by Alice Duncan
Frowning in suspicion, Billy repeated, “Pwetty?”
“Got me some rocks here that’re real pretty. Don’t eat ’em. They’re only to look at. And pick up and play with. Just don’t stick ’em in your mouth.”
“Wocks?” said Billy, a little less frightened and more interested. I think.
“Yes. Pretty rocks. Got me these here rocks in different places years ago. I still collect a rock every now and then. This one’s called a Pecos Valley Diamond. These are only found on the banks of the Pecos River there in New Mexico. New Mexico’s a state now,” He confided in Billy, who had begun gazing at him with rapt attention.
Mr. Prophet continued showing Billy the contents of his coat pocket, narrating as he did so. “And this here one is a black fire opal I picked up in Nevada. Here’s some turquoise from Arizona. Here’s some freshwater pearls and a few agates from Tennessee. Have you ever heard of New Mexico, Nevada, Arizona or Tennessee, Billy?”
His attention firmly fixed on the colorful display on his highchair tray, Billy shook his head.
“Here’s the last of the lot. These here are a couple of gold nuggets I found right here in California. Not on this trip.”
“Pwetty,” Billy said in a reverential tone.
“How nice of Mr. Prophet to let you see them, Billy. What do you say when someone does something nice for you?” Flossie-the-Mother to the fore, by golly.
“Tank’oo,” said Billy, his wide blue eyes now turned upon Mr. Prophet. He didn’t seem scared any longer.
Nearly sniffling from emotion, I said, “That’s so nice of you, Mr. Prophet.”
“Didn’t want a bawling kid to disrupt a good Mescin lunch,” said he, an impish expression on his own lined face.
“You’re very kind, Mr. Prophet. It might be difficult to wrest those rocks away from Billy when we’re finished eating, though,” said Flossie, smiling wistfully at her son.
“Oh, I got plenty more. I’ll give him a couple to keep.”
“That’s so nice!” I darned near started sniffling again.
Prophet eyed me askance. “Don’t get your under-frillies in a twist, Miss Daisy. They’re only a few rocks.”
Under-frillies? Another entry for my dictionary, I reckon.
The waiter returned, and we each perused the menu. Mr. Prophet wanted some tamales. I couldn’t recall if I’d ever eaten a tamale, so I ordered the tamale plate, too. Flossie, concerned about her son’s tender tongue, asked the waiter what the least-spicy dish on the menu was. He recommended a soft taco filled with shredded chicken for Billy.
“You, señora, can get the same thing, only with some flavor to it.” He smiled at Flossie.
“Do your lunch meals come with frijoles and arroz?” asked Prophet.
“Si, señor. Todas nuestros almuersos veinen con arroz y frijoles.”
“Good enough,” said Prophet with a happy smile. “Then I’ll take the tamale plate.”
“Me, too,” I said, wondering what I’d just ordered.
“And I’ll take the soft chicken thing you told me about for my son, and the other one—the one with flavor to it—for me,” said Flossie, smiling at the waiter with what looked like hope. Guess she wasn’t entirely sure of herself, either, when it came to Mexican food.
As the waiter walked away, headed for the kitchen, I asked Mr. Prophet, “What did you and the waiter just say to each other? I took Spanish in high school, but I don’t remember much of it. Nobody to practice on, I guess.”
“I just asked if the lunch plates here come with rice and beans, and he said they did.” Prophet smiled at me. “I got to talkin’ Spanish pretty good when I was in Arizona, New Mexico and Mexico. Did a lot of work in those parts.”
“Oh,” I said, thinking hard. “Maybe you can help me brush up on my Spanish skills.”
“Could,” said Prophet. “I reckon I know some words you won’t want to know, though.”
“You can leave those words out,” I told him.
“What would be the fun in that?” he asked, trying to sound ingenuous.
Flossie giggled. “Probably because his mother did it, Billy giggled, too.
I didn’t know precisely what “a twinkle” in a person’s eyes meant until I looked into Mr. Lou Prophet’s not-so-guileless light blue orbs that lunchtime at Mijares.
