Tomato Red (15 page)

She swam to me, then we swam together. We set out for the other shore, the grass bank, the far end of the pool beyond where the light ended. Fairly often I’d slow and set my feet down and nowhere did the scum push over my head.

We splashed close together.

Bev said, “This is strange. This is so strange.”

“Uh-huh. But I’ve got this opinion really firm now that you’d have to have help to drown here, Bev. This water ain’t much.”

“This pond, I don’t know, it’s making me moody. The strangeness of this. It runs moods over me.”

“I ain’t felt a single hook.”

“No, that’s not anything I’ve felt here either, hon.”

The pond heaved around us like a breathing thing that had swallowed us inside its foamy green skin and bad smell. In and out the water went as with a fat thing’s quick small breaths after gorging.

“I don’t want to believe this,” she said. “It’s really goin’ to hurt if I do.”

I saw Jamalee up by the headlights, flitting along the high lip of the dirt bank that ran around the pond. She continued on the move whenever I glanced that way, that white shirt causing a blur over there that kept bouncing slow sideways above the water.

“You know it’s true, Bev. We knew that a li’l bit before and we know it more now. But if we go on and say ‘yes, let’s believe it’ out loud, it’ll be mighty hard to sit still anymore. Mighty damned hard.”

After then we stroked through the green scum, paddling across the light to where the car parked. We got out there where his body had laid and went on up with water guttering down our butts. I shoved the headlights to dark, and we sat on the Pinto to dry some on the heated hood.

The white blur approached.

“And all your splashing tells you exactly what?” she asked. “Huh? Any answers?”

Twigs and leaves or some type of green matter in clumps and strands and flecks were stuck to Bev and me and we both picked and scraped, making the Ford wiggle as we sat on that warm hood leaking pond water.

“I never touched a hook,” I said.

“Me neither.”

“I never even
sensed
a hook, you know, or line.”

“Ah,” Jamalee went. “Ah, yes.”

Jamalee stared toward the dark pond and of course her heart and mind would be making connections between this spot, this spot at night, and some miserable way of death being inflicted on the prettiest boy in the Ozarks.

Pretty didn’t help much against mean, and mean had its way right exactly here.

She kept standing there, a nearby blur, her back to the car.

Bev shook loose a couple of straight smokes and I took one to burn the pond-scum taste from my mouth. We puffed a little cloud over our heads. She put her hand on my knee a few times. Her hair had got flattened around her face. There were lots of bug and frog sounds in the dark. I could’ve drunk a beer.

There was, I guess, too much to say, or think about saying, for us to say much of anything yet.

We hung around that pond until my skivvies dried, dried only to damp, then rolled downhill and returned to the holler, not talking at all—from fear, I think, of what we might have to say.

 

LATER, PAST MIDNIGHT, I imagine, I was in Rod’s house with Jamalee. A porch light across the street hung there up high and burned like a warning to small craft at sea. Sharp shadows had the walls covered. Jamalee lay inside her nook
with the blanket curtain closed and I sat on the cable-spool coffee table hard by the window. Biscuit flopped directly behind me and snored.

There were gangs of angers inside that house. Angers plus fears plus hurt. If this house lived as a human you’d send it to a rest home in the faraway world to receive a cure.

I wasn’t going to care much for being lonely again, if that’s what was coming. Something was coming. Hunting a new bunch that would have me, I never do enjoy that process. That hadn’t been said—get out—it hadn’t come to that yet, but I could see that same calamity that always hounded me hunkered at the edge of the campfire light, yawning and picking its teeth, lurking.

In my heart, you see, I knew I could live here.

I didn’t want to leave, or be left, either.

Jamalee lay back there behind the blanket curtain, and for extended yawns of time she didn’t speak, but when she did it was consistently on the topic of flight, flight to more civilized area codes and the various made-up shit she insisted would be true ways of life in those other classes of world.

