people said were foolish, but I never felt like it was anything that had much to do with me, with what I was really doing. I always felt I knew what I was doing. Always felt like God was taking care of me, putting me where I needed to be, showing me what was to be done.”

“Are you all right?” Cissy was unnerved by the spectacle of Amanda sitting at the bar sipping and talking.

“I’m fine.” Amanda sipped again. “I’m just fine.” Her right hand patted gently at her abdomen. “Gallstones all reduced to ash and guilt.” She grinned as if she had not meant to say that, then took another sip and looked around the bar. She frowned at the framed photographs on the wall, all pictures of local girls in bathing suits.

“You know, it’s intentional that God does not make things easy.” Amanda’s face became focused and sad. “Things are supposed to be hard. If they were easy, what would be the point? I always thought I knew what hard was about.” She frowned and pressed her lips together. “I always thought it was like praying and climbing a hill. You just keep your focus and keep moving, asking God to help but keeping on. That kind of hard.” She took a healthy suck on her straw, then pushed the glass toward the back of the bar. When she spoke, her voice was full of regret.

“When I thought I was dying, I thought it was all God’s plan. All I had to do was do it right. Thought God was making me a living lesson. Thought I had cancer like Clint or something worse, eating me up from the inside out. Being proud and stubborn and suffering.” She laughed bitterly. “Then to have gallstones. Just to hear the word about took my heart right out of me. Gallstones.” She licked her lips and gave a little whistle.

“You think maybe God’s got a sense of humor?” Amanda asked. She skimmed sweat off her forehead with two fingers and laughed again. “I’ve been thinking about that a lot, about God’s sense of humor.”

“I think you should go talk to your doctor.” Cissy tried to keep her voice level but she could hear the crack in it. This was crazy. In Amanda’s long, crazy life, this was the craziest yet.

“Well, anyway, this kind of hard,” Amanda said, ignoring Cissy’s comment, “seems to me it’s a whole different kind of thing. This hard where you don’t know what you’re doing, what’s the right thing to do, when you can’t be sure you’re not really a fool. I didn’t know nothing about that. And I never wanted to.”

Cissy sat there silently, her eyes fixed on Amanda’s profile.

“I guess I am going to have to learn,” Amanda said. She used the bar napkin to wipe her eyebrows. She looked at Cissy with an expression of great composure. “Guess I’m going to have to learn,” she said again.

The bartender leaned over the almost empty glass. “You’re the Byrd girls, an’t you?”

Cissy stared at the man. She felt like she had just emptied Amanda’s glass, like her blood was full of alcohol and confusion. She managed a nod and turned back to Amanda, but the man put his hand on the bar.

“Well, I hate to tell you this, but your sister’s been arrested. She took a shot at Sheila, one of my barmaids. Missed, thank God, but she did shoot that old boy runs Biscuit World. Shot him two or three times, they say.”

Cissy gaped. Dede had shot Nolan? ,

“She shot him?” Amanda said. She was right beside Cissy, her mouth mere inches away.

“Tried to kill him,” the bartender said. “They just hauled her off to the jail. Had a call from Sheila’s mama. Said that Dede went completely insane and shot up Nolan’s house and all.”

“She didn’t kill him?”

“Well, not yet, but he might be dead by now for all I know.”

“I’ll drive,” Amanda said. She seemed entirely sober. “Come on.” She picked up her bag and her keys from the bar. “Come on,” she said again, and took Cissy by the arm and led her out.

D
elia had paid off Marcia Pearlman with the money she received when Mud Dog’s compilation tapes were reissued the year after Amanda married, but she still did her hair every Friday morning while M.T. and Steph opened the Bonnet. That Friday she was running late, but Marcia did not seem to mind. She smiled happily when Delia arrived, muting the television set and gathering a towel around her shoulders while Delia unloaded her bag of shampoo and conditioner.

Marcia was bone thin and more crippled than ever. She walked only with great effort, bent over and hesitant. She lost interest in food for months at a time and set an alarm clock to make herself eat, mostly the same thing, macaroni and cheese, steamed carrots, and fruit cocktail. “At my age, that’s enough,” she told Delia, “though I do miss fresh cucumber salad and pork barbecue.”

“I’ll bring you some barbecue anytime you want,” Delia said.

“Oh, no one wants to be around me if I eat barbecue. Can’t hardly taste anything anyway,” she told Delia. “And Dr. Campbell tells me I shouldn’t use salt or hot sauce. That takes all the joy out of it. Nothing tastes good without salt.”

To comfort her, Delia brought bread pudding from the café downtown where they served a lemon sauce so strong you could smell it from the street. “Nobody else can stand it,” Delia laughed.

