by Tito Perdue
“Shore. They got one nearby Knoxville. And they’s lots of other ones nearby other places.”
Philip smiled. He could endure this sort of talk far better than your ordinary train passenger, who was likely right away to fall into confusion and turn and walk away.
“Good. But can you tell me the best place to have a meal?”
“She don’t serve transients, my wife don’t.”
Philip turned and walked away. Two blocks further, he could see the neon lights of a movie theater, and next to that a tobacco shop with a great many newspapers on offer. He headed in that direction, hoping to find a woman or even a man who might give him the directions he required. Instead, having advanced about fifty yards along the graveled path, he paused to rest and replace his cigarette with a newer one. He did not understand, and never would, why he had to go through the tedious process of traversing distances to get where he was going, when all he wanted was to be there already, as quick as thought. Or why he must strike a match to ignite his cigarette when he wanted already to be smoking, or why he possessed a body, or need be concerned with economics and shoelaces and all the other superfluities that stood between transcendence and his personal self. Truth was, he hated life, of course; it was no more complicated than that.
Reckoning from the placards on display, the theater was showing a standard film featuring people shooting at one another with pistols. A beautiful girl and handsome man were on the verge of kissing, their four lips and two noses coming to within about an inch of palpating each other. (He had done all manner of things in his life, Philip, but never had he actually kissed a woman.) How strange all things were! And were those dead actors thinking back to that scene as they lay miles apart in well-kept cemeteries?
The tobacco store was full of children who ought to be at home by now and asleep in bed. The magazines themselves were mostly concerned with hunting and fishing and female body parts. He bought the local newspaper, a six-page publication that appealed to him on account of the masthead that showed a rhino and two hippopotami locked in combat. Inscribed on brown paper, the paper reported solely on local events, presenting news of infinitely more importance than could ever be found in the execrable New York Times. Retreating off to one side, he read where a man was offering a ten-month-old shoat in trade for a productive bee hive and a few pieces of honey-gathering equipment. A woman had lost her ring. He read where used tires were to be had at significant discounts. By God, he had come to the right place after all!
He arrived at an appropriate restaurant at a few minutes before eight and found a suitable table. By “suitable,” he meant that he could situate himself at least ten feet from the nearest person and by “appropriate” that the place catered to the silent poor. (He loathed luxurious restaurants, and had rather starve than find himself among fawning waiters, French menus, and the usual upper-class trash foddering themselves fastidiously on tiny servings. Everyone knows the type. Dawdling over exotic coffees, etc.)
Himself, he asked for breakfast food — grits and two fried eggs. The waitress was a merry type in spite of her soiled apron and probable divorces, and delivered him his meal without a great deal of superfluous conversation. He had been losing weight, Philip, and really ought to have more than just one meal a day. Suddenly he noticed a mediocre-looking girl of perhaps eighteen who had fallen in love with him during the past few minutes. But he was too tired, the linguist, to be flattered by that.
The eggs were overcooked and the place smelled of dogs and cats. A man had fallen to sleep at the counter, but only to revive himself each time at the last instant. As to the waitress, Philip wasn’t wholly unaware that her legs, as much of them as could be seen, professed one dimple each in just the right places, an old-time weakness of his back when he concerned himself with such things.
The motel was near enough that Philip could get there without needing to stop and rest. This establishment was under the management of a girl as unselfconscious as the first one, a circumstance that pleased the linguist. At one time she might have run off to New York City to marry a doctor or lawyer or hell even just a realtor, but she had elected to stay at home after all. No wonder she was merry.
“Could I have a room for just two nights?” Philip respectfully inquired.
“Sure you can, honey.” (Honey? He was a long way from New York City.) “We got all kinds of vacant rooms. You want a single bed, or one of those great big ones?”
“Single.”
She wrote it down. “We got television, too. And we don’t even charge for it.”
“Good gracious.” (He had to go into his suitcase for the money, a dangerous expedient that revealed his wealth to the girl.)
“My!” she said. “Just look at all that… money.”
He covered it up. The office opened into the kitchen, where a bearded man sat at table. A suspicious type, he seemed especially suspicious of Philip. They nodded to each other.
“Naw, you don’t have to worry about him. He’s all right.”
“Your husband?”
The girl laughed out loud, at the same time passing Philip the key.
“We got ice, too. If you need some.”
The key didn’t comport with the room. Entering with some trepidation — the door wasn’t locked — Philip strode to the bed, put down his suitcase, and then returned to the light switch. Perhaps he ought to have chosen a more luxurious place after all. An unclean towel and two folded sheets lay on the bed. The chest was missing a drawer. Someone had left a sock behind. He tested the television, intruding upon an advertisement for an antacid in which two adorable mice were trying out the product. Came next a girl in a small bathing suit sitting on top of a car. It was a brief production, followed hard upon by the sight of a talking dog giving orders to its manicurist. Philip, always shocked by how readily the country was willing to expose its basic organizing principle, watched greedily. That was when a well-known basketball player, an aboriginal sort of man whose annual income was thirty times greater than anything Einstein had been given, began to describe in poor English the benefits, which were very great, of a certain amyloidal toothpaste.
