The Heaven of Mercury (22 page)

He looked up. Lovie was standing next to his desk, looking through her bifocals at the pages he'd done.

-Ha, she said, that chicken story. Jeepers, I remember my ma used to wring a chicken's neck, just like that.

She made a little flick of her slim speckled wrist.

-Say that was in Indiana, Lovie?

She looked at him a second, mouth cocked.

-Michigan.

-Oh, yeah.

Jeepers, she'd said, one of her words. Rubbing his stubble, Finus considered Lovie, her fading Michigan twang now warbled into some kind of new American generic fostered by television and a misplaced embarrassment over accents in general, a psychological and self-imposed diaspora of the regional self.

-I've still got to write up Birdie, he said.

-Ah, poor thing.

She'd come down, Lovie had, in tow with her retiring husband in '78. He was a salesman of nuts, the metal kind, nuts and bolts, a fisherman whose prize catches on their weekend trips to the coast she still displayed on her desk in the pastels of washed-out Polaroids. Why had they stopped here, in Mercury? Something to do with a cousin or elderly aunt, he thought he recalled. He favored one photo, with Lovie hoisting a huge red snapper, a little strip of flesh showing between her shorts and tied-up shirttail, her browned and more youthful feet beside a line of two-to-four-pounders laid out in the sand, invisible tiny fishteeth bared to the hostile air at her toes. He could have loved her, then. Anyone could've. His tender expression seemed to puzzle her, though.

-What? she said.

-You inspire me, Lovie.

-And just what does that mean? her voice querulous as a parrot's.

Finus just looked at her, smiling. She gave him her admonishing look and half-hobbled back over to her computer and began tappity-tapping the keys.

Finus bent again to his more formidable machine.

 

B
IRDIE
W
ELLS
U
RQUHART
,
88

• She was born in a little fishing village on the Alabama Gulf coast, but moved here with her family after the storm of 1906 wiped out most of the homes, and most of the people there, too.
  
• Her favorite story about herself was that she once threw a shoe at her sister Pud to make Pud stop snoring. Funny she'd marry a man who threw shoes out his shoe store at fleeing women who'd argued with him about their shoe size. The shoes he (her husband, Earl) threw were the size the women wanted: too small. Say all you want, good or bad, about Earl Urquhart, but Birdie never wore a shoe that wasn't right for her foot, nor any customer at the Vanity Boot Shop, either.
  
• Along with her two sisters, she once drove three hundred miles in a day chasing Earl from town to town as he made business calls, just missing him, and then got in trouble with him later because there wasn't any supper ready when he got home—just ahead of them. They hadn't wanted him for any special reason. Just a whim that got out of hand.
  

Scratching his beard stubble he pulled the obit from the platen and read it over, thinking. He knew he wouldn't stop at that. Pretty dull. If he'd been a poet, maybe, he could have written a poem and said what was in his memory concerning her. A brief epic. If he were a novelist he could tell her story. But he was an old man with a rambling imagination, a spotty if distinct memory. He wandered over to Lovie's desk where she clickety-clacked away, picked up the raw copy of the Spider Creek News, drew a line in pencil about where he figured twenty-one inches would stop, and put it back down on Lovie's desk.

-That's all, he said to Lovie, cut it there.

If not Johnette Chambliss could go on for columns with the running diary of her amazingly mundane week. Went to see my sister over in Bay Springs, she was having a time with her new washing machine, which was whirling catywampus, enjoyed our visit very much. The girls choir sang in the church Sunday morning, they sang three hymns including my favorite, we enjoyed the services very much as well. The drive home was really beautiful, the Lord had spread his grace upon the countryside, and we enjoyed the drive home through its splendor very much. I was down in the back, but managed to get Shelley Jean to drive me to see Coretta Mayfield who has been suffering so with her spider bite. Ankle still swole up big as a man's neck and all purple like. But she was in good spirits, and served us coffee and a delicious angelfood cake from IGA and we ended up enjoying our visit very much and it seemed like Coretta did, too. There wasn't a thing in the world Johnette and her sister or daughter or semi-comatose husband Fleck didn't enjoy very much, be it the simple pleasures of rocking on the porch or sitting around the space heater drinking coffee and gossiping, commiserating with others ailing or lame, or the sublime pleasure of laying somebody to rest, for that grief given lip service and noted in tones reverent enough it was on to the food laid out later and to the passel of flowers bunched around the grave which were quite beautiful and the words said over the corpse plowed satinly into its coffin and maybe even a brief hymn sung by the mourners around the tent, which was beautiful and which we all enjoyed it all very much. For no doubt not to enjoy anything on God's earth ultimately would be an affront to the Lord, cast confusion across the waters and among the peaks. Why yes Johnette we enjoyed your article this week very much.

