Flying Shoes (9 page)

Teever thought he’d stand there a little longer near the space heater ’til they put the chicks and ducks and seed sacks and tools up for the night. He liked to watch the little birds under the heat lamps. Too bad one of the halfway-house dudes did, too; one of them who thought he was a rock star—liked to dress up like a hair band—had bit a head off a chick one time. Teever had heard from Joey at the sally port that that dude had been sent back to Starkville to the
big
rutabaga ranch where they couldn’t go around normal folks. Or chickens. Teever did want to speak to Mudbird, just to check on her, see how she doing, what’s going on, she need some things done in the yard. Maybe she had a pill. He wondered if Jack Ernest was coming to town soon. He would have pills, booze, probably would need a driver. Mudbird would know when he coming back, though she and Ernest never hung out around people too much; some drinks maybe at the Bear, maybe a late-night. He knew Ernest chased Mudbird around some, but Ernest chase
all
the mossyjaw. He thought, personally, that Mudbird could do better. Wasn’t nothing wrong with Charles, neither; not as far as he could see, anyway, but who knew what in a woman’s mind. Some people probably thinking she crazy. She was nice. She was funny. Little old maybe, but not bad looking. Too bad she wearing those glasses—make her look like what’s-her-name, Murder She Wrote, or somebody. No tits or ass, but Teever enjoyed hitting on her, playing, get her all bothered and who knows, maybe one day. Everybody like secrets. Well. He wasn’t sure Ernest was doing her anyway. Maybe so, maybe not. So hard to tell sometimes
what
white people up to.

Teever, né Tolliver, was just about the last black Barr left in town. His people said they were descended from a slave of Pinckney Taliaferro of Goose Creek, South Carolina, who had come west to Mississippi when Taliaferro was accused of salting a competitor’s rice crop. The Barrs said they had some Native American in them, too. “Yeah, I got Indian,” was Teever’s response when asked about it, letting loose his extremely loud, throaty laugh. “
Blackfoot
maybe.”

He was also a Vietnam vet. Although no one could be sure that he could read or write, he was plenty smart. His company was made up almost completely of destitute Delta kids, mostly sons of sharecroppers from those sad old towns like Panther Burn or Marks, where the slogan chiseled into the courthouse lintel was
obedience to the law is liberty
. Those guys had little to lose. At Hamburger Hill something bad had happened with a second lieutenant, it was rumored, a white West Point boy from North Carolina. No one really knew what had occurred, but some of the black guys, Teever included, had gone to Parchman. Whenever anyone had the balls to ask Teever about it, he’d simply laugh and say, “Ain’t no shame in my game.” You did not want to press Teever too hard on things.

Now Teever was mostly a driver and yard guy. People around town—often some of the writers who drank a lot—paid him to drive for them. Took people to Memphis to the airport, drove kids to summer camp, picked up college kids at the bar or a party if they were too drunk, took old ladies to church and bridge, picked up “special deliveries.” He didn’t have a driver’s license. Why would he? He didn’t have a car. Nobody really knew where he lived, but if anyone needed him they could put the word out, stick a note on the wall at the JFC, and he would turn up. In a really cold winter he might do something blatant in public—openly sell some crack on the square, steal a King Cobra from the B Quick—and end up in the cozy Lafayette County jail where his old bud Papadop would cook him Philly cheese steaks every day and give him Cost Cutter smokes. He’d just repeat his mantra, “Ain’t no shame in my game,” and wait until spring, when the judge, who Teever knew to have a gay black lover in Memphis, would let him back on the street. Teever traded on the secrets he knew; it was the only currency he had. Why not? Everybody was trading on something. “Everybody got something somebody else want; pussy, drugs, famous, secrets, whatever. We all buying and selling. Every
day.
Every single
goddamn day,” was the way he felt about it.

Teever took one of the butts from his sock, trying to hold it to the orange and blue flame in the Co-op space heater to get it lit without burning himself. Before he could, Mary Byrd hurried out of the JFC with a sack and jumped in her car. Teever hollered “Mudbird!” but she didn’t hear him and drove on off. Oh well. Catch her later. Maybe she had stuck a note.

