Tomato Red (16 page)

Probably from the sounds of it they stood near the screen door or maybe just inside. He said something about how people pretty often insist something bigger happened than had happened. The smallness of the truth can rub the mind wrong.

She said, “There’s absolutely no way, not a chance, that Jason went hiking up to that pond and dove in there when he couldn’t swim across a bathtub and also had on his fancy pointy-toed shoes. Huh-uh, huh-uh.”

“Aw, Bev, do you know how average that sounds? Shit. I’m always running up on parents who swear their kids would never ever in a million years do what I caught them red-handed doing. I hear this stuff awful regular, Bev.”

“Those hooks, that’s impossible.”

“Bev, the coroner signed off on the drowning.”

“He’s a
tow-truck
driver, William! Abbott Dell can only maybe, and this is
just
maybe, tell a knife slash from a heart attack.”

“He’s the elected coroner. He can voucher out for a state boy to do a autopsy.”

“But he didn’t.”

“Each one costs the county so many dollars, Bev, I forgot how much but it’s plenty and they can’t do one on every kid who gets drunk and drowns.”

The screen door whined, which meant it opened, and the voices went into the yard and were lost to me. I shook out a cigarette from a half-wadded pack on the night table there. The cigarette had a crook in it but burned fine.

I sat on the bed and looked at those photos hung on the wall. Jamalee sat on the bed and looked the other way. The day was going to be another one that made tar bubble and flowers wilt and foul moods general. The smoke hung in the air, no breeze to break it up.

The door whined open again, and whacked shut, and the footsteps shuffled across the carpet and came directly to the bedroom doorway. Bev had on a white dress and no shoes and a real startled facial expression.

“Well, well,” she said. “You-all, you didn’t tell me something, did you? William said a strange thing. He said, ‘What I could investigate and
solve
would be which trashy bunch ruined the golf course. I could
do
that, Bev, and probably today.’ ” Bev switched her eyes from Jamalee to me to her own feet, then around the circuit again. “I think there might be something major you all need to let me in on, is that not right?”

“JUST GIVE IT to me one leg at a time,” Bev had said, and we did that. But Bev wasn’t swallowing the whole truth too well. She had a number of objections to it, which she shouted. More or less shouted. Sitting on a green picnic table in the town park with so many other folks about, her voice seemed shouted anyhow. Eventually she added, “You crazy babies. You crazy fuckin’ babies.”

Regular citizens from all the ages were all over the park. They were apparently celebrating some fun moment from history that I don’t know about. The picnic tables were coated by plates and sacks and big plastic bowls. There were grilling burgers and ice chests and lots of watermelons in evidence. I couldn’t imagine what big event was being honored this way. Watermelon rinds were scattered by the rusty trash barrels, looking like so many dead green grins. There were quite a few radios playing, mostly carrying the Cardinals game from St. Louis, and kids running loose and toys flung in the air, or batted or kicked there, flying from one big spread of food to some other feast across the way.

Biscuit got frisky from the many fetching smells and the active children. He was a shaggy fur ball of appetite. His nose kept busy trying to inhale the whole range of treat smells that rode on the air.

“What do you mean
skied
?”

I let Jamalee do the explaining, but once in a while I’d put in with a “That’s right” or “Yeah, yeah, that’s the way it happened.”

Biscuit wandered over to the chain fence that went around the swimming pool, which was defunct. The water in the pool was shallow and brown, with paper cups and leaves floating. The mutt sniffed and scouted most of the fence line, then heard something he liked, I think, and jogged over the grass to a man in a white T-shirt and plaid shorts and a three-day beard. The man slipped him a bite of something that he accepted with one big chomp and a tail wag.

“I guess you
could’ve
found folks worse to mess with, but you couldn’t do it around here.” Bev got a smoke lit. Her expression, funny enough, didn’t express fright or disgust or anything except, I think, anticipation. “If King Kong lived in town I reckon you could’ve fucked with
him
and been in worse trouble. Or if Frankenstein came from Grace Avenue you could’ve thrown mud balls at his momma and got a
monster
chasin’ after your dumb asses.”

