Tomato Red (20 page)

“Aunt Dot’s closed before I was even a girl,” Bev said, “just a tot. But I knew her. She died, Dot Gowrie, a funny death also.” Bev stood there on a patch of hot dirt that shimmered, shading her eyes, her head turning to track the pigeons. Her feet were bare, as so often they were, which I imagine made her feel like a kid on the loose for summer vacation, or somehow provoked forth some sensation of comfort from some soft spot in her memories. She had on a white T-shirt that recommended you eat at that restaurant near the Bootheel where they throw the rolls at you, and blue jean shorts that were frayed. “They said her truck fell off the cement blocks and mashed her while she tried to fix the muffler. A woman in her seventies, could barely walk or see, fixin’ her muffler, only she crawled under there with no tools and laid her head exactly under a wheel.” As the pigeons landed back on Aunt Dot’s eaves, Bev closed her eyes and rubbed at them, her face down. “I’ve put in a call to every-fuckin’-body I ever did know who might have some idea of what to do. What
we
should do. All they all say is to rest. Some say trust in Jesus, some say try and have another baby, and a few said keep your dumb-ass mouth shut and stay out of bigger trouble.”

Jamalee said, “We’ll just leave that money sit, Bev. We’ll let those dollars rest till tomorrow, then fling them back by the fistful at that shit-ass. We’ll make him dig
our
point of view, eh, Sammy?”

I didn’t say a thing. I was fairly well alarmed and captivated by that wrecked old house. That crippled sagging old
whorehouse
. I looked at the house and it was like looking at a snapshot of a crucial relative you never did know but instantly recognize. Do you know the feeling? The feeling that the picture is looking at you, too, and knows your whole
story, even the rest of it, which it might tell you if you kneeled and listened hard.

I misunderstood where I was for a while.

I recalled where later when Jamalee said, “Why not go inside?”

 

THE FLOORS HAD become incomplete. The good old wood, the slats, or whatever you’d say they were, had been pried out from sections of all the rooms downstairs and rot had gotten at several spots upstairs. You had to surrender yourself to your fate to step around fast in the shadows there. Who knew when you’d fall. There was a bounty of empty beer cans, brands you’d forgotten about, and assorted litter. Pigeon shit had fell down through the upstairs holes and made splatters that built and spread until they were the size of double-cheese pizzas. At some point a shotgun had been exercised inside the place, and big bites of wall and wallpaper had been blown loose and as the shot pattern spread freckles were applied to everything.

Bev said, “There used to be a piano in here. And there were some soft chairs. Several. I took the green one home. Other stuff, too. That’s been awhile back, though. Pretty
long
while. The piano even then didn’t have any guts left. The strings and stuff had been taken so you couldn’t make music anymore but the husk still sat in here. By the stairs, there.”

Jamalee stood by a window where the frame had tilted along with the house, the sunlight jumping on her back, and the light lit her hair extra red and her head lowered and raised like a red-sky sun that was trying to stay up late instead of setting. She said, “Would we really end up in a ditch the way he said?”

“Hon, you only hear about such stuff all the time.”

“Might as well see what’s upstairs,” Jamalee suddenly said. “With me?”

Bev said, “Yeah, baby, you’re right, we might as well.”

Then the two of them led the way around the pigeon pizzas and the trash from the bygones and deeper into the wreck, moving alongside each other, touching sometimes, like best girlfriends who’d begun a fresh strange adventure together neither would’ve started alone and both hoped not to regret.

I reckon I always had been huntin’ for a place to plant my feet and go down swinging.

My craving to be a hero started to swell, and I followed the gals up into the mess with a smile.

THE MONEY HECKLED us and got us itchy so we stuffed the stuff into an oyster cracker box which was then shoved to the far back of Bev’s uppermost cupboard shelf. It had seemed unhealthy to our ideals to have those heckling bills of folding money stacked before us on the table, catching our eyes, making mathematics happen in our minds, winking, flirting, courting our weaker sides. Powerful faith in our weaker sides is, I imagine, why ol’ John Law left money in such an amount with us anyhow, left it to serve as an agitator toward us accepting his sense of things.