He crossed the street and entered the Jones Food Center. Mr. Johnny in there, just standing, watching his new electric doors. He was really proud about his doors.

He said, “Teever. Teever, you want to help me and Big Dan bust up some ground tomorrow if we don’t get that freezing rain?”

“Might. You gone use them nasty mules or the tiller?” The mules were about a hundred years old and one of them, Lars, kicked and bit if you weren’t careful. They’d originally belonged to two old Norwegian twins who were just as ornery. Mr. Johnny had bought them at the Sale Barn and named them for the men, even though, or maybe because, they were alleged communists.

“Mrs. Shaw has Yim and Lars out at her place doing some clearing,” said Mr. Johnny.
Yim
was Jim, the good mule, but they all pronounced it like the Norwegians had. “So— the tiller. You want to work, be here six o’clock.”

“Patty fix me some breakfast?” Teever asked.

“Sure. On the go. Lunch too.”

“Okay, then. I’m here.”

That’s good, Teever thought. Hang out tonight ’til Dead Jerry’s close, maybe a late-night, back to the graveyard, sleep a few, get warm and get some coffee and a hot Hen’s Nest and a honeybun, make a little cash. Okay then. Thinking about a Hen’s Nest made his mouth water. It was a JFC specialty and he wished he had the cash for one right now. Take some three-day-old chicken salad with an ice cream scoop, mash it down some, break an egg on it, fry it a little,
umm
. Too bad. He’d have to settle for his bread and peanut butter stashed at the graveyard shed. But he wasn’t complaining. He was just glad he had the hooch and almost everything he needed there.

Above the pay phone, which was hung at midget height for kids and old folks in their chairs, was the bulletin board. All kinds of things were posted there for all the world to see. Teever looked them over. He
could
read, but he found it more convenient for people to believe he couldn’t. Bad check for this one, that one, some students from other towns, oh man, one for Booger Britches, the worst landlord and biggest asshole around. Lots of folks love to see that. He was not very surprised to see the little note from Mudbird posted too. He thought she was on to him about the reading thing, but when she wanted to get in touch she’d still just post a note with
teever
and a little drawing of a bird and some other scribblings if she had a big message, like in Egypt. Wonder what she want. Maybe Charles need some help, need a ride to the airport. He’d check on her later. Maybe tomorrow, next day. He liked her little drawings. This one said:

which he knew meant “Meet me at the Black Bear Bar (the only bar in town with stairs) at five and I’ll buy you a beer. Mary Byrd.” Okay then, I can do that. He looked over at the pile of the day’s
Mercury
to check the date. Today the ninth, so she mean tomorrow.

Putting the message in his jacket pocket, he left the Food Center and crossed the back parking lot just as an old Valentine Farms pickup pulled in behind the apocalyptic JFC Dumpster. It was always overflowing and unbelievably foul, and at night it came alive with critters: possum, coons, dogs, cats—an animal juke joint. Out of the truck came a Vietnamese guy that people called Cong, even though he was a refugee. He carried two clear sacks full of yellow crap that Teever knew was chicken feet or beaks, or both. Chinese students ate them, which disgusted a lot of people, but in Nam, Teever had seen it
all
with food. Anyway, it wasn’t any nastier than chitlins or crawdads. What folks ate and what folks fucked their own business. As Cong turned the corner of the building, Teever saw the heads of some live chicks sticking out of his jacket pocket. What up with
that,
he wondered.

Four

With the sack of groceries in one arm, Mary Byrd groped for the kitchen light. She set the groceries down and noticed that the crappy little kitchen TV was off. Huh, she thought. Usually at this time of day Evagreen would still be here, watching Oprah or her stories as she ironed Charles’s shirts. William and Eliza dumped their backpacks that sucked on the floor and ran off to the bathrooms. No one ever went to the bathrooms at school if they could help it. The bathrooms weren’t as bad as the buses, but they were often sketchy and disgusting; another no-fly zone in the education experience. Mary Byrd grabbed two leashes and went back outside to walk Puppy Sal and the Quarter Pounder so they could come in and spend the evening relaxing with the family.

