Tomato Red (13 page)

“Oh, baby Jam—you need to take you a whole day off from whining, sometime, and grow the fuck up during it.”

Bev made a move to get out of bed, and Jam and Jason both went “No! No!” Jamalee added, “Bev, we’ve told you to never walk naked in front of us.
Never. Ever
.”

Jamalee’s tent dress had been folded around her by rain and tucked in at a couple of places. She held a bottle by the neck that looked to contain rum.

“Jason?” I said.

“Why, yes, sir.”

“That wall behind you, there, looks a whole lot like England, understand?”

“Oh, don’t you have a high opinion of yourself now.”

“Study England so I can get dressed, will you?”

He did face that way, then shook like a dog, spraying a mess of drops.

I pulled on my clothes. I don’t know what Jamalee looked at. Nothing that was in that room, I don’t imagine. She seemed as though maybe she’d upped her normal pill dose and achieved a highly amped state.

“There’s things wrong,” she said. “Things we can set right. Things we can do about wrong things. Wrong things to make right
listen
and say sorry.”

Bev shook her head, pulled the sheet to her chin, lay back flat.

“I sense you’ve got a problem workin’ on you,” she said. “But ya’ll just be sure to let
that
problem stay
outside
of me, hear?”

 

I GOT MY finger stuck up the pig’s ass, you know, to keep him from squealing. He wrestled against me some, and his chest rose and dropped fast, but he stayed there in my arms while I carried him to Rod’s truck. My finger felt hot. This finger trick is an old-time farmer’s story, it always comes up at nut-cuttin’ time, but I’d never actually been in a situation where I needed to stick a finger up there and see if this story held true.

Mostly it held true, though there were grunts and such that sounded close to squeals, yet you couldn’t
quite
fairly call them squeals. These pigs hefted at about seventy—eighty pounds, and they’d been penned right near a rock road, somewhere over east of town. We only took three. All
three had that black-white-black banding running around their bodies—is that Poland Chinas?

I didn’t use the finger on the first pig, and he made too much noise. The other two didn’t hardly—I guess that finger poke worked as a sort of surprise pacifier to young pigs.

The rain kept beatin’ down. The farmhouse sat probably a hundred yards over. The dogs must’ve crawled under the porch, because they didn’t bark once.

The kids only just stood there in the mud watching me rustle those pigs, their mouths pulled back in silent
yuck!
poses. They hadn’t actually interacted with livestock to any useful degree, so, even though this was all Jamalee’s idea,
I
did the actual wrangling and toting and finger business.

I heaved the last pig into the truck bed, and he went straight to the burlap bags of ear corn we’d found in the metal feed bin. I bent down to the rainwater pooling in low spots around my boots and churned that pig pacifier extra frantic, to and fro.

“Get in the truck,” I said. “Give me that rum.” I splashed just a teensy amount on that finger. The alcohol brought back a sanitary feeling. “Let’s us get, before we get shot.”

 

THE PLOT WAS that after this night the country club would never be the same. The golf course part, anyhow. The pigs and their sharp hooves and snuffling snouts and hearty appetites would get out there in the gooey mud and rain and wreak horrors on the delicate golf greens so nothing would roll straight there ever again.

See, the truck couldn’t get on the course; posts had been sunk at the cart paths that left enough space for golf carts to pass but not other vehicles. Jamalee knew about those posts, hence the pigs.

So, we herded the three pigs between the posts, towards the nearest green. Water stood on the grass section, the fairway it seems they call it, a couple of inches deep, and that rainstorm still showed energy. All our head hairs lay plastered to skulls. Clothes had got sogged and made you feel fat and captured by something thick.

The pigs liked the weather. They followed the ear corn. Jason carried a bag of corn, as did Jamalee, and they held ears out so those pigs would follow, corn being a language the pigs understood. Their pointy hooves gouged everywhere they stepped.

I’d had me an idea and lugged a strand from Rod’s rusty logging chain. It was a big sincere chain, no toy, weighted to do heavy chores. I drug it along and kept sampling the rum.

