Tomato Red (6 page)

“Oh, why am I askin’ you? I
know
what
you
think—but the flats are so much more sensible for when we dance, hon.”

The woman tossed the pair I would’ve chosen off somewhere, put the other on.

She was one of those gals who look like they’ve patterned theirselves after a child’s doll. A Barbie who has gone to seed on roadhouse whiskey and panfried chicken. I’d put her age at plenty old enough, but not yet too old. Thirty-five, or maybe forty, but not much over that. She had a big smell, big hair, big smile.

“It’s less awkward,” she said, and sidled close up to me, “if you present my gift to me now, and I’ll hide it away, and that will be all we’ll say about that.”

“Might this gift be a cash gift?”

That big smile stepped aside, then she snapped a cigarette between her lips and lit it with a thin golden lighter.

“If you’re not Steve Jimmerson’s brother-in-law from Cape Girardeau, then A, you owe me for the beer, and B, you better quick say something sweet that doesn’t scare me. I’m
easily
frightened.”

“A mistake was made,” I said. “That’s all. Look here, now, I—you know—I went into that store up the road there, Lake’s Market, I think they call it, or somethin’, and they directed me here. The man at the counter. What I’m lookin’ for is this tiny red-haired girl, said her name was Merridew, which is the name I asked after at the store. They said knock here.”

About this instant she had things sorted out. Her eyes narrowed and her lips twitched as if a mocking laugh was getting into position to spring forth.

“Now how did she get her hooks into a rugged ol’
long
,
tall
cowpoke like you?”

“I met her, that’s all.”

“She’s not
be
-guiling. She doesn’t bother to be
a
ppealing, not often, not often that I ever did see.”

“She’s got a way, though, that comes across—to me, at least.”

“Does she now? Think you might could get a li’l of that cotton, do you?”

“Never say never.”

“Jamalee is my daughter—did you know?”

“Naw. Naw.”

“I’m Bev Merridew—that’s why Tim sent you to the wrong house. You say Merridew around here and that’s usually
me
. Not far off, though, it’s goin’ to always be Jason, I imagine.”

I did the beer in. I wasn’t sure what to do with the bottle.

“He’s a right glamorous boy—I can testify to that.”

She sucked and blew smoke, gave me an up-and-down look the way a warden might when he was deciding which tier to jail you on.

“No,” she said, and shook her head. “No, huh-uh, you’re not, I can tell. Not
you
, cowboy.”

She beckoned me to a side window, and I stood there and got rocked by her smell and smoke and sharp savory possibilities that were dangled merely by her posture and presence.

“Right there,” she said, and pointed to the next house over. “Jam and Jason stay there, close by but out of my hair. They’re old enough.”

The next house over was like a reflection of this one in a dented mirror that had been settled on by dust.

“Scoot. I’ve got a caller droppin’ by any hot minute now, and
you
can’t be here. So
ske
-daddle.”

At the doorstep I turned back to the screen, which had been tragic for quite a few flies that were squished there, and added, “My name is Sammy Barlach, and growing up I always kept chickens—so you
know
I’m a good lover.”

 

THESE WERE THOSE households of the awful fully shared. I parked in the mud-rut driveway. I knew such places by heart. Everything fine or wonderful got hoarded each to his own, but the miserable shit passed around and around and up and down.

A yellow bus honked on the road and went by, carrying a load of tired young Baptists home from the Bible camp that
sat four or five miles down. There were two babes in rusty-lookin’ diapers wrestling with a dog in a mud yard across the street. Mom squatted on the porch, cherishing her cigarette, and there was a squad of dead schnapps soldiers scattered to the side of the steps.

I soon changed my mind, stepped out of the Ford, and went over to Jamalee’s door. I could see she stood inside the screen door, watching me. The screen had been given a rounded, pooched-out shape by insiders leaning into it, headfirst, pushing a little farther out each time, hoping for some slightly improved view, I guess.

“Well, look what the rain washed by,” she said. “Didn’t expect to see you.”

“Aw, I ain’t goin’ nowhere in life anyhow, so I might as well get there this way.”

