The Heaven of Mercury (21 page)

They rarely went through the long elaborate playing out of the game, after the honeymoon, as it was Parnell's genuine fear that had led to it that time, and he was no real actor, Parnell. Which is not to say he had no imagination. For when he stood over her and she didn't respond, though he knew she was only playing again, his imagination soon took him to the time and place when this would be no game, when he would be speaking to a Selena who would never respond, and it filled him again with the old grief and lust.

This was her understanding, and she understood Parnell. She understood perhaps better than Parnell himself his attraction to the dead. She had known the first time she looked into his eyes that he was less fearful around the dead than around the living. What threat the living presented to him she wasn't quite sure, at the time, but she came to understand even that. It was that he and the dead shared the same secret, which was that the fearful illusion of mortality—and immortality, as well—is lifted like a veil to reveal something simpler and more profound, without fear. Only the dead see one another, and themselves, for what they truly were, or are. The terrifying idea of time did not apply at all.

What was it, the evening she went on her way, not to return? Parnell had stepped outside to get something he'd left in the car. She had stepped out of her dress and was walking about upstairs in her slip, barefoot, cooling off. She went into the bathroom, the soles of her feet cool on the bare blue tiles there. It felt so good. She lay down, the coolness of the tiles pressing through the silky thin material of the slip. She placed the palms of her hands down on them, too, pressed the back of her neck against them. It felt wonderful. A breeze from the ceiling fan in the hallway wafted in and over her, lifting a tuck of the slip from one of her knees. She knew Parnell would be up in a second, and she couldn't resist letting herself go. She closed her eyes, she found the blue swirling light in the darkness in the center of her forehead. She drifted deliciously. Delicious the last thought of that peace and of the stirring excitement of finding him on her, in her, as she came back to the world. She was weightless and moving swiftly toward the place of stillness. There she lay, in a kind of heaven, while in another, heavier, more burdensome world her love made his way to and from the drugstore to retrieve the package he'd thought he'd left in the car, to where the body of his beloved Selena awaited him, serene and beautiful in her slight undergarments, her lovely feet bare and clean, her palms down on the blue tile floor.

A
N EMPTY STOMACH
always sharpened his sadness. He leaned himself on down the sidewalk in the brimming morning, light like a bubble to the range of his vision in the air. So stunning now he stopped, to take it all in. Mercury lay nestled into the vale below the piney ridge to the south. It was the ridge over which the 1906 cyclone had skipped and fallen down onto Front Street, blasting to splinters and rubble what had been built since Sherman's March, when the town's first buildings had all been burned to the ground. After the cyclone the town had been rebuilt again with brick and stone into a thriving city in the twenties, its apogee, after which the railroad industry had abandoned it for Birmingham, where there was steel. Never enough gumption and guts in this town to sustain much strength. Throughout the century it hung on by its fingernails. And now downtown lay in a gauzy summer morning haze, and somehow its sleepy survival filled Finus with a kind of saddened joy.

There had been lately some occasional things envisioned, rare but distinctive, so that he had to wonder if he wasn't himself walking along so close to the edge of another dimension, like a man half in the mirror, half out. The week before, he'd been standing there in the
Comet
office talking to Maxine Thornton, a big redhead who'd been a real looker in her day, Miss Mercury and all, even though she was on the heavy side, went all the way to the state beauty pageant, and all on account of having a most beautiful, ICBM bustline. She lost at state, came home, went to work in the chamber of commerce office, took on a walking regimen, marching around town in the hours between dawn and the start of the working day, gradually diminished in size to something like petite. But the boobs were a casualty of her fitness plan, much to the chagrin of old farts who liked to watch her flapping along in pink walking togs. So, standing in his office talking to Maxine Thornton, his assistant Lovie out to lunch, Finus was listening to Maxine talk about an ad for the upcoming Business Fair when she pulled out her left bosom and held it cradled there in her hand, big brown nipple bold as an eyeball staring right at him. Finus snatched off his glasses, closed his bad eye, no boob. -Well, what? Maxine said, coylike. Finus told Ivyloy about it later on, still in a daze.

-Well, I liked her better heavy, myself, Ivyloy said. -Now
that
'd been a bo
zoom
.

