The Evening Star (71 page)

Tired of thinking about it, or of preparing to think about it, Aurora opened the drawer where she kept her little note from Jerry and her one photograph of him, a snapshot she had taken herself, of him sitting on his back step in a bathrobe, looking like a large, sleepy, slightly sulky child.

The little picture and the short note said more to her of her life—or, at least, touched her more—than all the memorabilia she had unpacked and arranged.

What the picture and the note made her feel was that it hadn’t after all been so wrong, her pursuit of Jerry. He had been, though a strange man, also a nice man. Better still, it had not been desultory—not from her side at least—and so many last loves
were
desultory, as she felt hers might have been had she had it with Pascal, or one of the Petrakis brothers.

At least her last real love had not been desultory. She had the feeling that one of the sadnesses of Jerry Bruckner’s was that
all
his loves were, in a manner, desultory. Probably he had simply been one of those passive men who accept all
women, each in her turn, much as he might accept the weather.

Then, out of nowhere, while she was thinking about Jerry—how comforting it had been that he had thought enough of her to write her the note—she remembered Hector Scott and the pointless quarrel they had had just before he keeled over in the booth at the Pig Stand. With the memory came a wave of weeping—there seemed to be no staying steady, in life, not really. Feeling better about Jerry led to feeling worse about her old soldier, who, after all, had struggled loyally with her for many years.

“I’m feeling better about Jerry but I just cried my eyes out thinking about Hector,” she said to Rosie when she was back in her kitchen, sipping tea.

“The General’s dead, it don’t do no good to feel bad about him and besides he didn’t have a lot of mercy himself,” Rosie said. “Why can’t you help me with some of my problems instead of just worrying about old dead and gone boyfriends?”

“I don’t know that I’m feeling
that
much better,” Aurora said.

“Do you wish you hadn’t done it?” Rosie asked—she had always been curious as to how Aurora justified sleeping with Jerry.

“No, I’m proud that I did it,” Aurora said. “It took true courage, and I don’t think I’ve done too many things that took true courage.”

She swirled her finger in the tea and licked it, a new, strange unladylike habit she had acquired.

“For a while I was wishing I hadn’t done it because it hurt so much,” she admitted. “But now I’m glad I did it, even if it does hurt.”

“Yeah, but the big question is, will I be happy if I marry Arthur Cotton?” Rosie said. “Or, if I do marry him, will I wish I hadn’t done it for the rest of my life?”

“If only Willie would have called, just once, it would never have come to this—at least I don’t think it would have,” she added.

“Do you really still think of Willie as much as you did?” Aurora asked.

“Every night—every single one, whether I’m with Arthur or not,” Rosie admitted. “I was in love with Willie, only I didn’t realize it until it was too late.”

“I doubt he realized how deep it cut, either,” Aurora said. “Willie was not greatly perceptive.”

“He was worse than that, he was just plain dumb,” Rosie said. “But it didn’t matter. Something about Willie touched me . . . do you know what I mean?”

Aurora thought of the boyish Jerry Bruckner, sitting on his back step in his bathrobe.

“Yes, dear, I know what you mean,” she said.

19

Tommy’s personal rule for surviving prison life was never to voice an opinion—any opinion, on any topic. Prison society was like a lake of kerosene, from whose surface fumes of rage and hatred rose continuously. An opinion that happened to strike someone wrong, happened to nudge some grudge or prick some prejudice, could ignite the fumes and leave one wrapped in flames.

Tommy’s problem, as he well knew, was that he was not quite the perfect master of his own disdain. Certain levels of repulsiveness or stupidity were apt now and again to tip him into sarcasm, or at least, cool rebuttal. Besides, though he didn’t much want to be human, he was, and he could not always resist voicing an opinion, nor could he easily conceal his total disdain for Mickey Cleburne, his cellmate Wilbur’s new disciple.

Mickey was, in Tommy’s view, the prototype of the Southern chain-saw massacre hulk—the word “hulk” could have been coined just for Mickey, a fact Tommy and Wilbur agreed on. Mickey was so far beyond mere redneck behavior, or even redneck beliefs, that the term could not accurately
be applied to him. He was more the white trash swamp rat, size extra large. Besides being large, he was never clean, had bad breath and bad acne, and was an obsessive cracker of his own knuckles, across all ten of which he had Confederate flags tattooed.