“Oh, baby, do
I
feel
that
theory.” She came in a step closer to the screen, which put her face to use as an attraction. “What about your job, Sammy?”

She eased on out the door, to the slumped wood floor of the stoop, and held the screen open with her hip. There was no makeup now. Her hair had been wetted and combed down slick.

“I’m gettin’ it back,” I said. “With a hike in pay, too, and a few special fringe benefits. The man said I’ll be startin’ the very next day after hell freezes over.”

“That sounds promising.”

She stepped backwards, into the house, and let the door shut between us. It was passing strange how different she looked in her own true clothes and her own true home, swaddled in her own true history. A big share of her sparkle dulled as that pooched-out screen door slammed her inside.

Then she moved backwards, deeper into the shadow. All I could see was that she was barely there, like something you
almost recall: the Pledge of Allegiance, your daddy’s real name.

“Come on in, Sammy. Share the stink.”

JAMALEE AND JASON were living together like a brother and sister who’d maybe once tended to play a lot more “Doctor” together than is considered sightly. They acted familiar with areas of each other that most siblings probably keep private, but this knowledge seemed to bond them together even better instead of wedging them apart.

The house was nearly a coop; you could’ve paced it off and counted the paces on fingers and toes. Jamalee had set up housekeeping in the dining nook, closed her zone in with a blanket curtain hanging from a clothesline she’d hammered to the walls. Jason had an actual room with a double-deck of bunk beds in it. He gave me the top, which is the new inmate’s rack in so many circumstances.

I made do.

I always have just wanted to fit in somewhere, and this is the bunch that would have me.

The house belonged to a timber hauler who worked off the books and only showed his face two or three times a month to crash in my bunk. He was yonder and all over knockin’ down forests and hauling them to sawmills. His wife had hit the highway and taken the three kids with her. They’d been holding those kids as hostages to the welfare machine and drawing decent ransom checks. His name was Rod, and Rod wanted those checks to keep coming, so he’d installed Jamalee to answer the phone and mimic his woman. A piece of paper had been taped to the wall above the phone,
and it had files, sort of, on his kids: birth dates, eye colors, school situations, excuses: so Jamalee could talk straight to any social welfare snoops.

She got a cut, but I don’t think a big one. Her main reward was the free inhabiting of this coop.

The Merridew kids shared the coop with Rod’s dog. It was a shaggy lazy dog named Biscuit who had the personality of a defeated old alcoholic uncle, more or less. Biscuit mainly just laid there and thumped his tail pleasantly. Once in a while he goes to the screen door and stands there scanning the street like he’s hopin’ to see the mailman bringing his disability check, then moans in disappointment and flops back down.

It was as though I’d never left, I’d always been here.

Jam and me split a cream soda on the porch stoop that first afternoon. Bev came strolling out from next door on the arm of a fella who was hard to remember. There was nothing to him at all except a green suit jacket and a Japanese car.

“I reckon your mom’s payin’ the utilities with that fella.”

“We don’t say mom, we say Bev.” There was a sharp bite to her sentence. “Bev’s a porcupine, Sammy. Know what that is?”

“I’ve heard this one, but I forgot.”

“If Bev had all the dicks that’ve been stuck
in
her stickin’
out
of her, she’d look like a goddam porc-u-pine.”

The man held the car door for Bev. She’d put on a nice print dress and those tall heels. I thought she gave us a glance, a short fox glance over the shoulder.

“Yeah,” I said. “That’s it. I’d forgot the punch line.”

“You want to keep your distance from her.”

Jam’s comment made no nevermind with me.

I’m not the type who can exclude people socially just because they operate under some bad habits.

SHE, IT TURNED out, had recently gotten to be nineteen, and he was about a quarter past seventeen. They’d felt as pointless in school as I had. Jason was an apprentice hairdresser at Romella’s, on the square. After so many hours and days of experience he could take the test to become licensed. Beyond that, see, Jamalee would manage a shop for him, not here but someplace in the high cotton, where folks spent money just so they didn’t have to carry it around anymore, and the rich ladies got snickered at if they didn’t have a beautiful boy “escort” that they were seen everywhere with.