“The problem is,” she said, “I’ve never really been anywhere. We drove through St. Louis one time at night, I don’t remember why, but didn’t stop. Then I ran away for adventure when I was fourteen, like anybody would, and found myself in Oklahoma, this little red dirt village not far from Tulsa, which I looked around and thought, This is not the direction to run toward ’cause nothing has changed hardly from home. You might as well be in West Table as Oklahoma, so I came straight back all disappointed.”

“There’d be little differences,” I said. “There’s always little details you don’t know about places.”

“I’m not fleeing toward ‘little details,’ Sammy. I want the whole picture painted over and a bunch of squatly shiny fellas
in tuxedos making music just out of sight behind the palm trees.”

“That place ain’t on the map.”

“Something close enough to it is.”

“You’ve got a lot of disappointments out there, waitin’ to greet you, Jamalee. You talk this mighty tall baloney but you’re smarter’n that, ain’t you?”

“I
want
what I
want
.”

“You want the future to be impossible, so you’re fucked over and short-changed
again
.”

“My, my. You learn that deep psycho-stuff in a prison chat group, or Harvard College, or where?”

She was, I know, operating on popped pills, talking at me from way inside a dope mist and her own scared and sort of biggety-acting personality. I could’ve gone for her heavy, man, if she had ever even gave me a light-headed hint I should. She just wanted me as like a third-string brother, I suspect, and nothing more, and I was willing to take that, too.

“It’s common knowledge,” I said. “It’s found written on most shithouse walls.”

I turned about and used my foot to jiggle Biscuit up and alert, end those snores. He stood and shook and made a noise from deep in his chest. He went to sniffing at me.

“C’mon, buddy,” I said. We both got to moving slow on our way out. “Ol’ Biscuit needs him a walk, don’t him?”

Just when we about reached the screen door she said, “Oh, Sammy’s the one needs to visit ol’ Bev.
Him
needs to get wrecked next door, but him needs to be sure and wear a condom; and also him needs to say, ‘Hi, Mom,’ for me, would him?”

A MESS OF cats whirled around and about in the dark, visible practically underfoot one second, then
pfft!
and they were gone away altogether like those ideas maybe you’d been told and told about but just didn’t get. There was a freight on the way, scolding traffic with its huge horn at each road crossing, a scolding you could hear for miles, this train still four or five roads distant. Two or three citizens were jaw-jackin’ the night away at one of the dark houses across the road, which one exactly I couldn’t say. Their talk was at that level of loud the too-drunk-to-notice favor. Biscuit broke away in the yard to my Ford and hoisted a rear leg and peed on my front left tire. He acted younger once he was done. One of the drunks over there had got to explaining some experience he’d gone through that had his congregation snorting and spanking their boots down on the porch steps, most likely pissing the host over there’s wife off pretty good.

I’d always craved to be a hero to somebody, which I know sounds fairly lame, but it had truly been in my wishes.

The train had screamed closer and louder and made you comprehend why people throw rocks at them. They really tested your patience and such the way a loudmouthed motor-cyclist in a holding cell might, or a father-in-law so often does on holidays. The train went by huffing like an avalanche late for a date with a flood someplace down the line.

Me and Biscuit went on inside of Bev’s shack. I eased the screen door closed so it wouldn’t slap. The front room
smelled like a bus station. There were stinks in those walls of an age where your great-granddaddy might have left them there, and then that steady application of current sad-assed stinks from cigarettes and liquor and home life layered over and combined with the older gloomy odors to create the complicated stink of right now, this minute.

There was a lamp on over by Bev’s green chair, which she was in, slumped. Her head jerked about and her eyelids flapped as she fought against passing out. A cigarette burned between her fingers and the smoke flew straight up in a thin line.

I guess she heard us.

She raised her face for a look and said, “Oh. I don’t feel . . . I don’t feel up to wrestlin’ you tonight, hon. TV.” “Right,” I said. “Rain check.”