I held the bottle to Jam, who said, “No thanks, Sammy, that’s for you. Rum might
clash
with my pharmaceuticals.”

I had only been lookin’ to get a buzz on, but of a sudden I was boom-boom-boom drunk.

At the first green the kids tossed down a dozen ears of corn and the pigs started stamping about, shoving each other aside, sliding in the wet, turning the grass up and pushing it away in long swaths like scraping thumbnails through the icing on a cake. The pigs made a considerable mess of that green, but Jam and Jason and me hadn’t let go, hadn’t begun enjoying ourselves yet. It was like a party that wouldn’t quite start happening.

We herded those pigs with boot toes and shouts and whistles, from one green to the next.

At about the third green I stretched the logging chain across the heart section, then stomped the links into the mud.

“Get on,” I said. “Jamalee, stand on that chain.”

When she did, me and Jason pulled. The pigs grunted and ran around, still enchanted by those ears of corn. We pulled the chain between them, scattering them some, and Jamalee stood back there, arms spread, skiing on the heavy chain.

“Putt this, assholes!”

That chain ripped serious damage into the putting surface. You could’ve laid pipe in the trenches we ripped there.

Jam had to ski each green after that. Me and Jason laughed crazy and the party was on. She glided back there, her hands held up to the rain, and shouted the shouts she’d shouted in the parking lot all over again. Those shouts had connected her and Jason more than slightly to those rich house break-ins. She’d screamed some pretty catty shit about who kept what where, and who had a mansion but drank jug wine, and who had undies that she and Jason found to be perfect fits, and what beds they’d peed on.

Her comments had shook me more than those humpy-knuckled fists had.

Anyhow, us and the pigs did a fine wicked job on the fat cats’ playground. The greens went bald that night, and we three screamed insults to the heavens and rejoiced in the storm.

Something that needed saying was getting said this night.

Jason cut loose, danced around on the mud, kicked up his heels, and danced with glee, his beautiful face turned to meet the rain.

The way he looked then has stayed with me.

THERE WAS NO call to ask each other who they were, because you could just look at them and understand right now that they were a news flash you’d been hoping to not be a party to. The aerial on their car kept whipping in long loose silvery whips even after they’d parked and started walking up the dirt drive. The both of them had ties on, the skinny shoelace sort, but not jackets. Their walking pace threw mud. Pistols made their belts sag, but their chins were raised.

The three of us stood there in a silent short line behind Bev’s screen door, facing out. This bunch of kids were laughing loud across the road, busting things in the ditch there, and fireflies were coming on. That antenna still was whipping silvery and wobbling atop their white sedan. Biscuit loped over as they came closer and got behind them. He snorted air and his tail made friendly motions.

Both of them kept their expressions squashed flat and nodded toward us behind the screen.

The one with a gray beard said, “Do all of you want to come?”

 

CONCERNS HAD SET in a lick after supper the evening before. Jason didn’t show. Bev brung home ribs from Otto and Belle’s, plus slaw and beans, which they say he loved and were in the absolute classic range and flavor of barbecue, but the boy never did show to eat. He’d been told about the upcoming ribs at noon, too. The concerns made only a faint
beep in Jamalee’s head just then. She paced off and looked out the windows a bunch of times. These ribs were dry-rubbed in the downriver fashion and cooked slow, slow, slow, and even the beans had caught a smoky taste, so up until the leftovers from his plate joined their kindred in my tummy I didn’t exactly percolate too wild about where, oh, where, young Jason could be.

Bev and me both said over and over about ten times that he was seventeen years old and probably making a friend off away from here somewhere.

“You don’t really know him,” Jamalee said. “He’s a very precise person as far as time goes, and also he’s a person who loves Otto and Belle’s ribs and he’d call if he got this late and say save him some.”

 

IT WASN’T THAT far where they carried us to in their car. The radio kept making noises, electric malfunction sounds, and sometimes voices came across the air but I never did catch a complete thought that was said. I sat over on the side of the backseat, Bev rode in the middle. The cops never turned around or said a thing. They drove us on across the creek which has a name I don’t know on that narrow black bridge with the sign that warns you suddenly the bridge is one-lane only. The road was paved to just beyond there then switched to rock and started to climb.