When she returned, the children were at their places at the counter, intently watching
Forrest Gump
as if they hadn’t seen it ten times
and shoveling in big spoonfuls of Frosted Mini-Wheats.

She said, “Okay, thirty minutes and
one
bowl, that’s it.” They didn’t reply. William, the Cereal Killer, consumed two or three boxes of Frosted Mini-Wheats and Honey Nut Cheerios per week and would be perfectly happy to exist on nothing else. Maybe the occasional potato chip and Miracle Whip sandwich on white bread. The brown and white diet. Mary Byrd unclipped the dogs, who rushed over to sniff Eliza’s backpack. Picking up both packs and setting them on a stool so the dogs wouldn’t hose down the reeky deer-piss one, Mary Byrd noticed a note on the counter, weighted down with an empty can of Magic Sizing. In that curious handwriting that a lot of black people had—a mixture of upper- and lower-case letters—Evagreen had written: “Get more. I’m gone. Call you husband.” She wondered a little; Evagreen rarely left early and she almost never left notes. Just leaving the empty starch or Zud can or Pine-Sol bottle on the counter would let Mary Byrd know she needed to buy more. And since Evagreen had left without her day’s pay, Mary Byrd supposed she’d need to run it by her house. Well, she heaved a sigh, it’d have to be later. Right now she needed a drink while she started dinner.

Where was the damn phone? Portable phones were not necessarily a technological advance in her book; you could never find them, and usually they ended up in Eliza’s room. Looking around, she spotted it under a pile of neatly folded dish towels. She checked caller ID, quickly deleting one she ruefully recognized as Ernest’s and beeping through a few more. One was a Virginia number she didn’t know; had to be the reporter calling again. She clicked back to confirm it. She had a bad feeling about that woman. Why was Ernest calling when she’d told him not to? Looking in the freezer, she wondered what to make, a decision she ought to have made at the JFC. She had the pork chops, easy enough, but what to go with them? Eliza hadn’t really liked “piglet meat” ever since, when she was a little girl, she had fallen in love with Wilbur in
Charlotte’s Web
and with Pooh’s friend Piglet. Pigs
were
adorable; Mary Byrd also wished they didn’t eat them. Maybe dice the meat and do stir-fry? As long as meat was served to her in a form that was not a body part, Eliza would eat it. Mary Byrd was suddenly weary. Fuck it; she’d just do the chops the way Nonna did—seared, quickly simmered with a sliced bell pepper in the sauce she’d bought, all of it dumped over pasta. Eliza could just have the pasta and Mary Byrd could add the anchovies to her and Charles’s pasta after. William would have to pick the pepper pieces out of his. Nonna would spin—sauce out of a jar. But sauce had come a long way since Chef Boyardee, even it if wasn’t from scratch. She did wish they wouldn’t put sugar in it.

“What about pasta tonight?” she asked.

Eliza said, “Again?”

William said, “Wow! Look at the TV! A giant snowstorm!”

“Actually, the other night we had spaghetti and meatballs,” Mary Byrd said. “Or was it alfredo? It would be rigatoni tonight.”

Eliza said, “Those are the tubes with the lines, right? We used to have all the time?”

“We stopped having them because
someone
insisted on putting them on all of his fingers. We might be over that now,” she said. How they could make it without pasta, the staff of their family’s life, their culinary lingua franca, the noodly duct tape that held their lives together, she could not imagine. It often seemed to be the only thing the four of them had in common and upon which they all could agree. That, and watching old
Little Rascals
tapes. And Mary Byrd, like her grandmother, almost always had meatballs in the freezer, like silver dollars socked away for an emergency. She’d have to replenish her stash soon. Meat
cakes
; her grandmother could never bring herself to say the word
balls
. Thinking about telling this to the children, she finally poured herself a glass of Chianti. Nope. They’d think it was funny if anybody but their mother told the story. Well, William would laugh.