Karen G. Berry - Mayhem 01 - Love and Mayhem (41 page)

He fell to his knees in the gravel and sand and weeds. Rocks like those that marred the knees of the pilgrims at Castelmonte as they made their humble way to the Black Madonna drove deep into his knees. Asa cried in gratitude for the pain, for the blood, for the words of revelation.

He had God on his side.

He always had.

IT HAD BEEN
the week of weeks in the Francie June Memorial Trailer Park, just outside of Ochre Water, California. A week of murder, abduction, and retribution. A week of death, a week of grief. And the residents of the Park had waited, they had worried and watched and waited through it all. It was time for their reward.

It was time for the talent show.

Beau Neely believed in the uncommon talent of the common man.

Fame, Beau thought, had somehow become confused with talent. But before the electronic media made the gifts of the few accessible to the many, it was different. Communities knew their own talented members. The quiet woman with the angel’s voice, the stern farmer with hands that worked a fiddle better than they worked a plow; they were public treasures.

He remembered his own father calling his mother into the living room to sing. She would dry her rough hands on her apron, step shyly to his side, and raise up a voice that would have stunned them in the Grand Old Opry. But women like his mother, they only sang in church or over the wash tub.

The common man needed a venue. For one hundred dollars, Beau provided it, one night a year. He allowed all kinds of acts to perform. The complicated, the simple, the strange, the wonderful. Beau gave even the smallest, most bashful talent a place to show itself.

He’d had hog callers, contortionists, snake handlers, jugglers. Even poets. One man, a certain Barry Thorpe, had driven forty miles to recite trailer park haiku. He said about ten, and Beau still remembered his favorite.

Barry had taken third place. Not bad for a poet.

Beau had declared a temporary ban on magic acts after a woman’s tube top had been nearly sawn in half by her drunken boyfriend. And because the crowd was mixed, he asked that some kind of restraint be exercised in dance acts, as far as how much came off and where it was thrown.

Quentin Romaine paid a cool fifty extra every year for the privilege of opening the show. He used his tuba to serenade the assembly with “Onward Christian Soldiers.” Beau stood behind the bar, mixing a Slow Screw and studying Quentin’s red face. Did he think he might lure some souls to his cause of Christian racism with that series of toots?

Beau slid two seltzers down the bar to Memphis and Isaac. Men usually gave up the tables to the ladies on the night of the talent show. “Too bad you fellas aren’t going to get up there first,” said Beau, his practiced eyes scanning the crowd looking for an empty glass, a clenched fist, an unsteady step.

In the corner, Rhondalee’s earrings glittered as she bent to take notes. Her head popped up now and then as she kept her eye on a fat man who sat near the stage, nursing drinks and leering at women. He had on a white suit with epaulets, and grey ostrich skin boots. To Rhondalee, he looked like the flashiest man in the bar. He had to be the talent scout.

The doorway darkened now and then with those foolish souls who hadn’t gotten their seats early. The bar filled up past the Fire Marshall’s capacity. Inside, the wives of Gator Rollins had primly seated themselves at two small tables, their backs straight, legs crossed at the ankles, hands clasped and pressed firmly into laps of their plain dresses. Out in the parking lot roamed the Bone Pile women, barefoot in the gravel, their thin dresses and long hair tossed by the evening breezes, the compelling bones of their faces unseen by the lustful eyes of Ochre Water men.

Beau left the doors open so they could hear.

I thought I had women trouble, he thought.

Quentin finished, mopped his shining forehead, beamed over in the direction of the seven wives of Gator Rollins. Beau stifled a laugh on his way to the stage. Was Quentin looking to take Gator’s place? Those were some mighty boots to fill, thought Beau. It would take more than a tuba to keep seven wives happy, even in your wildest Branch Davidian fantasies.

Beau ran to the stage and took the microphone. “And now, ladies and polecats, Cletus Clemmons and the Critter Skinners!”