 

HE MADE HIS
way to the Dreyfus Building, watched his reflection in the polished gold doors of the old elevator, rode it to the fifteenth floor, nodded his hello to Floyd, the sleepy engineer, settled in. Played “The Star Spangled Banner” to help wake everybody up.

-Good morning in the a.m., each and every one of you, and it's a fine morning, if a little sad by my lights.

-Midfield Wagner, farmer and carpenter, passed on last night. I'll tell you a little about old Midfield, wasn't really all that old. And Birdie Wells Urquhart. One of my oldest and closest friends. Companion. I need to spend a little time talking about Birdie, if y'all don't mind.

First he would tell about Midfield, in order to (though he wouldn't say so) get it out of the way. He would tell about Midfield's life. Twenty-two years at the Steam Feed Works, twenty before that with the telephone company, Named Midfield because of where he was born, while his mama was out picking ears of Silver Queen. Raised on the farm the family lost in the Depression. Started out stringing wire from here to India Beach while they were still digging the Intracoastal Waterway down on the coast. Caught malaria when he was only twenty-five, camping out in the swamps and digging pole holes, and recovered from it though many had died. He lived to suffer a stroke last night while out back feeding his dogs.

He said when and where the services would be, moved on to other business, news items about the day. He was saving Birdie for last.

He told about some of the high points of her life, including physical ailments she overcame such as colon polyps and gallstones in her forties, hysterectomy somewhere along in there, thought she was going to die of infection, didn't. Told about being widowed at fifty-four, living the rest of her life in that condition. Didn't go into the unpleasantness with Earl's family. He wound around back to her early years. He told the story of how he first met her, down in the little fishing village where she lived before her family moved to Mercury, the village wiped out in a hurricane, the same one that would move inland and spawn the tornado that wiped out most of Front Street in Mercury, 1906. How she made a life up here after that. How the vision of her as he'd known her young was what endured, for him.

He'd talked for two hours, mostly about her. Floyd the engineer tapped on the glass. Finus looked up, nodded, signed off. Took the elevator down and walked back into the air, onto the street, the morning traffic chuffing by, idling at lights. Amazing, he was still somehow alive.

And Finus, because he was ravenous now, thought he'd stop at Schoenhof's and treat himself to a rare breakfast of biscuits, bacon, and eggs before going in to work at the
Comet
.

 

HE MADE HIS
way down past the two remaining banks, Citizens and Peoples, past the Feinberg's fading clothing store, and into Schoenhof's. Shorty hailed him from behind the counter and he took a stool, leaned backwards for a moment to check out the back room where just one couple sat drinking coffee beside the stuffed mule in the corner. The mule belonged to the original owner. Was said to have been sired by him with the old mare he lived with until his wife could join him from Arkansas. Said it looked like his wife. Well that don't make sense. I know it. He ordered two eggs over medium with grits, whole wheat toast, and just two slices of streak-o-lean as Shorty stood with his square head—trimmed in a piece of Ivyloy's most serious work, skin-tight on the sides and bristly black on top—thrown back, gazing at the ceiling. Then Shorty jerked into action.

-I got your eggs over medium, freshest eggs to ever touch a tooth, and here's some hot coffee. He plunked a steaming cup before Finus and disappeared through the swinging doors to the kitchen. In five minutes he was back with a hot plate and clattered it down.

-See you got to write two today, Mr. Bates, he said.

Finus nodded. -Miss Birdie, he said.

-A fine woman, Shorty said with a grim snap of his head. -I remember Mr. Earl, used to come in here every morning before opening up his store. Hell of a gentleman. Finus nodded, studying his glistening eggs. Shorty shook out the white linen napkin he carried at all times and folded it back over his arm. -Hello, Mr. Mayor! he sang out then, and in a second Pearly Millens took the stool next to Finus.

-Morning, Finus said.

-Finus.

Shorty slid a cup of coffee before the mayor, who nodded, waved off anything else. Pearly brought the cup to his broad, red mouth, his flabby lips divining the steaming coffee like a horse's lips seeking sugar in a palm, though his winged eyebrows, bony hooked nose, and bald head made him look more like a plucked owl. Finus turned his attention to his breakfast. He pricked the eggs with the tine of his fork and watched orange yolk trickle out onto the white. He cut a piece of the white and dipped it into the yolk and ate it with a bite of bacon and a bite of toast. Its deliciousness spread through him. He was lost in it for a long moment, eyes watering.