I stubbed her cigarette in the ashtray. Her eyes eased shut and her chin hit her chest. Biscuit sniffed at her feet, then fell over and stretched flat. I got hold of her shoulder and tugged and she came along as I pulled, following my lead but not quite aware of it, I don’t imagine. She just followed to wherever I tugged her and I got her to her bed and into it. She only wore a thin naughty-nightie type thing, so I didn’t need to strip her. I tossed the white sheet across her legs and up to her middle.

She didn’t look her best.

I went into the kitchen where the beverages were stashed. There was no beer. I looked all up and down inside the fridge. There was no whiskey, either, none that I could find. There was wine, which I consider only for emergencies, and only wine, so I found a plastic blue juice cup and filled it high.

I switched off all the lights in the front room. I lit a menthol from her pack and went to the screen door and stood
there looking out, choking on the cigarette and the wine, which was of the Chablis category.

This holler, at night or during the day, either one, had the shape of a collapsed big thing, something that had been running and running until it ran out of gas and flopped down exhausted exactly here. The houses were flung out along this deep crease in the hills and the crease surely did resemble the posture of a forlorn collapsed creature. Scrub timber and trash piles and vintage appliances spread down the slopes and all around the leaning houses to serve as a border between here and everything that wasn’t here.

If I knew what to do I’d be willing to do it.

It took three smokes to help me get that wine down. I went into the bedroom then. I’d left a lamp burning in there so there was a tiny bit of light. I skinned myself naked and got into bed, pulled the sheet up.

There were several pictures of Bev hung on the walls of the bedroom that had been taken back when. I could lay there and see them. Back when was her golden age, that was clear. She’d been something for a spell there. I guess the pictures didn’t make her sad. Her face and figure used to be the kind you could’ve used to sell things with: Use this soap, get this face; eat this pudding, get this figure. That sort of thing.

You sure would’ve sold a lot of that soap and pudding, too.

I laid there with my eyes closed but still saw those pictures of her in my head, only now they had acquired motion. She was dancing with that old figure, that old face, or laughing and leaning against a Mustang convertible in the sunshine, or, best of all, just walking away from me down a brick walkway in summertime attire but looking back over her shoulder with a daring sort of pouty-lipped look. Those pictures played on for me in my head, and I experienced a wisp
of sadness and a bucket of appreciation. I hadn’t quite gotten slowed down to sleep when in came Jamalee walking like the undead, her arms slack at her sides. She didn’t say a thing. She had on one of those tents she wore, yellow-colored, and came along with her eyes held almost closed. Her tomato-red head wobbled a bit loose on her shoulders. She got to the foot of the bed, then got on her knees and dog-walked up to the pillows. She was on top of the sheet and she laid down on her back between Bev and me, the sheet like a hammock, sort of, beneath her, and closed her eyes.

“Lights,” she said.

 

I CAME AWAKE the way a bottle washes to shore. Soft, small nudges bobbed me in that direction and patted me toward eye-opening time, and when I did arrive at that time my eyes rolled open and so did Tomato Red’s. There was this jolt of social fright because we had gotten snuggled together while adrift, her tomato beneath my chin, and suddenly came awake and realized it.

The color red filled my vision and the smell of her hair and breath and neck had my nose twitching. I’m fairly certain I had worn a smile in my sleep. My arms had gotten under and around her and pulled her in close and held her there while my body formed around her like a big spoon on a little spoon.

There was a sense of comfort overall.

For maybe one instant I thought she might loll in my arms a spell even while awake, but uh-uh, baby. She began to buck against my hug. She got her fingers into my arms and pulled.

I went ahead and released her.

She spun over to where Bev had slept.

She laid on her side there and our eyes met and I couldn’t read her expression too well but I knew she hadn’t hated my hug all that bad, either. Not as bad as she acted. She’d wiggled backwards into me a few times, and that ain’t much of a brush-off, is it?

Voices were reaching us from another room, which is likely the thing that sparked an end to sleep. The voices were sort of loud and clashing with each other.

Jam listened, then whispered, “That’s that cop.”

I can’t say for certain how Bev got him to come over, but he was there, William the John Law in the front room, and they were going round and round with words.