We paced around in Bev’s shack and talked and talked but didn’t get much said worth repeating.

That cupboard
did
get glanced at quite a few times.

For a spell there was a woman in the road screaming at a house up the way. Her car was running and the headlights were on, but she stood on the road in the light beams with a kid hugging her leg screaming at the dark house in which she felt a husband-stealing slut hid. A slut who could have the sonofabitch, and welcome to him, if he’d make his stinkin’ child support payments like a man, though she knew he wasn’t much of one, but he could fake it that he was a decent man, couldn’t he? For the kid, for little Kenny?

Midnight was close by, and Bev said, “We can’t fight them any way but one way.”

Jamalee said, “You figure there’s even one way?”

Tires howled in the road and I’d missed the response from the house where the slut hid, which I’d sincerely wanted to hear in case her excuse was a good one and I might find a use for it also someday.

“The one way is if we put their secret shit in the street for all to know. We unload all my dirt about folks here to a minister, or a girl reporter, or like that.”

Jamalee rocked in the squeaky rocker, making a tune of squeaks that got irritating.

“I know you know some dirt,” she said. “You’ve gathered you some dirt, I’m sure.”

I said, “Most times a bullet wins over dirt, don’t forget.”

“Also, Bev, these days that between-the-sheets dirt doesn’t pack the same punch it used to.”

“Okay, okay,” Bev said. “The hell with it. So we’ll cast around tonight and dredge up
something
. We’ll show we’re not only who we look like we are, not deep down.”

At the slut’s shack the porch light came on. A dude and a gal came out to the porch and looked up the road, then hugged and laughed. The gal repeated the wife’s comments in a tone she’d use with a young child. This provoked snickers and hugs, then the light went off.

A couple of cigarettes after midnight Jamalee stood and yawned, then leaned her head to my chest and hugged me.

“I’ll leave you two alone,” she said. “I’m beat.”

 

IN MY DREAMS I had one I’d had before where it’s all rainy and I’m about full grown but on my way to the elementary school in a yellow raincoat and no pants and all these kids with pants and umbrellas point at my legs and hoot and I look down at my bare ankle and for some reason my butthole has moved down there and is leaking when I walk so I run and run and come to a raggedy house where the women in it
have whiskers and tattoos and won’t unlatch the screen door for me.

“You’ll track in shit, that’s why not.”

That dream is a dream I hate. I totally don’t care for that vision in my head, but it has shown there several times and always shocks me awake.

The sun hadn’t turned full on yet, but daybreak birds were tuning up their throats with short trills and quick song bursts. Smoke lolled about in layers toward the ceiling. Bev sat in a chair at the foot of the bed, smoking with her knees pulled up to her chest, sort of in a baby ball.

“Sammy. Can we talk? Sammy, you didn’t care for what went on with Mr. Dell. You didn’t. You felt I’d done you wrong and I want you to know I might do it again at any time.”

“I’ve got to where I’m cool with that.”

“
Cool?
”

“I mean I ain’t goin’ to stab your patrons, or nothin’. I don’t
think
.”

“That’s not exactly cool enough, hon.”

“Well, I mean, if
you’ll
hang with me, I’ll hang with
you
.”

I fell back in a flop and closed my eyes.

When I came around again the heat had charged in and the sun seemed as bright as midmorning. Bev sat in the chair, still smoking.

“What’s the deal?” I asked.

“I’ve got feelings all stirred up. Things to ponder.”

“Uh. Well. Time for coffee, I reckon.”

“No, don’t get up.”

“Huh?”

“Don’t get up, hon.”

She stood and pulled down her clothes and made a sight I’d never tire of seeing. She posed and so forth and made me
stoked with a stiffie, then gave me a jump that must’ve lasted an hour.

We rolled from bed and shared a cigarette. She followed me to the kitchen. A table chair had been pulled to the cupboard.

“She came in before first light, hon. She wasn’t that quiet. I heard her. Don’t go crazy, now.”

With only my skivvies on I busted out the door and ran to Rod’s. It’s like I could feel the truth when I stood by her nook. Her stuff had gone away.