He went back to his desk and put another sheet in the Underwood and started in.

He yanked the page out of the typewriter and slapped it facedown in his tray.

-Well what's got into your craw? he heard Lovie say from her computer, eyes on the screen.

-I can't get a handle on it just yet. Think I'll walk over to Ivyloy's for a shave.

-You could use one, Lovie said.

He looked at her a long moment, coming back to himself.

-Did you get breakfast, Lovie? Want me to pick you up a bite to eat?

Lovie patted a crinkled lump of foil on the desk beside her machine.

-I brought a sandwich, she said.

-What kind?

-Beg your pardon?

-What kind of sandwich.

She looked up at him with an expression as if he'd asked her the color of her dead husband's eyes.

-Turkey, she said finally.

Finus considered this as if she'd said something of grave import.

-All right.

-You're a queer one, she muttered to herself just loud enough for him to hear as he went out the door.

I
N THE MOMENT
just the other side of the mockingbird she drifted down the trail through the woods to the low and damp place where the little cabins sat like crooked tales of those who had once lived there in their way.

She knew she was in the ravine, a place she'd never seen except from the lip of it, and far back from that, from the car. It'd been like a hades the edge of which she was too scared to approach. Here was a little, old old house, a little bitty frame house with faded green shutters and porch that leaned away and down and had two old green wooden rockers on it.

I like green, Creasie said. Then she said, Nobody much lives down here anymore.

Inside the walls were papered with the funnies and looking close she could see one date was July 27, 1947—that would have been her funnies. So every Sunday paper Creasie took home ended up here on the walls, she thought some of them might have ended up in the outhouse. Maybe so. There was no natural color left to the funnies on the wall, they just glowed with their color again when she drew close to see them. Get out of my sight! Mr. Jiggs cried to his frumpy wife, Maggie. Oh, she used to like that one.

She said, I want you to forgive me, Creasie.

Creasie stood looking confused near the cabin's door, her arms at her side, a look like a blind woman's on her face, seeing nothing.

What for, Miss Birdie?

Well, I don't know. I done the best for you I could. I guess for being white, and you black.

Nobody couldn't help that, Creasie said.

I guess not. I know I was hard on you sometimes.

Well. Yes'm. She laughed uneasily. We done what we could.

Well, still.

All right, then, I forgive you, Creasie said. You can forgive me, too.

What for?

I don't know, Creasie said. I can't say.

Well, Birdie said, seeming distracted. All right then, I forgive you. And at that moment she diffused so thoroughly into the air her presence in this space was but a mote that Creasie could no longer see.

Creasie blinked her eyes, readjusting her sight to the dim light in the pantry. She cleared her throat. She was in the pantry in Miss Birdie's house, still waiting on the ambulance. Her coffee'd gone cold. She looked at the cup in her hand. The hair on the back of her neck bristled up.

-For hatin you, she whispered.

 

SHE WALKED THROUGH
the shorn corn stumps and furrows though mud would not cling to her long, thin, translucent feet. Out in the flat farmland, it was as if the earth were small, a ball no more than oh a hundred miles or so around, you could see the curve of the land so clearly, but surely she could not travel it round since she had never been around it in life and no spirit would travel into unknown lands where surely she would dissipate into the scattered bleak and deluded imaginations of a million strange and unknown souls, what hell those foreign tongues surrounding her, like some old madhouse from the days when they kept them in chains as if possessed by evil spirits. And such it would have seemed, to her. She would walk the lands she knew when awake.

She topped the little rise in the field and the homes of those who'd built out toward them north from town began to appear, drifting beneath her as if clouds skimming the surface of the earth. Ludlum's barn with the fading paint on it, See Rock City, as if anyone around here knew what that was anymore. Skirting town and over the little subdivisions with toy houses and the graveyards, large and spread-out neatly, and some so forgotten and neglected they were just a faint and luminescent greenish glow through the brambly growth that had overtaken them. She skimmed up the tended grass plots to where she'd lain Earl more than thirty years before. And then she was there before his grave without another second having passed and she spoke to him.

Earl, it's me, Birdie.

Only a murmuring from within. The particles of the earth hummed and spread apart like sand on vibrating glass so she could see him as through a grainy television screen. His old moldered body shivered, mushroomy eyelids blinked once or twice, a mossy old bone-stretched mummy he was, mustache grown long and flowing down into his armpits. His hands lay on his stitched and blackened chest. He coughed.