-What you into today? Pearly said.

-Not much, Finus said. -Got to write Birdie Urquhart's obituary. She was my childhood sweetheart.

-So I heard you say on the radio this morning, Pearly said. -I didn't know her too well, myself. Now I knew her son, Edsel. Did he die?

Finus nodded. -Down in Laurel. Bad heart, like his papa.

-I remember his papa Mr. Earl, now, Pearly said. -Sort of a distinguished old fellow.

Finus snorted. -Old. Didn't live to be but fifty-five.

Pearly looked at him in astonishment, himself being sixty-two.

-Time does move on, he said after a moment.

Finus grunted, sipped his coffee.

-Rumor had it, as I recall, she did old Earl in herself, way back then, some kind of poison or something, Pearly murmured, sipping his own.

Finus slowly turned on his stool and stared at Pearly.

-Say what, now?

-I didn't say it, I said
people
said it, back then. He looked sideways at Finus, then dropped his pop eyes back down to the coffee cup, mumbled, -Anything to it?

Finus glared at him a moment longer, then ate in near-silence, the light clattering of his fork against china, the gentle slurp of Pearly at his coffee. He swiped the plate with a wedge of toast, washed it down.

Pearly said, -Did they do an autopsy on him, then, on Mr. Earl?

Finus took up his napkin, wiped his lips hard, tossed it onto the counter next to his plate.

-Politicians can't afford to be rumor mongers, Pearly, he said then, pulling out a five and dropping it onto the napkin. -Your realities are sordid enough. Mind your own business. Or the town's, for a change.

Pearly looked back at him, winged eyebrows in flight.

-I'm going on, Finus said. -See you at the council meeting tomorrow night.

-You can skip this one, Pearly said.

-That's when you'd pass a pay raise, Finus said, and walked out.

At the
Comet
building he opened the door and went on in. Lovie was there with the Mr. Coffee gurgling, typing the community columns. With her big pink ears she looked like a silver-haired elf.

-Who you got, Lovie?

-Spider Creek, she said in her hoarse quaver. She didn't look up, focused on the computer screen. She'd wanted a computer since 1985 but Finus hadn't given in until last year.

-What's on Mrs. Chambliss's mind?

-She's down in the back and did all her snooping by phone this week. It's a long one.

-She knows I cut her off at twenty-one inches.

-I guess we'll see about that.

-I'm not giving in again. Twenty-one inches of Spider Creek is about all we need.

-I guess we'll see.

The newspaper's office was one large room that had been a tack and hardware store on the west edge of town in the early 1900s. The old press was in the back room, looking like some complex medieval torture machine for removing the bones by stages and flattening the body into figures for a ghastly tapestry.

He sat down in his own old wooden swivel armchair and made a couple of phone calls, then faced the heavy Underwood desktop manual he'd used since 1935, inserted a clean sheet of paper, and whacked out an obit on Midfield.

 

M
IDFIELD
W
AGNER
, 68

• He once took two of his laying hens to the top of a water tower to show his boys that they could fly a little bit, but instead of gliding to the ground as expected the hens, apparently inspired by the view, caught a thermal and floated all the way across the creek into Claxton Swamp and were never seen again. Now wild, mischievous chickens are among the most mysterious of creatures in that low tangly stinking place, and their presence is suspected of being the resource fueling the resurgence of the swamp's alligator population.
  
• He worked twenty-two years at the Steam Feed Works and could do any job in the foundry, from casting to repairing machinery, spent twenty years before that with the telephone company, and in spite of what some say about his lifestyle he never missed a day of work with either concern in all that time except for one week when what we'd now call a microburst blew his barn down in 1976 and he reconstructed the whole thing from broken timbers and splayed lumber and bent tin, so that the result looked like the same barn been out on a three-day drunk, and some said that was fitting, anyway.
  
• Although not a churchgoer himself he helped construct out of the kindness of his heart every one of the seven churches built in this area between 1963 and 1987. His wife was a Pentecostal but a gentle one, and he never succumbed, himself, to that spirit.
  

Finus rolled the sheet out of the Underwood and underlined a couple of things he wasn't sure of in pencil. He made some calls, to Midfield's relatives and friends, made a couple of corrections, and laid the obit in the copy box on the corner of his desk, on top of the three others he'd written since Friday for Wednesday's edition.