All too soon the advertisements came to an end, leaving Philip with a murder show featuring a strong woman, a noble Negro, and a treacherous white male. He dared, Philip, to change to an adjacent channel where the chief detective was a strong Negro assisted by two noble women. Finally, and this was his last effort, he changed to a place where the advertisements seemed even more incontrovertibly to adumbrate the approaching collapse of a people who had been so promising at one time.
He wanted to laugh, to cry, to read, but instead went to the bathroom — he abominated having to use faucets and doorknobs used no matter how long before by others — and scrupulously brushed his faultless teeth. He had had no bath in twenty-four hours, but was unwilling to put himself beneath such a cloudy sort of water that smelled like this. Lacking the proper key, he used the two pieces of furniture to block the door, and then transferred his cash to what he imagined would be the safest available place.
He did read, or tried to. The pillow had a hard object in it while two doors down a man and woman were yelling at each other. On the other hand, he was able to pick up a far-away train shrieking through the night, next to Wagner his favorite sound. His books, of course, always provided consolation when he found himself in motel rooms. But not tonight, not with trucks passing by, people running up and down the outside corridor, and the sound of that couple two doors down.
Fifteen
After just five hours of ordinary-grade sleep, the linguist awoke to the sound of traffic and that couple two doors down. His cash, however, was where he had left it, and after abstracting some fifteen dollars from the pile, he repaired to yesterday’s restaurant and consumed a sweet roll and three pretty good cups of coffee. It was while he was doing this that an ambulance pulled up in the parking area and began to take on board a seventy or eighty-year-old woman who had actually expired durin
g the foregoing night.
“Ah yes,” said Philip to himself. “And now she knows the great secret.” (The great secret as to what happens to a person who has passed away.) In her case, Philip predicted a short trial and then consignment to a work-a-day world not greatly unlike the current one — dishes to be washed, miscreant grandchildren, and the like. Or, if the scientists were correct, there’d be no aftermath at all. For himself, he would gladly accept either of those, instead of what almost certainly awaited him.
He had a fourth cup of coffee, smiling betimes in his sweet way at the waitress, who seemed to be concerned for him. Unable at first to cause her to fall in love with him all at once, he put on a pitiful look and gazed down at the table.
“Maybe you should see a doctor,” she said.
“Too late.”
“All those cigarettes. You aren’t doing yourself any good, but I reckon you know that already.”
“I’ve always known it. Got a match?”
He did so love it, toying with decent people. Immune to love, he gave her a somewhat larger tip than was typical of him.
Dressed in a blue suit, cerulean shirt, and appropriate tie, he returned on foot to the downtown metropolitan area with its drugstore, its hardware, and two or three other places. He hadn’t dreamt of buying a twelve-year-old truck with a set of tools in the bay, but now quickly did so after surveying the thing from different angles and then summoning the salesman, a crafty-looking man who had been watching from the window of his tiny office.
“Good vehicle,” the man attested. “Shoot, anybody would be proud to own this baby.”
“What’s the price?” Philip cheerfully inquired. He had only recently combed his hair and splashed his face with water, and he looked like a twenty-two-year-old athlete, or Rhodes Scholar, or like a northeastern poll taker asking tricky questions of small town people. “What’s your attitude toward Negroes?” he could be expected to ask. “All those drug dealers and wife beaters — you don’t really like those people, do you?” But in fact, the linguist had simply asked: “What’s the price?”
“Well now, depends. You from around here?”
“Give you a thousand.”
“Oh, good. Now I can get my wife that ring. No, sir, I couldn’t even let you kick the tires for less than, say… Five thousand?”
“Dang!” (He was doing well, Philip believed, in adopting the small town language of this region.) “If you’re trying to immiserate me, you’re doing splendidly indeed. All right, two thousand.”
“Two? OK, you can kick one tire. No, no, not that one!”
“You even look like him.”
“Say what?”
“Fellow at the train station. Very well, I’ll give $2,700. Signed and delivered. And a full tank of gas.”
“Half a tank.”
“Zeus. Three-quarters.”
“Hard man, ain’t you? Funny thing, I got up early this morning, thinking I might have a pleasant day. Clear sky and all. OK, I’ll drain out those five extra gallons, then.”
“Not stolen, is it?”
“But I tell you one thing — you got to promise to take good care of it.”
“Oh, shoot, yeah.” The linguist paid, jumped inside, and drove off down the street with it. Up ahead, a considerable building had been hung with a patriotic banner, while next to that a group of elders was ostensibly engaged in conversation while in fact closely monitoring Philip with all ten eyes. Having come to the end of the city, Philip reversed course and returned to the city proper. The dashboard had a wet cigar on it, and the glove compartment five shotgun shells.
The town had one single bank and one sole realtor, both of them headquartered in the same building. Loath to expose his money all at once, Philip retired to the men’s facility and peeled off an appreciable amount, more than a thousand dollars worth certainly, but still less than the sort of number that might send the teller into shock.
“You’re not from around here, are you?”
“I am now,” he said, laughing merrily. His gold-red hair fell helter-skelter over his luminous forehead, a fortuitous business that gave the woman pause. His cigarette had been smoked down to within an inch of extinction, a contingency that yielded an ashtray from the clerk.