Twenty-Eight
Lunch was delicious. I was intrigued with my tamales. “What do you call this stuff?” I asked Mr. Prophet, forking the thick, soft dough encasing a delicious combination of…Well, I don’t know what it was. It was Mexican, and it tasted good.
“Masa,” said Prophet, sounding as though he knew what he was talking about.
“Hmm. Looks a lot like cornmeal to me,” I said, digging a little deeper.
“It is,” he said.
“You mean we call this stuff cornmeal, Mexicans call it masa and Italians call it polenta?”
“Reckon so. Different languages for the same stuff, I expect.”
“Fascinating.”
Good mother that she was, Flossie had thought to bring a bib for Billy. She also collected all of Mr. Prophet’s rocks from the highchair tray before the waiter set Billy’s soft tortilla filled what looked like shredded chicken on it. Billy seemed to enjoy his meal, although it seemed to me he pasted more of it on his face, his bib and the tray’s surface than he managed to get into his mouth. I guess kids are all like that.
When I asked Flossie for confirmation of my supposition, she laughed and said, “Oh, my, yes. That’s why I brought the bib. I’ll still have to wash him from stem to stern before I pick him up again.”
Children are a lot of work. I’m not sure why my parents decided to have three of them, although I’m glad they did. If they’d quit after two, I wouldn’t be here. That might not be a big deal to anyone else, but it was to me.
Out of curiosity, I asked, “Do you have any children, Mr. Prophet?”
He stopped chewing for a second, swallowed, and said, “Not that I’m aware of.”
Flossie and I exchanged a speaking glance across the table. Not entirely sure what each of us meant our glances to mean, but we understood each other.
This points out yet another huge difference between men and women. A man might dally with any number of females, as I suspect Mr. Prophet had done, and then he could waltz off—or ride into the sunset on his horse—neither knowing nor caring if his seed had taken root. A woman doesn’t enjoy such a carefree prospect. If a woman gets “with child,” she knows it. In fact, the whole world around her knows it, too, and if she’s unmarried, she’s generally scorned and vilified.
How come men aren’t looked down upon for doing the same darned thing? But they aren’t. They’re called “ladies’ men” or “roués” and strut and swagger and think they’re the bee’s knees. The women, on the other hand, are called sluts and whores, and a whole lot of other derogatory terms and often shunned outright. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: life is unfair, confound it! I didn’t approve. Which makes as much difference now as it ever did, which is none.
Life annoys me a whole lot sometimes.
Anyhow, after spreading approximately half of his lunch on himself, the highchair tray, his bib and the floor, Billy began to flag and get fussy. That was all right, as the rest of us were finished with our lunches, too. Flossie asked for and received from the waiter a wet towel and a dry one. She more or less hosed her son down with the wet towel, and then dried him off. Billy was crying by the end of his ordeal.
Therefore, even though I’d had hard thoughts about him only a few moments earlier, I applauded Mr. Prophet’s attempt to soothe the little boy by again handing him some rocks. I think Billy ended up with a gold nugget, a pretty piece of agate and one of the freshwater pearls. I can’t even remember where they came from, and Mr. Prophet had told us not an hour earlier. Shows how much attention I pay to things.
“Thank you very much, Mr. Prophet. We don’t want to take your treasures, though,” said Flossie, smiling s
weetly at him.
It was evident to all of us that Billy had a different opinion on the matter. He clutched the three treasures to his chest, his fist tight around them, and looked mulish. I got the impression he aimed to fight his mommy for the possession of his new toys.
“Naw. I’ve got tons of ’em. Let little Billy enjoy something new.”
“That’s extremely kind of you, Mr. Prophet.” Flossie turned to her son. “What do you say to Mr. Prophet, Billy?”
For a second there, I thought Billy aimed to say nothing—or start screaming—but after thinking the matter over, he decided to be a good boy. “Tank’oo, Mistew Pwophet.”
“You’re welcome, Billy.” Prophet gazed affectionately at the child. I guess he meant it. The affection, I mean.
Huh. It wouldn’t surprise me if Mr. Lou Prophet could have looked fondly upon some of his own children if he’d stuck around long enough to discover he’d sired any.