Mickey Cleburne hated almost everything and almost everybody. He hated Tommy immediately because Tommy was educated, but even if he hadn’t been educated, he would have hated him because he was from the city. Mickey hated all people from the city, and was not much more tolerant of people from the small towns. The only good thing about small towns in his view was that they contained all-night convenience stores. Mickey liked to rob such stores; he also liked to hold his shotgun under the chins of the terrified clerks for a minute or two just to see them quiver, before heading back into the great piney woods and the safety of the swamps, where he could hunt alligators and coons. Before he discovered the pleasures of robbing small-town convenience stores he had made a living catching poisonous snakes—he would snare fifty or sixty cottonmouths or swamp rattlers, drop them in a barrel he kept in his pickup, and sell them to a laboratory in Lufkin, Texas.

The tattoos of the Confederate flags had been acquired on a trip to Texarkana—they had all still been bleeding a little when Mickey lost it, went on a hate rampage, and shot five people in one 7-Eleven, all because the young woman who was clerking that night asked to see his driver’s license when he walked up with a six-pack. None of the five people died, but Mickey Cleburne soon found himself in a place filled with all the kinds of people he hated most, black people and brown people being at the top of the list. In such a place it was not necessarily an advantage to have ten Confederate flags tattooed across one’s hands, but Mickey made no attempt to conceal his tattoos. The thing he would have been most proud of was to die for the South. Mickey could read only a few words, but he could listen, and the song he took as his battle hymn was Hank Williams Jr.’s “The South Shall Rise Again.”

Mickey Cleburne believed every word of that song and was ready to fight for its sentiments. The reason he had become a disciple of Wilbur’s, overlooking the fact that Wilbur was a town person and also an educated person, was that Wilbur, too, loved the South, and knew its glorious history. Wilbur was a Civil War buff, and had been, a little earlier in his life, a collector of medals. He liked to think of himself as the prison’s leading authority on Civil War battles, and he could spend hours describing to Mickey the glorious feats of all the dashing Civil War heroes, Forrest and Beauregard, Mosby and Jackson. Tommy, who listened with a more critical ear than Mickey Cleburne, suspected that Wilbur was making most of it up, but he kept his suspicions to himself and tried not to look at Mickey at all when Wilbur was doing one of his Civil War spiels. He knew Mickey hated him. In Mickey’s bloodshot eyes was the hatred of the despised—the not-good-enough southern swamper, more scorned even than Negroes in the small towns strung around the wetlands of the South.

Tommy didn’t feel that he needed to analyze Mickey’s hatred too closely. He had heard that a mad dog wouldn’t attack if you didn’t make eye contact with it, and he adopted the same principle toward Mickey. He didn’t look him in the eye. If Mickey wanted to worship Wilbur because Wilbur could bullshit about Civil War battles, that was fine. Tommy just avoided wanting to strike the match that might ignite the kerosene fumes of Mickey’s hatred.

But Tommy slipped. One day in the exercise yard Mickey was talking about his dream—he only had one, and Tommy and Wilbur had heard about it often. It was to escape from the prison, make his way through the woods to Idaho, and become a humble private in the army of the Aryan Nation.

“That’s noble,” Wilbur said. “You’ve got the right stuff, Mick. There’s one problem with your plan, though.”

“What?” Mickey asked.

“You’re gonna run out of woods long before you reach Idaho,” Wilbur said. “Isn’t that true, Tommy?”

“That’s true,” Tommy said.

“Lots of wide-open spaces out west,” Wilbur said. “Still, maybe you can hitchhike. If you could hook up with the right trucker, he might take you all the way. Some truckers are pretty sympathetic to the Aryan Nation.”

Mickey thought that over. He had never been out of East Texas—a world without trees was beyond his ken. But if he had to travel through a treeless world in order to enlist in the army of the Aryan Nation and help the South to rise again, he was willing.

“I could steal a pickup,” he said. He knew he didn’t want to hitchhike. He had tried hitchhiking several times when one of his old cars broke down, but it hadn’t worked. People just ignored him. In one case, two of his own brothers passed him without even looking at him. If he tried to hitchhike to the Aryan Nation, it was possible he would never get there. His new plan, then, was to steal a pickup from somebody’s driveway and to drive all night until he reached Idaho.