That's what you get for all that smoking, she said. Otherwise you'd be up and about like me, maybe moved on.

But then, she thought, I'd a had to put up with you all those years.

Wasn't the smoking, he said. How can you say that? Look what's happened here. He ran his withered fingers over the stitching on his chest.

Well it looks awful. I never knew they cut you open.

Worse than that, Earl said.

What are you saying?

I felt fine, leaving the house. Driving out to the lake I felt a tingling spread down into my chest, like when your arm or leg has gone to sleep. Got to the woodpile, started splitting some chunks, raised up for a chop, had the ax in the air, felt something let go, felt like, and just kept on going up, with the ax, all the way.

Well ain't that the way it happens? she said. I come through a birdsong.

I felt my heart, though. Squeezed like to field-dress a rabbit. It turned to a little ball of fire in my chest.

In another hand he then held his liver for her to see, a hard flat stone likened to the head of a caveman's club, and colorless.

And here's my kidneys, he said, reaching into his side and removing a couple of little withered yellow beans.

All that coffee, Birdie said.

They were silent a moment. He seemed to squint through the lacy growth on his eyes.

You were the prettiest thing, he said, it's just a shame. We weren't suited, were we.

I know I was pretty, but I was too young. I didn't want to get married. You all ganged up on me cause Papa thought it best. But I should have said no. It wasn't your fault.

Oh, well.

I'm going on, Earl.

Earl lifted his gnarled and blackened lungs.

Could you take these, they lay so heavy on me now.

She turned away. The soil sifted together again, and the grass snakelike intertwined, and she moved over the silent graveyard, once again all in the present air.

 

EVEN SO, GUILT
gave way to the stench of his cursed feet, curling back through some root or worm or aggregating grit so that Earl recalled and relived a moment insignificant in the long thin line of his brief life, a line that focused and broadened into the Brooklyn Bridge, in the middle of which he stood beside the tower smoking a Camel and fanning himself with a copy of the
Herald
beneath the lantern hanging from the tower. One thing you'd think about being up north is at least it'd be cooler, but no. Hot and humid, and not a breeze but the occasional stinker full of exhaust and rotten trash. He wriggled his toes inside his socks, felt a little grimy. All that stone and macadam.

He smelled the woman before he saw her, smelled her not so much over as through the smoke of his cigarette, and cut his eyes to see her sashaying, the very word, toward him, a scissoring walk, one leg crossing over the other as it landed, well he'd see how that worked in another territory. She was wearing a Tweedie, a perfect fit on her size six and a half, but only because he'd fit her, as she'd be wearing a six were it not for him, and not nearly so happy to be sashaying across the bridge in them as she was right now. A woman with a roomy shoe is a woman with happy feet, and a woman with happy feet is a happy woman, a woman who has learned how to curl her toes outward instead of inward. Squeeze a woman's foot when you're fitting her shoe and, if she's game, you're her man, simple as that, unless you're some kind of toad, and even then you'd have more of a shot than most men. It was the blessing and the curse of the business, for sure, but he was trying to make the best of it. He had license, anyway. A man whose wife gave it to him on the average of once or twice a year at best, and looking like it would only get worse, had plenty of license in his book.

The six-and-a-half had come into the store on his last day there so wouldn't she be some kind of reward? He saw it that way, and it was like she did too. On Monday he'd be some thirteen blocks away, opening another store, getting it going, two more stores and he would get the hell out of New York and back home for a while, but that'd be another two months. It would take at least eight women to get him through eight more weeks in New York. Some men loved New York but you could have it, have the stinking sewers and screaming subways and yapping yankees, most of them ugly as mongrel dogs. Sounded like a waddling flock of honking geese when they spoke. Birdie said she wished he'd take her and Ruthie up to be with him when he had to be away so long but he'd said he wouldn't take them to that place to live for a million dollars a year, and meant it, and not because of the strange pussy, he could get that her along or no. But what man would bring his family to live in such a place had they not been condemned to it from the beginning? Best stay home where you can still smell something other than piss on flagstone when you step out the door in the morning, he'd said.

Of course Brooklyn wasn't so bad in that way. The problem with Brooklyn was it was a foreign country. We couldn't live there, he said, we speak English. You wouldn't be able to order groceries unless you spoke Italian or Hebrew, he said. Jews and Wops and old-country drunken Irishmen, and crowded with them. And you won't find a nigger to do for you the way you will back home. You'd best stay here and wait this out, I'll have my own store back home soon.