Never mind me. I just get grumpy about the inequities of life sometimes. Oh, very well. All the time, curse it.
Then I had to fight Mr. Prophet for the bill, but he eventually relinquished it after I told him I’d hit him with my cane if he didn’t. I think I was kidding, but I’m not sure.
Flossie asked that I drop her at home before Mr. Prophet and I continued to the Pasadena Public Library, so I did.
“Thanks so much, Daisy. This was a fun treat for Billy and me. Good to see you again, Mr. Prophet.”
“Good seeing you, too, Mrs. Buckingham. You have a fine, handsome son there.”
The fine son, Billy Buckingham, lay sound asleep in his mother’s arms by that time. Mr. Prophet opened the front passenger door for the two of them and took Flossie’s arm to steady her on her way out of the motorcar.
After waving at Flossie, and after Prophet had re-entered the Chevrolet on the front passenger side, I drove us to the library. I don’t know about Prophet, but I was having disagreeable thoughts about men and life’s inequities.
We were about halfway there when Mr. Prophet said, “I do something to annoy you, Miss Daisy? I didn’t mean to, and I’m sorry if I did.”
I heaved a gigantic sigh. “It’s not you, Mr. Prophet. It’s life. Things are just so unfair.”
“Yeah? How?”
Hmm. It might be embarrassing to tell him. But what the heck. He was a grownup. He could take it. Or maybe he couldn’t. Only one way to find out. I felt heat begin to rise from my chest to my cheeks, but I forged onward anyway. “Well, for one thing, when I asked if you had children, you said you didn’t know if you had any.”
“Yeah?”
I was probably red as a beet by then, but I didn’t much care. “Well, if you were a woman, do you think you’d be allowed to be so cavalier about having children? I mean, for all you know—and I’m only assuming you’ve bedded your share of women—any number of those same women might have had children sired by you, and you wouldn’t even know it! But if you did sire any children, the women would sure as heck know it. And they’d probably be paying for what they’d consider to be their so-called sin to this day. But the men get away scot-free.”
After a second or two, he said with a single, slow wag of his head, “Yeah, go figure that one out.”
“What?” I asked in surprise.
“It ain’t right. Not one damn bit right, but there you go. Most of us fellas needed the, uh…the stuffing…kicked out of both ends, but there was no one around to do it, so—here we are in our black-hearted nastiness.” He rolled one of his infamous (to me) quirlies. “Havin’ to live with our fool selves at the end.” Prophet took a deep drag off his quirley and blew the smoke out the window.
“So you agree with me?” I asked, more than a little astonished.
“Sure, I do, darlin’. Women don’t deserve half of what men shove at ’em. Includin’ what I’ve shoveled at ’em.” He puffed the quirley again and stared pensively, maybe a little sadly, through the windshield. “I’ll tell you somethin’. I guess you can call it a confession, really.”
“Oh?”
“A long time ago, when I was still wet behind the ears—we talked about this once before—I survived the War of Northern Aggression.”
“I remember you telling us about it.” The War of Northern Aggression, my left hind leg! But don’t mind me.
“You Yankees call it the Civil War.” Lou Prophet had a masterful sneer.
He was right. We did. Because it was a civil war. Again, don’t mind me.
“But don’t get me started on that nasty topic, or I’ll likely go on a three-day—oh, never mind. Back to my point. I was so damned relieved to have made it through that horrible bloody mess not only alive but intact, when so many of my friends and family—most of ’em, in fact—got blown to smithereens by minie balls and mortar shells or cut to pieces by…Well, you get the drift. I was so damned relieved to have survived that nastiness, I made me a pact with Ole Scratch.”
“With whom?”
“You know—Beelzebub. Old Nick. El diablo. The devil. The fork-tailed, green-fanged demon his own nasty self!”
“Oh, Satan! You made a pact with the devil?”
“Him an’ me made an agreement. I’d shovel all the coal he wanted me to shovel down beyond the smoking gates to keep his furnace stoked and the butane burnin’, so the evil sinners could keep on swimmin’ them flamin’ rivers throughout eternity…swimmin’ an’ wailin’ away…as long as he gave me one hell of a real good time on this side of the sod for all the time I got left.”