“They might want you for a suicide soldier,” Wilbur said, looking at Mickey. He liked to test big Mick’s devotion to the Southland—the only thing he had any devotion to.

“I’ve never heard of the Aryan Nation having suicide soldiers,” Tommy commented. He didn’t really want to be in the conversation, but Mickey Cleburne was staring at him sullenly anyway, and he didn’t feel it was safe to be too conspicuously out of it, either.

“No, but they need a few,” Wilbur said. “They could wire Mick up with a little plastique and he could probably take out the whole Supreme Court, if he was willing. It was the Supreme Court that destroyed the South, when they started letting niggers into white folks’ schools,” Wilbur reminded them. He often treated Mickey to short civics lessons, letting him know what institutions had contributed most to the South’s decline.

Mickey hadn’t been thinking about blowing himself up in order to destroy the Supreme Court—what he had in mind was doing some shooting first. He hoped to kill some blacks or, failing that, some gooks or Mexicans. Just a few days before, a white man had lost it in some town in California and
fired his machine gun into a schoolyard filled with children, killing several. Most of the dead children were Asian, which made Mickey think maybe the Aryan Nation had been behind the massacre. He had been told by several inmates that in California gooks were as thick as niggers were in the South—maybe the Aryan Nation had had a few gook children massacred in order to give the gooks warning that soon they would all have to leave America or die.

“I’d plan on killin’ niggers, mostly,” Mickey said, thinking ahead to his life after prison. “Hangin’ them’s right—it’s what they deserve. I’d like to see every nigger in the world hung up on a tree with their tongues hanging out.”

“Wow, that’s a vision,” Wilbur said. “After niggers, who would you kill? Mexicans or gooks?”

“Goddamn yellow gooks,” Mickey said. He had seen very few gooks in real life, but on TV they looked as bad to him as niggers.

“You better be careful if you go after Asians,” Tommy said.

Mickey just looked at him.

“Why’s that?” Wilbur asked.

“Because they’re smarter than us, that’s why,” Tommy said.

He knew instantly that he shouldn’t have said it, but he was too disgusted with Wilbur to hold back. Wilbur liked having Mickey for a disciple; he liked dazzling him with his Civil War stories and he enjoyed helping him build fantasies about all the killing he would get to do once he had become a foot soldier in the Aryan Nation. It was all a tease on Wilbur’s part—Tommy couldn’t resist taking a little cool cut at it.

“Who invented kung fu? Not us,” he added as a clincher. “One good Ninja could take out half the tough guys in this prison, and all the guards, too.”

“Oh, the guards, sure,” Wilbur agreed. “Mickey could probably take out the guards—he wouldn’t need a Ninja.”

“Why do you want to get him worked up?” Tommy asked Wilbur in their cell that night. “He’ll never get near Idaho. He’s too dumb. I don’t even think the Aryan Nation would have him.”

“He’s big, dumb, and ugly, all right,” Wilbur agreed. “You shouldn’t have said that about Asians being smarter than us, though. Mickey doesn’t like to think that a yellow gook could be smarter than a white Southern American.”

“Too bad,” Tommy said. “Asians are smarter than us. Look at the math stats.”

Wilbur just looked at him and smiled. “Math stats don’t cut much ice with big Mickey,” he said.

Tommy decided he had indeed been incautious. Mickey Cleburne started watching him, saying nothing, just watching him, if they happened to be in the exercise yard or taking their meals. His worship of Wilbur didn’t diminish, either. He still hung out with Wilbur in the exercise yard, he still took his meals with Wilbur, he still listened silently as Wilbur spun stories about the great Southern cavalrymen or the great Southern victories.

There was one moment when Tommy thought maybe big Mickey was going to be distracted by a more worthy target than himself. Wilbur was giving one of his raps about the South ascending when Dog, the black man in the next cell, who didn’t like Wilbur at all, and had such contempt for Mickey that he wouldn’t even look at him, stopped as he was passing and gave Wilbur a little thump on his skull, just with a knuckle—the kind of little thump an experienced farmer gives a watermelon, to see if it is ripe.

“You talk all that shit you want to, motherfucker,” Dog said. “The South’s gonna rise again all right, but you ain’t gonna get to see it, because all you white motherfuckers are gonna be dead. Gonna be a
black
South that rises this time.”