So the six-and-a-half walks in that afternoon about three in a black dress, a warm day in May and she's cool, just a little sweat beading through her makeup, a little veil from her hat brim shading her eyes, red lipstick, and stands there uncomfortably, looking sort of at him, sort of at the displays, and he can tell she's in way too small of a shoe, so he goes over and touches her elbow and says quietly, Good afternoon ma'am why don't you have a seat and let me make your life a lot more comfortable for a change? And when he eased her shoes off and gave a quick squeeze across the ball of her foot and pressed a light and quick thumb into the arch and ran it forward he could hear the barely audible exhalation that told him, All right here's one for the plucking.

At the end of the bridge he hailed a cab and they took it to his tiny apartment in Brooklyn. On the way up the stairs he didn't try to time his steps to creak with hers as he had when he first moved in and brought home a woman. He'd hear a lot of crap from the landlord and landlady next day but they wouldn't have the courage to say anything till then, so to hell with them. Always threatening to kick him out but they didn't want to kick him out, too much trouble to get someone else, just loved to shout and shake their fists and claim they were going to kick him out. Fucking Wops. Genufuckingflect yourself over this.

He showed her the bathroom and bedroom and went into the living room to open the windows and smoke while she got ready. He was looking down on trees in smoky lamplight, the brick sidewalk showing through gaps in the leaves here and there, feeling lucky as always that at least he lived in a place here where there were a few trees growing from between the bricks. A man walked by his shoes clopping, whistling something that might have been religious, one of those old hymns that sounded like a marching number, like “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God.” None of his family except Mama had ever given a damn about religion so she'd tried to make up for them all. He'd told Birdie she could give a dollar a week and he'd take whatever that would buy him in the next world.

She was on his cot bicycling her legs in the air next to a pale patch of light slanting in like something from a painting. She was peeling off her nylons and wiggling her toes and tossing the nylons like ribbons to the floor. Her knees fell open to show him the way. He pulled loose his tie and began to unbutton, pulled his shirt off, unbuckled his belt, dropped the pants and pulled each shoe through the pantslegs one at a time and stood there in his drawers and socks and fairly new pair of Thom McAns, then stepped out of the drawers toward her nakedness, her shadowy tits and pale knees and black pouting bramble and eyes watching him like a driver waiting for a pedestrian to cross at the light, wanting to watch him. He crossed the room.

Ya not gonna take ahf ya shoes? she said, or something like that.

He knelt between her knees and held himself in one hand.

What do you care, baby, you interested in my shoes or this?

She smiled.

Whatavah.

He nudged it in.

Was thinking while they made the bedsprings creak slowly in the room so still he could see the dust motes suspended in the angled block of window light, so quiet otherwise he could distinguish individual springs on the bed and began to imagine each as having its own coiled and violated integrity, suffering the indignity of old brittling steel. He notched the toes of his Thom McAns into the edge of the frame at the mattress edge and began to push at her a little harder.

Oh-kay, she whispered, her head back and eyes closed, a half-smile on her lips.

It wasn't leverage, though, it was the stink he couldn't ever get rid of, embarrassing with him being a shoe man, but it was biological. Birdie made him take his shoes off outside the bedroom and sometimes still got up in the night and took them onto the back porch to get them farther away. Made him wash his feet in the tub with soap and water before coming to bed. Then still wouldn't give him any. Was it she just didn't like it, or she didn't like him? She seemed to respect him, treat him with respect.

Yeah, like that, whispered the six-and-a-half, teeth on her bottom lip, digging into his back with her nails.

She knew he fooled around but like with everything else pretty much just acted like she didn't. Acted dumb. She was naive, maybe, but she wasn't dumb. She knew a man had to have what he had to have, and when he wasn't poking around at her anymore she knew he was poking it elsewhere, but the subject did not come up, and would not. As far as Birdie was concerned, it would seem, the world would get along just fine without that. Maybe she thought it'd be better if grown women just played with baby dolls instead of having babies, if that was what you had to go through to get them, the babies. That family she came from had to be the most powdery dry and sexless family in the world, he was surprised they even ate meat they were so modest in their ways. A thing like that should enter a man's mind before he marries, should mingle with his knowledge of his own family's ways. Which in Earl's case included an old pussyhound of a papa and a mama obsessed in her own way, she might go off to every tent meeting in twenty square miles but her main obsession was sexual, all right, every woman did this or that was a whore. Wore makeup, a whore. Wore high heels, a whore. Wore short hair, whore. Smoked cigarettes, a streetwalking whore. Painted fingernails, toenails, don't even think it. Whore whore whore.