“Oh…oh, uh…Mercy sakes.” I’d never heard of such a thing.
“Sure enough, we shook on it, Ole Scratch and me. In a matter of speakin’, ya understand. And you can say what you want about Ole Scratch, darlin’, but the ugly cuss does keep his promises. I had me a real good time for a lot of years. Until…” He punched his wooden leg. “Yessir, a real good time. But it not only cost me an eternity of coal-shovelin’, it cost me somethin’ else.”
“What’s that?”
He turned to me with those big, round, sad eyes of his, set in their sun-wizened sockets. “The love of a good woman.”
“You mean Louisa, Mr. Prophet?”
“Louisa. I loved her. And she loved me. But she knew me too damned well. I never could settle down. I had to drink and run around with them women you were just talkin’ about, spillin’ my seed here and there and everywhere, with no consideration of the consequences. I reckon I was tryin’ to drown out the war memories, but that was no excuse. I was just bad. Rotten. Most men are. Except Sam. You did well there. Believe me, you dodged a bullet, Miss Daisy. Anyway, I now consider the consequences of my nasty ways aplenty. In spades. I coulda settled down with Louisa, but she knew me too damn well and wouldn’t have me, though I knew she wanted me somethin’ fierce. Just like I wanted her somethin’ fierce. My heart burned every time we were together. We were two peas in the same damned pod, and she knew it, and I knew it, but—” He punched his wooden leg again, hardening his jaws and gritting his teeth. “But I couldn’t tame the raging demon in my own heart, and neither could she.”
I swear his eyes were glazed with tears.
He didn’t say anything for a long time, and neither did I. I guess we both just sat there, digesting what he’d said.
He heaved a ragged breath, took another drag off his quirley and said as he blew the smoke out his mouth and nose at the same time, “So we get away with a lot, we fellas do. Guilty as charged.” Mr. Prophet turned to me again, and his eyes were grave and shiny with emotion. “But we don’t get away scot-free. I know it seems like it, but we don’t.”
We’d reached the library, and I parked the Chevrolet at the curb as near to the front entrance as I could get. His confession had given me pause to think, and I didn’t want Mr. Prophet to have to climb or walk more than necessary.
I still think men get away with too darned much in this life, but then again, women don’t have to fight wars. On the other hand, it’s the men who usually start the stupid t
hings, so it’s only fair that they fight them. Then again, it’s usually old men who start the wars. Then the young men get to die in them. Or become hopelessly wounded and crippled, as my Billy had been.
Nertz. Life was just too complicated for one phony spiritualist-medium to figure out.
“I’m sorry you’ll have to climb so many stairs, Mr. Prophet.”
He’d been staring out the window at the library building. “You mean that there’s the library?” he asked, visibly surprised.
“Yes. That’s the Pasadena Public Library where my friend, Miss Petrie, works.”
“Holy shee-oot, it looks like a castle.”
I, too, peered at the building. “It does kind of look like a castle, doesn’t it?”
“Kind of? With all them turrets and arched windows and so forth, it looks more like a castle than most of the castles I’ve seen.”
“Oh. Have you seen many castles?”
“Naw. Only in books. Some of the churches in Mexico look sort of like castles. Them Catholics, you know? They like to spend money on their buildings, even if most of the people who pray in their churches are poorer than dirt.”
“Oh, my. Maybe that’s one of the reasons Sam has rejected his Catholic roots.”
With a chuckle and a perceptibly lightened mood, Prophet said, “Yeah. Sam was a Catholic once, wasn’t he?”
“Sure. I think all Italians are. He goes to the Methodist Church with us now, though.”
“Huh.”
“When he was married to his first wife—I aim to be his second and last—he began attending Unitarian services with her. She’d been born into a Roman Catholic family, too, but I guess she wanted out.”
“Don’t blame either one of ’em. Not much of a church-goer myself.”
“You know something?”
“No. What?”
“That doesn’t surprise me one little bit.”
Mr. Prophet laughed outright, then said, “You stay right there, Miss Daisy. I’m going to get out of this here motorcar, walk around to your side, and open up your door for you.”