“You’re not Jim Howell’s boy, are you?” the lady asked.
“Howell? Oh, I doubt he’d ever want to claim me.”
Both people laughed. He was getting along well with the woman, but in order to get along better yet, he began to ask about the Methodist Church, its location, the pastor’s name and the like. That’s just the way he was — cagey, polite, well-dressed, and possessed now both of money and an old Ford truck.
“Could I talk to you in your real estate capacity?” he asked.
Together, they moved into the office at the rear of the building, where a ring of keys lay at hazard upon her unkempt desk. He saw there the remains of a meal as well, a fingernail file, a woman’s magazine, lipstick, a telephone directory quantitatively thinner than New York City’s, and several other materials needed for her business. The room held other things — photographs of someone’s children, Elvis, a farmers’ calendar, and a side table with an old-fashioned typewriter on it and two shotgun shells of the same manufacturer represented in Philip’s truck. But the proof of her sophistication was evidenced in a 12˝ x 12˝ reproduction of one of van Gogh’s more ubiquitous prints.
“So! Can I sell you a house today Mr. ———?” she asked, employing the straight line he had submitted in lieu of a name. Passing over to him the photo of a two-bedroom home with climbing honeysuckle, she said: “Anybody would be proud to own this baby. Just $60,000 and not a penny more.”
“Ah, no. No, actually I’m just looking for a temporary sort of place that…”
“Sorry to hear that.”
“… temporary sort of place that I can fix up, so to speak.”
“Oh phooey, you can do a lot better than that. Just think about that checking account you have now!” (She pointed to the account.)
That was when he excused himself, went to his new truck, took out a full $60,000 and laid it on her desk. The woman reddened and threw up her hands in delight.
“You just must be Howell’s boy!”
“One of the stalwarts of this town, I suppose.”
“Dead.”
“Ah. But he used to be stalwart, I expect.”
There followed a moment of silence. The realtor had unusual lips that extended all the way around to two paper ears that looked like hands. She seemed to him the sort of woman who in the absence of chemicals would have had to go about with a beard and a bristling moustache. As to her perfume, it had a clinical smell that put Philip in mind of his last hospital stay. And in short he predicted for her a lengthy trial by angels, to be followed by two or three hundred years in a septic tank.
Together they ventured out to her truck, a product of the Dodge Corporation with an assortment of “For Sale” signs in the bay.
“Who will look after the bank?” Philip interrogatively inquired. “In your absence, I mean?”
“The first place I want to show you is over on Ewell Street. Just adorable. She’s taken such good care of it, too, Mrs. Ewell has. She wants 135 for it but I’m sure she would come down.”
“Down to sixty thousand?”
“And rates are so good now. You wouldn’t have the slightest trouble getting a mortgage either — I can guarantee that.”
Two hundred yards further on, the street was blocked by a disused warehouse with broken windows. It became necessary to drive up a steep, dirt-paved road that led past any number of modest homes, many of them having been contracted out for sale by the woman sitting just next to him. Philip saw what either was a human man or else a pile of clothes with no one in them.
“That man’s not dead is he, for Christ’s sakes?”
“A town like this, you learn to mind your own business. Now just look at that one over there. Fenced yard, crown moldings
. You’ve come at the right time, I give you that.”
“Actually, I just want a temporary place, a shack really, something I could…”
“And that one. Lovely couple. Her husband has such a real good position at the Cash and Carry, too. Good investment opportunity.”
“Investment? Looks to me like the place is falling apart!”
“Oh, please don’t tell me you’re one of those people that judges by appearances. Don’t disappoint me at this late stage. Now over there, that one has a paneled den and the cutest little fireplace in the world.”
“But no chimney. No, actually I’m just interested in a room or two, a fishing shack, something on the edge of a fast-flowing river that changes color all the time. Or even a lake.”
“Oh, look at that. They’ve gone and added that pergola they were talking about!”
He felt certain she would stop the car, summon him to follow her, unlock the door, and lead him to the house, all of which indeed took place, even if in a somewhat different sequence of time. He had left his gloves in the truck, but found that he couldn’t easily refuse to shake hands with the owner, a swarthy man in pajamas tops and a frying pan in one hand.
“You!” he said, addressing the realtor. “I told you I’d changed my mind.”
“Now, Herb. We’re going to sell this house someday, absolutely, and then you and Gladys can get back together again.” And then, whispering to Philip: “She’s his wife, don’t you know.”
“Tell him about the termites.”
“Now, Herb.”
The house did hold a few books, most conspicuous among them an automobile repair manual and a complete works of Harriet Mews. The building had no great value, but still was too expensive for Philip. These words entered the linguist’s head:
“Is this what life is for? The transfer of monies from one person’s account to another’s?” And then finally, speaking aloud: “No crown moldings?”
It was exactly 4:02 in the afternoon before he was fetched back to the realtor’s office and offered a cup of coffee that he politely declined. He was anxious to conduct his own affairs, a double blessing that would allow him both to find a home and at the same time escape the woman’s perfume. But what would she smell like without it — this is what concerned the linguist even more.