Cletus and his boys took the stage wearing their Davy Crockett caps and tore into a song called “Roadkill Love,” some ditty about trapping up pretties for a ladylove. Oh, the song wasn’t so much. But the gaunt man on stage was hung about with delicate necklaces made from squirrel ribs and bird vertebrae. He bared a frightening set of choppers (were those homemade dentures?) and crooned, “You’d rather have gifts of skin…”

Beau felt his hair rise.

While Cletus sang, Gator’s progeny commandeered every last table in the pool area, holding the cues like javelins and staring with blank, dark eyes at anyone who approached. Beau feared they might scratch the felt, but he thought that if he went over there to talk to them, he might end up with a cue through his heart.

Their mothers listened from their tables in the corner. Beau considered their granny dresses and vertical hairstyles. Beau had seen a lot of interesting hairstyles duck under the transom of the Blue Moon Tap Room, beehives and mullets and the occasional Mohawk on a lady trucker who would make Raven look agreeable. But never had he seen arrangements of such natural ingenuity, since the women couldn’t use spray to keep their hair at that height.

Beau had returned Gator’s entry fee to them. One of the nameless women had received it with a smile. “Now we have gas money to get home!” she’d exclaimed. “He keeps providing for us, every day,” said another with a reverent tone.

Cletus was finishing with a delicate clatter of femurs. Beau stepped up during the polite applause to introduce the next act. “Now, ladies and gentlemen, I’d like to introduce a man who proves that time in prison is not necessarily wasted. No sir, this man learned a trade and beautified himself at the very same time. Let’s welcome Francis Dagwood of Dagwood’s Tattoos! Come on, Dag!”

The crowd clapped. “Whoo Dag!” Dag took the stage and slowly began to peel himself. It wasn’t a striptease; it was an unveiling. He stripped to his shorts, but even if he’d removed those, he’d have been covered. The man was tattooed from chin to wrist to ankle with classic cars. He wasn’t a lean man, and a few of the fenders of the cars on his belly looked like they needed a little Bondo and a belt sander. Others were adorned with patches of the man’s body hair, as if the cars had spent time on the bottom of a lake and grown a coat of long, wavy algae. It added an undeniable element of realism.

From the crowd, illustrated ankles, biceps, hips, and sacral dimples peeked out briefly from shirtsleeves and hemlines as if saying hello to the man who had decorated them.

As he listened to the thunderous applause, Beau decided that you didn’t have to understand an act to feel its power.

Raven sat with Annie Leigh, Melveena and Minah. Annie Leigh was terribly excited, but awed into silence by the spectacle of the Rollins boys, who threatened to bean each other with the balls and used the cues to vault over the WWF pinball machines.

“And now, Ladies and Gentlemen! The Catalina Cloggers!”

The Catalina Cloggers didn’t do much for Melveena. Western shirts over ballerina skirts, heavy shoes and dull faces concentrating on counting out the steps. All that scooting business.

Annie frowned. “Mom? It looks like retarded people trying to do the Riverdance.”

“Don’t say retarded, Tadpole. You’re liable to offend someone. Say ‘touched’ instead.” Raven wasn’t really paying attention. She studied the Rollins boys. They were so similar it was hard to get a head count. She looked from one to Annie, then back again. Nothing similar, as far as she could see. The Catalina Cloggers clomped and stomped, and Melveena crossed her arms and looked at Raven.

“I can see why my attendance was so necessary here. I feel changed by the beauty and glory of all this creativity on stage.”

Raven shook her head. “You just wait, lady.”

Melveena shrugged and looked down her tiny nose at the stage.

“Now, ladies and gentlemen, here’s a young man we’ve been seeing up here for a few years. He’s as wiry as a Greyhound and he plays as fast as one, too, so let’s give it up for Dale Highwater!”

Dale, a whippet-thin young man with long legs, taped-up boots and a thousand-dollar guitar, charged into a John Hiatt song, a real crowd-pleaser, called “Ethylene.”

Annie watched the man’s hands dance on the frets. She didn’t add her voice to the crowd that sang along for the chorus.