Apparently this region was thought to exist either in the Beverly Hills area or south Florida.

Romella’s Salon was where the kids heard who of note might be out of town when, and broke into the houses of these customers of note and had practice sessions at acting well-to-do. They needed to learn a way to seem natural surrounded by plush, since plush was where they were aimed. Jamalee immediately set out to rebuild my front, get me facing in the direction she wanted to go.

“I believe I’ll call you Samuel.”

“No. I’m a Sammy. Always have been.”

“But Samuel rings more like an adult.”

“It ain’t my name.”

“But Sammy as a name is a person that can only wash and wax the cars, whilst a
Sam-u-el
might own the dealership.”

“My ma named me Sammy. It’s what’s on my birth certificate.”

“Really? Truly? She named you Sammy? Flat-out Sammy?”

“She sure did.”

“Taggin’ that name on you, that was like casting a curse on you. Oh, baby, your ma made a sorry, shitty prediction on
your whole life and hung a name on you that would help the sorry, shitty stuff come true.”

“You ain’t bringin’ me any news.”

 

“WE CAN SEE that you’re not all bad,” Jamalee said, “but we hope you’re bad enough.”

This was the second of our days together, or maybe more than that. It could’ve been that second day, or a week later, but anyhow she and me were sitting in the waiting area at Romella’s, waiting on Jason.

“I’m not sure
bad
is the label I want.”

This was my first glimpse of Jason’s magic; there were three gals waiting for him to be free. They ignored the girl hairwashers and sat in a quiet, expectant row, waiting for Jason to scrub their heads, which at this stage was the most of what he was allowed to do. You could see their faces as his fingers worked across their scalps, ran through their wet hair, kneaded above their temples, and the expressions the gals displayed belonged over a diamond that wasn’t fake or during the first licks of love. Probably no man had touched their heads before who they weren’t “serious” with.

“I’m a bad girl myself, Sammy,” Jamalee said, “but not that many people get the benefit of it.”

“I prefer the word ‘rugged.’ Or ‘difficult.’ ”

“You’re both, baby, if that’s what you want.”

I kept an eye on Jason and, great balls of fire, that boy would be worth his weight in tips, almost daily. He had a spiffy future beggin’ for him to come on in, beautiful, and have all of what I’ve got.

“Let me tell,” Jamalee said, leaning my way, her little hand resting on my forearm, “our plans.”

This girl was tiny and relentless. Her head looked like an heirloom tomato after a rough, scrubbing cloudburst. If ever
I could possess a ’65 Mustang, four-speed ragtop, I’d want it to be the color of her hair.

“When I was busted for shoplifting the last time,” she said, “which was my fault—I got too bold, tried to stiff-leg a smoked ham out under my skirt—they sent me to a head doctor, a thought-shaper. He had all sorts of qualifications framed on the wall. He decided my problem was one of nurture, bein’
here
, you know, and asked where would you like to be, and I said, ‘Los Angeles.’ He said, ‘That could be done.’ Then I said, ‘In 1928.’ This got him leaning backwards. ‘Now, there’s your problem.’ And, of course, I already
knew
that.”

“Uh-huh. I’d like to be back when the biggest man was fairly small, and I could be a giant.”

“Right,” she said, and her hand stroked my arm. “Transferred to a period, a rare other time period, when I,
me
, would’ve been a happy standout, highly esteemed and just crushingly, crushingly special.”

“But, here on earth, what’re you after?”

Romella’s had a strong scent, the smells from various women and their sprays and perm solutions running side by side. Shoe heels clicked on the linoleum floor.

“Better days.” She pointed at Jason, who seemed to glow from the attention of his customers. “There’s ways and ways to get to those better days; we’re going to make use,” she said, and waggled her finger toward her brother, “of what we’ve got.
That right there
. Now you, Sammy, might be able to make sure we get
paid
for using what we’ve got.”

“That sure is an important part of any deal. Any good deal.”

“That’s why we treat you big, Sammy. That’s why we want you in our lives. You make us feel safe—or safer, at least.”