I could hear Jamalee breathing; her breaths were sucked in slow and off the beat, like she had to keep remembering to inhale.

Up the hill shy of the crest there was a sharp turn onto a rut road. The turn had gotten a mud bank built up by spinning tires and we went high to make the turn, then shot down and bounced on in a pretty rough way for a while. The
bounces made you wince, and us in the back were bashed into each other a few times. Nobody spoke anything.

I could see the water when we stopped. There was a rough log cabin across the pond and the water was green and the pond long and narrow. Two or three vehicles were parked ahead and an ambulance was one of them. This was now twilight, and a variety of men stood around the water’s edge shining flashlights.

Once we got out and had those silvery whips above us, the young cop held out a little blue jar full of that mentholated chest rub you use when your chest rattles in winter. He opened it and smeared a big glob right where a mustache would go if he had one, then pushed the jar at Bev.

“Huh?” she went.

“It’s been mighty hot, ma’am. The water, even, is warm this time of year. This cuts the—I’m sorry—this stuff here cuts the smell you’re goin’ to find.”

 

WHEN TOMATO RED would get to chattering and speculating hot and fevered she couldn’t hardly be interrupted. She could sure talk a gang of doom when she got going that way: The evil fates were biding their time in the attic of that empty house down the road just watching for a chance, and serious misery kept hovering just north of your brain pan holdin’ a pool cue—that sort of stuff. Not those words, but those were the messages.

Such speech had spurred me out and about town the next noon after those ribs with her looking for any sign of Jason. The Ford needed oil and a tune-up. This Pinto pooted small gray distress signals from the tailpipe and sounded like a chain-smoker at a cold dawn and practically shrieked for a civil rights lawyer when I forced it up hills.

Jamalee dangled her tomato from the other window, not too eager to be seen in my shit car but scanning up and around the roadside, checking faces and alleys.

You’d have to even now say that the day shaped up beautiful: big blue above and runny-butter hot with a sporty breeze shooing tender smells on by. Everybody came out of his house. Bicycles and baby carriages and shoppers rolled around the square. Even the drunks at the Tiny Spot Tavern between the square and the stockyards had wobbled into the light out front and took sunbaths with beer cans in hand.

At Romella’s we got told it had been a normal day. The day before. Jason had come and gone as was his custom, and said or did not a thing odder than usual.

In the car again, I asked, “Could he have a secret life?”

“Huh-uh. Not him. He just barely had an
un
-secret life.”

 

THEY HIT HIM with points of light from a fistful of angles and one held steady on his chest and the others slid away from him, peeked back at some segment of his dead self, then slid off and away again. He was a lump laid at the water’s edge. He still wore everything, including his shoes. The pond kept making noises, spit-up noises, like a baby that don’t care for mashed carrots. Let’s say it was the wind. They had him there flat on his back but his arms held out still sideways above the ground. There were fishhooks in him. Fishhooks trailing leader lines, stuck in him up here and down there, one in the cheek of his face, two in the purple hand I could see. The pond sounded ready to puke.

Someone official asked, “That’s him, ain’t it?”

Jamalee leaned forward and just looked and looked stricken, man, her face froze like a statue that got made at a moment of deep, deep, soundless fear.

“That’s my son,” Bev said. She sagged at the knees, then pushed herself up straight. “I remember those socks.”

 

LAKE’S MARKET STOOD there like the gateway to Venus Holler. You couldn’t come in or get out without going past the place. The building was old, wooden and splashed white with paint, with a pocked concrete walkway across the front raised maybe four feet from the parking spots. There were only three parking spots, and even from the coop you could hear horns honking at each other and gruff voices now and again saying
come on, buddy, move your ass
type of comments.

I had lucked into a spot and we both went inside. I always did enjoy Lake’s: There were no hard-and-fast rules about where things would be on the shelves, they sold every different kind of cheap beer you could think of, cheap beers from all over that he would sell by the can, and he kept a humongous old yellow cat that weighed about twenty pounds and could cut farts that ran everybody out of there hooting.