Marcia took a bite and smiled. “Well, it tastes pretty good to me, and looks like they strain the seeds.”

She ate part of the pudding while Delia set up a workstation at the kitchen sink. By now they had a comfortable ritual that both anticipated happily. Marcia even turned off her television while Delia was visiting, the only time it was ever turned off. Her nephew Malcolm, who was a mechanic for the Firestone people, had moved in with her after her stroke and bought a cable box that pulled in lots of channels. Marcia had grown addicted to jumping from channel to channel, watching bits of lots of things one after the other—old movies, nature specials, and any programs with music. “The kids look so young,” she told Delia almost every week. “They don’t know anything about what’s coming at them.”

“No,” Delia agreed, “they don’t, and that’s probably a good thing, don’t you think?”

“I don’t know,” Marcia said. “Some days I think life should come with a big warning label.”

That Friday morning, while Delia had her hair full of suds, Marcia suddenly reached up and took Delia’s hands in her own. Her eyes were bright that morning, and her skin translucent. “I had such a dream last night,” she said. The pale skin flared pink and her mouth curved up slightly.

“One of those dreams, huh?” Delia grinned.

“Oh, not what you’re thinking,” Marcia said. “I have those sometimes, but this wasn’t like that. I dreamed about my baby.”

“Baby?” Delia’s fingers stopped moving. So far as she knew, Marcia and her husband had been childless.

Marcia nodded and closed her eyes. A trickle of water ran along her jaw. Delia wiped it away with the towel. “I had a baby when I was a girl,” Marcia said. “Fourteen and stupid as they come. Didn’t go out of the house for six months and had the baby at home. My daddy took it to St. Louis and gave it to this lady who found good homes for babies like that. We never talked about it. Didn’t even tell my husband when I married.”

She let go of Delia’s hands. “Fourteen is so young,” Delia said.

“Yes,” Marcia said. “It is.” She opened her eyes. The faded irises were cloudy blue but not sad. “I never tried to find him,” she said. “Never wrote. Never called. Tried to pretend it never happened, specially when I never had another.”

“I understand.” Delia triggered the sprayer to rinse the suds out of Marcia’s thin hair. The water was warm on her fingers. She cradled the back of Marcia’s head carefully.

“It was a boy with blue eyes,” Marcia said. “In my dream he had the blackest hair and those pretty eyes. He came right up the steps and into the house, walked through like he knew where everything was, came right up to me and kissed my mouth. He wasn’t angry at me at all. He was just happy to see me, and it was the strangest thing. I wasn’t afraid. I was happy to see him.”

“That’s a good dream.” Delia wrapped a warm towel around Marcia’s head.

“It was.” Marcia pushed the towel up for a moment to look into Delia’s face. “I wanted you to know. Every time I look at you and what you’ve done with your girls, I think about my boy. I imagine him with a family who loves him, with children of his own that I’ll never see.”

“Oh, honey, I’m so sorry.”

“No, no.” Marcia shook her head emphatically. “You don’t understand. I’m not sorry. I’ve been sorry. I used to imagine terrible things, people being mean to him, that he was hungry and cold and alone. Terrible things, but these last few years I’ve had the sense that he was all right, that he didn’t fall among stones like the Bible said, that he fell into tender hands. He is loved, I know that, and he doesn’t hate me.”

Delia watched the skin move on Marcia’s neck, the little freckles that spotted her throat. This woman had been good to her. This woman was her friend. “It was a good dream,” she said again. Her chest hurt and her throat felt tight and sore.

“Yes,” Marcia said, tugging at her collar and pushing at the damp hair that had come loose from the towel. “You think we should trim it this week?” she asked. “Seems like it’s pretty much stopped growing, and all I really want is to look nice for church on Sunday. That’s all I ask these days.”

Delia put her hands on Marcia’s head again. She closed her eyes and took a deep breath. It would be all right. She knew how to do this. The wall phone near the door to the parlor rang loudly.

Marcia looked at it unhappily. “We better answer it. You never can tell who it might be.”

 

 

L
ooking at Dede across the scarred wooden table in the jail visiting room, Cissy thought, not for the first time, how like Delia her sister was. The hum of energy around Dede that was like the choral murmur that surrounded Delia, a slight charge to the air that made your skin tingle and the hair at the back of your neck fluff up. With both of them there was always the sense that something was about to happen, and when it finally did, people were not surprised but relieved.

That was what Cissy felt at the jail—a sense of relief. She was grateful that no one had been killed and that for the moment, at least, the storm was past, but she could see from the faint trembling of Dede’s fingers that a charge was building up again, that already Dede was starting to vibrate with furious energy.