“I couldn’t let them do me that way. You weren’t there to see it, Bev. I couldn’t have the regard for me I need to have if I let them do me that way.”

“Oh, so what if you were mistreated, baby Jam? So what? You weren’t invited. You weren’t wanted there. They didn’t send for you. Hon, that’s the entire purpose of private places—to keep
us
out. You
do
understand that, I
know
you do.”

Jamalee sat there and in response shifted into that simmering, sullen posture she could accomplish that left no need for a response via words. She had on shorts in daylight for, I think, the first time I’d ever seen. Shorts and a buttoned-down long-sleeve blue shirt, despite which she didn’t seem to be sweating.

I said, “There’s times you need to stand tall, you know, show some spirit.”

“You call trashing the golf course ‘standing tall,’ do you?”

“A person has to show some spirit—fate just about never shines kindly on chickenshits.”

Nearby the table we sat on there stood two rock pavilions that had gotten built by all those hungry hobos and whatnot the government harnessed and put to work back in the Dust Bowl-type days, when starvation was easy to come by and no rain wrung from the sky till too late. The pavilions had roofs and cement floors and held six or eight tables and each had big old brick cooking pits built in against the eastern wall. The pavilions were packed by people. Families, no doubt. They were grilling those wieners that grow plump over heat, that kids seem especially to favor. They had banners hanging that still didn’t make it plain to me exactly what great moment from the heydays was getting so celebrated by the general population. The men stood around holding scary long forks and had bellies drooping above their legs, most of them. These old boys thumped their fat bellies proudly, with a kind of strange confidence, like all that fat was so much fat in the bank, fat they figured to retire on someday and live off.

They seemed to like their children.

I saw Biscuit snorting the ground over near there, on a treasure hunt.

“Oh, lordy, do you really believe that crap, hon? You-all think maybe you got you something special going with the spirit world, do you, when you and your three pigs tore the golf place all to hell? You think the spirit world’ll be impressed by that?” She actually buried her face in her hands and let loose a gut-bucket kind of growl from her chest. “Which ear is it these ideas sneak into your head through?
’Cause you need to plug that one. You need to plant taters in that ear and block it shut for good.”

Well, there’s only so much of this blame a person wants to listen to. Nobody cares for getting belittled by a person you’ve had sex with. A person you’ve licked all over. Nobody wants to sit there and get run down
too far
by somebody who gives them a hard-on. Just about nobody does, anyhow.

A batch of kids attempted to get Biscuit to catch their Frisbees for them, but he didn’t give a damn for that, just let them fall and followed his nose toward burgers. He got to circling around a metal grill several tables over, but I could see him. He scooted between legs and so on, got petted a few times, wagged his thanks. Then he got just to the side of the grill and stopped and his back got all humped up. His back humped and it looked like even his hairs became tense from straining and he developed, I swear, a true grimace. He made quite a face. The mutt humped and strained, then pinched a loaf. He pinched a loaf right there almost underfoot. Relief showed quick in his face. He had another loaf ready to pinch when he was seen and empty cans started bouncing from him, and loud unhappy words were shouted. Biscuit fled, mighty confused, I suspect.

I suppose the three of us all had been watching.

Jamalee stood and clapped for the dog.

“About time to choo-choo,” she said. “Why don’t we go on and do something about it?”

WE TRACKED THE first important figure we knew of to his office, his tow-truck office, over past the stockyards but short of the train tracks. The office was in a vintage garage from the days when cars were narrow so garages were narrow to where they look like playthings to us from now. Tall, narrow doors and a low ceiling and a great big picture window. The old ones made the place with riverbed stone and made it to last. The man had his name above the door, branded in thick loopy cursive on a planed and varnished hunk of driftwood, I believe, that had been hung up there.
Abbott Dell. Towing and Repair.

When I parked, Bev jerked the car mirror around and aimed it at her face, then pushed her lips just about smack against their reflection. She worked her lips out hard in the mirror, stretching them wide, stretching them tall, puckering them tight, then got her lipstick out and started drawing. The color she applied I couldn’t name, though it was in the pink tradition, I’d say, but above the average pink in pizzazz, like a pink that had been drinking gin since lunch and wanted to dance. This color put some fizz on her face and seemed to make her hair and eyes look trampy and bold.