“He should have picked something that would show off his guitar work,” mumbled Raven. “He’s just trying to get the crowd on his side. He should have tore this place up. Instead, he’s just going for a favorite.” But a favorite it was. Dale finished the song, and the crowd went wild.

Annie Leigh did not look pleased. “Do you think he’ll win, Mom?”

“Tadpole, if the Bone Pilers don’t have a front man, it’s anybody’s guess who’ll win.”

Beau waited for the applause to die down so that he could announce the next act, an a cappella group from Washington state that had taken first five years ago. “These folks can yodel like my ex-wife can bellyache!”

“Don’t you mean ex-
wives
, Beau?” called a heckler.

“Details, details.” Beau laughed. “Ladies and gentlemen, the Yakima Yodelers!”

You could tell that the Yakima Yodelers were related, because they all had long necks, upon which balanced their oddly small heads. It gave a distinctly ostrich-like cast to their appearance. They stood up there, bobbing and peering like a herd of emus. Annie got set to laugh. But she didn’t want to laugh at all once they broke into a startling wall of calls and yodels.

“Holy moly,” Annie whispered, “this is pretty.”

The Yakima Yodelers sent out vocal tones that they yoked and freed and yoked and freed in their long, limber throats. Contrapuntal, alternately guttural and soaring, the noise of it was loud and strange and stunning. “That’s almost as fine as the Bone Pile women,” Melveena whispered.

Minah shook her head. “It’s like they’re yanking on my heart.” She retrieved an embroidered hanky from the depths of her cleavage and wiped her eyes.

“It’s something all right.” Raven was transfixed.

The applause was strong for the Yakima Yodelers. Raven put two fingers in her mouth and gave a whistle that hurt the ears. Minah waved her hanky around, then stuffed it back into her brassiere. Melveena looked like she just might relax a little bit.

Annie frowned. “Mom, I’ll be right back.” She headed over to the bar.

Beau stood at the microphone once more. “Ladies and Gentlemen, that was truly beautiful, wasn’t it? I say, one more hand for the Yakima Yodelers.” The crowd clapped again, and the gaggle of yodelers bobbed and preened, looking pleased. “All right, folks. Let’s have a hand for a trio that I like to call, Absolute Tit and Twang! I say it’s time for Mandy, Betty, and Esther, the Conklin Sisters!”

The crowd went wild welcoming the Conklins. Three bottle blondes who packed enough whammy in their satin shirts to start their own dairy, they were good-looking in spite of a genetic tendency toward wall-eyes that made every man in the audience think he was being serenaded directly, no matter where he sat. The ladies from Ochre Water went right for the heart of the crowd.

Oh, it was a rule that no one would cover Francie June in the talent show, imbedded as she was in the collective subconscious of the Park’s residents. But who could question Mandy Conklin’s right to sing Francie June’s songs? She had the same honesty in her voice. In addition, Mandy possessed some of that pug-dog ferocity; that grab-life-by-the-scruff-and-shake-it spirit. She angled her cropped blonde head to the mike, set her square jaw, and belted it out.

Despite a fiddle solo, a banjo solo, and a little bit of crowd-teasing improvisation, the song was too short. The crowd hooted and hollered in appreciation for the Conklins, for their three part harmonies and the straining snaps on their shirts.

Melveena was actually starting to smile.

Up on the stage, Beau had the microphone. “Now, I have the great pleasure of introducing a man I’ve had the honor of getting to know over the last week. He’s not regular, or local, but he’s one smart fella. And I hear he sings a little something like Gordon Lightfoot. Ladies and Gentlemen, please welcome… Isaac Mesher!”

“Hey Mom!” hollered Annie Leigh across the bar. “Ain’t that your BOYFRIEND?!”

Raven LaCour sat there with her jaw clenched.

Two tall men took the stage. The blonde man settled his imposing presence on a tall stool and took his guitar out of the case. Out of shyness, he let his hair fall in his face. His huge child’s hands stroked the neck, tuning.