The pistol had gone away too.

I split back to Bev’s, and thoughts and feelings and horrors banged and clanged and banged in my head.

All my angers revved.

Fears, I guess, did a bit of goading.

“She can’t do me like this!” I know I dressed myself at some point about here. “She can’t just dump me! She can’t just wad me up and drop me in the trash.
No!
I came
all
the way in, you know? I came
all
the way in, there,
here
, and she can’t abuse me this way!”

“Sammy, she’s got her reasons, I’ll give her that.”

I knew there was a short crowbar under my front seat. Something fine had fallen from her eyes.

“There’s Rod,” Bev said. “I’d say you should leave him be. Looks like he’s been drinkin’.”

I only looked at her. I only looked at her and she looked away.

I pushed out and went after Rod.

“Hey, buddy,” he said. He’d managed a haircut in jail. He looked more fit, too, but he smelled of ten dollars’ worth of cheap liquor. “Been celebratin’ my good-time early release. What’re you wantin’?”

“You seen Jamalee?”

“No. Not for a while.”

“How long a while?”

“They turned me loose before breakfast. I wanted to drive over to the Inca Club for a nice
stiff
breakfast, so I dropped the girl down by Towhead’s Gas Station. Where the bus stops.”

She had said those words that made me have notions, happy hopeful notions; now those notions got to haunting me and running me ragged and furious.

“And, hey, bud, I’ll be layin’ around here for a few weeks and that means adios to you, my special buddy. Get in and get your shit and get out and have you a good life, hear?”

I hardly did. I hardly did hear. I turned and headed toward Bev’s, and Bev stood in the door watching me.

“And, hey, where’d you stash my pistol? Come back here and answer me, peckerwood.”

At the door I said, “Give me a smoke.”

“I’m out, hon.”

“How could you? Huh?”

A long kiss-off sigh flowed from her.

“My baby Jam grew up of a sudden overnight.”

Biscuit shuffled to me and sniffed and I believe I had tears ganging up. I touched the mutt, then fled in the Pinto.

I was fixin’ to hurt her. Hurt her tiny body.

At Lake’s Grocery I flashed that I needed some smokes and turned in. The parking spaces were filled so I kept back and left room for drivers to back out.

I wish she wouldn’t have pulled what she did.

A station wagon started up and started to back out, then stopped. The woman hopped out and ran back into the store.

Jamalee was just a lot too holy to herself.

The bunch that would have me, I don’t like them to change their minds.

I thought maybe I might catch her bus.

Everybody was buying beer and baloney, picnic stuff. Then finally the wagon backed up, but right at me, so I backed some more. The wagon slowly turned its wheels and pulled away and a fuckin’ Toyota that hadn’t been there before wheeled in and took my parking space.

Each extra minute that bus went a mile more.

I leaned on the horn and got flipped off by two rough dudes in the Toyota. Beards, caps, dirty shirts, all that funky hard-guy crap.

The crowbar dealt itself into my hand and I sprang from the Pinto yelling. My yells contained threats.

Both dudes got out. The driver grinned a grin you ain’t meant to like. He lifted his T-shirt so I could see he had a pistol inside his belt.

“You think I care? You punk-ass canteen turnout motherfucker.”

I wish that road had bent another way.

Seems like there’s always some sonofabitch with a pistol. Testing your character, testing your dedication to stayin’ alive.

“You think that popgun’ll save you?”

“Hey! Hey!”

Tim Lake came quick down the steps.

I wish I hadn’t took to smoking.

She probably could about smell Memphis, as that bus spread fumes through the rice and cotton part of Arkansas, the flat region, clattering toward the river.

Tim Lake laughed.

I said, “You cacklin’ cheap bastard, put in some parking!”

I could claim that his laugh triggered me. His mouth jerked open in one of his big long laughs and spit spun a web from top lip to bottom and my arm shot out hard and straight and fast and his forehead met the crowbar flush.

You could look at him when he landed and not need to ask the main question.

The dude with the pistol said, “Oh, man, don’t try to leave. Man, you done
mashed
Tim.”