Jamalee said, “Ask him the questions sort of from the side at first, not head-on. See if he’ll let something slip.”

“Uh-huh. I could do that, hon. I certainly
could
do that. Or I could be an
a
-dult and flat ask the questions I’d
appreciate
answers to.”

“Aw, suit your fuckin’ self.”

“You look mighty fine,” I said, which I meant.

“Thank you, hon. When they get to panting for you, why it’s not so hard to steer them some.”

Bev got out of the Pinto and went toward the office. She slipped some comely wiggle-waddle-wiggle into her walk. Her dress was a size low or so and she got that white fabric slamming from side to side like it was a sack she’d trapped a poodle in.

She knocked on the glass of his side door and he bellowed a happy bellow when he pulled it open and got a look at her. It was the middle of the afternoon but quiet because, I imagine, of the holiday it apparently was. She spoke and Dell leaned to her, then slid his eyeglasses off and put them in his shirt pocket.

The man didn’t look like much. Do coroners pull down big side money? He didn’t look like he did. He looked about like one of those fellas who when you’re broke and on foot in Dallas or Natchez or Jackson you don’t even think about how maybe you could rob them. You let them walk right on by through the dark parking lot. You don’t even bother to check if anyone is watching or rehearse whatever stupid bone-chilling line you might use. No, he just looked like a fella who drove a tow truck but had lots of friends who voted.

You see, I know, that since Jason had died with help it fell to scum such as us to prove it. The good world hadn’t taken much notice. The ripples hadn’t reached them. There was not much official interest in the so-what death of a fella like Jason from an address like Venus Holler. If any rocks were to be kicked over or harsh questions asked, it’d fall to such as us to do the kicking and the asking, which it wasn’t much like our prior personalities to do.

The door shut when they went in.

I admit I was tickled at the idea of such as us doing the correct square thing, seeking justice, don’t you know, setting a wrong right. It hinted at more direction and purpose in life, I suppose, than I’d ever been saddled with before. I had this daffy notion I maybe
could
imitate such a person.

Me and Jamalee went over the street to the shade and sat on a step below an empty store over there.

Blinds lowered down the door glass and were twisted shut.

She’d forgot her cigarettes and I had one in the shade over there, watching for them through Dell’s big picture window.

Jamalee laughed when the blinds also fell across the big picture window. She laughed and poked me with her fingers a few times.

“Don’t sulk,” she said.

I lit a fresh smoke from the butt of the first. I flicked the butt at a light pole and hit it with a spray of sparks.

“Don’t act surprised,” she said. “Bev has always been sort of a kind of a kept woman, Sammy, only nobody keeps her more than overnight.”

I imagine all of us who are like me grow up with our own ticking bombs planted inside us. You know, the bombs of anger, fear, resentment, and plain ol’ not liking yourself to a healthy depth. Some of us carry the complete bunch. Sometimes the ticking from that bunch of bombs is so loud you can’t hear another word.

I said, “I guess he figures he’s hot shit, don’t he?”

 

WHEN BEV CAME out of that side door her hands were busy bringing herself back to order. She gave tugs at different aspects of her attire, you know, the hem, the bust, the sleeves. Places of that type. Those blinds had been down
most of an hour. Over half an hour, anyhow. Her hair had mashed-down spots in it the way forest weeds and stuff get mashed where deer sleep. The pink had passed away from her lips.

The door shut behind her without me seeing Dell, which maybe was good for him.

There were these celebration balloons overhead, the kind with people in them, riding inside wicker things sort of like clothes hampers, somewhat, or laundry baskets. They sounded the way I expect dragons would. These short flames burst out with a dragon-hiss sound, but around the sides of the hiss you could hear people. They mainly suggested folks on the ground wave up at them or went
Yahoo! Yahoo!
There were five balloons up there in happy colors but they didn’t maintain a formation or design of any kind. I can’t say yet what that holiday was about or how the balloons fit with it. They flew right along Broadway but well above it and added to the sky like dime-store jewelry on a clean young neck.